Antelope Valley lies almost exactly opposite the huge government area northwest of Las Vegas from the Bar H Bar Ranch. Much of that area is permanently prohibited to civilian air traffic, because there are several activities going on there that the government really doesn’t want well known. Since Jennlynn and Will couldn’t fly through the prohibited area, they had to go around it. The choice was to go around the west, the Tonopah side, or the east, the Las Vegas side. The distances were about equal, so since she’d already been up the Lost Wages side that morning, she decided to go the other way for the sake of variety.

It took well over twice as long as going direct, and the sun was below the horizon and the light going fast when she set Magic Carpet down on a crumbling old bomber runway left over from World War II. In later years she was to learn that there had been a bombing range target several miles away at Jackass Flats during World War II. For whatever reason, the generals involved decided that a paved emergency runway nearby was a necessity. The runway was declared finished on August 6, 1945, the day Hiroshima was bombed, and saw little Air Force use thereafter.

The existence of the runway, and the Las Vegas/Reno highway that ran close by, caused the first buildings to be built there, in the 1950s – a combination motel and gas station with a restaurant, bar and casino known as the Antelope Valley Inn, along with a handful of mobile homes. A small eight-unit motel, the Sagebrush, joined it toward the end of the decade. In those days, the Jackass Flats bombing range was put to another use – it became known as "the valley where the giant mushrooms grow." The nuclear weapons testing dates and times were supposedly secret, but the local grapevine knew when a shot was scheduled, and Antelope Valley became the place to go if you wanted to see an atomic bomb shot off. Sometimes people would fly into the old runway to watch a shot.

The open-air nuclear testing ended in the early 1960s with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but underground testing had gone on there until relatively recently. The area was also the home of Groom Lake, a facility originally built by Lockheed for the testing of super-secret airplanes. These included the U-2, the SR-71, which had been retired a couple years before while still being the fastest airplane in the sky, and the equally secret F-117A stealth fighter. There was still testing going on there, and UFO enthusiasts from around the country were thoroughly convinced that the Air Force was trying to back-engineer a UFO of their own, based on the remnants of one captured at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Jennlynn knew that Lambdatron was involved in some project that had something to do with Groom Lake. It was a small project, and since she hadn’t been cleared for it, she didn’t know much about it. Still, she doubted that it had anything to do with flying saucers.

The original building for the Redlite Ranch was still standing when Jennlynn and Will flew Magic Carpet in there for the first time. It dated from the early 1970s, but was so dilapidated that Jennlynn could have sworn it was at least fifty, if not a hundred years older. But there was a new double-wide mobile home sitting on concrete blocks in the parking lot to one side of the building, and there was evidence of considerable construction work going on behind them.

In the fading light, Jennlynn found a row of tie downs not far from the construction area. It was breezy, and she didn’t think much of the ropes that lay there, so she and Will got her own ropes out of the back of Magic Carpet. Between them they tied the little Cessna down firmly, then walked past the darkened old Redlite building, which had a sign with an arrow pointing toward the mobile home, where there were lights.

There was a small, not very stable porch on the front of the mobile home, which had the front door locked. But there was a sign that said, "Please Ring Bell And Wait." Jennlynn rang the bell, and in a moment the door opened. There stood Shirley, with a beaming smile on her face. "Jennlynn! Will!" she cried. "What a surprise!" She got a frown on her face for a second. "You might as well come on in. Will, you’re under twenty-one. If we get caught we can say it’s a family visit, not business. What are you doing here, anyway?"

"I stopped by the ranch looking for you," Jennlynn said. "Will hitched a ride; he wanted to see you."

"Well, it’s good to see you, Will. Come on back. We don’t have any customers in the house, and Claudia is about to serve dinner. If we get caught, we get caught."

"Claudia?" Jennlynn said, surprised.

"She’s here and she’s cooking tonight," Shirley smiled. "It’s like old home week at Bettye’s, Cindy and Tina and Sara are here, and now you."

"Cindy?" Jennlynn said, surprised. "Tina?"

"When that Frobisher woman said things were going to have to change at Bettye’s, that the lockdown started right now, and that shifts went three weeks, everybody packed up their stuff and was gone within an hour," Shirley laughed as she led them back to the tiny dining room. "She was about fit to be tied. She said everybody had contracts with Bettye’s. I told her that nobody ever had any more of a contract than a handshake with me, and if she didn’t want to honor that, I wasn’t going to push the girls into it. That got around real fast, they had a couple weeks before they had a girl in the house except that Frobisher woman, and she didn’t have a card."

"Did the sheriff find out about that?" Jennlynn asked, figuring it was the classic rhetorical question.

"Someone called him, I ain’t saying who," Shirley smiled. "It wasn’t the Mormon bishop, though." She got a more sober expression on her face. "We had a good deal there at Bettye’s for a lot of years, going back to Bettye, well before I was involved. There wasn’t anything broke, so there wasn’t anything to fix. But no, the Frobishers thought they knew it all and were going to do things their way, and they shot themselves in the foot."

"In terms that I’ve been using down in Phoenix, it sounds like a paradigm that didn’t need to be broken," Jennlynn laughed.

It was old home week there for a moment, hugs with Claudia and Cindy and Tina – and Sara, who Jennlynn knew from the ranch, although she’d never worked with her. Just about that time, Claudia was ready to serve dinner, and Jennlynn was happy to sit down to the best meal she’d had in almost a year. It may have been a far different place, but already she was back home. It felt good.

There was a good amount of catching up done over the first part of dinner, and lots of gossip had to be caught up on, but midway through dinner, Jennlynn’s curiosity got the best of her. "Ellen said that George put up the money for this," she smiled. "And that there were some big plans. What’s that all about?"

"Oh, my," Shirley grinned. "I don’t know where to begin. You know how I always used to say that the Bar H Bar ain’t the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from there? I was wrong. The middle of nowhere is out that way . . . " she pointed back over her shoulder ". . . about twenty miles, Jackass Flats, where they used to set off atomic bomb tests. I saw a couple of them, way the hell and gone a long time ago. But George and I talked about this place a lot over the years; he says that for the middle of nowhere, its location makes it a hell of a somewhere. That location being that we’re about two hundred yards this side of the Clark County line. This is actually the closest legal house to Las Vegas, we’re about twenty miles closer than the houses in Pahrump, and the road to get here is better. George has been sniffing around about buying this place for years and never got a nibble. We were about halfway to buying Bettye’s when the owners here decided they’d talk a deal. We had to keep talking about Bettye’s for a while until this was nailed down, but the Frobishers had been fighting us every inch of the way, so once George knew he had this place, we rolled over and played dead up there."

"I’m really sorry the thing didn’t work out with Bettye’s," Jennlynn shook her head. "That was a special place; I have some warm memories of it."

"It was a special place," Shirley agreed. "Although if George and I had managed to get it, we were going to try to develop it more toward being a resort with girls, rather than a parlor house. I’d already worked it that way up there as far as I could with the money I had to work with, and George and I had what I think are some good ideas to help more. And, some day, they may come to pass. The Frobishers will probably go broke sooner or later, and when the time comes we might just get in the market again. We’d have to build it back up from scratch, but we could do it from the ground up as a resort. But that’s all water under the bridge right now; there’s enough to do with this place."

"Like what?" Jennlynn asked.

"Lots of stuff," Shirley smiled. "I mean, I always knew George liked his girls, but I never realized he had a pot load of money. He’s got close to a million dollars in just buying the land and the licenses for this place, and there’s several million more already contracted for in construction. George says we’ll make all of that back and a pot load besides."

Jennlynn grinned. "George is crazy like a fox, isn’t he?"

"Like one with his own hen house, for sure," Claudia laughed, making Jennlynn remember another pleasant evening around another dinner table long ago.

"The county here has a bunch of goofy ordinances. They really don’t want a house here at all, but they don’t mind the tax money it represents. Sort of like Shelby County, for that matter. Some of those goofy ordinances are things we can’t mess with; it affects the plans for this place. This place has a bad reputation, you know that."

"I know. I was real surprised to hear you were here."

"It was a small bar house and a rough one," Shirley nodded. "The girls were pretty much trash, and about the first thing George did was give them their walking papers and tell them that Bettye’s was looking for girls like them," she laughed.

"He wouldn’t even let us use the old place," Claudia said. "He told all of us to take a couple weeks off and go somewhere. When we got back, this double-wide was sitting here."

"I was talking about goofy ordinances," Shirley smiled. "George had to build a plywood breezeway to connect the buildings so it’s all part of the same building. When we build the new building, it’ll actually be built on to the old one, with a separate entrance. We won’t use the old one at all, and tear it down as soon as we can, just to be cute with the permits. We’re supposed to have a fence, but because of the construction they’re letting us get by with keeping the front door locked. The sheriff and the building inspector sort of split some hairs for us on that one so long as it’s not that way permanently. They’re actually pretty decent folks, but the general agreement is that we don’t crowd them. Anyway, the customers coming to this place were pretty rough, too, and we’ve had some trouble changing that. The first thing we did about it was to close the bar. We can’t actually close the bar; it has to be open every day or we lose the license. So, it’s open between 10:15 and 10:30 every morning except Sunday, which is just as well since there may be as much as half a case of warm beer over there and nothing else. That’ll change when we get in the new building, and hopefully by then, the word will be out that the kind of horseshit that used to go on here isn’t allowed any longer."

"I take it you haven’t been very busy then," Jennlynn shook her head.

"Nope, not very," Shirley told her. "In fact, George has been writing the girls an extra check out of his pocket to make it up to them."

"Honestly, I don’t mind," Cindy added. "I see what George is trying to do, build a quality house, and we all realize that it’s going to take a while. I can wait. This is exciting to be a part of."

"This has potential," Jennlynn said, just a touch of exasperation creeping in. "But tell me about the plans, for Pete’s sakes."

"Well, since we know we’re going to have to start slow and grow, we’re only starting with ten rooms, a dining room with a small bar, a kitchen, and a few odds and ends," Shirley conceded. "The first rooms are going to be interesting; they’re going to be suites. You have a front room that’s a work room, and a back room that’s a bedroom that the customers can be locked out of so you don’t have them going through your stuff when you go up to settle at the office. That means, like Bettye’s, you don’t have to sleep in the bed you work in. Those will be for the more permanent girls, the short-term girls will have more traditional ones, but that comes later. But the whole building is designed to be expanded in phases. When it gets to its full growth it’ll be 110 rooms, and it could be expanded after that. It may be a few years before we get to that point."

"What! 110 rooms?" Jennlynn said in awe. "That’s twice the size of the Mustang!"

"It may be a while before we get there, and I really hope it doesn’t get that big for a while," Shirley said. "We hope to be able to develop the kind of traffic the Mustang gets, except twice as heavy. But we want to keep the focus on quality, rather than production, like we did at Bettye’s."

"That’s two things that don’t go together very well," Jennlynn nodded. "It’s going to be hard."

"Yeah, it is, and with that much action going on, there’s going to be too damn many people running around," Shirley said. "So, when we get over about thirty girls on a regular basis, and that’s a couple expansions up the road, we’re going to open a whole second lobby. The first section we build will probably become sort of a typical bar house. But the second lobby will be focused more toward a quieter girlfriend experience. Eventually, we’ll set up third and fourth lobbies, separate lineups in each one with other specialties. It all depends on how fast business builds up; it might take years."

"George has some big plans," Jennlynn shook her head. "This is going to take some bucks."

"He’s got the bucks," Shirley said. "At least to get started, then the rest is going to have to bootstrap itself," she explained. "Anyway, in the first phase, there’ll be an indoor pool and Jacuzzi, in the second an outdoor pool. There’s going to be apartments for me and George, and maybe another manager, since George won’t be able to be here all the time – for several years, probably. And, we can’t do outdates in this county, not that there’s any place to do an outdate to. If you take an outdate to Clark County you’re breaking the law, anyway. So, we’re going to have in-house outdates in a bunch of themed bungalows. Arab theme, South-Seas theme, hunting-lodge theme, stuff like that, all inside the fence."

"Sounds neat," Jennlynn smiled, but then the smile changed to a frown. "This is going to be fenced? Locked down?"

"Fenced, yes," Shirley said. "I wasn’t too thrilled about it either until I thought about it, but it’s county ordinance and that’s that. George thinks it isn’t worth the trouble to fight it, and I’ve come to agree with him. We’re right here next to the highway, we’re going to get curious people coming by, probably some assholes. Besides, in the near term, a lot of the people who are used to coming here are serious assholes, anyway. The fence isn’t meant to keep the girls in, it’s meant to keep the assholes out. We don’t have to open the gate for someone who’s drunk, or demonstrating or like that. Now, as far as lockdown, the way the county ordinance is written, you could read it as the law says we’re supposed to be locked down, but it doesn’t come right out and say it. That leaves us some wiggle room; we’re running it sort of like we did at Bettye’s. In other words, you’re pretty much expected to stay on the property, but you can go somewhere if you need to. We can be a little flexible if we need to be. Realistically, with that many girls it makes things a little different than they were at Bettye’s."

"Yeah, I can see that," Jennlynn nodded. "I’m not sure I like it all that much, but yeah, it’d have to be different."

"It’s going to have to depend on getting the girls we want, a lot of it," Shirley told her. "We’re going to do a sixty-forty break rather than the usual fifty-fifty, just so we can have more girls to choose from and be picky about who we take. Generally speaking, we want to have a core of girls who are more or less full time, to carry us through the periods when we don’t have as many customers, but fill it out with weekend girls, or maybe girls here for only a week or so. Girls sort of like you, in other words. The big problem I’ve seen in this business, and that George has seen, too, is that it takes a really exceptional girl to keep it up week in and week out without getting stale real quick and ends up just going through the motions. You’ve seen, I’ve seen, we’ve all seen girls like that, and that used to be about all they had here."

"Yeah, sure," Jennlynn agreed. Dinner had been long finished by now; Claudia was serving dessert and coffee. "I managed to carry it through the first summer on excitement, but I was getting a little flat toward the end when it was time to go back to school. I really don’t think I could have done a second summer on that schedule and kept it up."

"That’s it exactly," Shirley agreed. "The guy who used to own the Mustang saw that right off, that’s why he insisted on three on and one off. My own opinion is that two on and two off, or even one on and three off, is a much better way to do it."

"So, you’re going to depend on amateurs and part-timers."

"As much as we can," Shirley said. "Which sort of begs the question. Are you just here to be social, or are you thinking about going back to it?"

"Going back to it," Jennlynn admitted. "Frankly, under the circumstances, it sounds like a good deal."

"Isn’t it going to cause you trouble on your job? Or are you planning on sneaking around?"

"It’s a little weird," Jennlynn shook her head. "If I don’t do it, it’s going to cause trouble on my job."

"You’ve always been a little unusual, Jennlynn," Cindy laughed. "I want to hear about this!"

"You remember, the fall after I spent the first summer at Bettye’s, the first time I came up for a weekend?" Jennlynn laughed.

"Yeah, I remember," Cindy laughed. "You came storming in the door in your school clothes, dropped your bag on the floor, grabbed that young truck driver and just about fucked him to death. I’m surprised you made it back to a room."

"Right," Jennlynn laughed. "We made it in the door, we were a long time making it to the bed, we went to it right there on the floor. I’d gone two months without sex; I needed it, worse than he did." She let out a sigh. "As of today, it’s five and a half months. You think I had a temper then; it’s a hell of a lot worse now. I literally have people just about wearing flak jackets to the office expecting me to go postal and start killing indiscriminately. The only reason that I’m being nice and sweet right now is that the end is in sight. When I went to work there, my bosses and I agreed that I’d quit doing this. Now they’re begging me to go back to doing it. They like the work that I do, but they don’t want me killing someone in the process. Shirley, I’m ready!"

"I’d be ready to say ‘go to it,’" Shirley nodded. "You’re just exactly the kind of girl we want. Smart, sophisticated, horny, talented, and at best a semi-pro. The only problem is that this ain’t Shelby County, you don’t have a card, and I’ll bet you don’t have a recent medical, either."

"No," Jennlynn sighed. "I have to admit, I never thought of that. But then, this only broke this morning so I thought I’d better get back in the business before they changed their minds."

"I can appreciate that," Shirley said. "But the one thing that George made perfectly clear from the beginning is that he’s got enough money tied up in this that we can’t risk it by not going by the book, especially since we’re new here. George and I aren’t all that clear about which skids need to be greased and which don’t. So, ground rule number one is, if in doubt, follow the law."

"I’ve always tried to do that," Jennlynn told her. "That’s the one thing that keeps me from having trouble doing this. This is legal. I mean, I could turn indie down there in Phoenix, but that’s not legal and it’s not safe. The company would have problems if I were doing it illegally, anyway. Apparently not, if I’m doing it up here where it’s legal."

"My point exactly," Shirley said. "Now, we can run into Piute Wells tomorrow and get you going on your Piute County card, but there’s a weekend involved, so it’d be the middle of next week before you could get it. Pretty much the same for a medical. So, while I’d love to have you, it can’t be this weekend."

"Push comes to shove, I can wait a week," she replied, deflated. "Crap, I didn’t think of that. I got so used to how we used to do it at Bettye’s. It’d be that way anywhere else, too, wouldn’t it?"

"Pretty much," Shirley said. "But I can put you on the schedule for next weekend. We do get enough weekend business to justify another girl. You want to figure on once a month, like before?"

"I could stand it more often, but I’m not sure how the scheduling is going to work out. Let’s figure on once a month for a while. If I can work out the scheduling right, I ought to be able to do two, maybe three-night weekends once a month. We’ll just see how it goes from there. Maybe I can do two weekends a month, maybe not."

"Good enough," Shirley said. "In that case, welcome to the Redlite Ranch Bordello. I hope we have a long and profitable relationship, but starting next weekend." She let out a sigh. "Realistically, just to keep things on the straight and narrow, I can’t even let you stay in the house overnight, since you don’t have a card, or at least haven’t applied for one yet. Not you either, Will, since you’re not twenty-one. I can get away with it now while we’re having dinner and there’re no customers, but if one shows up I’d have to run you out. But for both of you, I can call over to the Sagebrush. Art will have rooms. It’s not a bad motel, it’s just small and old. Art keeps it clean."

"Guess I’ll have to ask you to do it," Jennlynn sighed. "Damn, I didn’t think of that."

Will had been sitting back rather quietly, just taken in by the rush of talk from all the women who surrounded him. "I guess I don’t got any choice, either," he said. "Damn, I had other ideas."

"This ain’t Shelby County," Shirley said, shaking her head and reading him perfectly. "Sorry, Will, but that’s the way it is."

Jennlynn glanced at Shirley, to discover her looking back with a big smile. "Great minds think alike, right?" she smiled.

"If you don’t mind," Shirley grinned. "Just keep it legal, no cash."

"Under the circumstances, I can make an exception," Jennlynn nodded with a smile.

"Uh, Miz Swift," Will said uncomfortably, but understanding the exchange perfectly. "Are you sure about this? I already owe you a hell of a big favor. I don’t want to owe you another one."

"I know you owe me a favor," she grinned. "And I plan on collecting on it. Think about it, Will. I want to keep my job. If you don’t get it, I’ll explain it later."

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