Vegas Vengeance by Randy Wayne White

business. I had seen the ruin of too many fellow prostitutes, and, like I said, I’d spent some time in the hospital myself. So I decided to start my own house. A classy place that was safe and carefully monitored. A whorehouse run like a first-rate business firm. The girls in my house have a damn good retirement plan. I strongly encourage them to take a sizable portion of their earnings and pool it in money market accounts or CDs or bonds. If they want to continue their education, the house pays seventy-five percent of the tab. Drugs kill more prostitutes than sickos, so the first thing I did was set up a drug rehab program. Every one of my girls is clean. So you see, Hawk, I was a whore before I became a rich businesswoman.” Her tight smile was like a challenge. “Are you shocked?”
    Hawker shook his head. “Like you said, there are many forms of prostitution. I imagine most junior executives in major firms compromise themselves more often than an average prostitute. Why should I be shocked?”
    The woman looked at him carefully. “For just a moment there, I thought I was hearing Jason again.”
    â€œWhich is exactly what I need you to talk about.”
    Barbara Blaine finished her drink, laughing. “God, I got carried away, didn’t I?” She found the martini pitcher and poured herself another drink. “But it all has to do with the way I met Jason and why I was attracted to him.”
    â€œHe wasn’t a … he didn’t come to your house—”
    â€œJason visit a whorehouse? You would have had to know him to know just how funny that question is. Jason is … was a pure spirit. An intellectual who loved the clarity of science. The absent-minded-professor type. He was very bright and very naive, and I grew to love him dearly. The way I met him, the Doll House was just nearing completion. It’s about a mile from here and, like the casinos, there’s nothing else around it. Just the neatly landscaped lawn out front, and sagebrush behind. I was in the house one afternoon, and I saw this stranger lurking around out back. On my property! With all the pomp and severity of a new landowner, I charged right out and asked him just what in the hell he was doing on my property. He had this shoddy canvas knapsack he always carried, and he had one of those funny-shaped hammers that rock collectors carry. I bawled him out good, lecturing him about trespassing and snooping and God knows what else. Like all whores, I guess, I had come to hate men, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to put this man in his place. But he just stood there, smiling kind of shyly, and when I was done, he held out this pasty-colored rock. He asked me to look at it. I came very close to slapping it out of his hand and calling the police. But instead I took it and looked. I spent the next two years secretly thanking myself for looking at that rock.
    â€œOn the outside, it was just a plain old rock. But inside was the perfect outline of an animal. Some kind of fish. Very delicate and very pretty. Jason began talking about that fossil. He told me that thousands of years ago, the land the Five-Cs complex was built on had been a riverbed. He said it was a big raging river that flowed to the sea. By that time, I had him marked as some kind of kook. Tall and blond, with glasses. Kind of gangly and boyish-looking, but harmless. I no longer had any interest in men in a physical sense. Even so, he was kind of attractive in a funny way. He made me feel like he needed protecting or something. So I listened to him talk about the fossil, and before I knew it, what he was saying was actually interesting . I had gone right from high school to being a Las Vegas showgirl, and then to being a Vegas whore, so I was academically ignorant. He made all that stale stuff come alive. I could actually see this river flowing where my business now was. He talked about the geological formation of the