I’d never met this particular bouncer but I wasn’t surprised that he knew my name, because of my oldest friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. Mouse was a remorseless killer, a criminal from sunup to sunup, and one of the five most dangerous men I knew of in Southern California. But he was more than that. Raymond was connected to organized crime because of his predilection for committing high-yield heists. Due to this affiliation even those establishments that usually turned away black skins were more likely to leave the door ajar.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“Come right on in, sir.”

Sir.

The dining room of the Dragon’s Eye was a perfect circle with maybe eighteen round tables taking up the main floor. There were semi-secluded booths along the wall. The waitresses wore variously colored thin silk slips with nothing underneath. The Eye was not a strip club but rather a high-end gathering place for sensualists of all genders and persuasions. I’d never been above the first floor, but it was rumored that there were bedrooms and other chambers nestled there where clients and their guests could enjoy all kinds of pleasure, pain, and euphoria.

The champagne was very good, starting at a hundred dollars a bottle, and the steaks well aged. The ladies serving were nice but you couldn’t press them—the management needed their servers smiling and friendly. You could, I’d been told, negotiate with the serving staff—I was relying on that.

The only thing wrong with the Eye was the smell. Not a powerful odor, but just a whiff of something too sweet, with, at the same time, somewhere at the back of the nasal wall, a hint of rot.

Raymond was sitting at a round table at the very center of the room. He wore a dark green suit with the same color vest over a lime shirt, all topped off by a deep brown, short-brimmed Borsalino cocked on the side of his head. Two women, one brown-skinned in pink and the other white in black, were talking with him, laughing loud enough that I could hear them across the nearly empty room.

I walked up to them. The tabletop was a swirl of different pastel colors, making it and its cousins resemble pirouetting dancers endlessly, gracefully in motion.

“. . . I told Benny that he had to pull up his pants before he could tie his shoe,” Mouse was saying.

The women seemed genuinely entertained.

“Mouse,” I said.

“Easy!” Raymond’s grin was gated in gold and there was a glittering yellow diamond embedded in his left upper front tooth. “Ladies, this here is my lifelong friend, Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins.”

“Hi,” the lady in pink said. “Desdemona.”

She held out a hand and I shook it, gently.

“I’m Priss,” said the girl in black. She smiled and nodded. No touching for her.

I pulled out a chair and Desdemona asked, “Should we bring over the champagne now, Mr. Alexander?”