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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
“Me? You want to sell the Redlite to me? Or a part of it?” Jennifer replied incredulously.
“Of course I do,” George smiled. “In fact, I can’t think of anyone better to be involved in this deal. There are a number of reasons, and your reputation as Learjet Jenn is only a small part of my thinking.”
“But . . . George, I’m trying to pull away from the business, not get more deeply involved.”
“I realize that, but it’s not the same thing as standing lineups and taking customers out back. For at least the foreseeable future you wouldn’t have to be directly involved at all if you didn’t want to be. Yes, at some point we’re going to have to have a manager in charge, and I’m trying to bring a couple of people along to do it, but there’s no point in it if we don’t have the other problem solved first.”
“I have to go along with you at least that far. It would be a shame to lose what we have here to someone who just wants to line their pockets.”
“Right, and that’s what I want to avoid. Now, I have to point out that I’m not looking for a huge investment on your part. Keeping the vision of the place is more important to me. Because of the way the stock is held, I’m the one who decides how much it’s worth, well, with Shirley’s cooperation, of course. Once the stock is sold, there’s no way in hell that my idiot nephew can get his fingers on it no matter how many lawyers he hires. Although I don’t want to do it right away, in the long run I’d like to get rid of most of my holdings, to people I trust and who share the vision, of course.”
“Have you asked anyone else about this?”
“Not yet,” George smiled. “Shirley and I agreed that you had to be the first one to be asked. I want to bring in some others, but I want them to be people you can trust to share the vision, too. That means I’m going to want your suggestions. What I’m saying is that I think you’re understanding and idealistic enough to not let this place get ruined. Look, we can kick this around for a while and I don’t want a quick answer from you today, but I want you to think about it so we can move ahead quickly. How much money we’re talking about is irrelevant, because you’ll be making it back in dividends pretty quickly, but I want to talk about transferring twenty percent of the stock to you in the near future.”
“Twenty percent? That much?”
“Yes, and if you’ll stop and think about it you’ll understand why. Shirley already owns thirty-three percent of it. Add twenty percent to that and it comes to a comfortable majority no matter how much my greedy nephew bullshits some of my other potential heirs. If, after we get some others involved, you want to reduce your holdings we can work it out some way or other. That would cover the place if I were to drop dead of a heart attack or something. With that much accomplished we can adjust as needed.”
“George, it’s very tempting, and I think I’d like to help you out. But like I said, I’m trying to put Learjet Jenn behind me.”
“I don’t want to sound critical, but I don’t think you can. Maybe in a few more years your profile will be lower, but you are Learjet Jenn now and you’re not going to get rid of it easily, so you might as well make use of it. I know you’re in a unique situation down at Lambdatron and I know a little more about it than you might think, but you are accepted there in spite of the fact that you’re Learjet Jenn in another part of your life. But Lambdatron is not the real world and you might have things very tough if you tried to find a job outside the company.”
“I’ve always known that. I would really rather be just plain old Jennifer Hoffman who works as an engineer, and forget all the other stuff, but,” she sighed. “I guess that’s just wishful thinking. I’ve been talking with, uh, Justine . . .”
“We know who you’re talking about,” Shirley broke in. “You can use her real name in here if you want to, but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea outside this office in the building.”
“All right, I’ve been talking with Norma, and she thinks there are some ways that I can use my Learjet Jenn reputation positively. I mean, to make girls aware of some of the downsides of the business, and to help them out, especially when they’re in real bad situations.”
“Norma has talked with both of us about her idea,” George told her, “and I think it has a great deal of merit. It sounds good in theory but I can see it’s not going to be easy to put into practice. If you’re involved with her on that, you can probably help out a lot when she gets it going. And yes, your Learjet Jenn reputation can lend some validity to her project.”
“George and I have already agreed to help where we can,” Shirley added. “After all, we have some resources available that aren’t always available elsewhere. Let’s face it, if a girl is going to get into this business, I’d rather she did it here rather than out on the street being pushed around by some pimp. There’s no way that stuff is going to get stopped, but maybe we can put a small dent in it.”
“She has some good ideas, that’s . . .” Jennifer started to reply but was interrupted by the loud hoots of the emergency alarm. There was a panic button in every girl’s room in case a customer got out of hand, but it was rarely used.
“Now what the hell?” George said as he got up from his desk and hurried for the door, with Jennifer and Shirley trailing in his wake. They rushed out of the “employee only” part of the building into the main hall from the customer lounge into the back part of the building. “What’s up?” he yelled to the shift manager standing at her desk at the end of the hall.
“Lynette says a guy collapsed on her. She thinks it’s a heart attack.”
“Oh, shit,” George said and turned toward the back of the building, still with Shirley and Jennifer following him. “I think I remember how to do CPR.”
Lynette’s room was not far, and George was the first in the door, to discover the youngish girl looking fearfully on at a guy lying limp on her bed. He was pale, breathing fast but shallowly, and when George tried to find a pulse in his wrist, he noticed that the man’s skin was cool and clammy. “Shit, that doesn’t look good,” Shirley commented in a low voice.
“Crap,” George said still trying to get a pulse, and now noticing that the older client had stopped breathing. “You two, help me get him turned so I can try to do CPR.”
It wasn’t easy; even with the three of them they had difficulty. All of a sudden they heard a girl’s voice say, “Get out of my way, goddammit.” Jennifer turned to see who had spoken, and saw a totally nude girl carrying a small red case. It took her an instant to recognize the girl, who she knew as Peppermint Patty – and she knew from meeting her before that Patty was a pre-med student and had worked part-time as an emergency room aide.
Jennifer moved to the side as Patty ripped open the red case – it was a home automatic emergency defibrillator, something she’d talked George into buying a while back just in case something like this happened. “George, keep up the CPR,” Patty ordered; it was clear that she knew what she was doing. She quickly checked the client’s pulse again, and hooked up some leads to his bare chest. “No pulse, in full arrest,” she said clearly. “George, stand back while I give him a bump.”
Patty touched a switch on the device, and the client’s body bucked under the impact of the voltage being shot through his chest to his heart.
“No good,” she shook her head. “I’m going to bump him again. Stay clear.”
Again the man’s body bucked from the effects of the defibrillator. “OK, getting something now,” Patty said in a tone of sheer relief. “Someone call an ambulance. This may not hold, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
The man had settled down by now, but Patty was carefully monitoring him. “A little steadier now,” she reported after a couple of minutes. “I think I can keep him going, but it’s going to be a hell of a long time before we can get him to a hospital.”
It took a while for a helicopter ambulance to arrive – nearly an hour, from out of Las Vegas. Patty stayed with him every instant. Somewhere along in there someone found a robe for her, but she was still hovering over the man when the EMTs rolled in with a gurney. Patty gave them a quick but technical description of what had happened, telling them that he had briefly been in CPR and it had taken several shots with the defibrillator to get his heart running again. “He’s steadied down a lot, but I’ve done about all for him I can do here,” she reported.
In a few more minutes the client was in the air ambulance heading for Las Vegas. Patty had collapsed onto the bed and was breathing deeply; it appeared the intensity of the excitement had shaken her a little. “Damn, Patty,” George told her. “I’m sure glad you were here. Look for something extra in your check when we settle up.”
“I’m just damn glad I talked you into buying that defib,” she shook her head in exhaustion. “He’d have been a goner without it.”
Jennifer couldn’t help but snicker, “He may die anyway when his wife finds out where he was when he had his heart attack.”
“That could get a little awkward, that’s for sure,” George laughed. “Patty, you did good. At least you knew how to use that thing. If it had been me doing it I’m sure he would have died while I was trying to read the instructions, not that I even remembered having it anyway. As soon as you can I want you to give all the regular staff training on how to use that thing, especially me. I don’t think I could use it as well as you did, but at least I might have a chance to do some good.”
“It’s pretty simple,” Patty yawned. “Nothing like the ones in an ambulance or an ER, but it helps to have practiced a little. I just hope that client I was with didn’t get too pissed off when I threw him off me.”
“If he’s still around I’ll see that he gets a credit,” George said. “You did good, Patty. Very good. I think you’re going to make a hell of a doctor someday.”
It still took a while for the excitement to die down and for George, Shirley, and Jennifer to get back to his office. “I think that ought to have taught us a lesson, at least about what we were talking about before,” he said as he settled back behind his desk. “Shit like that can come out of nowhere, and we would be in a world of hurt if that happened to me right now. To look at him I’d have to guess that the client was younger than I am. That’s why I want to get what we were talking about set up, even if it turns out to be a stopgap measure until you and Shirley can work out something else.”
“All right,” she gave in. “You made your point. Figure out what has to be done and set it up, and I’ll sign it so long as it’s not too expensive. I may not want to stay with it, but I’ll give the place some backup until you and Shirley can figure out something else. But I’m going to tell you right straight out that I am not going to be managing the place, or even helping. I have other things to do that are more important to me.”
“I told you that you don’t have to do it,” he assured her. “You can be as involved as you want to be, even if it’s just helping to preserve the idea of this place. That’s the most important part of the job, anyway.”
“I’m willing to do that,” she nodded. “I may not be able to do much more than that, but I’ll do it, so long as you don’t want to change the name of the place to “Learjet Jenn’s Redlite Ranch.’”
“Now, would I do something like that?”
“Yes you would, if I didn’t stop you.”
“Well, it is a hell of an idea, but if you don’t want to do it I guess we won’t. But if you change your mind I’m sure we could take it under consideration.”
“Jesus, all I wanted to do was earn a few bucks so I could finish college and keep my plane, but look what happened,” she shook her head. “I sure never thought things would come out this way.”
“Life does some unexpected things to you sometimes, and that’s a fact,” he agreed. “How much longer can you stay around today?”
“Oh a few hours yet, assuming I’m going to spend the night at the ranch,” she said. “That was what I’d planned on doing.”
“Then let’s grab some lunch before you get on your way. There’s going to be some paperwork involved in the stock transfer, but there’s no reason we can’t do it today if I can get a couple of things done by phone and fax. In fact, if the two of you want to go out front and jaw for a while, I’ll get going on it before we eat.”
“Sure, fine with me,” Jennifer said, still trying to cope with the idea that she was about to become the owner of a major part of the place.
She and Shirley got up and left George’s office, but as soon as they were outside, Shirley said, “There are a couple other things we need to talk about and I’d just as soon we didn’t discuss them in public, either. Why don’t we head back to my office?”
“Might as well,” she replied, wondering what this was all about, as if she hadn’t been hit with enough for one day.
In a minute or two they were in Shirley’s office with the door closed. “Now what?” Jennifer asked.
“I didn’t want to put pressure on you, but I’m glad you did that,” Shirley said. “George really does have a valid concern, and this will put it to rest. Things don’t always stay the same around this business, and I’ve seen more change than most. You’re going to have to be ready to change with the times, and that may mean adjusting what George is calling the vision of this place. You realize, don’t you, that once the papers get signed that you and I are going to have more of the stock than George has, don’t you?”
“I thought that was the general idea.”
“It is. But I’ve always been content to let George be the chief cook and bottle washer because that’s what he wants to do. There are times he hasn’t been right or has gone off half cocked on something, and he might do it again although I agreed with him on this one. Now, just between us I’m perfectly willing to let him do things his way unless we think he’s really screwing up, but there could be a time when we have to override him.”
“Well, yeah, I guess. Even Stan does stupid things once in a while, and like George it’s hard to tell him no.”
“You may have to do it,” Shirley said. “Look, I don’t know how much Will has told you about this, but he’s been buying up claims to my estate to get control of the ranch.”
“Yeah, I knew that, but I don’t know much about the details.”
“It’s complicated, but at least everyone who will be affected has bought off on the plan, unlike George’s relatives. But when I die, Will winds up with majority control of the ranch. His folks will still own the rest of it, but that would eventually come to him anyway. That’s partly because he’s the only one of the family who wants to end up out there, and I’ve given him quite a bit of help under the table to manage it since there’s no way he could do it on his Air Force salary. It’s a family thing, after all. But he will also wind up with my shares in this place.”
Jennifer took a moment to process that statement. “You mean, Will and I would wind up owning this place?”
“Not all of it, but a majority share of it the way things stand now,” Shirley replied. “George and I hope to bring in some other shareholders to cut his family out of it some more, but like he said earlier, no one else has been asked until now because we wanted you to have the lead on it and your say on who else gets asked.”
Jennifer shook her head. “I never expected that to happen, on top of everything else.”
“Some of it was going to happen anyway, but it’s just as well that you know about it now. It’s bound to affect how things work out in the future for you and Will. The thing of it is that I know you’re going to bring a different perspective to both the ranch and this place, because you’re not a rancher and you were mostly just a weekend girl looking for a little fun, not for a living. You can step back and take a look at the whole picture. I sort of wonder if maybe George and I aren’t a little too close to the business and maybe we need the outside view. You operate in a different world than us, and I think that’s a good thing.”
It was three more hours before Jennifer said goodbye to George and Shirley, went out the back gate, and untied Magic Carpet. In that time, the necessary paperwork had been signed, and she now was the owner of twenty percent of the Redlite Ranch, or to be more precise, of RLR Operations LLC, the parent company of the place. For reasons involving a long-ago divorce, the ownership of the Redlite was buried in a fog of paperwork companies, some of them in states as far away as Delaware, and some offshore. Jennifer had always known that but hadn’t paid much attention to it; now she knew what the structure actually was, information that George’s ex-wife’s attorneys would have paid high dollars to get a few years before. Presumably George’s nephew, whoever he was, would still like to have it, so she had agreed to treat it like it was classified information. Her interest in the business would stay secret for a while, too.
Another surprising thing she had learned was that the Redlite wasn’t as profitable as she had always assumed it was. It made a profit and a nice one, even better than Lambdatron on a percentage basis, but since George didn’t need the money a lot of the profit was plowed back into the business and to the girls who were the core of it. Girls at the Redlite had always made a better cut on the business than elsewhere in Nevada, and at other places they were often charged for services like food that were free at the Redlite. That policy had been in place from the beginning, because George wanted to be able to pick and choose the girls who worked there to provide the best possible services to the clients, who were the source of all the funds in the first place. If Lambdatron’s motto was “Break the paradigm,” George’s had always been, “A happy hooker makes for a happy customer.” Unstated in that motto was its corollary: a happy customer is willing to pay more for a happy hooker.
Even more surprising was the price that she had paid for her shares in the business. George had offered her a sweetheart deal for his own reasons, but she’d never expected it to be that much of a sweetheart! It was clearly a giveaway price, and she could never have gotten the shares that low if George hadn’t felt he needed to.
She finished her walk-around of Magic Carpet, then got in the little airplane and started it up. Even though the many hours she’d put in flying it were years ago, she could remember how the old engine had sounded, and this one was more authoritative. She taxied out to the runway, not bothering to go clear to the end like she did with Skyhook, paused for a brief engine run-up, then pointed it down the runway and opened the throttle. Even after a short run, it almost bounded into the air; once she was up a little ways she started an easy turn to the northwest.
It was less than an hour’s direct flight to the cabin, but she couldn’t go direct because the Nellis Range was in the way. This “range” was not mountains, but a restricted area that included gunnery and bombing areas, not to mention the area where atomic bombs had been tested and the super-secret attraction for UFO crazies, Area 51. There was no choice but to fly around the Nellis Range; it was about the same distance to go either east or west of it to get to the cabin. In the past she’d usually avoided the slightly shorter eastern route since it took her through the Las Vegas area and close to Nellis Air Force Base, and took the longer but quieter route to the west, the Tonopah side. She chose that route again without conscious thought, mostly because she had other things to think about.
Now that the deal had been done, she wished that she’d had a chance to talk it over with Will before she put her signature on the paperwork, since this was going to affect him, too. In fact, it was going to affect him a lot, especially when his grandmother died, which with any luck wouldn’t be soon. She was aware that there had been some comment in the Air Force over just who it was he had married, but it wasn’t widely known that his wife was Learjet Jenn. But if he was in the Air Force when the word came out that he was a third owner of the nation’s premiere brothel – or that he and his wife owned the majority of it – to say that eyebrows would be raised would scarcely cover it. The Air Force was not Lambdatron, when all was said and done. Once again, she wished that he was out of the Air Force, but that was a different issue, and one not easily approached.
She knew she would have to call him and tell him about what had happened, but she really wished he were home so she could talk with him face to face. Maybe it wouldn’t be too much longer.
