Vegas Vengeance by Randy Wayne White Read Free Book Online Page B

know about the code he used is something he told me about his boyhood. He came from a big family with a drunken, nosy mother. He said he developed the code when he was in his teens, so she couldn’t read what he had written. He said he’d been using it so long that it was second nature to write that way.”
    â€œHe never hinted at the key to the code?”
    Barbara Blaine thought for a moment, then gave a negative shake of her head. She began to riffle through her handbag. “Do you have any cigarettes?”
    â€œNo.”
    She put down the bag and returned to her drink. “I don’t either. I quit two years ago—when I met Jason. But sometimes I still carry them for friends—and to prove I don’t need them. He had this way about him, a way of making you not only believe in him but in yourself, too. I mentioned once that I wanted to quit smoking, and then very calmly and very kindly he told me all this scientific stuff about cigarettes. He explained that no one really enjoyed sucking poison into their lungs; that claiming to enjoy it was really just a rationalization for the physical feelings of addiction. He asked me to picture how ridiculous I looked sucking a white stick of burning leaves. He said it was the tobacco industry—a multibillion-dollar industry—that had replaced the honestly absurd image of smoking with a carefully planned image of sophistication and sexuality. He said I was allowing them to use me as a dupe. A slave, really, who earned them several hundred dollars a year in profit—not to mention the grave harm I was doing to my own body. Jason didn’t lecture people. He reasoned with them. He got me so mad at my own silliness and at the tobacco industry that I quit that afternoon.”
    Hawker waited patiently, knowing the woman had to work into it in her own way.
    She swirled the gin in the glass, staring deeply into the clarity of it. “I met him just over two years ago. I had just built the Doll House, had just built on property I’d bought from the Five-Cs syndicate. Outwardly I was feeling very proud of myself. Very tough and in control. The house was tastefully done, and I had built it all myself. No partners. And I knew that I would soon be rich, have all the money I had ever dreamed of.
    â€œBut inwardly I felt … I felt just as cheap and dirty as a person can feel.” She looked up at Hawker suddenly. “Do you want to know how I became the matron of a whorehouse? Take the most obvious guess, and you’ll be right. I worked on my own, free-lance, for three years. A thousand dollars a night—and I did my best to make damn sure I was worth it. I read all the literature, learned all the tricks and then improved on them. If a man paid me once, I did anything I had to do to make sure he would be back. I got the occasional sicko. I was beaten badly twice. But I went right back to work when I got out of the hospital. For an attractive woman from a poor background, there are only two ways to get rich, Hawk. One way is to marry a rich man.” She laughed sardonically. “That’s the most common form of prostitution, isn’t it? But I didn’t want a bad husband and a bad marriage. I had watched a bad marriage turn my mother into an old and broken woman. But I did want to be rich. Money was power, and I wanted power. So I chose the other form of prostitution.
    â€œI told myself I was just being a tough businesswoman. I had a product that men were willing to pay dearly for. So I exploited it. In those three years, I grossed $463,500. I didn’t make the common mistake of not declaring my earnings to the IRS. I reported every cent, paid the taxes, saved every remaining dollar. I told myself I could quit when I had a quarter of a million. After three years as a whore, after paying taxes and living expenses and making some wise investments, I had saved $305,000. It was all the money I needed to start my own