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slice of the scene that Buffalo Kabuki’s offered. Just off Broadway, the midtown club catered to those who shunned the nuclear nosecone look, whether God given or silicone enhanced, in favor of mini-mammaries of the Orient. The great American plains, Japanese style.
    “Another round?” the waitress asked in flawless, unaccented English. There was a crispness about her words, a confidence beneath them. She might be a student at NYU just doing what it took to make ends meet. Or, possibly, a moonlighter out to meet certain ends and service them at a premium in some dark, out of the way corner. Jude had said you could get that at BK’s if banging a babe with tiny tits was your thing, if you said the right thing to the right girl and had the right amount of Mr. Green on hand. Or you could simply watch the little boobs bob and bounce with the music. Just sit, watch, and drink away the night or the day or the week gone by.
    “Fellas?” Jay asked, and got three certain nods in reply. No dissent at all. And why should there be? It had been a shitty week (were there any good weeks for junior brokers at S&M), and such a week deserved to be drowned properly. “Whose turn is it?”
    “I bought the last one,” Steve said.
    “You’re up, farmboy,” Jude told him.
    Jay nodded sluggishly and fished a twenty from his wallet. He laid it on the tray the waitress balanced on her forearm. “Fill ‘em up...uh...what’s your name?”
    The waitress beamed at him. Through the drunken haze it looked sincere. “Suzy.”
    “Fill ‘em up, Suzy,” Jay said, and she gathered their empties and headed for the bar. He watched her wiggle away, though how much was her and how much was the drink working on his eyes wasn’t clear. “I’m getting really fucked up.”
    Steve lifted his empty hand toward the spinning stage. “To getting fucked up.”
    Jude and Bunker raised their hands, each mimicking a glass where none (sadly) was, and then Jay pushed his fist into the mix, joining the toast.
    “Hear-fucking-hear,” Jude seconded.
    “To bathing in booze,” Bunker suggested, and his fist thrust out and up again, the others responding in kind.
    But quickly on the heels of that, Jude offered his own toast. His own, yes, but one he knew they could all concur with. Would concur with, because he knew their dreams. Dreams that were the same as his. “To rolling naked in dirty green paper, my friends—fifties if times are good, and hundreds if they are better.”
    They were about to raise their glassless fists when Jay amended the toast, his words coming wet and thick, like golf balls rolling into his mouth. “To better times, I say then.”
    “Here-fucking-here,” they chorused, smiling wryly, cockily, sincerely, each with his own mask of gladness at that hopeful thought, each the willing keeper of a common want smoldering madly in their hearts.
    “Righteo,” Jude said, punctuating the moment, marking it like a point of convergence where travelers met on disparate journeys to the same destination, then he looked left toward the stage. Bunker looked right. And Jay, he lifted his eyes as best he could and watched the show with his friends.

    A few minutes later, Steve wasn’t looking at the dancers anymore.
    “Oh my God,” Bunker exclaimed quietly. He had seen it, too. Who could have missed her ( them ) in here.
    “What?” Jay asked. He was staring at Bunker and Steve as they gawked at something, though his drink-numbed brain couldn’t quite make the connection that maybe he should look that way as well.
    “Christine Mellinger,” Steve said, and that made the connection. Jay’s head turned toward the club’s entrance.
    She was blonde, built, and beautiful; the perfect package of legs and tits, with the sweetest meaty ass in between. Stanley & Mitchell was on the fourteenth floor. Christine Mellinger was on eleven. The reception desk for BrainTrust Investments faced the elevator lobby on that floor, and there she could be found,