Stone Rain by Linwood Barclay

you at the bar, all hard under their jeans, even when you’re back in your regular clothes. What did she expect, exactly? The place was run by a bunch of biker types. You wanted a bunch of gentlemen? Go work someplace else, lady.
    Eldon, he was one of them, but he wasn’t one of them. Didn’t even have an actual motorcycle. Had this old Toyota, the guys made jokes about him. He always treated Miranda, eighteen now, like a lady. Thought her name was Candace, though. He was the only one called her that. Everyone else called her Candy. Let’s have a lick of Candy, they said. I’d love to eat Candy, they said.
    So dumb, she thought, coming up with a name like that. Thought it sounded like a good name for a stripper when she applied for the job. Stupid.
    But Eldon, he called her Candace, talked to her like a person. Asked what she wanted to do with her life, like he knew she was destined for something better than wrapping herself around a pole for a bunch of horny drunks.
    “I like numbers,” she said. “Maybe, like, something financial. Planning, or accounting, doing people’s books for them. I look around here, they’re wasting so much money. They could be saving a lot.”
    “No shit?” he said.
    “They have a course, at the college?” she said. “I’m going to see if I can take it, learn more stuff. I don’t like the dancing.”
    “Yeah, you’re good though. You bring the people in.”
    “They’d come in and watch anyone does what I do.”
    “You should do what you want to do. You’re smart. No offense, but you’re too smart to be up there doing that, you know?”
    She told him that Gary, the guy who ran the Kickstart, he kept pushing her to work upstairs, where lots of the other dancers made extra money on their backs, or their knees.
    “That’s not right, him pushing you like that,” Eldon said. “Not right at all.”
    He had a nice smile. Not huge. Just the corners of his mouth coming up, like he wasn’t just smiling, but he was thinking about why he was smiling. He did odd jobs for Gary, dope runs up from the city, upkeep on the Kickstart. The heavy-duty stuff, like when someone from the other gang in town started cutting in on your territory, and you had to go out and teach somebody a lesson, beat the shit out of somebody, blow up a car, that kind of thing, Eldon gave that a pass. Let Zane do it. Or Eldridge. They were fucking crazy. They were made for that kind of work.
    Eldon thought it was great that Candace was going to take a course to better herself. “You got a car? If you don’t, I could drive you up to the college in my Toyota, you could check it out, this financial stuff. On days that you have a class, I could take you there, bring you back, we could get something to eat after.”
    So he drove her up. She didn’t have the marks, or the money, to enroll full-time, but she was able to take a couple of courses. She was a natural. She’d dress real plain, bulky sweaters, try to look like someone else, in case some of the male students recognized her from stripping at the Kickstart. Eldon would come by when her course was over and drive her home. “Stop here,” she’d say along the way. “I gotta go in and buy the new issue of
Money.”
    She said to Gary—they called him Pick behind his back sometimes but not to his face—he could save some money by changing around some of the bartending shifts, he had too many people during the slow parts of the day, she could draw up a better schedule?
    “The fuck you talking about?” he said. She explained it to him. He said, “Shit, you’re right.”
    She had other suggestions for him, how he could negotiate better deals with his restaurant suppliers, how the girls upstairs could charge more for certain things some guys really liked. What the hell, as long as she didn’t have to do it. She told him how he could be putting his money from prostitution, and the cash from dispensing dope, in legit investments, make it look like it came