By the time we'd finished our lunch—a large soyburger with Maui chips, two of the same for Scott—the afternoon crowd had started to roll in. A succession of dancers—quite pretty, most of them, and some could even dance—disrobed and strutted their stuff for the indifferent audience. As the patrons gathered along the bar and in the shadowy booths, I felt even more at home. Apart from style of dress and the preponderance of deep tans, these slags were almost exactly like the crowd that frequented my favorite watering holes in Seattle and Cheyenne. Hard-edged customers, most of them—totally at home in the reality of the streets, if not full-on denizens of the shadows. Many were packing—I could see it in the way they moved—and those who weren't looked as though they could more than hold their own even without a weapon.