Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

Sell any? Temple was fleetingly tempted to take umbrage, but then she remembered the rainbow of glitzy fabrics on her lap.

“Yeah, several. I thought I’d watch some of the girls’ acts. Get more ideas for outfits.”

“You do whatever you like,” he said, “as long as you feed the kitty or you feed the bartender.”

Temple glanced stageward. A lone girl was striding across it to a drumbeat, squatting every now and then to wrap her fingers around some moonstruck guy’s neck and let his fingers jam paper money down the skimpy pocket of her Tess-sold thong. Temple presumed that was “feeding the kitty.”

She sipped the pallid margarita. It tasted more of lemon water than anything else.

The stripping profession is a lifestyle choice, she reminded herself. Who was she to judge? According to Molina, Temple was in an intimate relationship with a suspected murderer, and Molina ought to know, having been in an exploitive relationship with another murder suspect.

Speak of the devil.

Temple gazed across the huge room with anxious recognition. Wasn’t that him? Rafi Nadir? Standing in the first row of tables, watching the woman onstage. He nodded as she passed. She winked back.

So he was indeed a genuine habitué of these places. A bouncer, Max had said. A man who liked to hang around naked ladies, who wallowed in the loud, sleazy atmosphere.

Her disguise was great, like wearing sunglasses on the street, Temple decided as she checked herself out in the mirror. Her actress aunt, Kit Carlson, would be proud of her. Amazing what one heavy-haired wig could do. She could watch everyone, just some idling costume pusher waiting for the next shift of dancers to come in and grab her wares.

Associated pros often came and went at strip clubs: photographers, costume hawkers, maybe even undercover cops.

O holy nightgown! Nadir was heading her way.

Temple turned back to the bar to swig from the smudgy margarita glass. She did not want to be caught making eye contact with a murder suspect. Also, he had seen her before, sans the Dyan Cannon locks. What had Max said? An ex-cop? He’d be good at penetrating disguises.

“Hey, Jay,” his deep voice addressed the bartender behind her. “Anything shakin’ tonight besides booty?”

“The usual usual,” Jay answered, filling his order for scotch on the rocks.

Temple noticed that Nadir’s drink had more color and needed less color of money to pay for it than her watered-down drink had required. Apparently he was known here.

“No suspicious characters?” Nadir asked.

“Just you.” Jay snickered. “You’re not hired heat anymore, why worry?”

“This used to be my beat.” Nadir’s eyes, so dark the black pupils melted into the surrounding iris, scanned the entire club.

Temple wondered if his pupils were dilated from being high on something, or if he just came with creepy jet black eyes, like a larger-than-life cartoon villain.

She remembered Thomas Harris’s one chilling fantasy touch in his description of Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter. He had “maroon” eyes.

How could Molina suspect Max’s true-blue eyes (sometimes disguised by contact lenses as alley-cat green) when here stood a suspect with eyes as black as his presumed heart?

Supposedly Molina had at one time fallen for this man, this hired muscle, this jaded strip club junkie.

Just as her description of Nadir was yearning toward truly extreme heights of distaste the man himself turned to her. “You’re new.”

“Not according to my mother.”

He was speechless for a second, then laughed. “So you sell overpriced elastic bands. How’s business?”

“Good. And they’re not overpriced. It takes tremendous skill to make the ‘gather’ setting on a sewing machine pay off. These costumes have to survive a lot of…stress.”

This time he exploded with laughter, his dark eyes almost disappearing inside the fleshy eyelids.

“You got that right, kid. So, is your sister a stripper? How’d you get into this scene?”

“You got the sister part right. She does this.” Temple shook her hoop like a Salvation Army girl her tambourine. There was no noise, though, which wouldn’t have been heard over the sound system anyway. She and Nadir were shouting at each other, although only two feet apart.

Yikes. She was sitting only two feet away from Molina’s ex–sleaze-a-squeeze and the only man in Las Vegas, or anywhere, that Max Kinsella had shown any fear of. Wow.

“Say, you’re kind of cute,” he said, as if just noticing that. Having a strip club epiphany of sorts.

Anyone else called her cute, she’d raise a ruckus.

This was the fearsome Rafi Nadir, so she’d accept it. “Thanks. I won’t say you’re kind of cute yourself.”

Again he laughed. She got the impression he didn’t do a lot of that and he enjoyed the novelty. He was…gasp…enjoying her.

“What’s your name?”

“Tess.”

“That all there is?”

“That’s all there is around here.”

“Smart. You never know who you’re talking to.”

“Well?”

He shrugged, let a smile touch his lips, smugly. “My name’s Raf.”

“Smart.”

He aimed his forefinger like a pistol. “Bang. You’re faster on the uptake than most of the broads around here.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m not a broad.”

He digested that along with some sodium-rich snack sticks salted with about three peanuts from a bowl on the bar that Temple had rejected forever after one try. Salty snacks encouraged drink orders, and bloating in the female of the species. Better dead than bloated.

“You want to go someplace where we can talk?”

Temple couldn’t believe her luck: Rafi Nadir, feeling talkative, all to herself.

Too bad she didn’t dare risk going as far as the jukebox with him, not that there was one here.

He read her hesitation so fast she thought he was Max. Predators were like that. Funny, she’d never thought of Max as a predator before.

“How about a quiet table?” he suggested.

“There is one in this place?”

He jerked his head toward a far corner. “There is one in every place. You just gotta know the terrain.”

She shrugged her acquiescence and slid off the barstool.

“Leave that,” he said, stopping her hand from reaching for the drink. “Send over a real one for the lady,” he growled at Jay.

Temple was glad she had ditched the high heels, the better to disguise her daily habits, the better to run for her life.

His hands were always on her: between her shoulder blades to guide her toward the right table, at her elbow to thread between the tables, on her shoulder to follow her down onto the chair he pulled out for her.

With a man you were attracted to, it was a barrier-breaking, seductive exercise.

With a shady character, it was stomach-knotting. Temple wanted to use her fabric ring like a barrier to fend off his attentions, but undercover junior G-girls didn’t get any good leads that way.

“Amazing,” she said after Jay had come and gone, leaving a margarita with a high lime color behind. “It really is quieter here.”

Nadir pointed to the ceiling. “In Vegas you always gotta check the ceilings. They’re not only where the spy cameras lurk, but the loudspeakers. This is a loudspeaker-free zone.”

“How’d you know all that?” Temple asked, sipping her margarita through its short, obligatory straw like a teenager at a soda fountain. She figured the more naive and impressionable she acted, the more information she’d get.

“It’s my business.”

She waited, sucking on her straw. Whew. This margarita had a tequila kick.

“I’m in security. Right now I’m working for a major Strip celebrity, but before that some of the strip clubs asked me to check out their systems.”