Dark End of the Street - v4 by Ace Atkins

panties. She dropped in her remaining four quarters and turned the key.
     
Chapter 8
     
    THE GOLDEN LOTUS OOZED with sex and tired Chinese food. Just sitting in the parking lot with the sound of my Bronco’s motor ticking in my ears, I could tell that the vegetables would be overcooked, the snow crab frostbit, and the egg rolls soggy. Of course, the patrons probably didn’t give a shit. The little cinder block building topped with a pagodalike tile roof near the airport also offered table dances with your egg foo young and a shower show with your moo goo gai pan.
    I shut off my engine and walked to an ornate red door guarded by a teenage girl in a bikini top and hip-hugger jeans. She wore stiletto heels with rabbit fur straps, and an angoralike sweater hung loose off her bony shoulders. She smiled briefly at me, remained perched on her barstool, and took a five buck cover.
    Her fingers slowly traced a vertical scar that ran from her navel to the clasp of her bikini top as her gaze drifted to a long black row of clouds rolling across the flat land of the airport where a 727 rumbled overhead.
    Inside, the floor was concrete and the room smelled of clove cigarettes and cherry air freshener. There were three amoeba-shaped elevated stages throughout the shadowed bar pumping with a slow Ann Peebles song. Couldn’t stand it, baby, if you said we were through. That’s what you keep on doin’ to me. Heartache. Heartache. Heartache.
    A brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty wearing only pearls looped in a knot like a man’s tie stooped to the floor of the center stage and pulled off a balding patron’s glasses. She crushed the frames between her breasts and placed them back on his head upside down. Throughout the bar, there were only six guys — most eroded businessmen with wrinkled shirts, slightly untucked — watching the matinee show. Pink and green neon glowed in the dark cave while a soft gray rain began to patter the sun-bleached parking lot framed by the open door.
    I lit a cigarette and took a seat at the long bar and ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress was about my age, somewhere between thirty and forty. She had short brown hair, not boy short, but cut just below the ears and tosseled in her eyes.
    “Mr. Cook around?” I asked.
    She shrugged. She had a sharp nose and full lips. I could tell she worked out by the shape of her biceps as she poured the coffee and firmly shoved a cracked mug before me.
    “Could you check?”
    “Why?” she asked.
    Her man’s ribbed tank top didn’t quite touch the edge of her dark blue jeans held together with a Western belt.
    “Health inspector,” I said. “Somebody found a G-string in his wonton soup.”
    “That’s funny,” she said. She chewed gum, keeping her eyes trained to a soap opera. The television was muted and suspended by chains from the ceiling. “I never heard shit like that before.”
    “It’s true, and the other day someone reported the indecent use of a fortune cookie.”
    “How would that work exactly?” she asked. She turned away from the television and wiped off the angry head of the dragon carved into the cherrywood bar. The bartender’s eyes were deep blue and the whites had the clarity of someone who didn’t drink.
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I bet it could be done.”
    “You want to tell me what you want, or do I just introduce you as the funny guy at the end of the bar?”
    “The funny guy works.”
    I smiled. She smiled back.
    The song ended and the naked woman plopped off stage and took a seat next to me. She was sweaty and out of breath and played with the pearls around her neck like a rosary.
    “Hey, cowboy,” she said.
    “Ma’am,” I said, tipping my imaginary hat.
    The girl behind the bar disappeared and I watched her jeans as she did. I took a sip of the burned coffee and watched the rain beat on the worn streets outside. The thunder growled in the distance as the naked woman sighed and disappeared. A moist print of her butt