Last Girl Dancing

by Kate Aeon

  “I’ll pick us up supper on the way to your place. How do you feel about pizza?”

  “I haven’t eaten much of anything in days. Bring two, cover them in meat and cheese, and make them extra large.”

  He laughed, his half smile beautiful to her. “A woman after my own heart.”

  “I’ll see you at my place, then?”

  “I’ll leave when you do. We should get there at about the same time.”

  Jess got out late, walked back to the dumpster, and tossed her bagged teddy bear into it.

  The floor manager accompanying her said, “Didn’t like the present?”

  “Didn’t like the person who left it for me.”

  “Ah,” he said, and walked her to her car. Behind her, the undercover cop in the dumpster would be quickly tossing it out to the luckier senior cop who was loitering around outside the dumpster.

  In her rearview mirror, Jess saw Hank pull out of the parking lot right behind her. She watched him until he veered off to pick up their pizzas.

  The rest of the way home, she traveled alone.

  She pulled into the parking lot at the crappy by-the-month rental community, and stared at her run-down building, and thought, I’m not alone because men are jerks. I’m not alone because no man would understand the importance of what I do and find ways to fit me into his life. I’m alone because it’s easier to make excuses than to make changes. And if I keep making excuses, I’m going to die alone.

  Except she didn’t know how to make the changes she needed to make.

  She sat in the car, staring at the puddles of light her headlights threw against the cracked, faded siding. At the shadows they made in the moth-eaten shrubbery. At the overflowing dumpsters sitting beside the seedy units, at the towels and blankets and aluminum foil being used as curtains by tenants, at the piles of dog crap in the weedy grass.

  This moment was a snapshot of who she was — of the path she walked voluntarily. Her mission mattered — it mattered as much as it ever had. But did that mean she had to sacrifice everything else for it? She was going to spend the rest of her life alone if the answer to that question was yes. And she desperately did not want her mission to be the only thing in her life.

  Work to home. Home to work.

  Without even a cat waiting for her.

  Or a goldfish.

  Or a plant.

  Because work took everything she had.

  She turned off the ignition. She’d go inside, and in a few minutes Hank would come along and those awful yellow walls would fade away, replaced by his life and his warmth and his humor. By his touch.

  For tonight, things would be better. But how did she keep them better? She’d taken only one other chance on a man, and she had been the one to give up and walk away. In retrospect, he hadn’t been the right man. He’d been like a crosstown bus. If she’d wanted another like him, one would have been along in ten minutes.

  Hank, though... Hank was magic, and if she couldn’t figure out how to fix her life to fit him into it, another Hank wouldn’t be along in ten minutes. Or ten years. Or ever.

  She got out of the car, took the fire-exit stairs rather than the elevator up to her room because it was late and she didn’t want to find herself in an elevator with anyone, and walked down the seedy chipped-linoleum-floored hallway to her room.

  Unlocked the door. Opened it.

  The lights were off, when she always left them on. But some light spilled into the room from the dim hallway; she could see enough by that to have adrenaline kick her hard.

  Everything she owned was scattered around the room. From her first glance into the dark studio, she could tell that almost everything had been torn to shreds.

  Jess had her backup gun on her ankle. She reached down, pulled the weapon from its holster, and thumbed off the safety. Stepped into the room, elbowed the light switch on, kept the handgun raised as light flooded the place.

  The studio apartment was empty; the bathroom door hung off its hinges, and from the doorway she could see every bit of space clearly. She didn’t touch anything. Didn’t want to take a chance of screwing up fingerprints.

  No one was in the apartment. No one was out on the back fire escape.

  A knife stuck out of the wall two feet above the daybed.

  It might have been the one the vandal had used to slice up the mattress. It pinned an index card-sized piece of paper in place.

  Jess walked over to it, keeping her attention on both entrances to the apartment — the window and the door.

  I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

  Yeah. No shit, she thought.

  Her cell phone was clipped to the waistband of her jeans. She pulled it off and dialed Jim.

  “Got a threatening note in my apartment. And the place has been trashed. I need you and backup over here at light speed.”

  “You safe?”

  “Secure for the moment,” she said. “The place is empty except for me. I’m armed. And Hank should be here with pizza any minute.”

  “The cavalry and I will be right behind him.” On the other end of the connection, Jim sighed, and she could hear him mutter, “Yeah, baby, you’re going to have to go home. Case I’m working on just hit another snag.”

  She heard a female voice complaining bitterly. Then Jim was back.

  “By the way,” he said, “are you ever going to let me get some fucking sleep?”

  “Apparently not.”

  When she hung up, she called Hank. “Someone hit my apartment,” she said.

  “I’m about seven minutes out at current speeds. I’ll punch it,” he said.

  He beat the APD by three minutes. Hank clearly had a good understanding of the art of quantum driving.

  Jess met him in the hallway, and she wasn’t sure if he looked that pale because the lights in the hallway were flickering, buzzing fluorescent monstrosities, or because he was scared.

  She got sure fast. “What the hell happened to your car?” he asked, and her mouth went dry and all the air whooshed out of her lungs.

  “What do you mean, what happened to my car? My apartment got hit.”

  “So did your car,” he said. “The tires are slashed, the windshield wipers and the antenna are broken off and gone, the doors have been jimmied open and the seats have been ripped apart.”

  “On my... car?”

  She’d been calm about the apartment. It wasn’t hers; nothing in it had really belonged to her — it had all belonged to Gracie. But the car was her car.

  She loved that car. There’d been less than seven hundred of them made, and hers had been in good shape. Not mint, but everything on it was original, and it had been hers. She’d hunted it down, bargained for it, babied it, got it running. She’d loved it.

  Suddenly she was shaking. She wasn’t the cop at a crime scene anymore. She lost her distance. All of a sudden she was the victim, with somebody coming after her. She couldn’t say the killer was after Grace anymore. She couldn’t separate them out. In that moment, she and Grace stopped being two separate people, and the reality that she was in danger — that she personally had someone who planned to kill her, hit her hard.

  Her knees wobbled, and Hank pulled her into his arms. “I’ve got you,” he said.

  He walked her out to the parking lot, and let her see what the bastard had done to her car.

  “Can you tell who did this?” she asked him. “Was it the killer, or someone else?”

  “The same person who killed the dancers did this.”

  Which meant the killer had been in the bushes, watching her sit in her car. Watching her get out and walk across the parking lot. He’d had the chance to grab her right there, right then, while her mind was on Hank and not on protecting herself. It could have been all over. She could have been gone, and they’d have never found her.

  Jim and Charlie came down to the parking lot to talk to her.

  Hank said, “She’s going to be staying with me until you catch this guy.”

  Jess looked up a
t him. “Am I?”

  “Yes.” Hank’s voice made it clear that he would not accept alternative suggestions. At the moment, she didn’t feel like making them.

  Jess’s attention was on the car. She couldn’t stop looking at it.

  The slashed car seat and the tossed and scattered batting could have been her. She kept seeing those long cuts in the upholstery, kept transferring them to her body. Seeing blood — her blood — in puddles on the pavement. Seeing long rips in herself. She knew what rips in people looked like. She knew only too well the way skin pulled apart and left gaping holes filled with dark, bubbling blood.

  More cop cars were in the parking lot, lights flashing, and uniformed APD officers were combing the apartment complex hoping to catch the bastard before he got away clean. Detectives walked from door to door, knocking.

  For a moment, Jess felt nine years old again, down at the bottom of the public swimming pool with Ginny, with both of them holding their breath and watching legs and arms flashing overhead. The screams and laughter sounded like they were coming from another world, drifting down to the bottom in little shivery fragments. She heard people talking all around her. But all the sense behind the words was gone.

  It would have been easy to stay there, to let herself be the victim. But victimhood was never productive. Never useful, neither to the victim nor to anyone else. Jess needed to think, not feel. She needed anger, not fear. She needed focus. She needed to catch the son of a bitch who was doing this, and nail him to a wall.

  She realized that Hank had been watching her. “Back with me, sweetheart?” he asked.

  She looked at him steadily, and gave him a cold, angry smile. “Bet on it. Let’s get this guy.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The long night got longer. Hank and Jess stood eating pizza straight out of the box off the back of Hank’s car while he and Jess answered questions.

  By the time the two of them got to his place and climbed into bed, the sun was already well on its way up the sky.

  They lay together, touching, not speaking. He drifted toward sleep. At which point she said, “I hate to admit this, but I’m scared.”

  “You’d be foolish not to be.”

  “It’s not the kind of scared you get when someone has a gun pointed at you, though. That’s... immediate. Right there, right then, either you’re going to live or you’re going to die, but it isn’t going to follow you around. This is... well, he’s after me. Some part of me believes that even if I shed Gracie and turn back into Jess, he’ll keep coming. Because this is about Ginny, and she’s part of Jess, not Gracie.”

  She sounded so rational. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he would slay dragons for her, that the bastard coming after her would have to go through him to get to her, and he had a lot of practice taking apart bastards who were coming straight at him. But she didn’t seem like she needed to be rescued right then. She was talking, but in a funny way, she was still very much in control of the situation.

  So he locked his arms around her and told her all those things in his mind, and willed her to understand.

  All he said out loud was, “I won’t let him.”

  “You can’t be with me all the time.”

  “Watch me.”

  She laughed. The Jess laugh. The I-am-bigger-than-this-disaster laugh. He loved that about her. That she could walk through, if not hell, then at least some version of purgatory, and laugh on the other side.

  He kissed the back of her head, and the smell of her hair went straight to his brain, like a drug. Patent that stuff and Viagra would be old news, he thought.

  She moved against him, sliding her butt back against the erection he’d been trying to keep from happening — and once it happened, trying to pretend wasn’t there — and she said, “Not so tired after all, huh?”

  And he sighed. “I’m a pig, clearly,” he said.

  She made a soft cat-purr sound in the back of her throat, and rubbed harder.

  “You’re not a pig. And I want you, too,” she told him, rolling over and wrapping her arms around him.

  He kissed her, and sighed. “Good.” He kissed her a little harder, and she arched against him, and he thought, Well, yeah, I want you. Only I want you to be mine, all mine, only mine, from now until forever. With nobody and nothing I have to share you with.

  She bit his earlobe, and he groaned and said, “You’re making it hard for me to be a gentleman right now.”

  “I don’t want you to be a gentleman.” Her voice was hoarse in his ears. “Show me I’m still alive.”

  That he could give her. Did give her. And after, when she lay against his chest, curled warm and soft against him, he stroked her hair and watched her sleep, and thought, This is what I want. Jess is who I want for the rest of my life. And how do I keep her? If I don’t protect her, I’ll lose her. If I do the things that I know would protect her, she’ll push me away. How do I do this? How do I get us past this?

  Blood red tunnel walls pushed in on Jess, and someone was chasing her. She was running. Turning left, turning right, but whoever was coming up behind her was quicker than she was. She tried to run faster, but her feet were mired in the dream air that flowed thick as clotting blood, that clogged her lungs, that weighed her down.

  The floor tilted up and became a hill, rose steep and then steeper, and she fled slower, ever slower, while behind her the ground leveled back for the hunter who came after her, smoothing the way for him. And then a light reached out to her. Bright and white and welcoming, straight ahead, and for a moment her feet grew wings and she shot forward while the hunter lumbered. To a door. She touched the door and grabbed the doorknob, which seemed to grab her back; but the light around her was blue-white, clean, and it burned away the clotted air of the tunnels below and behind. She pulled on the door, and it resisted her. She pulled harder, and the air began to thicken around her again.

  She was not free.

  Had not earned her way free.

  She yanked and hammered and tried to shout for someone on the other side to let her in, knowing, believing that freedom lay on the other side if she could only reach it, but something on the other side fought against her, would not give her safe haven, and she tried to scream, but no sound would come out of her mouth, and then whatever was on the other side of the door released its hold on the knob, and the door flew open and brilliant blue-white light focused like a spotlight on a girl on the other side. Lovely and young, with long pale hair and pale blue eyes and pale full lips, until the pretty peeled away, fell in sheets and clumps and clods to leave a dead girl standing. Long dead, blue and white as the light, her blonde hair lank and matted, her eyes gone, turned into sunken dark holes that still saw. Dressed in the ballet dress made by her mother, facing her still living mirror image.

  Jess screamed, “Ginny!”

  In a voice at home only in hell and nightmares, Ginny answered, “Run!”

  Hank shook her. “Wake up, wake up!” Jess lay rigid beside him, growling in the back of her throat. “Wake up. It’s a dream.”

  Jess opened her eyes and stared at him, not seeing him. His fingertips fed him her pain and her guilt and her grief just as they’d filled him with the bloodied shapes of the nightmare.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked her.

  “I found Ginny,” she told him, her voice as hoarse as if she had spent hours screaming.

  He pulled her close and held her.

  Jess said, “All these years she’s been calling to me to find her. In my nightmares, she’s always close — but always out of reach. She’s been begging me to fix everything, to find her, to bring her home.”

  “I know,” he said. “You told me.”

  “You don’t understand. In all the years I’ve been looking for her, even in my dreams, this is the first time I ever found her. And she told me to run. Not to save her, not to take her home. All she said was, ‘Run.’ ”

  He pulled her tight against his chest and murmured something in
her ear.

  And her phone rang. She hadn’t even shaken off the cobwebs of nightmare that still clung to her, and the caller ID on her cell phone told her that Charlie was already tracking her down. She’d had two hours of sleep.

  He said, “Hey, Jess, I’m the bearer of bad news. We need you to work right away. It’s crucial.”

  “You’re kidding,” Jess said. Hank raised eyebrows at her.

  “Not kidding,” Charlie said, “Your car, your apartment, that stuffed animal — forensics said the killer left nothing. But this is the first time Lenny hasn’t had an alibi when something like this was happening. He lost his tail, and we have no idea where he was until he showed up at his place around three A.M. But we shut down the club. And a minute ago, Teri got here. She’s upset. She’s packing up her office right now. We need you in here as fast as possible. See if you can get her to connect him to anything — anything — related to this case. We’re waiting outside the judge’s office; if you can get her to give us something solid, the judge will give us a search warrant on Lenny. Find out why she’s scared of him. Tell her what happened to your place last night. See if she’ll connect the dots.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll come out from undercover?”

  Jess listened to the long pause at the other end. “No. Not yet. She looks like she’s edgy around cops today — stay in character for a while yet. Take your badge and wear your sidearm out of sight in case there are still parts of this we’re missing. If someone else in the club poses a danger, you may need to break cover. And tell Hank to come, too. When we get the go-ahead, I’m going to need him up in Lenny’s office.”

  “Got it.”

  When Jess got off the phone, she gave the rundown of the conversation to Hank, and said, “I need to have you drive me to my condo to get my badge and my service weapon.” She grinned a little when she said it. “I think we have our guy. The judge is willing to work with us this morning — that might mean Lenny’s friends have decided he’s too much of a liability to keep protecting.”