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  Kayla made the introductions and then left us. I squeezed in next to Ginger, which of course wasn’t her real name. Aaron was smiling at me. Ginger and the other one, who I’d never met, didn’t take their eyes off Aaron. He must have been paying them well.

  “Unfortunately we are closed to new investors,” he said, cutting right to the chase.

  I slumped my shoulders a little bit, which caused him to smile again.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” he said, wagging an impatient finger at me. “We are closed to new investors, but we could help you out because you are friends with Kayla and Miranda. You wouldn’t be a new investor, you see, because we’d consider your investment to be part of theirs. Of course, there would be a minimum amount, just to make it worth everyone’s time.” He let that last phrase dangle in the air while he sipped at a dark drink. It looked like regular old soda, but I could have been wrong.

  Finally, I bit. “How much are we talking about as a minimum?” I asked.

  He was staring at my chest. I was wearing a tiny black bikini top that didn’t leave much to the imagination. I shifted in my seat under his gaze.

  “For you,” he said, “ten thousand. But I need to know right now, are you in or out?”

  I could do ten thousand, I thought. It was a lot of money, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it could be my ticket out of this stinking strip club. I sure as hell didn’t want to invest any more than that, not without checking them out some more and making sure everything was legitimate. “I’m in,” I blurted out.

  Aaron nodded curtly at me and then waved his hand vaguely, signaling that he was done with me. I got up to leave.

  “The girls will tell you how to get the money to me,” he said offhandedly.

  The strange sensation of unease began the second I turned to walk away from the table. It was something about Aaron, I decided, something about the way he seemed almost put out that I had asked to invest through him. Was I supposed to think he was doing me some kind of favor, and he was going out of his way to help me? If so, I wasn’t buying it. People didn’t run investments as charities. They ran them to make money. For themselves.

  I met back up with Kayla, who was beaming at me from the central dance floor area where the music was thumping. “Welcome to the club!” she yelled two inches from my ear.

  I smiled back at her, still a bit uneasy. “Before you know it,” I said, “I’ll be wearing handbags to compete with yours!”

  “What?” she yelled.

  I mouthed “never mind” and gave her a fist bump. She headed off to round up some lap dances, no doubt, and I headed back into the locker room to cool off.

  My nerves were getting the better of me, which was odd since I was kind of a gambler. For me ten thousand dollars wasn’t a life-or-death amount of money. I had saved up a little nest egg with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to keep raking in the money as I eased into my late thirties or forties. It wasn’t enough to retire on, which is why I’d started working as a private investigator. But it was enough that I didn’t live paycheck to paycheck, like so many of the girls who worked here. What Kayla didn’t know was that as much as I admired their handbags, I would never make enough money that I could justify spending five thousand on a single bag. It just wasn’t gonna happen. One of my fashion magazines had recently done a spread showing how much money Hollywood types spent on their clothes, and it blew my mind. It wasn’t just the fancy stuff you’d expect, like crocodile shoes and Swiss watches. No, they were blowing ninety bucks on a single pair of men’s underwear. Five-hundred-dollar T-shirts. Custom jeans for three grand. There was no end to it. This was how people who came into money easily spent it. No, I’d happily stash the money away or let it keep riding to try to make even more. As much as I liked shopping, I liked freedom even more, and that’s what the money meant to me above all else—freedom to have a life where I could make money with my clothes on.

  So although the ten grand wasn’t a massive investment for me, it was grating on me that I’d gotten into the investment not through a licensed securities broker or adviser but through a couple of twenty-something strippers who probably hadn’t even finished high school. It reminded me of the old Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to the kind of club that would have him as a member. How was it that a few strippers out in the middle of the desert, and God knows who else, had stumbled onto this amazing investment opportunity that the financial experts had somehow overlooked?

  As I was removing my makeup, I wondered what would happen if I got cold feet. Would Aaron take it out on Kayla and Miranda? Would he kick them out of the investment just because I’d wasted his time? I looked at myself in the mirror, eye to eye, which is not something I found easy. What I saw was doubt, an unmistakable mask of skepticism. Looking back at me was the face of someone who wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if she invested even a measly hundred bucks with Aaron, much less ten thousand. It just didn’t sit right.

  I waited there for Kayla in the locker room, resolved but irked about my indecisiveness. A typical female investor, I figured. One minute she’s in, and the next minute she changes her mind. Screw it. I didn’t care.

  Kayla burst in, a bundle of energy, but her features hardened when she saw the expression on my face.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “It just doesn’t feel right to me,” I said sheepishly.

  Kayla grimaced. “It’s a lock, Raven. Trust me.”

  I smiled a joyless smile back at her, hoping she’d drop it. I felt bad enough already for wasting their time. “I know, but I just got a funny feeling about it. That’s all. I can’t explain it.”

  She put her hands on her hips, clearly annoyed by the turn of events. “But we vouched for you, Raven. It’s not like just anyone can invest with Aaron.”

  “Why not?” I asked. I could feel my face reddening. “Money is money, right? Who cares where or who it comes from?”

  “He does,” she said firmly.

  I shrugged. “Well, I’m sorry,” I said softly, hoping it was firm enough to put the matter to rest.

  Kayla performed a full-body sigh. “I guess we’ll have to come up with the money ourselves, then,” she muttered, just loud enough for me to hear. It was one of those passive-aggressive efforts to play the victim, which was especially annoying because of how effective it was. I had no choice but to bite.

  “You mean my ten grand?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It’s already pledged. That’s how it works.”

  “What do you mean pledged? I’ve never heard of that.”

  She coughed. “Well, to be honest, we got a little bit of a commission for bringing you in. And he paid that out already.”

  It was all becoming clear now. They weren’t just being nice. They were getting a cut of my investment. This made things worse, of course, and even more complicated. But I made the decision right then and there that I’d rather lose ten grand than be known as a girl who stiffed her friends. Even though they weren’t really my friends.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, relenting. “How do I get you the money?”

  Her body relaxed, and she offered the tiniest of smiles. “Cash,” she said simply.

  “Cash? Like wads of hundreds?” I asked, cocking my head.

  “Well, it’s only a hundred hundreds really,” she said. “It’s not wads.”

  It was now my turn to sigh. “Okay, I can get it together tomorrow. I’ll hit my bank first thing in the morning.”

  Kayla nodded. “Thanks, Raven. You won’t regret it for a minute, I promise.”

  I pursed my lips and kept silent. I hope you’re right. We made arrangements so that I could drop the money off at her apartment the next morning, and then she left to go rearrange her hair and head back out onstage.

  After I got dressed to leave, I took one last look at myself in the mirror. There was something missing, I realized: a Chanel bag on my arm.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The teller a
t the Great Western Bank nodded at me in recognition. Vegas was a small town once you got off the Strip and away from downtown. It was also a town where cash was the oxygen we all breathed, and so my request for one hundred hundred-dollar bills didn’t cause the teller to bat an eyelash. She probably figured I was entering a large poker tournament or, more likely, was planning to blow it all on five-dollar slots. She counted out the money with a practiced firmness and then printed out a receipt.

  I asked for a few envelopes and then shoved the bills inside. Kayla was right that they weren’t exactly wads of cash, but there was a certain unmistakably pleasing heft to the money, a feeling I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with. There was nothing like cash—the feel and smell of it—to give you a rush. For me, cash was much sexier than designer purses or shoes.

  Money in hand, I drove over to Kayla’s apartment which was in an up-and-coming section of town a few blocks east of the Strip, not too far from the Hard Rock Hotel. She was on the sixteenth floor of an industrial-looking high-rise.

  “Thanks so much for coming up, Raven,” she said.

  I held on to the money a few seconds longer than necessary and then handed it over.

  She smiled understandingly. “I really do appreciate it,” she said.

  Behind her I saw a pudgy man in boxer shorts and an undershirt trudging over to the counter to refill his cup of coffee. He had stringy, gray hair and a gut like a watermelon and emitted guttural, grunting sounds with every other step. I tried not to cringe, but I’m pretty sure I failed.

  Kayla half turned to acknowledge the grunting walrus behind her and then flashed me an embarrassed grimace.

  I shrugged as though I didn’t care and told her I’d see her at the club.

  I had no business judging the company Kayla kept, especially since I hadn’t had a real boyfriend in years. But still. She was a well-paid stripper, and now she was making bank with her investments. She definitely didn’t need a sugar daddy, much less one who sounded like a rutting elk when he walked. Imagine how he sounded when he…ewwww. I’d known plenty of younger women who took to father-figure types, guys who made them feel secure, even while dozens of much more eligible bachelors threw themselves at them. It wasn’t my thing, but apparently it was Kayla’s.

  I spent the rest of the day trying to track down a missing woman I’d seen on the news. She had two kids and a distraught husband, and I figured I could use whatever talents I had to try to help the police find her. In my experience the cops didn’t work overtime when an adult disappeared, the theory being that in most cases the disappearance was intentional. The typical person who vanished was up to her eyeballs in debt, she hated her marriage, she had a secret life—whatever. Usually the missing person would turn up a few days later and return to their old life. But this case seemed different to me, so I knocked on a few doors and spent a lot of time searching the internet for any recent friendships on social media or unusual tweets that might give me a hint as to her whereabouts. I came across a few things but nothing that jumped out at me.

  The evening was a profitable one, as Friday evenings usually were at Cougar’s. Miranda jokingly asked where my new purse was, and I told her I’d wait until my first profit check came before I spent the money. Of course, I wasn’t going to blow it on a purse, but I didn’t want to burst her bubble quite so soon.

  By five o’clock in the morning it had become clear to me that the ten grand was boring a hole in my subconscious. I’d told myself that I could afford to lose it, that it wasn’t that big of a deal, but that had been a big fat lie. The truth was that apart from my designer shoe habit, my string of European cars, my luxury condo, and my penchant for drinking real champagne, I was pretty tight with money and conservative with my investments. Being a stripper didn’t exactly come with a pension or a 401(k), whatever that was, so I didn’t have a lot of room to lose money. And that money was preventing me from sleeping. I knew that the only thing I could do was to be patient and then withdraw my money whenever it seemed socially acceptable to do so. But did that mean two weeks? A month?

  I managed three or four hours of restless sleep and then gave up trying around eleven. I wasn’t the patient type, the kind of person who could just sit back and let things develop around me. I wanted to take some kind of action. But what was I supposed to do?

  The obvious idea struck me halfway through my breakfast omelet. I was a damned detective—it even said so on my business cards—and so if I was nervous about my investment prospects, then I should investigate the guy who was in charge of the thing. All I knew, though, was that the guy’s name was Aaron. And I wasn’t even sure if he was the guy in charge of the entire investment or whether he was just someone who helped recruit new investors. I’d have to talk to Kayla.

  I sent her a text telling her to give me a call when she woke up. That, of course, could mean eleven in the morning or three in the afternoon, especially on a weekend.

  I was searching online for information about the missing mother when Kayla called me back around noon. She was a touch apprehensive because I was asking about Aaron, so I was honest with her. She already knew I was nervous about the investment, so I figured there was no sense trying to hide the ball.

  It turned out that Kayla didn’t know much about Aaron. She had his business card, though, which was more than I had. It said his name was Aaron X. Garros and that he worked for a company called Proprietary Capital Growth, or PCG for short. But the card didn’t have an address or phone number, just an email address.

  “What do you think the X is for?” I asked Kayla.

  “Um, I have a nephew named Xander with an X,” she said.

  “Xavier?” I asked.

  “That’s more likely,” she said. “Do you pronounce the X or is it like a Z?”

  “I always say it like a Z,” I reported, overconfidently. “My cousin went to Xavier University. I think that’s in Kentucky or something.”

  “Oh,” Kayla said, her interest waning. I thanked Kayla for the information and then hung up.

  So now I had a name and an email as well as the name of a company, and that was more than enough to get started. I decided to begin with the company. I pulled up the State of Nevada’s business registry website and ran a search for Propriety Capital Growth. The search came up blank, so I tried PCG. Once again, nada. That told me that PCG was probably just a DBA, an invented name Aaron used to Do Business As, rather than an official business entity like a corporation or limited liability company. If it had been a real company, the website would have produced a business address, or at least contact information for a registered agent. But since PCG apparently was just an informal business name, it told me nothing.

  My Plan B was to do a search on the name Aaron X. Garros, which was an unusual enough moniker that any results I got should lead me to the right guy. The guy was a ghost, though, it turned out. The only Aaron Garros on social media was a tennis instructor in New Zealand who interspersed his thoughts on professional tennis with bizarre opinions about pop culture and politics. The phone book—my tool of last resort—was equally useless. As far as I could tell, there was no one within five hundred miles of Las Vegas with the name of Aaron Garros, much less Aaron X. Garros.

  That was suspicious in and of itself. If you’re running an investment based on garnering new investors, why keep yourself hidden away from sight? Why meet prospective investors in the middle of the night at a strip club? The mysteriousness of it all seemed to confirm my worst fears.

  But I wasn’t done yet. I still had Aaron’s email address: [email protected]. The email told me not only how to get in contact with him but also that the company maintained an IP address and possibly a website. I tried the website, but not surprisingly, the website was a nonentity, a blank page telling me the IP address was owned but that no page had been created. Another dead end.

  Should I email Aaron directly? What should I say? From our brief encounter, I knew he fancied himself to be a baller, a big shot who lik
ed throwing money around and hanging out with women he’d probably rented for the evening. I also knew he liked strippers in general, although I’d gotten no sense that he’d liked this stripper in particular. Still, it wasn’t a stretch. Even though I suffered from issues of self-confidence, I’d never met a guy like him who would turn down an invitation to get closer to a girl with the best rack plastic surgery could produce.

  I decided to keep it light and breezy rather than get all hot and heavy. I told him I’d enjoyed meeting him the other night and wondered if he might like to get together sometime for a drink or dinner. Face-to-face I’d have a shot at judging the man and possibly getting an idea about whether he was on the level or some kind of sleazy crook.

  Aaron apparently wasn’t overly eager to remake my acquaintance because my email inbox was silent the rest of the day and evening. No response came on Sunday either. By Monday I had begun sleeping a little easier. The world hadn’t come to an end. There were no news stories about Aaron being indicted in some massive fraud scandal. And on Tuesday Kayla texted me that she’d gotten another fat payment from Aaron. Human nature kicked in. As the days passed I grew more comfortable with the idea, and I learned to stop worrying and love the idea of my new investment.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Two weeks had passed since I’d sent Aaron an email. It was the Saturday night before Halloween, which was no small holiday in Las Vegas. Countless female tourists used the holiday as an excuse to dress as slutty as possible: imagine a citywide celebration that was a cross between St. Patrick’s Day, Mardi Gras, and a party at the Playboy mansion. Needless to say, Cougar’s would be a madhouse that evening, which was second in craziness only to New Year’s Eve. The tips from lap dances on Halloween were simply too rich to pass up, but I was dreading it all the same. Halloween brought out all kinds of amateur drinkers, the kind of folks who didn’t drink much normally but who decided on special occasions to quaff a dozen drinks in a single evening. For some strange reason they either tipped extremely well or not at all. There was no in-between with this crowd.