Read Online Royal Flush by Stephanie Caffrey - Free Book Online

stomach—and came home with a dozen Italian sausages, two onions, and five green peppers, an amount of food I told myself would feed me for a month, even though I knew it would magically disappear in two days.
    I grudgingly dragged myself off the couch and forced myself to go the gym in my building. The nice part about working out at four in the afternoon is that you usually have the place to yourself. That proved true today, except for a geezer whose armpit flesh was dangling so low that I was afraid he'd trip on it. After a grueling hour of pretending not to stare at his mesmerizingly flappy flesh, I returned upstairs and threw together a little tomato sauce from a mixture of canned diced tomatoes, oregano and basil, salt, and a dash of sugar. Come to think of it, there might have been a little ketchup involved too. Add some Italian sausage and the bell peppers, and it was an almost carb-free delight.
    Thursdays were work nights, which meant a shower followed by makeup and a gray yoga suit. The weather was warm and dry, typical for September, so I decided to walk the Strip down to Cougar's just as dusk was fading into night. After twenty minutes of weaving through tourists, I passed the Wynn and Trump hotels at the north end of the busy part of the Strip, which is where the foot traffic thinned out. A turn around the corner got me to Cougar's, where the lead "host," which is what they called bouncers, winked at me and held the door open.
    The place was already hopping, especially for a Thursday night. I hadn't bothered to check whether there were any big conventions in town, so I didn't know if I was going to be dancing for accountants or morticians, both of which were more interesting than they sounded, or some other group in town for the week. Morticians tipped better than accountants, but not as well as dentists or chiropractors. The other girls and I would often theorize why that was the case, but it was uncanny how true it proved every year.
    Luck was not going my way. It turned out that there were no big conventions going on at all, which meant mostly locals and small groups of tourists. I usually had two or three "regulars" on Thursdays, guys who were nice, or at least non-creepy, and tipped well enough to get a little of what we called "preferred" treatment in the private booths off to the sides of the big room. It was nothing even close to what the guys wanted me to do to them, but they paid handsomely for the privilege of being on my favorites list, and I returned the favor.
    Despite the busy start to the evening, the place hit a lull around midnight, just when it was usually hitting its full swing. On a break, I started thumbing through my smartphone, and I couldn't resist the urge to check Jojia Takada's Facebook page. There wasn't anything from Jojia on there, but a friend named Hassan had posted "Hakk tonight??? U know it." That post had four "likes" plus a comment from Jojia. "Thinking about it. Ok, screw it, c u there! :)"
    I assumed Hakk meant Hakkasan, one of the hottest nightclubs on the Strip. I recalled seeing a selfie of Jojia taken at Hakkasan, and from the photo it didn't look like my kind of place. Lots of neon lights, expensive drinks, and thumping music. I briefly wondered why she spent so much time in clubs when it seemed she had trouble holding her liquor, but I supposed that the bathroom incident at the Bellagio could have been a solitary event. Or maybe she just liked to dance.
    I finished a fifteen-minute set at 12:20 and then fielded three lap dance requests, which killed twenty minutes and netted me a cool two hundred, most of which came from a young, balding guy who claimed he was from Finland.
    My bouncer-friend Carlos tapped me on the shoulder on my way back to the locker room.
    "Slow night," he said. "I don't get it."
    I shrugged and fanned my wad of twenties in front of his face.
    He smiled. "Guess it's not so slow for you."
    "Don't worry about me, Carlos. Hey," I said, on a whim, "you