A '72 Olds Cutlass Supreme held down the VIP space beside the entrance canopy's awning, the license plate asking, RUGAME? The muscle car's powder blue coat had been recently sprayed, the white soft top restored, the chrome hubcaps and bumpers buffed to a mirror shine. The stand-alone building fronted an enormous mesh-enclosed preserve, like a butterfly pavilion, a bite of maybe fifteen acres from Playa Vista's Ballona Wetlands. A gravel road carved through the marshy ground, widening into a parking lot. Frogs and crickets shrilled. To the west the concrete-clad Ballona Creek moved slow and steady, pulled along like a strip of black fabric. The wetlands between were a surprising sprawl of nature within eyeshot of Lincoln Boulevard.
The last few customers trickled out, paintball guns holstered or dangling from slings, their store-crisp camo getups looking like Halloween costumes. Monday nights, Walker guessed, were slow when it came to war games.
He caught the solid oak door on its backswing and entered the spacious front room. With its wall-mounted weapons, framed Soldier of Fortune covers, and wooden bar complete with thatch canopy, tiki torches, elk heads, and twining plants, the lounge was part tropical-themed frat house, part movie-villain lair. The lights had been turned off, though a desk lamp remained on in the connecting room, illuminating brackets of guns and video equipment, clipboards hanging from pegs, and a row of lockers. To the side of a service counter, a wide ass barely accommodated by board shorts jutted into view, its owner rustling in the cabinets below.
Walker moved silently through the lounge toward the office, passing a curtained entrance to the enclosed preserve. Humid air breathed through the olive drab gauze, smelling of greenhouse. A camo tarpaulin banner secured by twine arced across the threshold between the two rooms, red letters offering what Walker assumed was the corporate tagline: GAME: SEXUALITY DISTILLED. Catching the drift, his eyes pulled to a routed-wood sign nailed to a door: GIRLS'