Dick swiveled his head and stared at Ryker, outraged, his mouth slack. Suzi became more animated, trying to get their attention. Bills were already falling out of her crotch. She’d empty it at the end of her set. Ka-ching! Once, a twenty fell into the toilet in back, and she just let it go. “Maybe it’ll reach somebody who needs it.” She twirled her ankles in the air. Her stilettos had ankle straps made of thin silver chainmail. Another guy came up, passed her a $10.

Dick gave the tipper a dirty look before addressing Ryker.

“What the fuck did you just say? You wanna get bounced the fuck out of here?”

Ryker ratcheted up the menace a notch.

“You don’t want to do anything like that. I suggest you calm the fuck down before I put you on the floor in front of this pretty girl.”

Ryker jerked his thumb at Khalika, who snorted. The guy didn’t seem to be worried about the bouncer.

“Pardon my French, sweetheart.”

“No praa-blem,” Khalika shot back, doing her perfect Marlene Dietrich imitation.

Ryker gave a thumbs up before turning his attention back to Dick. Dick got more submissive after that, and Ryker, nostalgic now, returned to reminiscing.

“Good boy. I used to close my eyes and dream I was doin’ the old horizontal with Marcheline, my high school girlfriend, but lately it’s mostly your little helpmeet. Variety is the spice and all.”

Ryker really seemed to enjoy his work, and Khalika was digging it to the max.

“Does the old ball ’n’ chain sport a Yul to keep up with the latest style in twats, or has the pie been off limits since before this song was a hit?”

Dick put both hands around his glass and festered.

“OK, enough. I told you I’d get the money. I always do.”

Suzi adjusted her black fringed G-string before “Magic Bus” began its intro. Her pelvis was at eye level with all their faces, and she humped and ground the air before drawing her open legs almost behind her ears. She started to pull aside the crotch of her G-string, then aborted the move. Ryker grinned.

“I guess this would be where the camera cuts away if they want the R-rating.”

He winked at Suzi and she smiled back at him. Ryker passed her a $50.

Suzi flipped over on her knees, did some more grinding.

“Ooof baby, I can almost see your breakfast.”

Suzi sat up, folded the crisp bill lengthwise, snapped it between her manicured fingers, eyes fixed on the thug. She licked her lips, then slipped the bill into one of the chainmail straps on her shoe and blew him a kiss, her eyes hard and black as obsidian.

“Ever wonder where your paper money’s been, Dicky? Maybe it’s time they got rid of it, but then what would these little ladies do for shits and giggles?”

He leaned in even closer to whisper.

“Consider this your final warning, fuckwad. My employers? They got very little sense of fair play, and what they do have is draining away like pus from an infected sore on your dick. Now, I, or one of my associates, is gonna be here tomorrow night at 9:30 p.m. Be here with the full wad, plus interest. And I mean the full wad, no more consideration. Capiche?”

He drew back, smiled again, and backhanded Dick’s cheek hard enough to make him jerk. Customers around the bar looked up, muttered to one another, turned back to Suzi and their drinks.

“No way I can get it by tomorrow. Tell them I need another week, tops.”

Now Dick was sweating for real.

“Nope, you’ve already had two, and that’s two too many, hotshot. Be here with the money’s all I’m sayin’—9:30. Don’t be late.”

Ryker smiled, downed his second scotch in one go, and spun around on his stool. Suzi was ending her set, and he saluted her. She smiled down at him like a Mayan priestess who’d just eaten the heart of a sacrificed infant. Suzi was the future, Khalika decided—the embodiment of it practically, the prototype.

Over his shoulder, Ryker said genially, “Meantime, don’t hide the salami anywhere I wouldn’t.”

The next offering mounted the steps to the platform. Snowy Peaks, thin and startled under the spotlight—like a filly at the Kentucky yearling sales. Just Dick’s type, like she fell off the hay truck and needed a sandwich. When the music started, she tried too hard. Dancing in these places, you’ve got to look like you wouldn’t piss on any of them if they were going up in flames. It’s best when you’re unapproachable; if you smile, you’ve got to look like it’s because you want to eat their organs raw. In these places, sex is wound up with violence, like maybe it is everywhere. Once in a while, though, you’ll get a bozo who likes them to look all innocent and vulnerable, so they can play Daddy, or worse.

That would be Dick.

Khalika thinks it’s hardwired in their brains—the need to humiliate, to be humiliated, or maybe it’s something Mom or Dad did, behind those weed-choked or manicured lawns.

“But for some, it’s the chase, subduing, bringing down of prey, that’s everything,” she said, later that night. “It’s all scrambled up in there, from when they first slide into the world and discover that they call the shots, even if they’re dog-shit stupid. Lots of women go for the best predators too. They want to breed with them to continue the line, to make sure there’s a steady supply of world beaters.” She stared into the darkness for a moment.

“Of course, there is that rare breed of female that indulges her thrill of the chase. It’s called poaching.”

Dick stared after the thug, still rubbing his cheek, then pretended to turn his attention back to the dancer. The new girl had gotten down on the floor and swung her body around so that she was on her knees, facing the mirrored wall. She gyrated her ass in Dick’s face, mimicking Suzi, then looked behind her, trying out her best smirk. Her beaded, pink-and-blue G-string featured a Minnie Mouse motif, and there were a couple of singles and fives hanging out of it, fore and aft, Khalika reported.

“Give her a few weeks, and she’ll be grinding in their stupid faces with the best of them.”

With that, Khalika treated me to one of her famous impromptu scenes:

INT. Naked Envy, evening. July 1984. Cue “Sharp Dressed Man” by ZZ Top.

A man — Dick Danzinger, who viewers may know from An Asshole out of Hell — leaps over the bar, up onto the stage. He drops to his knees and, before she knows what’s happening, bites the skinny dancer’s rear savagely before reaching into his unstructured jacket for a hunting knife and disemboweling her, spraying the zombified clot of humanoids lining the bar with a fire hose of blood.

He fishes around in the gore, picks up her entrails and flings them — raw scraps to jackals — and laughs like a jackhammer. He extracts a gold monogrammed cigarette case from his jacket, takes one out, taps it on the case a few times before jumping down and lighting it nonchalantly in the aisle. He is soaked in the dancer’s blood.

Grinning grotesquely, like the master of ceremonies from Cabaret, Dick does a jaunty, Broadway-style kick-walk toward the exit in time to the music. The onlookers, now fully animated, stuff their maws with the gore he’s tossed, fight over it — a feeding frenzy.

Freeze frame closeup on Dick’s bloody face. Dick winks at the camera, does jazz hands as he exits into the anonymity of the Manhattan night.

END scene.

I applauded enthusiastically. “Too funny!”

Khalika enjoyed creating these scenes, executing the mental gymnastics, sticking the dismount. A perfect ten on this one, as usual. Short and sweet, yet full of visual knockouts. These exercises helped diffuse the rage, she admitted, gave her ideas for our future endeavors. As for me, I liked to think they helped me understand things better, but in reality, I think it felt better to imagine everything in digestible chunks, from a distance. So that’s how she fed it to me.

“Don’t fret, little sister; they’re both in the dirt now. Hoist on their own petards, and O, ’tis most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet.” Khalika saluted skyward. “All props to the Bard of Warwickshire!”

Khalika winked, made a sweeping stage bow to an imaginary Shakespeare, then drew her index finger across her throat.

“They would have killed that dude if they knew what he was up to—a real subversive, that one, playing cat-and-mouse with King James—the wisest fool in Christendom.”

But back to the action:

Of course, Dick just sat there massaging his face, and Khalika laughed silently at his obvious humiliation. He collected himself, rubbed one finger on top of the other in the “naughty” gesture, and downed his drink. He signaled the barmaid to pour him another double, which he flung down. He passed a crisp hundred, along with his card, to the neophyte, and her eyes popped before she tucked them both into her G-string, front and center.

“It was like she snagged an Oscar,” Khalika told me, laughing.

Dick stood up and slapped a tip on the bar, headed off to the back for a piss. Khalika exited, lit a cigarette in the vestibule, and listened to Ryker on the pay phone.

Ryker didn’t bother to turn around. He didn’t care who heard him.

“Uh-huh, he’s lookin’ for another week… I know. I’m thinkin’ we need to maybe let him know how serious this is. He plays fast and loose, and I think he’s into something worse than we know about, and when I say bad… uh-huh… yeah, that bad. He’s got more stuff than cash. Yeah, yeah… uh-huh, sure. Just let me know what you wanna do, and I’ll organize it. Blackmail won’t fly, ’cause the wife hates him. Maybe she’s already filed but hasn’t served him yet. On the other hand, she’s probably in it with him up to her fake tits. Sheesh, what an asshole. I’d beat the snot out of him for free, no shit,” he said, and chuckled.

Khalika didn’t need to hear more. She headed back to paradise to drop off the script.