Stripped

Thick, hazy smoke and bright lights hid the faces of the drunken men as they cheered and hurled obscenities. As soon as empty beers mugs clapped on tabletops, hands raised to flag down X-rated waitresses for refills. The music thumped hard enough to break through my chest. Despite the painful noise, the degrading banter stayed with me. They didn’t have any right to yell and whistle at me like some nickel whore.

This must have been a nightmare. Like the kind you have when you’re dreaming you’re naked on stage and you wake up realizing it was only in your mind.

One problem: I was partially naked, on a stage, and even my mind wanted to hide under a rock. Not funny at all, considering I had no idea how I had gotten here.

I dared to shift my eyes to the right. They landed on a gold pole stretching from the stage to the black-painted ceiling. Just as I thought. No amount of pinching would wake me from this horror.

Colored lights radiated overhead, heating the center stage. I knew how a hamburger under a heat lamp felt. I stood in the middle of the waxed hardwood floor while two more strippers danced at opposite ends of the stage. The music hit an ear-blasting crescendo and the dancers tore off the tops of their striped prisoner uniforms. Two pairs of boobs jutted out at the same time.

If there was a cue, I missed it. My behind wasn’t dropping a thing for these bums.

Pain bit into the side of my big toe. Tight straps nearly strangled it to numbness. I glanced down, pulling my bent knee inward. A very naked knee at that. Someone had strapped a pair of five-inch, black stiletto heels around my bony ankles. It was a miracle I remained standing in these things.

My hands clung to both edges of the tiny policeman’s jacket. A black thong rode up my butt crack like floss through teeth, no thicker than the straps on my heels. Something sat on my head, holding my wavy black hair down. Reaching up, I pulled off a policeman’s hat with a bright, shiny badge pinned in the center. Gee, why didn’t that surprise me?

“Come on, baby,” a man yelled at the edge of the stage. Between the missing teeth and the long stringy hair, I would rather kiss a donkey’s crap-filled ass than go near that creep. His hand thumped the small round table, sloshing beer from his mug. “Come on, sugar. Blast me with those cute little tits y’all got hidin’ under thar.”

How I had sunk to this level, I didn’t have a clue. In fact...I didn’t have much of a clue about anything. Not my name, where I had come from, or family. It was all...gone.

Men loitered in every nook and cranny of the seedy saloon. Some shoved shot glasses in their mouths while others gulped their beer from frosted mugs. A long bar stretched across the back wall where a half-dozen patrons waited for the bartenders to fill their orders. One of the barkeeps finished putting foam-dome touches on a beer before placing it on a tray covered with shot glasses and more mugs, and handing it off to a scantily dressed waitress. Then again, “scantily” was an understatement. She wore a V-neck outfit that covered up the areolas of her bulbous boobs and stretched down to barely cover her crotch. Another similarly dressed waitress made her way around a crowded table. I got a look at her fishnet pantyhose with the rest of the V riding up her ass and out to her shoulders. A man at the table slapped her on the bottom before smoothing his hand along her reddening butt cheek.

I didn’t know which was grosser—the outfits or the way these men degraded the women.

An image in the mirror behind the bar caught my attention. From this distance, my reflection showed me standing on the stage with my one hand tucked under my jacket ready to flash the room. Only now, the other two strippers stared at me like I had lost my mind. The dark-haired one nodded for me to take it off. I shook my head. She’d need a crowbar to get me out of my last shred of dignity.

My feet staggered backward. On the way, my elbow clipped the pole. Panic began chiseling away at my nerves. The men sitting closest to the stage pulled their heads back, faces twisting in bewilderment. That made two of us.

“Boooooo,” a man shouted. “What the hell’s wrong with this girl?”

“She’s probably on something.”

“Mr. Wiggly will straighten her out.”

“Whore!”

A scotch tumbler flew across the stage. Shattered glass and whiskey spilled everywhere. One stray piece sliced the top of my strangled toe.

Why that no good, son of a—! Stiletto heels or not, I marched to the end of the runway, fisted the man’s shirt in my hand and lifted him from his chair. His eyes went wide. His rapid heartbeat thumped loud enough to reach my ears and his pupils dilated. I’d have him crapping his pants in about...three...seconds...

I paused.

I had lifted him straight up out of his seat with his feet dangling about four feet off the floor. My bony arms hardly strained a muscle. Something in the back of my head screamed I should be accustomed to this kind of strength, but I wasn’t.

Nonetheless, someone needed to let this inebriated jerk know he couldn’t get away with things like that. I yanked his sour-smelling face within an inch of mine. “Next time you throw a glass on this stage, you had better damn well hope it kills me.”

I let him go before he stuttered through a pathetic response. The man dropped onto the rickety table, smashing it to pieces and startling a group of onlookers.

The blaring music stopped—finally—and everyone came to a standstill. All eyes were on me. If I didn’t feel comfortable a few minutes ago, I sure as hell wasn’t feeling it now.

I zipped up my police jacket, turned on my stilettos and marched—slipped once—my thong-clad behind out of there. I threw open a pair of blood-red curtains, leaving collective “boos” at my back. Butt cheeks flapping or not, I didn’t care. Depending on how many times I had stripped without realizing it, these jerks probably had grown accustomed to seeing my ass to the breeze.

Click, click, click.

I didn’t turn around. I knew the other girls had followed because my instincts said so. In fact, my instincts seemed more heightened than usual. But then again, I didn’t know what usual was nor did I remember.

The miniscule print in the corner of a movie poster was as clear as a message on a billboard. My ears captured conversations behind closed doors. The toxic smell of alcohol-laced perfume pinched my nose from trails left minutes—hours—ago. There were at least four different types on the air, meaning at least four different people had passed through this hall and brought a horrible stench of incense with them. My nose picked up a few more scents, making it nine fresh ones in the last few minutes and numerous ones in the last couple of hours. Stale dust settled on my tongue from the blowing air conditioner that hadn’t been cleaned since the owners had it installed.

I passed more than a half-dozen girls, giggling and wearing some sort of X-rated getup. There was a nurse, a scantily dressed princess and someone who looked like a dominatrix. What kind of striptease freak show did I belong to?

The rust orange hall tickled my mind with familiarity. I had a general idea of what lay behind each of the doors. None of them interested me except for the last one on the right. An announcer’s voice boomed through the walls, muffled but audible as he apologized for my slipup and introduced the next act.

Tender hands warmed my shoulders. “Keisha, honey, what’s wrong? You can’t just leave the stage like that.”

Keisha? I didn’t know this woman, so she had no right putting her paws on me. I threw her off and whirled on my heels. “Don’t ever touch me again,” I snarled.

Redness brightened her made-up cheeks. With her long curly hair, thick lips and high cheekbones, she was very pretty. If only she would sandblast some of that crap off her face, a decent guy might take notice. She stood an inch taller in her heels and had boobs that would keep a set of sextuplets happy for months. When I tried to pull her name out of my head, I drew a blank.

Grabbing my shoulders, another woman shoved me into a rack of hanging clothes. “Get a grip, Keisha. Don’t make me get Paul to put your ass back on straight. You ruined our act.”

I wanted to snatch each of her long blond hairs from her scalp. Who cared if she had a few inches over me? I’d be more than happy to blacken both of her baby-blue eyes. Better yet, I’d tear that prisoner’s hat off her head and shove it far enough down her throat to feel like a stomach staple.

I dug myself out of the clothing rack just in time for “Drop It Like It’s Hot” to blare over the speakers. How apropos for what I planned to do.

Narrowing my eyes on the chick, I slugged her with a right cross. That pop to the chops registered up and down the hall. She staggered backward into the rust orange wall.

Snagging her thin neck between my fingers, I yanked her to her feet. “If this Paul person has answers, then get him.” I shoved her hard enough to crack the back of her head against the wall.

Now that our little alpha-female power display was over, I wanted answers.

I stalked down the corridor and stopped in front of a burgundy door with a gold star glued to the front. The familiarity surrounding this place came through like a bright light from the heavens; only this place had more to do with hell. My mind traveled into the past where I recalled a beige locker with a Harley Davidson sticker on the front and someone else’s initials carved on the lower right corner.

Although I couldn’t be sure, I’d bet anything it was mine. Perhaps some of those answers I wanted lay in there.

Slapping my hands on the door, I burst inside.