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POLITICAL MISFORTUNES
PART 2
By Shorterbus
With ten minutes left to his shift, Herb Snell inched his mop bucket towards the The Panda Room.
He dipped his mop in the bucket and slopped it around the floor a few times.
He could see Heidi, a drink tray perched in one hand, leaning out over a customer to collect an empty glass. Herb could see the Slurpee's logo – a long, wet tongue dangling from a pair of grinning lips - tattooed to her ass. Purposely, she brushed her naked breasts across the customer's cheek. Touching was frowned upon, but the girls had to make quota.
Heidi wasn't her real name, of course. All the girls were given stage names: Crystal, Amber, Muffin; that sort of thing. Whoever Heidi really was, she looked like she could be earning thousands of dollars prancing up and down fashion runways in New York or Milan. Instead, she was here, in Tyler, Texas, in foot-high heels, neon green hair, silicone-filled tits and a tattooed ass, serving drinks and dancing naked.
Herb had seen his share of Slurpee's girls, and except for sizes, shapes and color, they all looked the same: stunningly beautiful, with bouncing, surgically enhanced breasts and hair dyed some neon color. They wore shoes with heels and soles stacked a foot high, and each sported a permanent Slurpee's logo on her ass. The girls had costumes, of course, a nurse, a cop, a school girl, that sort of thing, but usually the costumes were on the floor. The only other thing they wore was a smile. Always.
Before Slurpee's came along, Herb frequented other clubs. Some of the girls were marginally attractive, but most were downright skanky. Pretty or not, they were all temperamental, unreliable little divas. But Slurpee's girls were incredibly beautiful, wantonly willing and fiercely loyal. It was a mystery how Slurpee's managed it. But Herb knew. He had stumbled upon the secret.
In Walden, a town more than a thousand miles away, in a life that seemed more than a thousand years past, Herb had owned a less-than-successful insurance agency. More importantly, he had happened to be on the city council when Slurpee's made its push to open shop in the community. There was little hope of succeeding, of course; Walden was a very conservative area and most of the voters were appalled by the idea of having a strip club in town, especially one as brazen as Slurpee's. Besides, there were lots of long-standing laws prohibiting adult related businesses, But as soon as the envelopes stuffed with cash started arriving, Herb and his fellow councilmen went to work.
That was when Catherine Sedgewick-Vanderfell stepped into the picture. Herb had known Catherine – known of her – all his life. Daughter of the wealthiest man in town, Catherine was intelligent, cultured, educated and above all else, breathtakingly beautiful. Now a wife and mother of two, Catherine was determined to prevent Slurpee's from moving in. She appeared one morning at Herb's office with some very compromising photos of he and his underage secretary and made a thinly veiled threat to expose him if he did not cooperate. The minute she left, Herb raced to the site where the new Slurpee's was under construction. The manager there took Catherine's name and address and assured Herb he had nothing to fear. At that moment Herb heard the unmistakable sound of a sneeze coming from inside one of the crates being forklifted onto the dock. When Herb asked, the manager had given a vague smile and said, “Talent.” A few weeks later Catherine Sedgewick disappeared. Despite an intensive search and wide media exposure, she was never found. It didn't take Herb long to assemble the pieces.
“Herb? Where are you going?” said Agnes, his wife, as Herb hurriedly tossed a few clothes into a suitcase.
“Hunting!” Herb had replied, annoyed, “Bear hunting!”
“Hunting? You don't hunt”
With a map clutched in his hand marking the location of every Slurpee's in the US, Herb hit the gas. “Don't wait up!” he shouted as the Taurus squealed out of the drive. Ten days and ten Slurpee's later, in Tyler, Texas, he found her.
Herb had spent the next three weeks watching her, funding himself from one of the many ATM's, reluctant to leave his seat even to eat or go to the bathroom. When sleep overcame him he simply plopped his head on the table. Thankfully, Slurpee's never closed. No telling how long he might have gone on like that, but somehow Agnes managed to shut off his access to the bank accounts, so Herb had to resort to shoplifting food from a nearby convenience store, then sneaking back into Slurpee's to avoid the cover charge. When that no longer worked, he applied for a job. You would think being a business owner and city councilman would equate to something significant, but no, they made him a janitor, and reluctantly at that. But Herb didn't mind, the position gave him access to almost any place in the building. The work was hard and the pay was for shit, not even enough for Herb to afford one the most squalid rooms at the nearby motel, but no matter, Herb wasn't going anywhere. Each day, when his eight-hour shift was up and he was off the clock, he continued to work anyway, for free, for another ten, twelve hours, until he was too exhausted to stand. Then he would stumble out to the far edge of the parking lot to his car, the tires long ago gone flat, and crawl into the back seat to sleep. He bathed and shaved from the mop bucket. Herb avoided mirrors because the person he saw in them looked like the living dead.
Herb glanced at his watch, realizing his shift was over. He scooped up the mop and bucket and headed straight for the Panda Room.
The Panda Room was one of the private areas of the club, exclusive and more finely appointed, by invitation only, a place most patrons didn't even know existed. It was where Catherine now worked.
All of the girls were beautiful, but it had taken management almost no time at all to discover Catherine Sedgewick was special. She was not merely another bright-eyed bouncing beauty, she was educated, intelligent, refined and keenly perceptive. So they moved her up. At this moment she was standing on a table, not dancing really, just swaying seductively to the music, deep in discussion with a well-dressed man on the effects Putin's social reforms would have on the burgeoning Russian economy.
Though thirty-one...no, wait, thirty-three now, she still had the body of someone ten years younger. Originally, her breasts had been on the small side, but now she sported a pair of silicone cantaloupes. Her hair was neon pink. The shoes she wore added another twelve inches to her nearly six-foot frame. Other than the shoes, she was naked.
The discussion reached a pause. The customer took a big puff from his Cuban and smiled up at her. “What did you say your name was?”
“Tiffany,” she said, turning her smile up a notch. Tiffany was the name management had assigned her, the only name she went by.
Herb, working his mop across the floor, inched a few steps closer.
“How do you know so much, Tiffany?”
She shrugged, “I read a lot. Most babies come out screaming, Mama says I came out reading.”
“You a local girl?”
“Denton,” she replied without hesitation, her voice a false southern drawl. It was a lie, of course, Denton was a town a few hundred miles east. Herb knew without a doubt she was from far away Walden.
“What brings you here?”
“Life,” she said with a shrug, and went instantly into a long, spiel about growing up in Denton, describing the little house she lived in with her mother, how in winter they slept on the floor near the steam heater because the insulation was so poor, listed her favorite places to hang out as a teen, named the high school she attended, and her eventual transfer to the new school when its construction was complete, how the fresh paint in the science lab often made her nauseous and she knew she could never be a nurse because dissecting frogs made her just a sick, then progressed into the subject of not really knowing her dad, her mom passing away two years ago after an arduous battle with the cancer, how Denton just didn't seem to be home anymore, so she and her best friend Carol moved here to Tyler, where they shared an apartment and took classes at the local Jaycee until Carol returned to Denton and married her old boyfriend and she could not afford the apartment alone so she took this job dancing. All of it said in about two breaths.
It was her story. She had several much longer, more detailed versions of it, which she could deliver flawlessly for hours on end, if thats what the customer wanted, with nary a mistake or contradiction.
Every Slurpee's girl had a story, a false history rich in detail and so thoroughly memorized and practiced it sometimes seemed even to them to be true.
That was how Slurpee's did it. Find a suitably beautiful girl, abduct her, transport her to a place a thousand miles away, pump up her tits, dye her hair some shocking color, put her in shoes that added a foot to her height, mask her with false eyelashes, glitter, and heavy make-up, giver her a new name and a new life history, and then hide her in plane sight – naked.
Herb had even overheard a few close calls. “You look just like the girl that was in the news there a few months back. What was her name? Karen, something. A college student in Boston. She was missing. Her family was offering a big reward.”
Herb could almost hear the girl's heart quicken. “Boston?” she said with a dismissive wave, “I ain't never been there! My name's Lola. I'm from Fort Lauderdale. Moved here a year back, when my dad and me had this terrible row. All on account of my boyfriend. Oh, how Daddy hated that boy. Well, me, I figured I had my fill of both of 'em, and I come here. But Shayna, she was my best friend – my ex-best friend, she let the beans slip about where I was and Danny...” On and on the girl went, reciting her story until the customer was no longer suspicious.
Or perhaps it wasn't a close call at all, but a plant Security had placed to make sure the girl would not take the bait. That was Security's primary function, keeping the girls in line and on task. Any girl who strayed paid a brutal penalty.
The man took another puff of the cigar. “What about that?” he said, pointing to the Slurpee's logo tattooed to Catherine's naked ass.
Catherine Sedgewick put her hands on her hips in mock defiance. “Can't a girl be proud of her job?”
“Sure,” said the man, “Just seems a tad permanent for part-time work.”
“All the girls get them,” she replied with a sniff. “Besides, I think its cute!”
“I suppose.” he said, taking another puff. “Is that your plan? Spend the rest of your life dancing?”
“Of course not! Well, for a while, sure. But later...” she was staring off, her face a wistful expression, then her eyes moved pointedly back to the man, “When the right guy comes along...”
It was the thing all the girls did, in one way or another, give the customer false hope, keep him coming back, keep his money flowing.
That was precisely why management had moved Catherine here, to the Panda Room, where the customers were shakers and movers and men of importance; because Catherine offered such promise. Strikingly beautiful, amazingly refined and cultured, well versed in finance, opera, literature, fashion, cubist art – almost any subject imaginable; yet with a small-town innocence, always in awe of his position and accomplishments, she would make the perfect mistress, better still, the perfect wife. Each man envisioned her at his side, the ideal accessory to his success.
“Why don't you climb down from there, sit in my lap and you and I get to know one another better.”
Catherine's smile got even brighter and – no easy task in those shoes – she hurried to comply . But Herb knew how false her smile and her eagerness truly was, for as she did, her eyes cut quickly - so quickly, so imperceptibly that you had to be watching ever so closely – which Herb was – to notice, to a man seated alone in a distant corner. The man was an officer at the nearby Air Force base. He was a frequent guest, especially here in the Panda Room, and management took extra care to assure he was always happy. After all, many of the customers were airmen from the base and management did not want someone in authority to have reason to declare Slurpee's off limits.
Herb watched as slyly, the young officer returned the glance, then looked away. An instant later he was up and gone.
Herb knew what was up, had known for some time. Ever so cautiously, Catherine Sedgewick was orchestrating her escape.
“You are a pretty young thing,” said the man, a plume of his cigar smoke drifting across Catherine's face. With a feigned shiver of delight, she settled into the man's lap.