"I'm fine, Donnie. Everything's okay."
"Okay, talk to you later." Donnie hung his cell up.
Lee breathed a sigh of relief. "Everything's okay, right?"
"I dunno," Donnie mused. "Ace sounded weird just now."
"Weird? What do you mean?"
"When I first heard his voice...this may sound dumb, but he sounded like he was crying. But there ain't no way that can be right."
But it was right.
Outside, under the dead cameras, Ace had seen.
He waited outside next to the 300C with Bennie J.
The air, smoky and burning with neon and pulsating spotlight, was equally thick with the psychic feedback of unrestrained anticipation and desire. Most of the patrons were men, with the few women in the crowded showroom either with dates or to fulfill their own desires, whether they admitted it or not. Some of the customers were involved with each other, for one form of fulfillment or another.
Most, of course, were there to watch the show.
On the main stage, which ran through the showroom and comprised a total of 400 square feet of area, a dozen exotic dancers gyrated and writhed about poles that extended to the ceiling. Their naked bodies glistened under the hot lights, merchandise, advertising the club's main attractions with pornographic thrusts, bends and strokes to inane, ear-blasting cookie-cutter trance and hip-hop. In these ladies' craft, the only pretense was in the performance...and very little was left to the imagination. Most were Caucasian, naturally, and blonde. Not all of those blondes, though, were naturally so: one would only have had to look at the peroxide manes of some of these girls, and then simply look further south to see the truth.
Scattered through the main room and around the stage one would have seen a different kind of meat. The testosterone-fueled kind, as obvious in the purpose of
their presence as their steroid-induced musculature. A relative handful were scattered around the stage in t-shirts emblazoned with "Hot Biscuit" in stylized script...
bouncers, their presence an implied threat that no one gets out of hand with the dancers. Several more were scattered among the patrons in strategic areas. They wore dark suits, and if one looked closely at each of them through the thick air, one would have noticed a bulge at one's waist...under the arm of another...even the ankle of a couple. These men were armed and pure business...soldati, urban soldiers armed to their capped teeth.
Except for one.
Danny Choi held the most critical position, standing next to the door that led to the V.I.P. rooms; from there a back corridor led to the dancers' dressing room and to access to the basement floor under the club, where Antonio Pucci was entertaining guests. Danny's eyes were hawk's eyes, always searching his environs, missing nothing. He held the least-intimidating presence, wearing a cream-colored business
suit. A casual observer could have been forgiven easily for thinking Danny a customer. Unlike his fellow enforcers, he wasn't armed.
He didn't have to be. Danny Choi was several times deadlier unarmed than his peers would have been even if they were each outfitted with the heaviest of armaments. He held a 7th Dan Black Belt in Shotokan Karate and was a 10th Degree Master of Southern Hung-Gar Kung-Fu. But his training and knowledge of the deadliest arts of martial combat known wasn't all that made him dangerous. It wasn't what made him truly deadly.
What made Danny deadly was his anger...an incandescent, nova-white anger that did not stem from any form of psychological disorder, although it had verged on becoming pathological. It was an anger born from the events of his life, an anger at times that threatened to drown his senses in a crimson fury. Even here, as he looked out at the room full of patrons, Danny seemed to be moribund with the situation but the anger wrapped about him like the bandages of a mummy. He was angry with the customers who were so self-involved, and the dancers and their seeming shameless-
ness. He even felt angry with his fellow enforcers and the stupidity of their roles, and his employers and their unapologetic amorality.
And of course, Danny was angry with himself and the circumstances of his life and his role. He had given his anger free vent, of course, and many times. When some ignorant customer couldn't control himself during a lap dance, Danny would ask him to leave...after ensuring he would leave stumbling away with his face looking like bloody ground beef. When Antonio Pucci or someone else in Nico Roccoli's organization would task him to interrogate someone for a real or imagined offense, and more often than not many bones would be broken as a result. When, on several occasions, Danny was ordered to pay a visit to someone who wouldn't pay a debt, attempted to cheat, or refused to be intimidated by the Roccoli family, and he would deal with them. Permanently.
Such acts never abated Danny's anger. On the contrary, they only fueled his rage even further. Only his surprisingly strong sense of self-control kept that rage in check. If he was a man of lesser will, he would have lost all control years before...
but as the 37-year-old enforcer watched from his position in the club, his self-control
was threatening to fail him.