Perdido County: Someone's Daughter

After two blocks, the pair turned off the main road and proceeded through a gutted stretch before seeing the rainbow of vice that pulsed in the distance in the form of blinking red, green, and blue lights.

“Looks like the place,” Olivia said.

As they neared the entrance of the Molino Rojo, they passed a throng of young ladies offering their services for twenty dollars. Outside the club a middle-aged Latino with a heavy black mustache shouted in heavily accented English like a carnival barker. “Show time! Show time! Come in and watch the most noble girls with no pretensions!”

Oliva and Wolfe walked past him into the club. In the entrance they stopped and looked at printed colored handbills tacked to the wall.

“That’s her,” Olivia said, pointing to a printed image of a girl wearing a fancy sombrero hat. Beneath the picture it said “Alex.”

“Guess we got a first name at least,” Wolfe said.

“If it is her name,” Olivia said. “I’m pretty sure strippers all go by stage names.”

Wolfe nodded. “That’s been my experience. Let’s go talk to a bartender.”

The place was dimly lit with murals of naked attractive women on the walls and sawdust spread on the floors. Bright spot lights panned back and forth over a half dozen individual stages. On the stages scantily dressed young women with tall angular bodies gyrated around brass poles to the loud thump of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” As the men crowded around the stages, mostly Americans, waved dollar bills at them, the girls intensified their movements as the music played and stripped to loud approving whistles and catcalls.