floor and rub elbows
with the rabble?”
“I don’t expect any special
privileges,” Lara said, smiling back at Turnbow.
“You know I own the place,” Clay
said. “That means I can dole out privileges to whomever I please.”
“I wouldn’t mind hanging out with
the rabble.”
“That settles it, then,” Clay said
as he guided Lara toward the elevator.
Chip the doorman threw the door to
the street open, and shrieks of pubescent girls filled the vestibule. Turnbow
joined Chip in forming a human barricade to let a scruffy young man and his
entourage slip inside. Lara recognized him from billboards advertising the
upcoming initial installment of the umpteenth series of hunky teen vampire
movies. Not bad looking, but a far cry from what’s on the billboards.
Chip and Turnbow managed to stave
off the worshippers and get the door closed, but the shrieks still came through
loud and clear.
The young lion slouched and
shuffled along amidst his unsavory clique—big dudes with shaved heads and lots
of tattoos, and women with fake breasts and tramp stamps who looked like they’d
been plucked from an Arkansas trailer park.
“Is that…?” Lara wondered.
“Ah, yes.” Clay gave the James Dean
wannabe a nod of recognition. “I was told he might be coming tonight. Would you
like to meet him?”
Lara gave the pretentious cadre of
celebrity handlers the once-over.
“Do they always travel with their
own armies?”
“The young ones do—until they
discover that most of them are leeches and crooks.”
“Oh.”
“You know,” Clay said, “here’s
another privilege that comes with ownership.”
He led her around a corner to where
a guard stood watch over an unassuming door.
“Evening, Mr. C.” The guard punched
some numbers on a keypad and the unassuming door opened to the most lavishly
appointed elevator Lara had ever seen.
3
The elevator was lined with richly
finished bamboo paneling alternating with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The ceiling
itself was one big mirror.
“Interesting décor,” Lara mused
when they were safely inside. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be so big on
Asian themes.”
“I’m big on Asian themes?” Clay
said as he pressed a button.
“The tiki torches at the party the
other night?”
“Oh, right. I like tiki torches,”
Clay said in a faraway voice. Then he snapped back into the moment. “This was a
freight elevator before I took over the building—and it was trashed. I went
with bamboo because it was the most environmentally responsible material.”
Environmentally responsible? It sounded weird, somehow, to hear him say it, though Lara could recall having
read something at the Fast Lane website about sustainable materials.
Specifically, materials that were sustainable as well as exotic and expensive.
Tree-hugging just for the sake of saving the Earth didn’t fit the übermanly
metropolitan male.
The door opened to the dining room.
To say it was gaudy would be kind. Rev didn’t just flirt with tackiness, it
made wild love to it. It resembled a sports stadium, with tables on a playing
field in the center surrounded by concentric rings of tables on tiers that
looked like stands. Diners in the lowest rings even sat in fold-down plastic
grandstand seats and ate from retractable trays. A ring of private rooms that
mimicked luxury boxes lorded over the entire scene.
So this is what a gazillion
dollars buys?
Lara realized Rev went beyond the
wildest dreams of Fast Lane’s founder, Clay’s father, Chase. The magazine
flourished during the Swinging Sixties with smartly written articles on
politics, business, cars, music, travel—and how to mix drinks, dress right and
impress women. There were also pictures of shapely girls in swimsuits, though
the swimsuits gradually got smaller, then optional, then disappeared.
Chase Creighton died when his
ultralight plane crashed into a cliff near Malibu,
leaving Clay in charge at age twenty-three. Clay made no changes until