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Sure, Levee was generally pretty light and fun, but he hadn’t survived his youth working for local gangs without picking up on how to read people and situations.
“Why these two and not the others?” I asked Seeley.
“It’s not that it’s not the others. It’s just who Huck thought made the most sense. He’s open to other opinions.”
“Who is the guy with the gauges?” I asked, nodding over toward a man at the side of the pool, sitting on the end of a chaise, seeming to have some deep conversation with one of the club chicks.
He was tall and fit with black hair, a matching beard, dark eyes, black ink, black clothes, gauged ears, and a black hoop nose ring.
Seeley looked for a minute, brows pinching. “I don’t remember him being invited,” he admitted. “Go strike up a conversation. I’m gonna check back with the others.”
I grabbed three fresh beers, and headed over.
“Ceerie,” I said to the club girl as I approached. “Refill?” I asked, holding out a beer to her.
The interruption seemed to shake whatever serious mood had been hanging around her. “Hey, Cato,” she said, giving me a warm smile. “I’m going to go say hi to Eddie,” she said, seemingly desperate to get away now that whatever spell this guy had on her was broken. “Nice talking to you,” she added, though she sounded mixed on that.
“What was that about?” I asked, taking Ceerie’s seat, handing the guy another of the beers I was carrying.
“She was telling me about how her mother used to beat her as a kid,” the guy told me, making my head whip over.
The fuck?
“That’s not exactly party talk,” I said, confused. Ceerie was a party girl through-and-through, always light and fun, never having any sort of serious conversations with anyone, not even if the party was dying down, and people were having drunken heart-to-hearts; she always tried to lighten things up again.
“I kind of have that effect on people,” the guy claimed, shrugging. “A skill, if you will. Often, not one I like having, but…” he said, waving outward.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Velle,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Cato,” I supplied.
To that, he nodded, then looked off at the party as a whole. “So, Cato, what’s her name?” he asked, and I couldn’t stop myself from glancing in his direction, finding him already smirking at me, like he knew he was right.
A skill.
Yeah, that seemed a good way to put it.
An asset, even. For the club. Maybe not so much for his personal life.
“Whose name?” I asked, feigning ignorance.
“Doesn’t take a genius to see you haven’t spared a woman here a second glance all night. There’s a lot of them,” he added. “And they’re all pretty. So what’s her—his?—name?
“I’m not seeing anyone,” I insisted.
“But you want to be?” he asked.
“Alright, Doc,” I said, exhaling hard. “Enough about me. You’re the one who should be doing the talking here. Why do you want to join the club?”
“My old man was in a club. Not a one-percent club,” he clarified. “Spend most of my life in a clubhouse. Especially after my ma ran out on us. Sometime in my teens, though, he stopped going. Which meant I stopped going. I dunno. I always kind of missed it. But I’m not looking for a hobby, a place to drink and bitch with friends. If I do it, I want to make a job out of it.”
That wasn’t a bad answer. And it was always good to have someone around who knew how clubs worked. Even if the outlaw aspect was unfamiliar to them.
“What do you do now? Or what have you been doing?” I asked.
“Well, up until three months ago, keeping my nose clean to stay off my parole officer’s radar,” he admitted.
