Open Doors Read online

  Okay, so that one she sent to her pending folder, to save for later to trace the IP address. If it could be isolated, she’d block the asshat from accessing the site.

  At least my grammar and spelling aren’t an “abominatin aginst god.”

  * * * *

  By lunchtime, Marcia had received another forty or so e-mails in the club’s account, all but six of them legitimate inquiries via the website, two creepers looking for pay-to-play, one pro-Domme and probably fake spammer looking to work at the club, and three mental midget religious whackadoodles who apparently flunked the same English 101 class in high school as the composer of the earlier e-mail.

  And who all had the same fondness for caps lock.

  Caps lock. The true “abominatin.”

  When Derrick stuck his head around the corner of her office doorway, he stopped, then walked all the way inside. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing, except that Shayla’s article apparently gave us a ton of free advertising for the club.”

  “That’s good, right? Most of them are, except for some real pieces of work.”

  She crooked a finger at him to show him the whackadoodle e-mails. A scowl creased his brow as he scrolled through them.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “That’s not the kind of attention I wanted.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  * * * *

  Three weeks later, it was eight o’clock in the morning on a Monday. Derrick sat in his car and waited for Ed to pick up his call.

  “We have a problem,” Derrick said by way of greeting.

  “What?”

  “I’m watching a group of about eight religious whackjobs with signs marching up and down in front of the club.”

  No doubt they’d been inspired to activism by Shayla’s series of articles. The timing was too coincidental.

  “Where are you?” Ed asked.

  “I’m sitting in the parking lot at the club. I pulled into a space in front of one of the other units.”

  “What do the signs say?”

  He tried to read them. “One of them, it looks like it says ‘Get Sex Out of Sarasota.’”

  Ed snickered. “They’re a little late for that.”

  “This isn’t funny.” Dealing with crank e-mails was one thing.

  This was another. This was unwanted attention drawn directly toward their members.

  “Yeah, it is funny,” Ed said. “They’re on private property. Call your landlord, because that’s his job and why you guys set things up the way you did in the first place. Kel can have a trespass warrant issued on them. He needs to go order them to leave, then call deputies if they refuse. They’re a disruption to your business. Besides, they’re not even correct. You don’t allow sex in the club. It’s in the rules. Hence, why we have rules. Duh. Why are you there anyway?”

  “I forgot my cell charger in the office Saturday. And you’re not helpful.”

  “Yes, I am helpful. And the billable hours I’m not charging you right now is even more helpful. Call Kel.” Ed hung up on him.

  With a sigh, Derrick started to pull up his friend’s number before he realized, duh, Kel might be at his office. He drove around the building and was relieved to see Kel’s car sitting parked in front of the unit.

  He knocked. Kel frowned when he opened the door. “What’s going on?”

  “I called Ed, and he told me to call you since you’re the landlord.” Derrick crooked a finger at him to follow and led the way back around the building, on foot. At the corner, they peeked around.

  Derrick pointed at the scraggly group of protestors. “That’s the problem.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you kidding me?” Kel charged ahead toward the group. Derrick stood there, watching from the safety of the building’s corner.

  When Kel approached, they ignored him, at first. Until he ordered them to leave.

  “Look, I’m the landlord. You’re disrupting my tenants’ business. I’m ordering you off my property.”

  Derrick was wondering if he’d have to call the sheriff’s office himself. The guy who apparently was their ringleader, an older man, maybe in his late sixties or early seventies, with thinning and crazy-looking grey hair and dressed mismatched Goodwill finery, leaned in and brandished his sign at Kel.

  “You’re the filthy Sodomite allowing this perversion to ruin our county?”

  Kel’s calm response nearly made Derrick burst out laughing. “Well, for starters, no, I’m not a Sodomite. I’m a Sarasotan. Secondly, not sure what you’re up in arms about, because this isn’t a sex club.”

  “We read those filthy articles about this place. It’s an abomination!”

  Okay, that’s probably one of the crazies who e-mailed us a couple of weeks ago. Not many people dropped the A-bomb in average conversations.

  Kel wasn’t swayed. “Then you also read—unless your reading comprehension is as bad as your listening skills appear to be—that they don’t allow sex, alcohol, or drugs in their club. Leave. Now. Before I call the cops.”

  “Oh, you just call them! I’ll be happy to talk to them and get this den of evil shut down!”

  Derrick watched Kel snort as his friend whipped out his phone. “Dude, that schtick is sooo retro. Next thing you’ll be telling me is Dungeons and Dragons is the gateway to hell. I’m calling the sheriff’s office. Last chance. You are trespassing.”

  The guy and his followers, now gathered behind him, remained defiant.

  Kel put the phone up to his ear and stepped away, catching Derrick’s eye as he answered the phone. “No, this isn’t an emergency… Yes, I’ll hold.”

  He turned to the ringleader. “FYI, the club has all their proper zoning permits, occupational licenses, and business licenses. They also file their state sales taxes and federal income taxes in proper fashion… Yes, I need a deputy to respond to issue trespass warnings. I’m a commercial complex landlord. There are protestors disrupting businesses, and they refuse to obey my orders to leave…”

  Twenty minutes later, a calm and dispassionate deputy was writing trespass tickets against an even more enraged goofball. Derrick stood in the shade of a nearby tree, arms crossed over his chest and struggling not to laugh as the deputy pretty much ignored every last one of the guy’s rants.

  Until, finally, he got a little too close to the deputy’s face.

  The deputy straightened and one hand came to rest on the Taser holstered at his waist. “Sir, I’m going to ask you one last time to step back and calm down, or I will arrest you. If you have a problem with this business, then take it up with the county zoning board or the tax collector’s office.”

  “The tax collector?”

  The deputy ripped off the ticket and handed it to the man. “They issue business licenses in this county. This is unincorporated Sarasota County. Now, if you don’t immediately vacate these premises, I will be forced to arrest you for trespassing.”

  “But what about our right to free speech?” he spluttered.

  The deputy turned and pointed at the sidewalk running along the road. “That ends over there, on county right-of-way, which is public land. You can protest all you want on that sidewalk, but you set foot on this private property again? The owner is within his rights to have all of you arrested. I suggest you don’t provoke him. He seems to be a man of his word.”

  “I am,” Kel said. He’d leaned against the patrol car and watched the entire display, answering questions asked by the deputy.

  The other seven protestors seemed confused by this and looked to their apparent thrift-store leader.

  The older man straightened. “I know my rights as a sovereign citizen of the United States of America! I do not have to tolerate this! I am allowed to peaceably assemble and protest.”

  The deputy looked like he’d rather be raiding a meth lab than dealing with these people. “Are you refusing an order by a law enforcement officer?”

  “Yes. If you want us to leave, you’ll have to arrest all of us—”
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br />   In a movement Derrick could barely follow, the deputy grabbed the man, spun him around, and bent him over the hood of the cruiser as he snapped handcuffs on him.

  I bet he’d be fun to watch doing takedown play on a subbie.

  Kel just stood there, slowly shaking his head as the guy ranted and rambled while the deputy Mirandized him and searched him.

  To the other protestors, Kel said, “You really should opt to leave, now.”

  “Don’t you dare!” the man screamed. “This is righteous work we’re doing!”

  Kel asked the deputy, “Is he even a local?”

  “Arcadia address.”

  Kel snorted. “Figures he’s an imported crazy, not a domestic one.”

  “That’s usually the way,” the deputy said.

  Within twenty minutes, four more deputies had responded to the officer’s call for backup, and all the protestors were being loaded into the backs of patrol cars.

  “I want their vehicles towed, too,” Kel said. “They can pay an impound yard to get them back. They aren’t coming back on my property. Period.”

  That enraged the older man even more. He started ranting from where he was sitting handcuffed in the back of the first deputy’s car, until the deputy closed the door on the man’s protests.

  “You realize they’re probably going to be released on ROR and come back, right?” the deputy asked.

  “Well, if they can afford it.” He smiled. “Depends on what judge they get. And they’ll have to pay to get their cars out.”

  An hour later, it was done. Wreckers had come hauled the cars off, and the deputies hauled the protestors away.

  By this time, Marcia had come over to join Derrick and Kel and watch the festivities. One of the other tenants had walked over to talk to Kel when they noticed the commotion.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s okay,” Kel said. “I handled it.”

  “Are they protesting the club?”

  “What do you know about the club?” Kel warily asked.

  The man smiled. “If it wasn’t for my wife’s work schedule, we’d already be members. I looked it up a few months ago when I was here one Saturday night and saw all the cars outside.”

  Derrick laughed and extended his hand. “Derrick. Owner and manager of Venture. Nice to meet you.”

  * * * *

  It turned out Judge Connelly wouldn’t be handling the protestors’ case, because he was family law, not criminal.

  Ed relayed that info. But apparently he’d called Pat anyway to give him a heads-up. And Ed cleared his schedule and attended the arraignment that afternoon, where he asked the judge to issue restraining orders against the protestors. An unusual request under the circumstances, but one the judge granted.

  The protestors seemed shocked to find out that if they committed contempt and violated the restraining order, they could end up in jail without bond until trial.

  Ed reported back to Derrick, Marcia, and Kel, while sitting in the office at the club that evening, that once it seemed to start settling into the other protestors’ brains that their leader was not only in the wrong, but costing them a ton of money and black marks against their personal records in terms of now giving them criminal rap sheets, they seemed to band together against the man.

  “Do you think they’ll be back?” Marcia asked.

  “Hard to say,” Ed admitted. “They could instigate another group to protest in their stead, along the street, but what’s that going to do? Not a damn thing. You can’t even see the club’s front door from the street because of the other building.”

  “And it’ll get even harder to see,” Kel said. “I’ve got a landscaper coming tomorrow to add extra shrubs along that front swale until I can get the permits to put up a stockade fence there and completely block the view from the street.”

  “What about your other tenants?” Marcia nervously asked.

  “I believe about half of them are already members of the club,” Kel said.

  “Yeah, I know that, but what about the other half?”

  He shrugged. “You realize how quickly these units go when one comes up available?” He snapped his fingers. “I might have one sitting for three weeks, if that, once I list it. I have waiting lists for a couple of my units, like the front corner ones. And, to be honest? I’ve told all of the new tenants I’ve rented to since you opened what kind of business you are, so they can’t come back later and claim I didn’t. Haven’t lost a single renter over it. You don’t operate during their business hours, and you aren’t doing anything illegal, and the crime rate in this complex so far is zero. They’re happy there is a business open on weekend nights, when most crime would happen, that actually discourages crime from happening in this complex.”

  “Huh,” Derrick said. “I never looked at it like that.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Kel said. “I mean, a bunch of guys who enjoy beating people for fun basically providing weekend security for free? Um, yeah, what’s not to like about that?”

  Marcia nudged Derrick. “You should call Larry Bartwell.”

  “Why?”

  “Uh, why? To do a pre-emptive strike.”

  “Again, why?”

  She shrugged. “It’s out there about Shayla’s articles, now. Let’s get ahead of it and control the message.”

  “I can’t ask one of our accounting clients to do a fake story for us for the newspaper.”

  “No, but you can give him the story and let him write it. I’m sure he’d be fair.”

  “She’s got a point,” Kel said. “He’s been here a couple of times.”

  “As your attorney,” Ed chimed in, “I say do it. As your friend, I’m telling you you’d be an idiot not to do it.”

  The next day, Tuesday, Derrick had lunch with Larry and spilled the whole story to him while Larry took notes on a reporter’s pad. “Do you want me to use your scene name or your real name?” the man asked.

  “I don’t know. My attorney says I’m okay liability-wise.”

  “I’ll just list you as Derrick,” he said, smiling as he looked up from his notepad. “That’ll make it easier for you.”

  “Look, I don’t want you to write what you think I want you to write. I want you to be fair.”

  “Oh, I will be. Religious nuts who think they can impose their morality on other law-abiding people. Got it.”

  Derrick laughed. “Your editor will let you write the story like that?”

  He shrugged. “This isn’t a political race. I’ll find this dingleberry who was their ringleader and interview him and cherry-pick the craziest of quotes from him. Anything you’d like to add?”

  “Well, Shayla’s articles did increase our membership by quite a bit.”

  “Got it. The quote from you will be, ‘All this attention has helped get the word out about what it is that we do, and helped dispel the completely erroneous myths and lies that are out there about us. We aren’t breaking the law, we’re not bothering anyone, and we’re having fun while ensuring people are being safe. And our membership has grown by explosive numbers after all this coverage, so we’re glad to take the scrutiny. I’d like to thank our protestors for that.’”

  “Wow. That makes me sound smart. Do you often write good quotes like that for the people you interview?”

  He grinned. “Only the ones I really like.”

  * * * *

  Wednesday morning, Marcia walked into Derrick’s office without knocking and closed the door behind her. In her hand, a newspaper that she must have purchased on her way in, because they didn’t have a subscription.

  She’d already turned it to the right page and laid it in front of him on the desk before sinking into one of the chairs. “Read it. I’ve already had twenty-six new e-mails today from people wanting info on how to join the club. And five more whackadoodles.”

  “Is it a good story?”

  “Read it.”

  He did, nervously. He’d resisted the urge to go online and read the story there.


  But five minutes later, after having read the story three times, and giggling at the picture of the Rev. Paul Mark Bartholomew—which made him look even crazier than he had during the protest—Derrick laid the paper back on the desk.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I don’t think we could have bought anything better in terms of advertising. He made the guy sound like a lunatic.”

  “He didn’t have to work very hard to do that.”

  Derrick picked up the phone and called Larry. “Thank you,” he said when his friend answered. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Hey, it was low-hanging fruit. I’ll never turn that down. My editor asked why I didn’t write a longer story. People eat it up. There’s a growing backlash against the ‘morality police’ in this state. People are sick and tired of the hypocrisy, and of these nuts, especially the ‘end big government’ nuts, who try to do the exact same thing with their religion while ignoring the irony as they do. He gives you any more trouble, let me know. I’ll do a follow-up.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.” Derrick said good-bye and ended the call, leaning back in his chair as he stared at Marcia. “Well?” he asked her.

  “Well what?”

  “Have I hit your ‘we’re done with this shit’ high-water mark yet?”

  She smiled and stood, rounding the desk to sit in his lap. “Not even close, buddy.” She kissed him. “Honestly? I was wondering how to do a new membership drive. We’re doing well, but some of the older members have dropped off. People have moved or moved on. It never hurts to bring in fresh blood. This is great.”

  “Any new protestors?”

  “Kel reports the coast is clear. I would imagine the money the people had to put up for bail and getting their cars out of impound imparted a level of fiscal reality to their lives they weren’t expecting. Not to mention I’m sure some of them missed work, and all of those kinds of aggravations, and lost revenue.”

  He stroked her back. “I’m a lucky, lucky man. Don’t think I don’t know that.”

  She got up, walked over to his office door, locked it, then turned. She yanked her blouse up and off over her head. “I think you’re about to get even luckier.”