Last Girl Dancing

by Kate Aeon

  Teri said, “I’m... so sorry.”

  Jess said, “Me, too. But I’m trying to take a practical, realistic approach. It seems better than crying.”

  “Good for you.” Teri stood up, which Jess took as an indication that the interview was over. But Teri said, “You’re going to have to go up and see Lenny the Worm in a minute, but before you go, I’ve been made aware of something in the last few days. A... situation we have. And while I’ve been instructed not to discuss the problem, I’m going to give you some unasked-for advice.”

  Jess watched her, wondering what was coming.

  “This job puts women in vulnerable positions. You’re here doing something worthwhile, and I admire you for that. So don’t do anything that would make you less safe. Do not agree to meet customers alone anywhere. Ever. The same for employees. Don’t ever let a customer hand you a drink. Take drinks only from the trays the waitresses bring, or directly from the bartender. No alcohol. Don’t assume that you know anyone, or that anyone is safe. Walk to and from the parking lot with one of the floor managers and — if you can — with at least one of the other dancers, and all of you watch each other get in your cars. This is all simple common sense, and I wouldn’t even bother to tell you, except there’s a possibility that some of our dancers have... gotten in trouble... for failing to exercise common sense.”

  Jess nodded. “What sort of trouble?”

  “That’s what I can’t tell you. I don’t know for sure that the problems are related to this place, and until I’m sure, I’m going to have to trust you to simply acknowledge that problems could exist. And that your behavior can keep you safe.”

  “Thank you,” Jess said. “I’m a very careful woman.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Teri said. “I think you’re going to do well here.” And then she shook her head and chuckled. “Go. See Lenny. Take Louella with you, and don’t let her leave you in there alone.”

  Jess walked out the door wondering exactly what sort of nightmare Lenny the Worm was.

  Hank paid his cover charge and stepped out of the Atlanta heat into dim, cool air and a huge, extravagantly decorated foyer. The designers had been aiming for lush Victorian, but what they’d actually achieved was cheesy X-rated Victorian theme park: stained-glass lamps, polished brass rails, fat leather chairs. Victorian-style oil paintings covered the walls — but the subjects were skinny women with enormous breasts in positions no Victorian painter would have ever considered.

  It wasn’t the sort of place Hank would have voluntarily spent five minutes in.

  “Welcome to Goldcastle Gentlemen’s Club, sir. Is this your first visit?”

  “It is,” Hank said, ostensibly looking around the foyer but from the corner of his eye studying the greeter. She wore a blue sequined floor-length gown that prominently featured her breasts, and mostly hid the walking cast on her left leg. Dancer, he thought, and one who’d had a mishap.

  She gave him a bright corporate smile. “Then let me quickly acquaint you with our facilities. As a nonmember, you are permitted in the downstairs area only. The downstairs area includes our excellent restaurant, our bar, and our world-class exotic dancers. Downstairs areas where you are not permitted will have a Members Only sign on the door. Upstairs is off-limits entirely. We have dancers in the grand ballroom to your immediate right. In the smaller VIP lounge to the right just in back of the staircase, our girls, excluding our feature acts, will dance for you privately.”

  “Features don’t do private dances here?”

  “They do for members. Also note that our house rules are quite strict. You may look at our dancers, but if you touch, you and the dancer will either receive a public warning, or, depending upon the severity of your infraction, you’ll be removed from the facility. We are,” she said, “a class establishment.”

  “Got it.” Hank had to suppress a laugh. “What are the advantages of membership?”

  “You would have access to our private gentlemen’s smoking chamber with its wide selection of excellent cigars, beverages, and library; to our gaming room — we have several avid pool players, an enthusiastic poker group, and even a small group of chess players — to private rooms for members who wish to reserve them for meetings, parties, or simply personal entertainment; and to the upstairs dance room, of course, where our featured performers and select house dancers give special members-only performances. If you decide you would like to become a member, I can arrange a tour of the member facilities for you.”

  “Not today. But I’ll keep it in mind,” Hank said.

  The greeter turned to someone else, and Hank quickly touched the place on the wood-and-brass podium where the woman’s hand had rested.

  And death was there, in the midst of a clamoring crowd. Thick and heavy and ugly, hunting already for its next meal, it was watching and looking and reaching out to fill the black hole inside of itself. He felt the poison of a vile, evil mind, and the pleasure it took in the terror and the pain of others clogged Hank’s lungs and fogged his vision. He managed to let go of the podium and step away, wondering if the greeter could be one of the killers.

  Then a new customer rested a hand on the podium. And a moment later, a fully clothed dancer sauntered out of the room to the right and caught the greeter’s attention and leaned up on the podium with both hands to whisper something in the other woman’s ear before she flashed Hank a come-hither smile and strolled back the way she’d come.

  The podium was a touch point. From reading it, Hank could only know that one of the killers had been there. Recently. He could not assume that anyone near it had anything to do with the deaths.

  People touched things. All the time, unconsciously as well as consciously. Hank had once been stopped in his tracks by a little boy in a store pointing to a toy on a shelf and asking his mother, “Can I see it with my hands?”

  That was people — all of them. They saw things with their hands, even when they didn’t know they were doing it. He stared at his own hands and acknowledged that some people saw with them more clearly than others did.

  He headed into the grand ballroom, grabbed the first open chair, and sat heavily in it. He rested his hands on the table in front of him to stop them from shaking...

  ...and death was there, too. Lies and cleverness, lust and twisted love, perversion, hunger and rage.

  Hank shuddered, smelling a faint, light perfume, thinking that was part of the vision, part of the horror that he was pulling in.

  Until a pair of heavy breasts propped up by an architectural red silk bustier hove into view inches in front of his face, and somewhere above them, a voice said, “Hey, sweetheart, would you like a little company?”

  She rested fingertips lightly on his shoulder.

  And he felt death again.

  Dark and hungry death, searching for a place to happen. Death, but at one remove. Death had touched this girl and left whisper-prints on her skin. Death had looked at this girl and thought, Maybe, maybe, maybe later, but not this one right now. Not today.

  Hank leaned his head back far enough from the breasts to be able to see over them to the face. She was a pretty girl. One of the dancers. Her fake breasts were oppressive, but the girl herself still looked friendly, warm, unjaded. Didn’t mean she was, but if she wasn’t, the job hadn’t left its marks on her face yet.

  He smiled a little, trying not to let the queasiness he was feeling show, and said, “I’m waiting on a friend, actually.” The girl’s smile became a bit more genuine; she looked almost relieved. “You’re friends with one of the dancers? I can tell her you’re here if you’d like.”

  Hank shrugged. “Not sure if she’s a dancer or not.” And when the girl looked puzzled, he said, “She came in to interview. I drove her because her car’s in the shop.”

  “Well, sweetheart, if you’d like a little company while you’re waiting, let me know.”

  She trailed fingers with long, fake nails painted blood red down his arm, and Hank said, “Maybe another time.”


  The girl nodded and sauntered off, her cherry-red miniskirt flipping and flirting with each swing of her ass.

  It was a good ass. Not fake, like the breasts. Or the imitation of attraction the girl had projected at him. That stung — to see the friendly smile and feel the flash of distaste that lay underneath it in the moment that she touched him. The pain from that never wore off, because every time, it came from someone new.

  Watching the dancer stroll away, Hank found himself thinking about Jess bursting out of that bathroom door in the station like she was claiming a stage she owned, with that huge smile on her face, wearing heels and short-shorts and a skimpy tube top, and he remembered the way her appearance had felt like a punch in his gut. She’d been projecting the same external cheer, while hiding dark emotions beneath it

  But none of those emotions had been distaste for him.

  Hank leaned back in his chair, balancing it on the back two legs, watching the dancer on the main stage, whose athletic, high-energy performance was impressive. The greeter hadn’t been overselling the talent of the dancers in the place, anyway. As he leaned back, he pretended to tip his chair too far back so that he had to grab the table to catch himself — and as he did, he reached under the edge of the table and placed one of Tech’s signal-booster transmitters against the table’s central post, out of the way of casual contact. A person who found it would have to be looking for it

  He was quick about placing it because he didn’t doubt for a minute that he was being monitored from a security room somewhere in the building.

  He set the chair back on all four legs and looked around as if he hoped no one had noticed him almost fall over.

  A waitress in Goldcastle’s blue-and-white French maid uniform strolled up to him and asked him if he wanted anything, and he said he’d take a beer in a bottle. She had the big smile, too. The bright attitude. The same faint air of “hustle” that he found so disturbing. And the same falseness.

  She came back and handed him his drink and gave him that flirty smile and reminded him that the dancers would be happy to sit with him and keep him company if he asked them.

  When he picked up the bottle she’d held, he felt it again. Death. But death distant, and uninterested. Death — had touched the waitress, had looked at her, considered her, and had passed her by as unsuitable. Because death was watching someone else in the room, someone who more closely fit its appetite of the moment.

  He caught glimpses of a personality behind the murders. Shapes of calmness, of rationality, of amusement. The killer was orderly, organized. Hungry for the victims, enchanted by their beauty, angry at them, disgusted by them.

  Cold washed down Hank’s spine like ice, as the shape of the killer’s passions came into focus. He had maintained a personal relationship with each of the dead women. Had loved each woman, and had convinced himself that love was returned, until each of them demonstrated...

  ...what?

  Hank couldn’t catch it. Feelings of betrayal clung strongly, but the acts that had given birth to those feelings were lost in the sheer multiplicity of destructions.

  Hank could feel more than three deaths. A lot more. Most of the dead women hadn’t been dumped in parks. The park dumping was new behavior that came about only when the killer ran out of room in his preferred storage place. He’d kept most of the girls’ bodies as souvenirs, someplace safe. Someplace that wouldn’t betray him. Someplace close to him.

  Six by six. Hank thought, and didn’t know what that meant. It meant something to the killer. And it scared Hank. He felt a lot of dead women in that echo. But he felt only one killer, and felt that the killer always worked alone. Which didn’t fit the facts. Could there be another predator haunting this place? And what about the dead girls? So many — so many more than anyone had suspected. Had all of them come from Goldcastle? If so, how had no one noticed?

  And then he considered women who became strippers. A lot of them had walked away from awful families or bad home situations. Many of them didn’t have any contact with people who would be motivated to report them missing. A lot of them lived transient lives; traveling from club to club, across cities and states and even countries, often without notice — so that in many cases absences would be unremarkable, even to friends. Some exotic dancers used dancing as a cover for prostitution. Some drank heavily; some did drugs. Hank, considering all of that, decided that, careful as the killer had been, he had exercised his greatest amount of care for keeping himself hidden simply by the victims he chose.

  Jim would need to know all of this. So would Jess. She would be facing a practiced, experienced killer who was actively hunting for victims, who was a lingering presence in the club, who might be an employee. Who would see her before she saw him.

  But Jess would add a ‘psychic garbage — verify independently’ modifier to anything Hank told her, simply because of the way he got his information.

  He sat in a cloud, the touch of a monster cold in his veins, and wondered how he could make her believe in him.

  Chapter Seven

  “If you want me to leave, tell me,” Louella said. “Some of the girls do."

  Jess studied her through narrowed eyes and said, “Why?”

  “The girls who, well, work with Lenny...” She looked away when she said that. “They make a lot more money than the girls who don’t.”

  Jess could guess how. Lenny would be the guy who “arranged” things between high rollers and those dancers willing to provide what people in the trade euphemistically referred to as extras. She wondered if Lenny had been the target of Vice’s undercover operation, or if he was a middleman for someone higher up the food chain.

  She was... curious. With a cop’s keen interest, she wanted to know exactly what sort of slug would crawl out from under his rock if she lifted it. There was always a chance that he was killing dancers who became a problem — but it didn’t seem like a big chance. The crimes she was looking at didn’t have the feel of anything that had been done to keep a business running smoothly. The killing had been the point for the killers, not some other motive.

  She’d keep her eyes open, though. In case he was mixing business with pleasure.

  Louella led her out of the concrete back rooms into the main club, through a wide, burnished-wood-and-brass lobby, and up a broad, curving staircase. Customers already on the premises looked her over, and though she wished desperately for a longer skirt, or pants and a heavy jacket, she remembered the part she was playing. She smiled at them — the showgirl smile, practiced in front of mirrors by dancers since dance began, and once learned, never forgotten.

  And the men smiled back. Some leered.

  Jess’s queasiness returned.

  Louella nodded toward the open door to the right of the landing, and raised her eyebrows in question.

  “Don’t. Go. Anywhere,” Jess told her, sounding more desperate than she’d intended.

  Louella smiled. “Not a problem, honey.”

  They went through the door together.

  Lenny stood with his back to them, talking on the phone and flipping through a ledger.

  “I brought a new girl,” Louella said.

  He held up an index finger. “Minute.”

  Lenny was big. Six five maybe, probably close to three hundred pounds, and most of it looked like it was still muscle. Blond hair going silver, a voice both deep and coarse, accented with last week’s episode of The Sopranos and way too many mob movies patched over a lifetime of deep-fried Southern good ol’ boy. He snapped, “No, Kasim, the house is short for the last week because we had a bunch of dancers quit.... How the fuck do I know? Someplace opened up that has a smaller tip-out, or that lets them have tattoos and piercings, or that gives ’em darker corners to screw in. They’re goddamned flakes — you know that — and if you build a business that depends on goddamned flakes, sometimes your receipts are going to come back funny.” A long pause. “Yeah, well, I’m interviewing one now, so how ’bout you let me do my job?”
He slammed the phone down and turned around, looking pissed.

  He might have been a good-looking man. But Jess hated him on sight. He gave her the creeps.

  Louella said, “This one’s only here to get your okay, Lenny.”

  And Lenny started to say something to Louella, except that as he was opening his mouth, he looked at Jess.

  He froze, and his face went pale and gray and sweaty, and his breath rushed out of him in a whoosh. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He scrabbled for his chair with suddenly shaking hands — big, meaty, ring-bedecked hands — and collapsed into it as if his knees wouldn’t hold him any longer, and for a second Jess wondered if she was going to have to do CPR on the bastard.

  He stared at her, saying nothing. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  “Have we... met?” Lenny asked, his voice shaking, his face getting grayer and grayer.

  “Not that I know of,” Jess said. “I’m Grace Callahan. I’ve been Hot Pepper, and Randi Lee, and Silver Jones, but not for a few years now, and nowhere around here. I suppose you might have seen me a long time ago.”

  Jess watched Lenny the way wolves watched injured deer. He looked like prey to her. He was limping, and she smelled blood. But... from what?

  “Good Lord have mercy,” Lenny said. “I reckon I... must have.” The mobster voice fell away completely, and for a moment he was someone else. Not the gangland wannabe anymore. He was younger. Vulnerable.

  Scared.

  He stared at her with eyes that had, a moment before, been hard and cold. Ruthless. Killer’s eyes. But that hardness had washed away. Lenny stared into Jess’s eyes, looking for something he wasn’t finding, and she would have given anything to know what he wanted to see. Because that would have told her so much. Then he cleared his throat, and that questioning look slipped away, replaced once more by flat, dead, reptilian eyes. “Grace, is it?”