Last Girl Dancing

by Kate Aeon

  She stalked to the front door, grabbed her shoes, and was outside getting into her car before he even had a chance to respond.

  Hank was discovering he could not have been more irritated with Jim. A friend would have warned his buddy about what was coming. A friend would not have dumped this icy Viking on him and expected him to deal with her.

  Jess Brubaker was Hank Kamian’s nightmare, and what was worse, Jim had to have known that when he chose her. Because she was another tall, beautiful blonde, and when Hank looked at Jess, he was right back in Walter Reed again, discovering his brand-new psychic gift of psychometry — of knowing hidden truths about people by touching them or things they had touched — by holding the hand of his beautiful blonde fiancée and discovering all the different men she’d been screwing while he’d been fighting for his country overseas and sending most of his paycheck back to her.

  Hank looked at Jess, and she wasn’t the blonde bitch. She was... He didn’t know what she was. Something different. Someone honest. But looking at her sent shivers running up and down his spine.

  He stood staring after her, the echoes of everything that question had set off vibrating like little explosions from his fingertips straight into his brain. And his gut.

  “Hell,” he whispered.

  When Hank first saw Jess, he thought he’d known what to expect. He knew the type: beautiful, self-centered, bitchy, unfaithful.

  When he shook her hand, he discovered he’d been wrong. She felt straightforward and solid to him. And she wasn’t repulsed by his injuries. She was startled. Interested. Curious. Surprised.

  But not repulsed.

  And with that second touch, he’d discovered that she hadn’t been kidding about liking his voice and his hands, either. Or about hating the fact that he was a psychic. She’d been flat-out honest with him, which was something he’d come to believe women were incapable of being.

  Her honesty was bad, because she was beautiful in a careful, frostily perfect way. But that second touch also insisted she was nowhere near as frosty on the inside as she was on the outside. And his body was entirely capable of thinking wicked thoughts about this stranger who’d looked at him and almost liked what she saw, while his mind knew that pursuing those thoughts would be disastrous.

  He walked to the phone, thoughtful. Called HSCU, asked for Jim, and waited.

  And when Jim got on the phone, he went straight to the heart of the issue. “You bastard. You had to pick her?”

  Jim said, “Hated her that much, huh?”

  “Actually, I sort of liked her,” Hank said. “I didn’t want to, but I did. But... man... watching her walk in here was like reliving my worst nightmares.”

  “She has qualifications for this that would make your jaw drop,” Jim said.

  “Maybe so. But I thought fucking Liseé had materialized, first glimpse I caught of her.”

  “She doesn’t look anything like Liseé,” Jim said.

  “Same height, same coloring, same build. The face was completely different, of course, but after what happened in Walter Reed, I don’t react well to that combination. I was... cold.”

  “Don’t be. Jess is honest, she’s dependable, she’s not looking for anyone to give her any free rides. When I worked with her, she was just one of the guys. Not a bullshit bone in her body.”

  Hank rubbed his temples and leaned his head against the wall. “I know. I felt that. There is something not right about her, though — which is the real reason I called. Not sure if it’s a problem. Figured I’d run it by you.”

  “Shoot.”

  Hank said, “We were talking about tonight’s work, and my uninspiring neighborhood, with its walking-distance strip clubs. She mentioned in passing having walked into a strip club while she was in college. I followed up, thinking it was kind of funny — and all the color drained out of her face, and she turned into the ice Viking and stalked out of here. You have any idea what I fucked up?”

  “Yeah. I know what it was.” Jim was silent for so long Hank started to think their connection had been cut. Then Jim said, “It relates to the thing that killed her dream, the incident that changed her life. The reason she’s a cop. But it isn’t my place to tell you, any more than it would be my place to tell her that you were blown up saving the life of one of your men, or how your fiancée financed her acting career.” He paused. “Or how you had to fight to get your life back.”

  Hank sighed. “I understand.” If he closed his eyes, he could still feel the shrapnel ripping into him. He could feel the warmth of his own blood, the heady, floating feeling of bleeding out. Could hear the chopper blades pounding the air, the medics shouting at him to hang on, to stay awake. Could remember the surgeries, the nurses, the doctors, the pain.

  A handful of years and endless surgeries let him walk, move, chew, and swallow. Allowed him to walk on the streets in daylight without little kids screaming at the sight of him and bursting into tears. The surgeries, though, couldn’t fix him up well enough that he would ever be a Ranger again — and being a Ranger had been the only thing he’d ever wanted.

  So he knew about the death of dreams. About pain in the past kept inside, and pushed out of sight. He knew about searching for meaning in the ashes.

  Jim said, “She’ll tell you when she’s ready. Or she won’t. She’s never talked with me about it, and we’ve been friends for years. I only know because I’ve read the deep digging someone along the way did and filed in her jacket. I can only tell you that she couldn’t be more motivated to solve this case.”

  Hank said, “Then I won’t push. If she tells me, she tells me.”

  Jess hadn’t handled that at all well. She’d fled, which was ridiculous. If she hadn’t been such an idiot about her exit, she might have hoped for a graceful recovery — some blasé story that brushed close enough to the truth that it would satisfy, but dull enough to make the issue never come up again.

  Instead, she’d managed to send up a flare the size of Texas regarding her dance-school years and the whole strip-club issue.

  And she had never done that before. Had never faltered regarding the details of her past. She didn’t think Jim knew about Ginny. If he did, he’d never said anything. None of her partners had ever known. A lot of cops followed up on cold cases in their off time, and Jess was, as far as any of them had known, only doing what a lot of others did. She didn’t talk about the case, she didn’t leave notes around, and she didn’t let her investigations into her sister’s disappearance interfere with her on-duty work. Her department psych evals had never shown anything wrong, so she’d never had to discuss those formative events with the department’s psychiatrist. She figured she’d had no trouble with anyone because she was so good at compartmentalizing things.

  Until today, when something fell out of the box.

  What did that mean?

  She walked to her car, unnerved. She didn’t know what to make of Hank Kamian. He wasn’t at all what she’d expected. She’d disliked him on principle before she met him, and after standing in a room with him and talking to him, her principles remained. She simply wasn’t sure they applied to him.

  He didn’t seem like a psychic.

  He’d been a Ranger, for godsake. He was someone real. Someone who knew about the line, and who’d made his stand on the right side of it. He seemed like someone she could like. A lot.

  She ought to turn around, walk back into the dojo, and say, “Look, I don’t have anywhere I’m supposed to be right now, and I’m sorry I reacted so badly. Can we go someplace and sit? See if we can figure out how we’re going to work together, and see if we can get to know each other enough to understand what our roles are going to be with this job?”

  But she didn’t do that. She wasn’t ready to go back in there and talk to him.

  Why?

  She almost felt like she was afraid of Hank Kamian, and getting into the Crown Vic and driving toward home, she explored that a little. She was going to have to work with this man in a situat
ion that put her safety at risk. She had to know what buttons of hers he was pushing and why he was pushing them.

  She wasn’t physically afraid of him. In no way did she think that he would turn on her or hurt her. Not least because he was a friend of Jim’s, and Jim would not have put her with someone who would turn vicious.

  She wasn’t unnerved by the way Hank looked. The scars had been startling, but they hadn’t been disturbing. She considered his appearance for a moment. As she did, a quick image of a friend’s old Kevlar vest flashed in her mind. The vest had taken some lead, and he’d shown it to her afterwards. The bullets had torn it up. But not him. And that, she thought, was Kamian’s face.

  He’d taken some damage, but it hadn’t destroyed him.

  And that made him interesting. Oddly attractive. Certainly not repulsive.

  But...

  In light traffic, getting home hadn’t taken too long. She pulled into her apartment complex and parked her car in her reserved space and sat there staring up at the dingy four-story building.

  She could afford better, but she’d never gotten around to looking for better. The only person in her life was her, after all, and all she had was her work.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Jess?”

  “Yeah, Ginny?”

  They’d been doing arabesques together in the garage their father had renovated so that they would have room to practice without destroying the house. They were sixteen, not quite ready for pointe yet, wanting pointe so badly, but already hearing their dance instructor explaining to their mother that both of them were too tall. That they would never be anything but chorus dancers in the ballet. That they had the talent and the fire and the beauty to win lead roles, but...

  Ginny said, “You heard what Dame Gerta said, right?”

  “I heard.”

  “You going to stick with ballet?”

  Jess sighed. “I suppose the chorus wouldn’t be so bad. But I’ve been thinking maybe theater. Or modern.”

  Ginny nodded. “I’ve already decided to switch to modern. I don’t have the voice for theater. And I already know I want lead roles. I’ve been looking at the North Carolina School of the Arts. I think I could get what I need there.”

  Jess sighed. “I thought we were both going to try to get into Harrt School. It has one of the best dance programs in the country.”

  Ginny shook her head. “Be practical. You want us to endlessly be fighting each other for parts? I don’t. You take one school, I’ll take the other, and we won’t each be competing with our double for every single slot.”

  “I wanted to be your roommate, though.”

  “I know,” Ginny said. “It would have been fun. But this is about the two of us being dancers. For real, up on the stage. With lights, and music. And applause.”

  Jess opened her eyes and stared up at the four-story apartment.

  She and Ginny had figured it all out. Then fate threw Jess’s new path before her as clear as a broad highway at midday. She’d had no choice. She became a cop, with her goal from the very first to make detective.

  On patrol, and soliciting johns on the Tricks Task Force, and at the bar when she celebrated making detective with her new partner, she’d privately shared every moment with Ginny, and with a pain that Jess never admitted to anyone.

  At the beginning, even after the dream of dance was dead and buried, Jess had still tried to have it all. She’d seriously dated a nice man, a man who could have been worth marrying. She’d gotten engaged, and she’d struggled to be everything to him and everything to her work at the same time. But she’d discovered the same truth a lot of other women had already discovered. Having it all was a lie. She could be an overworked cop and a frazzled wife and a mother who never saw her kids. Or she could choose to do one thing with everything in her, and make the sacrifices that took. Every path she followed meant turning away from all the other paths.

  It was the same for everyone. Life had costs, and to live, she paid, just like everyone else.

  So as she’d walked away from dancing, she walked away from the dream of marriage and children. She said good-bye to any hope of a normal life lived among good people; traded it in for a life lived amid criminals and their crimes.

  Years later, she didn’t know if she even believed in good people anymore. One thing she’d found, first as a uniformed officer and then as a detective, was that in almost every situation, almost everyone lied. She trusted other cops. And not all of them. She never looked at civilians without wondering what sort of games they were running, what nasty secrets they were hiding, who they were hurting and how.

  She was disillusioned with humanity. She didn’t have dreams anymore. She had work instead, and the single goal that stretched out in front of her like an open maw that would never be filled. Save them. The innocent few, the helpless, the victims of the cruel, the violent, the insane, the evil.

  Sitting in that car looking at her life, she abruptly realized why she was afraid of Hank Kamian.

  He made her realize there was more to life than work, which was a deep, dark truth she had spent years avoiding. And she wasn’t sure she could deal with that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  Some dreams were better off dead.

  Chapter Three

  After her odd exit, Hank wasn’t sure what to expect, but Jess was right on time arriving at the dojo that evening. She got out of her car, and he shook his head at her idea of dressing for a night of sleaze. She was wearing a denim shirt with the tails out, and a short denim skirt, and high, high heels that would put her right at eye level with him. Her hair was loose, and it fell in neat lines to her shoulders. She had nowhere near enough makeup on.

  Except for the shoes, she failed spectacularly to look trashy. The makeup would have to be half an inch thicker, the skirt four inches shorter, and the denim shirt a whole lot more unbuttoned to get her to that point.

  She looked good, though. She had great legs. Long, muscled, tight, sleek, tapered. He’d always been an ass man — and he was deeply appreciative of good tits — but he could get behind a great set of legs, too. He considered himself well-rounded that way.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kamian. Are you going to say anything, or are you going to glare at me?” she asked.

  “Um... could we drop the ‘Mr. Kamian, Detective Brubaker’ thing? I wasn’t glaring, I swear,” he said, embarrassed that he’d been staring, and at the same time relieved that she’d misinterpreted it. “You look very nice. Though the denim shirt isn’t really club wear,” he added.

  “Club wear doesn’t offer a lot of places to hide a weapon,” she said. “And... yes. Call me Jess.”

  “Hank,” he said. “And thanks.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about... whatever I said this morning—”

  She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’m sorry I let it bother me. I didn’t have a great time in school, and right around that time I ended up walking away from something I’d spent my whole life to that point thinking I wanted. I don’t like to dwell on it, and I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Then I won’t bring up your educational experiences again.”

  He wouldn’t either. Not directly, anyway. But he was for damned sure going to find out what she had going on inside her head.

  She said, “Thanks.” He noticed that she was studying his outfit. He’d gone with tan slacks, loafers, and a dressy shirt that he’d had to go out and buy for the occasion. He told himself he wanted to look like a typical strip-club customer, but he’d known even as he thought it that it wasn’t true. He could have gone into any of the clubs on his list for the night wearing a scruffy shirt and jeans, and as long as he paid, they’d have let him through the door.

  He was dressing up because of her.

  “We ought to go in my car,” he said.

  “You don’t like my ride?”

  She had a ’69 Pontiac Trans Am, original paint — white with blue stripes — that was in good shape, and he was tempted to drool all over he
r ride, even if it could have used a good bath and some fixing up.

  “Good car,” he said. “But you don’t get to drive us to strip clubs.”

  She laughed, conceding the point, and strolled around to the passenger side of his car, a nondescript older Nissan that he’d hung on to because it was reliable and he hadn’t been trying to impress anyone. He went to open the door for her, and noticed that she walked like she’d been born wearing five-inch heels. He didn’t get it. In his experience, only women who spent a lot of time in heels that high could walk in them gracefully, and, also in his experience, very few detectives traipsed around in stilettos.

  More mystery, more proof that something was going on with her that she’d kept secret from everyone who worked with her. And maybe even from herself.

  That smooth high-heeled saunter did fascinating things to her ass, though.

  It was going to be a long night.

  He drove her one block from his dojo to the first place on Jim’s recommended list, a dive currently named Kat’s Place. Hank paid the cover to the bouncer, who took the money while trying to look down Jess’s shirt.

  Inside, they bought the requisite drinks and carried them to a table along the side wall facing the door. The interior of the place was typical for the area: dark, grimy, loud. The girl on stage at the moment was about three quarters of the way through the first dance of her set — she still had on a miniskirt and a G-string, but nothing else. She was one of the ones who thought she could strut around the runway, wiggle her ass a little, and flip her hair a lot, and men would go wild for her. Hank sized her up in about two seconds and dismissed her, noticing that most of the customers had done the same. He and Jess engaged in a brief, almost wordless struggle over who got the chair facing the door. “I’m armed,” Jess finally whispered in his ear, and he conceded the strategic seat.