Night of the Living Deb Read online

  “I don’t want anyone’s life on my hands.”

  Night of the Living Dead, 1968

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1-23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Susan McBride

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Circular pleats of red velvet draped the ceiling above Brian Malone’s head, a dimly lit chandelier

  dripping down from the center. If nothing else about The Men’s Club had cried “bordello” but that, it would’ve been plenty.

  There were tacky touches wherever he looked, if he needed reminders that he was in a strip joint.

  He didn’t. Barmaids in red corsets, short black skirts, and high black boots served overpriced drinks. Bored-looking women in G-strings writhed on nearby laps, swivelling club chairs making for easy access. Green and blue laser lights flashed with Jedi intensity as deafening music pounded the air with a throbbing bass.

  Like, there wasn’t enough throbbing going on as it was. The place could call itself “a gentleman’s club,” but it was a strip joint, plain and simple, despite the upscale clientele of horny, mostly white-collar males. When he’d pulled up to the waiting valet in his Acura coupe, it had been the lesser in a line of luxury automobiles disgorging Rolex-wearing passengers to the curb beneath a well-lit porte cochere. More Mercedes and Jags than you could shake a stick at, so to speak.

  It was his buddy’s idea to come here, a final request before he was due to get hitched in a few weeks, a destination wedding in Tuscany just for the bride and groom and their immediate families.

  The Men’s Club wasn’t Brian’s first choice as a site for celebration. He would’ve been happy as a clam sucking on the long neck of a Shiners at any number of local bars with ESPN on the tube and the noise of folks shooting pool. But Matty wanted a lap dance as a final adios to bachelorhood, and a lap dance he would get.

  Brian had been to this establishment on Dallas’s northwest side a couple times before, once for business when a client of the firm wanted to checked out the “local action” before he caught a flight out of nearby Love Field, and again when he’d been dating Allie Price and she’d been curious to see what was inside the pink stucco walls, behind the front windows filled with peekaboo lingerie.

  He didn’t plan on becoming a regular.

  There was an air of desperation hanging overhead as surely as the red velvet pleats in the ceiling. Not a feeling he ever wanted under his own skin.

  Another hour and then we’re outta here, he decided as he polished off a third Peroni, adding to the vague fog that lapped at his gray cells. Three was his limit for tonight—he was the designated driver on this little R-rated field trip—

  so the bar was as good as closed for him.

  A slender brunette in stilettos and little else strutted past him and straddled the lap of a wild-eyed dude at the next table, a couple pals cheering them on, and he shifted in his own chair, embarrassed at the, ah, public display. But then, he knew that’s what this place was for: getting an eyeful. Look, don’t touch.

  Right.

  He wondered if Hugh Hefner ever got tired of living the cheesy life, but figured, Naw, the dude probably bled Velveeta.

  “Hey, Bri, check out that babe’s rack. You think they’re real?”

  He shifted his gaze to the woman gyrating on the small stage. She ignored the shiny pole that Demi Moore had so energetically flung herself around in Striptease, doing a truly uninspired bump and grind to AC/DC’s “Who Made Who.” He’d noticed how few of the dancers ever used the thing, except for balance.

  So much for choreography.

  The “babe’s rack” looked anything but real to him. As big as ripe cantaloupes, they barely moved as she shimmied, so roundly perfect and pert that they were almost comical. Like a cartoon. Or Pamela Anderson.

  “Not even close to real,” he weighed in.

  Matty Karas, the groom-to-be, bobbed his head. “Silicone?”

  “Saline, I’d wager.”

  “Fewer lawsuits?”

  “Yep.”

  Their firm regularly defended Big D surgeons who’d done botched boob jobs, but that didn’t mean he was an expert in augmentation. He only knew what he liked, and it wasn’t the kind of uniformity he saw parading around him beneath the red velvet and crystal chandelier. It was actually kind of frightening, as if The Men’s Club had sent all its “ladies” to have their chests bumped up to DD

  cups by a doc on the payroll of Frederick’s of Hollywood.

  Stepford Strippers.

  Spooky.

  He didn’t even like breasts that looked like cantaloupes, not really; though he had a certain appreciation for those that did, sort of in the vein of admiring the curves on a shiny new Porsche Carrera.

  Bigger wasn’t necessarily better.

  It was a personal preference, nothing more, nothing less. The girl he was crazy about was hardly built like a brick house, something she’d even apologized for in the beginning, as if it would bother him. He told her “good things come in small packages,” and he meant it.

  Natural was okay by him. Whatever God gave a woman was perfectly fine, especially if brains and a sense of humor were part of the deal, both of which his girl had in spades.

  Despite the noise and lights and naked women, he smiled to himself, thinking of Andy and what she was doing tonight, wondering if she was having as bad a time as he was, and wishing they were together right this minute.

  He knew exactly what she’d say, if she were here, amidst the drunks and the bimbos. . . .

  “My gawd, buddy, check out the lap action over there!”

  No, that wasn’t it.

  “Hey, earth to Malone.” Matty elbowed him cleanly in the ribs. “You’re treating me to a private session, right?”

  He’d paid for the beer and the twenty bucks’ cover charge collected by the hostess at the podium in the foyer, so it only seemed fitting.

  “Yeah, buddy, anytime you’re ready,” Brian told him, leaning over to clap him on the shoulder, thinking as soon as Matty was done in the back room, they could get the hell out of there, and he could go back to Andy’s place.

  Quiet, that’s what he craved, and to hold her in his arms, breathe in the clean smell of her, as opposed to the stench of sweat and cigar smoke.

  “Believe me, I’m ready,” his pal said, a hardly sober smile plastered across his flushed face.

  “Okay, just give me a minute.” Brian pushed out of his club chair and stood.

  Which is when he looked across the room and saw her, and for a moment he couldn’t move. He squinted behind his wire-rims, doubting himself for an instant because seeing her here seemed so out of context. But it was no mistake. It was who he thought it was, all right.

  So what the hell was going on?

  His eyes doubtless burning a hole through her back, the blonde turned, and their gazes locked. Before he’d even moved a foot in her direction, she took off, hurrying toward the doors to the left of the stage.

  Brian went after her.

  “Yeah, buddy, great eye . . . bring her on back pronto, I’m good to go!” Matty called out, but it barely registered, not with the music in his ears and the strobe lights in his eyes, and his pulse thumping loudly in his veins.

  He kept moving, weaving between the tables, past corset-wearing waitresses and men in swivel chairs with breasts pressed to their faces.

  He hurried past the stage and opened the door through which she’d disappear
ed a moment before.

  And down the rabbit hole he went.

  Chapter 1

  “Lordy, Lordy, come to mama, sweet cheeks!

  Rub a little sweat on me! Shake that bonbon till you break it!”

  I cringed at the screaming woman who stood but a foot to my right inside the packed hotel ballroom. Colored spotlights danced across the faces fixed ahead at the stage a dozen rows in front of me, where well-oiled male dancers gyrated and ripped off what little clothing they had on to start with. It was the first time I’d ever seen men in uniform with tear-away pants and jackets. Did any branch of

  the military actually wear G-strings? It was certainly one way to inspire shock and awe.

  “Hey, sweet meat, over here! Gimme some lovin’!”

  For Pete’s sake.

  The woman howled like a twelve-year-old at a Backstreet Boys concert, and she was old enough to be somebody’s mother. No, more like somebody’s grandmother, I decided, taking in the white hair upswept in the bouffant ’do and the cavernous lines that pleated her face (not to mention the Stride Rite tennis shoes).

  I thought of my own mother, the ultradignified Cissy Blevins Kendricks, society maven extraordinaire, and knew she’d rather be caught dead than attend a Chippendales’ show, waving dollar bills in the air to entice scantily clad male strippers over for a quick round of dirty dancing.

  Though I’d pay through the nose to see something like that.

  Heck, I’d kill to see it.

  Since I, Andrea Blevins Kendricks, fruit of said dignified mother’s loins, stood amongst the crazed crowd viewing the, um, scenery, I guess that made me something less than stand-up. Though I was here under duress, let me make that very clear.

  As Enrique Iglesias crooned, “Let me be your hero, bay-bee,” the assorted buffed bods trickled from the stage and into the throngs of berserk females, pausing only to bump and grind for tips.

  “Bring it home to mama, sweet cheeks!” the liquoredup woman beside me hollered louder than Minnie Pearl yodeling “Howww-deeee!” at the Grand Ol’ Opry.

  I wanted to tell her to give it a rest.

  But it was too late.

  Sweet Cheeks was heading our way.

  The sight put dear old Granny in a tizzy, and she gasped, “Oh, dear Lord, oh, dear, Lord,” again and again, as if a witness to the Second Coming.

  I considered sticking my fingers in my ears, until I felt a nudge, as the blonde on my left leaned over to yell, “Gird your loins, Chippie Virgin, ’cuz this one’s on me.”

  If I hadn’t already been gritting my teeth—I was dooming myself to porcelain veneers someday, wasn’t I?—I would’ve started then.

  “Thanks, but no thanks, Allie,” I got out, loud enough to be heard above the music, only Allie wasn’t paying the least attention. “Are you listening to me?” I tried again, but the witch (with a capital B) in the size two Seven jeans merely raised her arm higher and wagged more bills than poor old Grandma was offering.

  Damn her for being so aggressive.

  She was bound and determined to embarrass me.

  I sunk down into the metal folding chair, hoping I’d disappear and wishing I’d refused Brian’s suggestion that I go out with Allie tonight, help Allie show Eleanor—his friend Matty’s fiancée—a fun night on the town, because Eleanor had only just moved to Dallas from Pittsburgh and didn’t know anybody.

  Well, anyone except Allie, apparently, who happened to be Brian’s colleague at Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt (aka ARGH), as well as his ex-girlfriend.

  Not a combination I liked any better than pickles and peanut butter.

  And it made me just about as nauseous.

  Like a numskull, I’d let him talk me into it, mainly because Brian was out on the town himself, at a strip club “celebrating” with Matty.

  What better way to even the score while he was ogling big-breasted strippers than by ogling, well, big-breasted strippers? ’Cuz these Chippies had pecs the size of Nebraska.

  Not to mention other bulging parts.

  “Hey, Captain G-string, over here!” Allie yelled, even getting out an ear-splitting whistle, and I shrunk lower in my seat, shooting my deadliest evil-eyed stare at Blondie and her cohort, mousy little Eleanor from Pittsburgh, who had gotten into the act, standing on her chair and gesturing like an abandoned sailor on a raft, flagging down a passing ship.

  Damn them both.

  Aw, hell.

  I saw the rows of women parting faster than Sharon Stone’s knees in Basic Instinct, and suddenly there he was:

  a spray-tanned and oiled hunk with black hair to his shoulders, wearing what could only be described as a black satin slingshot.

  As if in slow-mo, I watched Allie slip a couple bucks into the strap of his thong, her mouth forming the words, Give it to her good.

  Gulp.

  Before I’d blinked, the buffed body loomed over me, dark eyes seeking mine, a slim white smile spreading across the chiseled face, and I morphed into a dishrag.

  This was definitely not what I’d signed on for.

  I tried to stand up, but his hand landed firmly on my breastbone and eased me back down against the metal of the chair, as Enrique’s warbly croon segued into a vintage ditty by the Gap Band, “Let’s whip it, baby, let’s whip it right, let’s whip it baby, whip it all night.”

  Subtle.

  He squatted in front of me, grabbed my legs and threw them across his shoulders, so that I straddled him. A move that surely would be frowned upon by Miss Manners, since we hadn’t even been properly introduced.

  “Grab my head,” he demanded in Brooklynese that didn’t go at all with his striking Asian features.

  Instead of issuing a protest, as a good twenty-firstcentury feminist would, I did as he asked, not sure of any way out of this except through it. And maybe I’d have a good story to tell my grandchildren someday besides. You want to hear about the night your meemaw had a fling with a Chippendales’ dancer?

  With impossible ease he lifted me, as I clung to his head and hooked my feet at the ankles, my legs around his neck.

  He shimmied and gyrated, oblivious to the fact that my fingers clutched his hair and the back of his skull. I was upside down, the blood rushing to my face, heating my cheeks.

  The world swirled around me, and I giggled hysterically, feeling like a complete idiot . . . and enjoying myself in spite of it all.

  Until Allie’s two bucks’ worth was up, and he lowered me to the chair. Like a spineless jellyfish, I slid against the metal frame, and my dark-haired, um, friend slithered his slick body up against me so that his scent filled my nose.

  He finished me off with a kiss on the forehead.

  Poof.

  He was gone.

  Slimed by his sweat, still breathing hard, I couldn’t move for a full minute after.

  It was Allie who finally dragged me to my feet, though my knees felt strangely wobbly.

  “Girl, that was crazier than any Six Flags ride I’ve ever seen,” said Brian’s smiling ex, slinging an arm around my shoulders and giving me a squeeze.

  For a fleeting instant, I almost liked her.

  “Thank God they don’t allow pictures,” was all I could come up with, and I meant it. “That’s one Kodak moment that should rest in peace.”

  “Ah, but that would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it?”

  My stomach did a fast nosedive, not liking her tone in the least. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Which is when Allie produced her cell phone, flipped it open, and stuck the tiny screen in my face. I squinted and saw a miniversion of someone who looked very much like me, dangling from the neck of a hard-bodied Chippie. I was moving—he was moving—it was a video, for crud’s sake.

  “Oh, no,” I breathed.

  “Oh, yes.” Allie grinned broadly. “Can’t wait to see Brian’s face when I download this baby and shoot him a copy.”

  “You wouldn’t
.”

  “Of course I would.”

  “But—”

  She cut me off before I could come up with another lame appeal.

  “Sweetie, I’m a defense attorney. I eat nails for breakfast.

  This”—she tapped her cell—“is too delicious for words.”

  Then I remembered why I didn’t like her.

  It was simple, really.

  Allie Price was a Grade-A bitch.

  Chapter 2

  It was just past midnight when I got back to my condo in North Dallas, far away from shrieking women, blinding lasers, and gyrating Chippies; not to mention the bride-to-be from Pittsburgh

  who’d had one too many vodkatinis and who, I sorely hoped, would puke all over the hand-stitched leather interior of Allie Price’s brand-new BMW Roadster.

  I pulled my Jeep Wrangler into an open slot in front of my building, half expecting to spot Brian’s red Acura, to catch him sprawled on my porch steps, working off a beer buzz and waiting for me to get home.

  But no such luck.

  He’d said not to expect him tonight unless he called first; that he’d probably head back to his apartment after he dropped off Matty. He didn’t like waking me with knocks on the door after midnight (which also woke up nosy neighbors), and we hadn’t yet reached the “exchanging keys” point—my call, as I’d been independent for far too long and fiercely protected my privacy.

  Still, I’d assured him that he was more than welcome to come by at any time, so long as I was awake enough to hear him rapping.

  The fact was that I missed him.

  I hadn’t gotten to see Malone very much lately. He’d been working so hard on some big case or another. I could never keep track, and he didn’t go into detail about them besides, or maybe it was that I didn’t ask. He probably spent more time with that damn Allie than with me, though I tried not to think about it like that.

  Maybe I didn’t feel all warm and fuzzy toward his exgirlfriend, but I’d gotten over being jealous of her months ago. Okay, weeks. Um, days?

  All right, I was still working on it.

  One thing I did know and appreciate was that he wasn’t anywhere near her at the moment. They couldn’t have had their heads bent over papers full of legalese back at the firm, because I’d been with Allie watching half-naked men dance for our viewing pleasure; because of her, I smelled like cheap cologne and sweaty Chippendale. As sure as shooting, I’d pay for it, too.