Enjoy this story. It’s a bit shorter and leaner than a lot of mine, but I hope you like it. It stands on its own, but if you want to read more about Steve the stripper? Check out “Violet Eyes” on my story page. As for Nadia… well, she’s new, but her friends Izzy Speier and Ronnie Silber turn up here and there.
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Kenny From Dispatch had had a giggle in his voice when he’d sent me on the call, so even before I arrived I was tense. Something had to be up, because Kenny From Dispatch was not really a giggler.
“Reports of a mishap at a party. The caller wasn’t willing to be more specific, except that it apparently involves a stripper, over.”
“A what, over?” Mikey, my partner, had glanced sharply over from the passenger seat. A stripper. I was thinking of caustics and paint, turpentine, shit like that. Maybe an inhalation injury, or a chemical burn? And who the hell does painting work at ten at night? My mind was suddenly flying through our inventory of stuff in the back of the truck: did we have silvadene? If so, how much? Might we need to wear respirators? I hoped it wasn’t the eyes, as I was pretty sure we were out of erythromycin…
“A stripper.” There was that little giggle again, then Kenny From Dispatch clarified. “An entertainer, over.”
“Oh.” I pondered, shaking my head, before it made sense. “Oh!” Shit. “Like, a dancer? Over?”
“Roger.” He seemed unwilling to say anything else, which made sense over a radio net being listened to by six sets of paramedics and all the firehouses.
“Ten-four,” I shrugged. “Enroute.”
The place was a nice house over at the base of Briggs Rd, just at the bottom before it started climbing. McMansions crowded the neighborhood on all sides, and I could smell wealth in the air. This wasn’t the big, old-money fraction of town: that was further up. Down here lived banking people, lawyers, folks like that.
It was not the kind of neighborhood where one would expect a stripper.
“So,” I sighed to Mikey as we dropped down from the cab, “a couple things to think about when you’re responding to a call like this. There’s the potential for embarrassment for the patient, but also for the people around.” A police cruiser was already parked on the far side of the driveway, and I nodded toward it. “There’s already a cop here, so everyone will be on edge.”
“Got it.” Mikey was a rookie, but not a bad one.
“So we need to be mindful of all that and keep the patient calm.” We started up the serpentine walk, my heavy medical bag perched high on my shoulder, and came to the door. “Remember: be professional. These people are likely to be embarrassed, and there will probably be tits hanging out. You ready?”
He nodded. “Ready.”
“Good.” The door was unlocked, the room beyond an echoing expanse of hardwood and beige paint with a big sectional facing the fireplace. In the corner was one of those rotating light thingies, throwing dazzling spangles of red and green and blue all over the cathedral ceilings. A speaker system sat forgotten in the corner, and I stepped in over a cast-off pair of pants. “Hello?” I called loudly. “Fire department! Is anyone injured?”
I calmed down a little bit when I didn’t hear any screaming or anything. You never know what you’re walking into. “Back here!” came a thin reply. “The back bedroom!”
Hoisting my bag higher, I led the way along a set of shallow stairs, through an open-plan dining room furnished in an expensive but dated style, checking out some Lladro figurines in a china hutch. No, this definitely did not look like the kind of house where strippers would be hanging out. This house screamed baby boomers, and as I reached the wide doorway to an impersonal granite kitchen I began to hear voices.
Mostly the soothing kind. And, occasionally, a sharper one: that would be the cop. I picked up my pace, my boots flying across the nice tile: I thought I recognized the voice of that cop.
Yup. LaFratta.
He was not an ugly man, really, but his attitude was terrible and there were many, many rumors about him. Not the good kind of rumors. I saw him from behind, leaning casually against a doorjamb with his arms crossed in front of him. He twisted his head around when he heard Mikey and I in the kitchen, talking into the room out the side of his mouth. “See? Paramedics are already here. You guys will be fine.” He turned then, his face melting into a leer as we ran up. “This one’s a fucking doozy, Sloman,” he chuckled quietly. “Good luck.”
I flashed him a severe look, the kind I liked to give to assholes of any kind, in any circumstance. “You can duck out, Officer LaFratta, if there’s no real threat.”
“Just securin’ the scene,” he snickered as I pushed past him into the room, my med bag bumping him. Might not have been accidental, either. “Ow.”
“Mikey,” I snapped over my shoulder once I’d gotten my first look at what was going on here, “why don’t you and Officer LaFratta take some of these people out of here while I figure out what our patients need, hmm?”
The bed before me was huge, with a flowered comforter and a rattly brass headboard, a King at least. Probably a California King, the kind I’d never ever be able to get through the door of my apartment. Sitting against that old-fashioned headboard was a man, stark naked, with a body like nothing I’d ever seen before outside of anatomy textbooks. Every muscle was visible beneath mocha skin, from his shaved head to his big feet. He sat there with an odd little smile on his face, his hand wrapped around one of the largest erections I’d ever seen, a monstrous brown stalk pushing up from his groin like a NASA rocket. It loomed thick and uncut over mouth-watering thighs, his hand tracing lightly up and down its length.
The next thing I saw, nestled between his knees, was a shape now covered by a big fluffy towel, being alternately cooed at and petted by five shapely young women. They all looked like sisters, or at least cousins, and it took me awhile to realize they actually weren’t: they were just women, punched from the same mold and occupying the same social class, educated the same way, and so forth. Their wild eyes kept shifting from the quaking figure under the towel to the last person in the room, the one closest to me in this weird little tableau.
It was a man, just a bit taller than me, standing naked and sculpted and sweaty just a couple of feet away from me, at the foot of the bed. It took me a moment to realize he was actually leaning up against the thing under the fluffy towel, and that the thing under the towel had an ass, and that that ass was a woman’s. And it was naked. And pressed tight against the front of the man’s thighs. He looked back at me with a mournful little smile that suggested a mixture of about 10% shame, 20% concern, and 70% amusement.