by Virna DePaul
Nick grinned, his hands on his jeans-clad hips. “Yeah. My kind of woman.”
“Oh shut up.” Barrett ran her fingers through her newly white locks, purposely messing up the severe geometry of the cut. “Yikes. I just can’t get used to this. At least I can dye it back to my natural color when this is over.”
“Whatever you want.” He reached for the laptop he’d brought with him and propped it up on his knees when he sank down into the couch. “So break it down for me. What does the place look like from the inside?”
“Chaotic. It’s overwhelming. I barely know where to start. It’s totally fabulous and really trashy at the same time.”
“Specifics, please. But wait.” He held up a hand. “Before we start, was there any sign of Jane or other girls who didn’t seem to belong there?”
“No.”
She knew that his quick question was anything but casual and that there would be more. Her answers, no matter how trivial, would be fitted into a mental grid to help him plan strategy. For anything that involved kids or innocent victims, he put his whole heart into it. If his mission was to take out a bad guy, there were no emotions involved whatsoever.
Unless, she thought, that so-called “bad” guy happened to be his brother.
He frowned, his expression soberly thoughtful as he looked at her. “Barrett, what is it?”
She jerked. “I’m sorry. I—I lost my train of thought. Where was I?” Barrett asked.
He hesitated before saying, “You were about to describe the interior of Club Red.”
“Right. The main space is big. There’s a runway right down the middle. Lots of seats and little tables. The strippers and dancers are above all that, I guess.”
“They have to be. There’s always some bozo who tries to grab a girl by the ankles,” Nick commented.
“Always? And how do you know that?”
“Believe it or not, I have been to more than one strip club.” He glanced up at her. “Don’t give me that look. I’m a guy. We do a lot of things women don’t like.”
She gave him that look anyway.
“Please continue, Miss Miles.”
Despite the exasperating smirk on his face, she did. “There are wraparound balconies with glass walls for the party people who want to watch from on high.”
“How many?”
“Two. The top one is bigger. It kinda juts out over the bottom one.”
Nick typed. “So when exactly does the club open? I looked online. It still didn’t say. What the hell are they waiting for?”
“Rave reviews. Big buzz.”
“Don’t they need customers first?”
“No. They need bloggers, reporters, scene makers, columnists, and trendsetters. A reliable source—Justine’s pal, if you want to make a note, her name is Moira Finn—says that Vladimir bankrolled a press junket. It’s happening tomorrow.”
“A junket? What is that exactly?”
“They vary. Could be for a movie, a big event, a publicity campaign. Media types ask bullshit questions and get phony answers and try to scoop the competition. Besides the free plane ticket and hotel room, there are the swag bags. At Club Red, there’s also the, uh, entertainment.”
“Who’s doing the entertaining?”
“Could be the strippers. I happened to see them rehearsing when I was wandering around.”
“What exactly did you see?”
“Like I would answer that.”
He shook his head. “I meant when you were wandering around.”
“Oh. Rooms with tacky sex furniture. Locked rooms. Before the rehearsal, I walked around some and went down a long corridor. There was a door at the end of it with a keypad.”
“How close did you get to that?”
“Not very. A guard appeared out of nowhere, asked me what I was looking for.”
“Do you think you could find that door again?”
“Of course.”
Clickety-click. Click click click. The faint blue glow of the laptop gave his dark eyes an odd, distant look. He sure was focused. Barrett couldn’t remember him getting his head stuck in a laptop to this extent back when they were overseas.
“Hey, almost forgot to ask about your roommate,” he said, still staring into the screen. “Did she get hired? It would be great if there were two of you inside before I get there.”
“The answer is no. Justine’s going to be our outside contact and liaison to Belladonna—but wait a sec. How are you going to get in? I haven’t had a chance to figure that one out.”
Barrett hoped he got her point. Actually, she had two points to make. He needed to work with her. And she didn’t work for him.
“I’m mulling it over.” The keys clicked as Nick kept on. “Getting back to the original topic, a crowd of random people on the loose will drive the security staff crazy and provide cover for us.”
“Or totally get in our way.” He didn’t answer. Her logical comment must not fit in his mental grid.
“Do you happen to know where the media mob is staying?”
“At the same hotel we stayed at. On Vladimir’s dime, most likely.”
He nodded. “I’ll pay my own way.”
“Excuse me?”
He finished taking notes and shut the laptop. “I’m going to the hotel after I pick up some stuff. I’m thinking canvas jacket with big pockets, netbook, black-frame glasses. If I get the same clerk, he won’t remember me.”
Nick had been the one who’d gone up to the front desk. He was just being careful. But she wasn’t so sure that he should infiltrate the media bash. Barrett covered up her uncertainty with a vague reply. “Whatever.”
“It’s a start. Look, we don’t have a warrant to search the club, and if Vlad or Mansfield get suspicious, they’ll get Jane out fast.”
Or kill her. Barrett knew it could happen. No matter how much money Jane was worth, there was always the chance they’d decide she was more trouble than she was worth and go looking for another girl.
Nick seemed to take her silence for agreement.
“I need a way to get in and now I have it. Let’s not waste time.”
“Nick, I’m not done discussing this.”
He didn’t seem to think that was particularly important. “This media thing dropped in our lap, so let’s take advantage of it. Reporters are supposed to ask questions. I can wander around with a drink and spy right out in the open.”
He could have asked if that was okay with her. Nick may have been to a few strip clubs, but he knew zip about the behind-the-scenes reality of this one. She didn’t mind him having her back, but she really didn’t want him taking over the hunt for Jane.
Why was that, she asked herself suddenly?
“Okay,” he said as he stood. “I gotta get started.” He set aside the laptop and rose from the couch to stretch, but not for long. He gathered up his things briskly, effectively keeping her at a distance. It almost made her panic.
“Nick, is everything—”
“We’re done for tonight, right?” His tone was cool. Abrupt.
Instinctively, she slammed down a mental door between them. What other choice did she have? This morning, he’d been all over her, showering her with affection in front of Justine. Now he was all about business. And distance.
Confusing her.
And pissing her off.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re done. I won’t keep you.”
His mouth twisted. “No one can.”
That seemed to be a joke but his timing stunk.
“I’ll call you a little later,” was his parting shot.
After he left, Barrett picked up her cell phone and paced with it in her hand. She looked out the window. Nothing to see. His car had to be long gone. Ultimately, Barrett decided against programming the phone to send him to auto-answer hell.
It wasn’t that late and she wasn’t sleepy. Barrett couldn’t go back to Club Red to hang around or someone would get suspicious. She had to think and she might as well do it
right here. Alone.
The first deep breath she took to clear her mind was ineffective. She drew in another and blew out all thoughts of him with it. Then she calmed down.
There had to have been a clue right in front of her during her brief foray into different parts of the club, something much less obvious than the heavy door with the keypad lock. That was how it always worked. She’d missed some tiny thing that would lead her to Jane. Her visual memory had a way of unfolding when she wasn’t distracted or half nuts.
It was a part of herself that she barely used anymore. Once it had meant so much. Art had seemed like a refuge, a world she could escape into and make beautiful.
She thought of trying to draw what she’d seen without analyzing it. When she was in a state of flow, she was sometimes surprised by what appeared on paper.
Barrett unzipped the large pocket on the outside of her suitcase and took out the pad of sketch paper and inexpensive colored pencils she’d purchased at a highway stop.
She put it all on the kitchen table and poured herself a glass of white wine. In another few minutes, she was absorbed in a drawing that seemed to have a life of its own.
Slowly, the dancers she’d glimpsed in the rehearsal studio got set down on the paper, caught in sinuous lines. She left out the dirty details, sketching fast. Flowing hair. Hands reaching out, legs kicking high, bodies as supple as cats.
The faces were only a suggestion, and not because she didn’t remember each one. All were young and pretty even without makeup. But there had been an unmistakable hardness in their eyes. They weren’t dancing out of joy. Their critical gazes at themselves in the mirror said it all. They were on view. They had to be physically perfect. And there were hundreds more waiting to take their place on the stripper runway.
Barrett filled several more pages, doing careful recreations of the rooms and hallways, forcing herself to concentrate with her mind’s eye. Nothing clicked. If there was a clue, she had missed it. After a while, she literally drew a blank. And stopped.
She selected dark colors—black for the outline and brown for the eyes—and drew Nick. The finished sketch lacked an indefinable something that would make it a good portrait. Barrett frowned. The lines were too light and too fine. Nick was all about being big and bold. He could be captured, but to get his ruggedness right, she would need a thick-tip marker and paper she could slash at.
Some other time. She quickly removed the drawing from the pad, leaving a jagged edge along one side.
She turned to a fresh page and switched to graphite pencils, sketching Jane’s face from memory, doing the outline first in hard pencil, and shading in the skin tones with a soft one in light gray. When she finished, she studied the drawing for a long time. It was a mix of the innocent girl she’d once known and the frightened teenager who’d appeared on SexFlash.
It was a good likeness, much better than the dated photo on the have-you-seen-her poster. Barrett detached the drawing, being very careful not to tear it, and set it aside. It seemed like a talisman, something of Jane that she could always keep.
But it wasn’t as if she could show it or a photo around the club or ask questions. While she was at it, she removed the drawings of the sex rooms that she’d hoped would jog her memory. The dancers, she left in. They might come in handy to break the ice, get the girls to talk to her.
If they had that much time.
For a moment, she wondered if she would even recognize the real Jane if they found her. When, she told herself. Not if. But it was a possibility that the abductors might have forced her to change her appearance in some drastic way. The girl’s ordeal was far from over.
Thinking of Nick, she knew theirs wasn’t, either.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
One day after getting hired, Barrett was wandering Club Red, thankful that the hostess station had been overrun by Vlad’s publicity people. The preparations for the junket were under way, with party planners running around in teams, handling everything from banners to swag bags. Guys were unrolling the inevitable red carpet for photo ops.
Vladimir had gone all out.
The club’s top dancers shoved past her in the hallway, even though only a few media people had arrived. Barrett looked back at them with annoyance and brushed glitter off her sleeve. It was a sure thing that the glammed-up girls intended to preen for the cameras and starstruck male reporters.
She headed upstairs and into the dressing room, not surprised to find it mostly empty.
Two girls were over by the corner mirror, basking in the brilliant illumination of the bulbs surrounding it. Only one looked like she belonged there. Barrett was pretty sure she’d been at the rehearsal.
Her fresh complexion, which she was slathering with makeup, and her round eyes made her look way too young to be a stripper. But it was hard to tell. She supposed it was possible she was over twenty-one.
The girl with her seemed out of place. Her clothes were shabby and she was thin, with hollow cheeks and a pinched mouth. She let the dancer, who was now brushing on eye shadow, do most of the talking, answering in monosyllables. Barrett didn’t want to seem like she was listening.
She got busy. The bleaching compound used to turn her hair pure white would also make it brittle and dry. Barrett reached into her bag, searching for the shine goo Yolanda had given her, taking out her drawing pad and markers, her phone, and some other personal stuff before she found the unlabeled jar and the scoop that went with it.
The goo was cool in her palm. Barrett dabbed her fingertips into it and applied it evenly to her hair. No split ends yet.
The conversation in the corner seemed to be ending. The dancer got up and adjusted her skimpy outfit. Still, Barrett thought, it was a lot more than she would wear onstage.
“You look great,” the thin girl told her.
The dancer made a kissy-face at herself in the mirror. “I want my picture in the paper.”
“What if your mom sees?” the thin girl asked.
“I don’t care.” She grabbed a tiny evening bag from the cluttered counter under the mirror.
Her careless reply was still a reminder that these girls had mothers. And that none of them were as tough as they pretended to be. The dancer pulled out a smartphone and stretched out her arm, tilting her head and arching her back so her breasts rose high.
“Gotta get a selfie,” she told her friend. Another kissy-face, a couple of taps on the screen, and the photo was posted online.
Barrett stared straight ahead at her own reflection. The dancer sauntered past her, freshly dolled up and ready to prowl, the thin girl tagging after.
She was alone again. When Barrett was done with her hair, she thought about calling Ginny. That would have to be later. She felt bad that there was no information she could share, though obviously there was none on Ginny’s side, either. There were no new messages on her phone.
Not since Nick had texted her before she’d left the condo this morning.
She picked up the phone and scrolled through the stored messages for something to do. There was his.
In hotel. To club by 10 tonite. OXOXO. Clark Kent.
Right. The black-framed glasses. He would be easy to spot. Too bad he wasn’t easy to understand. His flirty email, complete with hugs and kisses, confused the hell out of her after last night’s freeze-out. She didn’t know what to think of Nick’s erratic behavior, but one thing was for sure—she didn’t need it distracting her. Barrett tucked the phone into a pocket of her bag and flipped back the cover of the drawing pad, leaning on the counter and looking through what she’d done.
Barrett took a hairbrush out of its holder and replaced it with a handful of markers.
She started several pages in, doodling intersecting shapes and filling them in with different colored markers, then lifted the page and used the bits of color and line that had bled through to start another drawing. A half hour went by.
“That’s really nice.”
Startled, Barrett loo
ked up into the mirror. The thin girl was standing behind her, watching her draw. “Oh—thanks.”
“Can I look at it closer?”
Barrett thought before replying, not seeing any harm in the request. The girl reached out a hand.
“Why not.” Barrett handed her the drawing pad.
The girl sat down in the chair next to her, starting at the beginning. She looked at the sketches of the dancers with something like awe. “You’re so lucky that you can do this,” she said softly. “I always wished I could draw.”
“I wish I had more time to do it. But you know how it is. Work, work, work.”
“Yeah.” The girl flipped through the drawings again and stopped, idly touching the jagged edges of torn paper stuck in the spine. “You ripped out some.”
“Sometimes I do. I don’t like looking at my mistakes.”
The girl smiled slightly. She lifted the pad and tipped it toward the brilliant illumination coming from the mirror.
An impression of the drawing of Jane was clearly visible. Barrett almost gasped. She must have been pressing down harder than she’d thought with the pencil.
“That doesn’t look like a mistake,” the girl said thoughtfully. She tipped the pad this way and that, peering at the page.
“No. It wasn’t. I took that one out to—to give it away.” Barrett held her breath. There was an outside chance someone had seen Jane. Could it have been this odd girl?
“Who is she?”
An invisible sigh of disappointment escaped Barrett’s lips. “Just someone I know.”
“Would you draw one of me?” The girl handed back the pad.
The sudden request surprised Barrett. But it was her way out of a very awkward moment. She sat up and got to work.
The thin girl had gone off with several portraits in pencil, carefully removing them from the pad, including the ones Barrett thought weren’t that good.
Looked like she’d made a friend. It was too bad that the girl didn’t work for the club and wasn’t supposed to be there, about the only fact Barrett had gleaned while she was drawing her. For some reason, the girl had never mentioned her name and Barrett had been too preoccupied to ask.