The Bar Watcher by Dorien Grey Page A

‘and I don’t have to do it in front of a fucking camera.’
    “‘Don’t knock it till you try it,’ he says. ‘And it’s kind of hard to find a guy hung like you who’s uncut these days.’ Jeezus, but I’m dumb! That went right over my fucking head, how the hell he knew how I’m hung, or that I’m uncut. I was too busy trying to keep the lava from coming out of my ears to let it register.
    “But then he says—get this—‘There are other perks, too,’ and he fucking unzips his fly and whips out his cock about a foot in front of my face. That did it. I jumped up out of the chair and slugged him so hard he stumbled back against the wall and knocked that big picture off-center, and I saw the fucking two-way mirror behind it. That son of a bitch had been watching Troy and me fucking!”
    He looked at me, wide-eyed, shaking his head.
    “I tell you, Dick, I lost it. I had to get out of that room before I killed the bastard—and, oh, I wanted to. So I left, and I never went back. I was afraid that if I ever saw Comstock again, I would kill him.”
    He noticed me looking at him, and he suddenly realized what he’d said. He gave a quick, not totally convincing smile, and said, “I didn’t, of course. Somebody else beat me to it. I owe him one.”
    He finished his drink and pointed at my almost-empty glass. I drained it, and he waved to the bartender, indicating the glasses.
    “Maybe we should get a table,” he said.
    When the drinks came, we did.
    *
    Glitter occupied the entire second floor of a huge old warehouse in the riverfront district. The dance floor took up at least half the space, with an assortment of bars scattered around the edges. In the back, separate from the dance area, was a show lounge that attracted some well-known B-level entertainers. It had a separate outside entrance for those who didn’t want to fight through the dance-floor crowd to get there.
    The whole huge space was painted black—exposed girders, pipes, factory-style windows that pushed out from the bottom to let air in when the air conditioning couldn’t handle the heat generated by the crowd.
    The DJ’s booth was suspended from the girders in the center of the room, and was reached by a catwalk from a side wall, where a narrow, metal-caged stairway led to it from a locked metal gate on the side of the dance floor.
    The volume was set just below “stun.” Nobody talked much at Glitter, not that most people there were in a talking mood anyway. A makeshift U-shaped balcony ran across the end of the room above the main entrance and enabled those so inclined to look down on the milling throng below. It was a good place for the predators to spot their prey.
    Jared and I paid our $5 cover charge and pushed through the mob to the stairway to the balcony. Jared thought he’d have a better chance of being seen by his DJ buddy from up there. There was yet another small bar at the top of the stairs, and we each ordered a beer—easier to keep control of in all the jostling. We managed to work our way to the railing, where we had an unobstructed view of the action.
    Jared’s buddy was doing a pretty good job of keeping both the volume and the excitement level high, and whoever was working the lights was doing an impressive job as well. The two of them worked well together, with the room going pitch black at exactly the right spot in the music, then bursting into a minute or two of full strobes, the jerky, freeze-frame effect never ceasing to fascinate me, and I wondered if they’d posted a notice warning epileptics that strobes were used. Every time a sweeping spotlight would move across the balcony, Jared would wave toward the DJ booth, and finally the spot swept back and zeroed in on him for just a second, then blinked on and off before moving on.
    “Mission accomplished,” he yelled into my ear.
    I was slightly distracted by an incredible blond, standing at the far end of one of the ends of the U staring down at the crowd. A