Last Girl Dancing Read online

  When Jess was ready to stay home and hide, humiliated, Ginny encouraged her to hold her head up and keep going. Thanks to Ginny, both of them made it to school every day, smiled politely at their tormentors, and graduated just like the girls who hadn’t accidentally stimulated an unending stream of idiot boys’ lesbian-twin-sister fantasies.

  So Jess caught her breath.

  I can do this, she told herself. I can do this better than anyone else could. I can do this because those dead girls need me. Because this isn’t about me at all. It’s about them, and about the job. The mission. About getting it done.

  And the smile went back on her face, and this time her hand made it all the way to the doorknob and opened it, and she put on a dancer strut that came out of nowhere. She swung out into the room of waiting men and did a little twirl like the one she’d seen one of the good dancers do on the runway the night before.

  She heard the intakes of breath. From Charlie: “Omi-gawd.” A low whistle from Jim.

  Yes, she thought. I can do this.

  And she came to rest facing her audience, and found Hank there with Charlie and Jim and Bill. When had he gotten there? Hank’s eyes met hers, and she could see pain in there, coming from somewhere she couldn’t go.

  Inside she yelled at him, This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This is the job!

  But she kept on smiling, and kept her strut, and did a little bow before walking over to get her picture taken. And pretended the wary, suspicious look on Hank’s face didn’t matter. Because this was the mission. And if she broke when her heart fell out of her chest onto the floor, when she wanted for reasons unknown to go over to a man she’d barely met and explain herself, she would not be able to trust herself to stay in character when the situation inside Goldcastle got uncomfortable, when she wanted to arrest someone rather than to smile and wink and move out of reach.

  Jim looked at her and nodded. “I knew you were the right one for this, Gracie,” he said. “I don’t know how I knew it. But you have layers.” He shook his head, and laughed ruefully. “Whole lotta goddamned layers.”

  “All of which are in that brown paper bag in the bathroom.” She shivered, shedding her stripper persona at last. “And which of you bastards turned the air conditioning up? God, it’s cold in here.”

  The men around her saw the change, saw her shaking off the stranger’s skin and becoming a cop again, and she could see them relax. Charlie laughed; Bill snickered. For a moment there, she had been alien to them, and they’d been tongue-tied, not sure how to react. But when she became one of them again, even in her outlandish getup, they could become themselves, too.

  Charlie said, “We wanted you to be all... perky for your picture.”

  “You’re supposed to take a picture of my face, dumb-ass,” she said, laughing, not missing his meaning. Her nipples felt like rocks under that skimpy top — they had to be visible from space. She didn’t know of any men who missed the presence of visible nipples beneath clothing. Men were wired that way, and she’d learned not to take it personally.

  Charlie got the pictures. Bill brought in the wire and fitted her with one that lay beneath her right breast and itched like hell. He bitched at Jim for a while about the low output with the technology they had, and how they were going to need to have a lot of signal boosters hidden around the club. He and Jim agreed that they would have Hank place transmitter boosters around the inside of Goldcastle. Bill thought maybe the guys who’d been co-opted from Vice could place the boosters, but in the end they were not HSCU, and they were an unwilling part of the investigation, and Bill, Jim and Charlie agreed that “their Gracie” was their secret weapon. That she was strictly need-to-know. The Vice guys didn’t need to know.

  Jim vouched for Hank, who had experience placing hidden things. “Army Rangers,” Jim said in a soft voice, and Bill did that little spine-straightening thing men did when in the presence of someone who had earned respect without question. Yes. Hank was their guy, too, even if he was not officially one of them.

  Jess felt the same way. And she kept trying to fit her natural reactions to him into her well-earned loathing for psychics. It wasn’t working. There were pieces of Hank that didn’t match up.

  When the photos were done and the wire was fitted and she was back in work clothes again, with her hair brushed out and the goop off her face, she got her assignment for the next day, which was to get a job at Goldcastle. Hank talked to Jim while Charlie put the finishing touches on Jess’s ID kit; Charlie told her that for routine things, Hank in his role as her contact would act as a go-between. He told her of two neutral places that she could meet with either him or Jim if she had to have a face-to-face.

  “I’ve duped everything in your wallet that you might need. Credit card and bank card will work up to one hundred dollars in case you have a situation. Jim came up with your new name — he said he wanted to keep it simple. And your story is that your brother has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and no insurance and you need a legal way to make a lot of money fast, which is why you want the job now. Further, you worked as a house dancer up north in Fayetteville, North Carolina. You danced in two clubs near Fort Bragg — both of these went under years ago, so you won’t have to worry about any unfortunate employers failing to remember you. You... ah... hung up your G-string after one year of dancing, and retired until this came up.”

  Jess nodded. “That’ll work.” She looked from Jim to Charlie. “But what if they don’t hire me?”

  “We’ll worry about that then.”

  “All right,” Jess said. No point second-guessing things that she couldn’t control. Her job was to give Goldcastle every reason to want her.

  “You are undercover from this point on. Go home, get changed, memorize your new name and your story, fill in whatever details you’ll need to keep it consistent. I put together a short list of cheap rental places — you should get one so that you can go home again once you’re done with this. You have enough cash in there for the first month’s rent at any of these places. Some of them, you get a discount if you rent by the month.”

  “Real high-class places, huh?”

  Jim smiled. “If you live in a real high-class place, why do you have to work in a strip club to help your brother out?”

  Jess nodded.

  Jim said, “Speaking of your character. You’re in character anytime you’re outside your own doors. Your badge stays home, and if you carry, make sure it’s your backup weapon and not your police issue. And for God’s sake, stay away from anyone who could make you. At this point, our serial killer could be anyone, and where Goldcastle is concerned, that anyone covers a very wide scope.” He frowned. “Got a neighbor who can feed your cats or goldfish or whatever you have there?”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  Jim said, “Here are a list of places that rent by the day, week, or month. Look them over; pick one. But get into your place today. Move before you interview with Goldcastle.” And then he told her, “Don’t break cover at any time, for any reason. We are, at this point, without any solid theory regarding the identity of the killers, or killer, and until we have something, the field of possibles is huge. The Goldcastle employees are the usual sorts, but the clientele consists of senators and sheiks and actors and sports celebrities and old, rich men. Lotta foreigners, fair amount of Eurotrash. And middle- and upper-middle-class locals, too. If you catch the attention of the killers, we have no idea what sort of resources they’ll bring to bear to get to you. We have every reason to believe they have good resources, though — that these are not broke losers operating out of their mothers’ basements.”

  “Got it,” Jess said.

  “Not much chance Goldcastle will get raided while you’re there — Vice wants to get back in with its drugs, prostitution, and gambling investigation once we get our work done, and they want to keep everyone quiet and happy until then. However, shit happens. You get swept in a raid, Hank’ll get you out,” Charlie said.

  “And if Hank gets
swept, too?” Jess asked.

  “We’ve already taken care of that.”

  Which meant either that Hank had fake cop ID for this gig — which Jess found hard to believe — or that he had something else under the table as his get-out-of-jail-free card.

  She was okay with that. In spite of the shaky footing of her part in this, her people were behind her. She felt very solid right then.

  Of course, the weight of her Beretta and her badge at her hip didn’t hurt, either. It would be a little tougher to feel solid when she was unarmed and wearing a G-string and nothing else.

  Chapter Four

  Hank hadn’t been expecting what he got when Jess walked out of the bathroom door. He’d been expecting a cop in too little clothing, and instead he got a Vegas showgirl, all legs and big hair and bright smile. She’d looked like Jess. Mostly. But bad memories suggested she wasn’t.

  She’d become someone different. She felt like Liseé all over again. An actress hiding behind convenient faces. Someone who used men.

  He waited until he had an opportunity to brush against her, lightly, just for an instant. “Jim said they’re having you move into a by-the-week rental place,” he said, but he only half listened to her response, which was something funny about strippers and dives. He managed to laugh appropriately. But his attention was fixed on the flash he got in the instant he touched her — of fear, embarrassment, awkwardness, pain... and a deep determination to do this thing she had to do to save lives.

  Pain? This was more of whatever Jim had hinted at without ever opening up. Hank realized an awkward silence lay between them — he was supposed to have said something, and he hadn’t. So he blurted out, “I’ll go with you to look. Since you can’t advertise that you’re a cop, I’ll debut in my friend role so if any creepy neighbors are watching you move in, they’ll see you with someone big and ugly and mean.”

  Puzzlement in her eyes. He’d missed answering something that required an answer, then. Still, she flashed him a quick, genuine smile. “Thanks.”

  When she was done with Bill and Jim and Charlie, she and Hank walked out together. Hank didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to know where that pain of hers came from. And the determination, too. There was more to her than just a good cop determined to do a good job. There had been... what had Jim said? Layers.

  Yeah. Whole lotta layers.

  Jess kept pace with him easily. She wasn’t talking either.

  Hank knew eventually one of them was going to have to break the silence, but he had no solid basis for coming out and asking her, “Who hurt you, and when, and how?” He couldn’t tell her how he knew something was wrong. He’d invaded private space inside her for no legitimate reason. They weren’t friends. They weren’t really anything — yet — and that question was far too personal for new work partners.

  Out of nowhere, Jess said, “I’d like for you to show me some of the stuff you were doing in the dojo yesterday.”

  Which kicked Hank out of his reverie, and threw him a curveball. “You... what? Right. Sure.”

  “Because I’ve spent the last whole lot of years focusing on armed combat, and while I haven’t let unarmed practice fall completely off my radar, I’m not sharp.” She glanced over at him. Lovely face — she had a damned sweet face, soft and rounded, with very blue eyes and full lips. Kind of a sharp nose, he thought, but that gave her face strength it could have lacked otherwise. And her chin made no compromises. She said, “I’m going to be unarmed a lot of the time, and I had one nasty experience dealing unarmed with a real creep. Next time, I want to be ready.”

  He nodded. “If you haven’t eaten, I’ll take you someplace for an early dinner. Then we can check out that list of rental rooms, and after that, we can go to the dojo and claim the back room. I use it for cop classes mostly, but nothing is scheduled in there today.”

  “You’ll still be working at the dojo during this?”

  “I’ll go in on the days you aren’t scheduled to be in Goldcastle, but I have my instructors covering most of my classes until Jim doesn’t need me anymore. So, no, I don’t have to work today, but there will be days that I will, at least for a few hours.”

  “Thanks for giving me some of your time,” she said. “As much as I can, I want to be ready for this thing.”

  He drove again. She was leaving the Vic at the station and driving only her personal until this was done. He could tell, from the look of longing that she gave the big white cop car as she walked past it to his vehicle, that she was not happy to be leaving it behind.

  Her expression of misery when Jim and Charlie went over the whole “no badge, live undercover, backup weapon only” thing upstairs had been comical. It had made him want to like her, because he understood that part of what she was heading into so very well. The weapon, the badge, the clothes — they all became an extension of the self. In the hands of someone qualified, they became a rarely used but well-understood final solution to deadly problems for those who stepped into harm’s way for the good of others. The weapon itself was the last resort, and never, never the easy solution. But it was, in some cases, the best solution. The effective solution. A tool to draw the line between evil and good.

  He’d been forced to lay down arms, to put away the uniform, to walk naked back into the world, stripped of his mission and his mandate. He’d rebuilt himself into a weapon. Found new missions.

  So to that extent, he understood her. Maybe he understood more than that, too. Or would, if he could uncover the parts of herself that she was hiding.

  She directed him to her apartment.

  When he pulled into the parking space she indicated, she said, “You can come up while I change. I won’t be long, but you could get something to drink if you’re thirsty. Or use the bathroom...”

  “I’m fine,” he told her, staying right where he was. “I’ll wait here and watch people until you get back.” He smiled a little, and nodded toward a cute young black couple running together, their German shepherd on a leash between them, and then to a tremendously fat man who was sitting on a bench beside the sidewalk with his head lolled back and his mouth hanging open.

  “Yeah. I have some interesting neighbors,” Jess told him, and then she was gone, running at an easy lope toward the closest building with her brown paper bag under one arm.

  He studied her shoes, noting that the heels weren’t all that low, and he wondered what sort of physical training she did to be able to move like that.

  He had no interest in her neighbors, actually.

  But he didn’t want to go into her personal space. He didn’t want to confront who she was away from being a detective — didn’t want to see pictures of the boyfriend or the kids or the hubby or whatever it was that she had stashed away up there. Didn’t want to meet her dog or cat, or see what kind of books she read or what kinds of games she played or what kind of furniture she sat in when she had free time.

  He had a vested interest in her where work and mission were concerned. That pain of hers... that could well impact the mission. It was, Jim had said, why she became a cop.

  He had no desire, however, to see who she was outside that frame. He didn’t want to find himself with a personal stake in her. He wanted to know her as a cop. He most definitely did not want to know her as a woman. Did not want to risk falling for another Liseé.

  He didn’t want to care.

  Jess threw on jeans and a loose cotton shirt. She tucked her backup gun, a .38 Smith & Wesson Airweight, into its ankle holster, and strapped it on.

  She pulled her real driver’s license, her badge, and anything else that identified her as her out of her wallet, locked it all together in her lockbox with her police-issue sidearm, and filled her wallet with the fakes that Charlie had dummied up for her. She studied the made-up face with the big hair on those new IDs. She didn’t look like herself. She looked like someone who was having fun, someone for whom life was one big party.

  And then she looked at the name on
the driver’s license for the first time, and started swearing.

  Grace Kelly Callahan.

  “Sonuvabitch,” she muttered.

  Jim was going to have his moment of fun at her expense, apparently. She should have been more suspicious when Charlie told her that Jim had made sure she had a name she could remember.

  So she was going to be Gracie for a while, God help her. She could admire Jim’s logic; she was used to hearing the name, and knew when she heard it that it meant her.

  But, dammit, she hated that nickname. And for the moment, at least, she was no fan of Jim’s sense of humor, either.

  Badgeless, with the wrong gun in the wrong place, and with somebody else’s name attached to her face, she scrubbed her skin completely free of makeup, pulled her hair back in a ponytail, and tucked her shirttails into her jeans — tucking in a shirt was something that she hadn’t done in years.

  Naked. Fully dressed, she felt naked.

  She hated it.

  She practiced the bright smile in the mirror a couple of times, but she wasn’t feeling any cheer.

  Realizing that she could walk away from the apartment and never come back, and that not a single soul would be inconvenienced — not even a goldfish — did not improve her mood. A couple of her neighbors, who knew her to say hello but nothing more, might notice she was gone eventually. Maybe. No papers would pile up. The mail in the tiny, locking apartment mailbox down in the parking lot would fill invisibly, and when it was packed to capacity, her mail would stop coming equally invisibly. People would come out to turn off her services if she didn’t pay them. But who would notice that? Her neighbors were home no more regularly than she was.

  Walking out her door into the melting Atlanta summer, locking up, she was reminded again that this was not the life she’d wanted for herself. And then, because she was on a case that mattered to her personally, and because this case mattered so much, she pushed her dissatisfaction with her personal life out of her thoughts, the way she always did. She didn’t have time for it