Janet had evidently asked him his name because he was saying, “I’m Nick.”
Janet was totally focused on the guy. She put her hand to her chest and said, “I’m Janet…” A moment later, like it was an afterthought, she waved, “And this’s my friend Linda.”
Linda put on her best smile, touched his arm, and said, “It’s so nice to meet you.” She studied his face, wondering if she’d recognize it. She was thinking that it was usually famous people that got to bypass the line going into popular clubs like Petroglyph. She didn’t recognize him, but thought he looked pretty young. Oh well, he has to be at least twenty-one or the bouncers wouldn’t have let him in. She and Janet were both twenty-two and Linda would rather have someone a little older and a little taller than herself. But she’d forgo those usual requirements for somebody with the kind of juice Nick must have.
To Linda’s dismay, Nick took Janet out on the dance floor. Linda was prettier than Janet so she usually got first pick of the guys. Another guy separated himself from the pack of guys who’d been standing with Nick earlier. He made his way to Linda’s table. When she glanced at him, he lifted his glass in a little salute but didn’t say anything. Linda turned to look back out at the dance floor, thinking that this new guy was a little taller and older than Nick. He was more her style, though not quite as handsome. Uncomfortably she wondered why he didn’t try to talk to her.
The waitress brought them more drinks. Actually, two drinks for Janet and two for Linda. Freed of monetary constraints, Linda took a big gulp of hers and wondered whether she should try to initiate a conversation with the guy who’d come over.
Nick brought Janet back. A moment later, he touched Linda on the arm and leaned closer, “Wanna dance?”
Linda felt torn. She wanted to dance, but felt like it’d be unfaithful to her friend to accept. Besides, it seemed pretty rude of Nick to dance one dance with Janet and then and ask her. After a moment’s hesitation though, she shrugged and said, “Sure.” As Nick guided her out to the dance floor, she leaned back and said over the beat, “You didn’t want to keep dancing with Janet?”
He gave Linda a smile as if he was giving up a secret. “No, you’re the pretty one. I just danced with her first so she’d feel good.” He looked back over his shoulder, “My wingman, Marco, he’ll dance with her.”
Linda felt warm at being called the pretty one. She glanced back and saw the other man was coming out to the dance floor with Janet and that assuaged her guilt. A third guy had moved out from Nick’s little group of men and was standing next to their little table. Linda had the disquieting feeling that the guy was just holding the table for them.
Nick wasn’t a very good dancer. Linda thought he was a little drunk, but didn’t think he’d dance very well even if he were sober. Of course, a lot of guys can’t dance at all if they aren’t drunk enough to overcome their inhibitions, she thought.
Roni waited until the bouncers let a party of four into the Petroglyph. Invisible, she walked in right on their heels. The bouncer was stretching his velvet rope back across the opening behind them and almost bumped her, but he hesitated at the last moment so that he’d miss. Roni wondered whether this happened because her presumed instructions to not notice her had caused him to avoid the contact. A contact which, after all, would have made her hard not to notice. She puzzled over this as she made her way into the pulsing nightclub, wondering about the fact that she could touch someone without them noticing, but at least in this situation the guy seemed to have actively avoided touching her. Why couldn’t he have bumped her but just not noticed it?
The nightclub was dimly lit and she had a hard time seeing with the black scarf over her face. It was translucent, but not translucent enough for this lighting. Thinking she wasn’t going to learn anything about the club if she couldn’t see, she wondered whether anybody’d be able to recognize her in a poorly lighted security video. Deciding she should try to be as safe as possible, she pulled the scarf down to just below her eyes, then tightened the string to snug her hoodie down over some of her forehead. Her eyes were exposed, but she doubted anyone could recognize her from them without a really good image. It was warm, so she unzipped her jacket most of the way.
Suddenly, she realized that at least some people would know who she was if the security video was in color. Her dark skin was visible around the eyes and if they could tell her eyes were blue, it’d be an immediate giveaway to people who’d heard of her. It wasn’t as if no one else in the world had dark skin and blue eyes, but such people were very rare. She didn’t think anyone else in the city had her combination. She realized, I can’t do anything that’d get anyone excited enough to look at the security videos. I’ll just wander around a little bit to get a feel for how things work here, then get out of this place.
She walked back behind one of the bars, looking around at how they handled their money. There was a lot of cash back there, but not the kind of money that’d hurt the Castanos if she stole it. Looking around at their cash registers didn’t really help her understand how the Castanos might be laundering money at the nightclub.
Roni kept moving so she’d be harder to notice. She made her way upstairs where she looked over a balcony. She didn’t glean any brilliant insights there either. She was starting to think she’d just as well leave when a couple of men in suits burst out of the door near the back of the upstairs balcony. Security guys, she thought. They ran up to the balcony rail and leaned over, looking like they were searching the crowd.
“Do you see him?” the one shouted to the other over the music. The second one shook his head and spoke to his wrist. The two men started running down the stairs. Roni saw a couple of men get up from tables and start looking around down in the main part of the club.
A cold, clammy feeling came over Roni as she turned to look back toward the door the men had come out of.
If they had people actively monitoring the video, she’d look pretty suspicious wandering around the club in a hoodie with a scarf over her face.
Looking back at the men she saw they’d stopped running down the stairs. One had a finger to his ear as if he was trying to hear something from an earbud. He turned and looked up the stairs toward the balcony, staring almost right at her.
Roni backed away from the edge, even though she felt sure the man couldn’t see her. She stood dithering for a moment. Then, gaining resolve, she turned and ran toward the door the men had come out of. Thinking hard about how no one should notice the door opening, she pulled it open and stepped inside. She was in an office with monitors all over the wall. One security guy remained in there and had his eyes jumping from screen to screen.
Roni looked around. There weren’t any cameras in the security office itself. Looking at the screens, she couldn’t see any that were pointing toward the door she’d entered through, so the guy probably hadn’t seen her come into his office on the videos. There were two computers in the room. She suspected that only the one next to the security guy was actively recording the video streams, but to be sure she stopped at the other one first.
Pulling out a memory stick she’d marked with some red nail polish, she jacked it into the second computer. A few seconds later her special program had loaded itself and a little window popped up in the lower right-hand corner saying, “Drive-Wipe running.” The window disappeared almost immediately, even though the program was still overwriting the entire disk with binary nonsense to be sure no one would be able to rescue files off of it.
She pulled out the USB stick and stepped over next to the security guy. His knee was in front of the USB ports on the CPU’s tower. She thought about how she didn’t want him to notice her putting in the USB stick and he obligingly moved his knee out of the way. That’s pretty amazing, she thought as she jacked in her memory stick, almost as if I can make people do certain things. As it had on the other computer, her little window popped up momentarily to say Drive-Wipe was under way, then disappeared. The computer’s screen froze. She glanced up
and saw with relief that all the video feeds from the club had also frozen as the computer’s CPU started working to overwrite its hard drives rather than processing the video. She’d tried to write a program that would continue whatever process the computer had been working on while it rewrote everything but the operating system in the background, but she hadn’t been successful. The best she’d been able to manage was to set up the program so it’d freeze the screen, making the user think his computer had locked up, rather than going blank or actually displaying the wiping process.
The security guy started cursing and entered some ineffective commands on his keyboard. He tried to restart the computer, but of course her little program prevented that from happening as well. Roni pulled out her USB stick and backed away, wanting to leave, but worrying that he might try unplugging the computer before her program finished overwriting the drive and thereby permanently wiping any video they still had of her.
Now that she had a breather, she berated herself, I should have known they’d have people actively monitoring the security cameras in a place like this.
The doors at the back of the security office slammed open and the two guys who’d gone down the stairs came back in. One of them shouted, “We can’t see the bastard anywhere! Do you still have him on video?” Then, noticing that all the video screens were frozen, he cursed. “What the hell’s going on?!”
The guy at the desk shrugged, “I sure as shit don’t know. I can’t even get the system to restart.”
The door opened and an older guy came in. Evidently he’d heard that last statement. He said, “Do a hard restart.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hold the power switch down! If that doesn’t work, unplug the damn thing. You’d better get it fixed, the big boss’s son’s in here tonight! Believe me, you don’t want news of this to get back to the bossman.”
The guy at the desk reached down and put his finger on the power switch, depressing it. Roni watched curiously. On some computers the button just activated a software switch. On those kinds of computers, her program was supposed to make the computer look like it’d turned off while it was actually still running the Drive-Wipe program. It didn’t work on this one though; she could see the case lights go out.
She waited with them for the computer to reboot. With relief, when Windows loaded, she saw the systray pop a momentary DW icon to tell her that her Drive-Wipe program had started itself again. The security guys clustered around the computer offering one another suggestions until the older guy told the other three to get their butts back out to the floor and keep an eye on things visually. Frustrated because the boot process seemed to be taking such a long time, the guy cursed and started trying some things, none of which worked. It didn’t look like he had enough computer savvy to figure out what was going on. Or even enough to unplug the computer and wait till someone who did know about computers could get there.
Roni took a deep breath. It looked like the guy was going to leave the computer plugged in and powered up, so eventually her program would finish wiping the disc and then erase itself.
Even though he’d been yelling at the other three guys, Roni thought the older guy looked pretty frightened. I don’t think I’d like working for the Castanos, she thought.
Roni went back out into the club. She fought a strong urge to leave the place after all the tension she’d been feeling. She told herself she really didn’t have anything to worry about anymore. After all, they weren’t recording anymore and her program would soon erase everything they already had.
She stopped at the balcony rail and looked out over the club again.
Nick! she thought, seeing him in a recessed area off to the side of the dance floor. He was pawing some girl. The girl didn’t look happy. A moment later, the girl started trying to get up.
As the night wore on, Nick danced less and got more and more touchy-feely. Linda was pretty drunk herself, or she’d have objected more. She also would have objected more if Nick hadn’t spoken to one of his buddies who’d magically cleared people out of a premium table for them.
Getting them any table in the crowded club had really impressed Linda. The one they had was up a couple of low-rise stairs and back in the shadows. Surrounded by big soft chairs it had a good view of the dance floor, but the speakers faced the other way leaving it a little quieter. They could talk without screaming though it was still difficult.
When they’d first gotten back to the table, Linda had looked forward to talking more. But Nick answered her questions with short answers and didn’t initiate any conversation himself. Mostly he seemed to take advantage of any opportunity to touch her. He’d been sitting closer and closer and now he started trying to kiss her. She accepted the first kiss, but his breath was pretty bad. When she tried to pull back, he resisted her withdrawal with the arm he had around her. Now she was reduced to trying to keep him from kissing her on the mouth.
Unhappy about how things were going, she struggled to her feet and looked at Janet, hoping Janet would be willing to go home. Linda staggered a bit. Then when Janet looked up at her and Linda tried to lean closer, she nearly lost her balance and had to lean hard on the table. Realizing she’d had far too much to drink, she said, “I’m going to the bathroom.” She steadied herself on one of the guy’s shoulders, then looked back to Janet, “You want to go with?”
Janet nodded and started struggling to her own feet. She didn’t look very steady either. Linda turned to Nick, “I think I’ve had a little too much to drink. Can you order me a coffee?”
He nodded, but gave her a funny grin.
In the bathroom, Linda turned to Janet, “Nick’s got his hands all over me. It’s getting to be a little too much. How’s your guy?”
Janet gave a disappointed moue, “My guy’s a little bit too much of a gentleman. He’s been ordering vodkas?”
Linda nodded.
“But he seemed really sober, so I took a sip of one of his drinks. It’s just water!”
Linda snorted and nudged her, “Maybe I could get Nick to drink a few of those?”
Janet rolled her eyes, “Fat chance of that. You ready to go home?”
“Yeah, but I’m not walkin’ so good. I asked Nick to order me a coffee. Once I choke that down, I’ll be good to go.”
“I’ll get a coffee too.”
Back out at their table, Nick was even more aggressive about groping Linda. When he tried to kiss her again, she picked up her coffee, using that as an excuse. She took a sip and alarm shot through her. The coffee had to be half and half with brandy!
Linda stood back up, “Janet, I’m not feeling so good. I think I’d better get home.”
Unsteadily, Nick got to his feet beside her, “Sorry to hear that. Let me get you a taxi.”
Though Linda just wanted to be away from him, she did think it was nice of him to get her a taxi. She thought to herself that it’d be even better if he paid for it. She let him take her arm and steer her through the club, though she wasn’t sure he was much steadier on his feet than she was. She blinked a little blearily, “Wait, the entrance is over there,” she said pointing.
“We can go out the back way,” Nick said. “I know the owner. One of my guys is calling a taxi and it’ll pull around back there. Less hassle with the riffraff out front.”
Linda had a fleeting thought that she’d been the “riffraff out front,” just a few hours ago. But then she thought about how it was pretty cool that Nick had someone to call taxis for him and knew the owner so well that they could go out the back door. She let him steer her onward.
The back door let out onto an alley. Not a very clean alley.
No taxi in sight.
Nick looked both ways, “Damned taxi should already be here. It’ll probably be a couple more minutes.” He turned to Linda, “You’re cold. Lemme keep you warm.” He turned in front of her and pushed her up against the wall.
He was warm, but the wall behind her was cold and a moment later he was grinding in
to her. Linda pushed at him, “I’m okay. It’s not that cold.”
“Oh, come on,” Nick said, forcing his face close to hers.
His boozy breath made her feel sick. She pushed, but he didn’t budge. His knee slipped between hers and a hand moved to her chest. Desperately, she looked around for the taxi.
Or Janet.
Janet’s guy was holding her up against the opposite wall of the alley, about forty feet away. Linda didn’t think the guy was groping Janet, but she looked like she was struggling anyway. There was another guy standing by the door to the club. “Help,” Linda said weakly.
The guy just turned and looked the other way. Oh God, she thought despairingly.
Roni’d followed the two girls into the bathroom and stood listening to them. From their conversation, she decided that they certainly didn’t sound like long-term girlfriends. The one who’d been with Nick sounded pretty unhappy. Big surprise.
Against her better judgment, she followed them back to their table with Nick and his cronies. To her surprise, Mario wasn’t at the table. She’d kind of thought that when you saw Nick, you saw Mario as a matter of course. The other guys sitting at the table were older than Nick and didn’t seem like the type who’d be his buddies. They also looked pretty sober. Realizing that they might be employees, she looked at them carefully. Some of them had earpieces in. She wondered whether they might have been some of the same guys who’d jumped up and looked around the club when the security team was searching for her. She’d only gotten a glimpse of them earlier so she couldn’t really tell.
Nick was really pawing the one girl. The girl took a sip of what looked like a coffee, but spluttered once she got it in her mouth. She looked as if she thought it tasted pretty bad. Roni didn’t drink coffee but she wondered if it could be brewed so badly that someone would actually spit it out.
The two girls started getting up and making excuses about how they didn’t feel well and needed to get home.
The Girl They Couldn’t See (Blind Spot #1) (Blind Spot Series) Page 15