Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [70]
I stood up straighter and forced an injection of confidence and total I’m Supposed to Be Here into my voice. “Hello. My name is Raylene Jones, and I’m looking for Sister Rose.”
“Raylene Jones, looking for Sister Rose. Is this some official business? Because sister, it is too soon to party.”
“Official business, yes.” Because it’s always better to let them think you’ve got some kind of authority backing up your right to be present. “But not,” I hastily clarified, “the strictly bad kind. Rose isn’t in any kind of trouble.”
“You look like a cop,” declared a second girl, from around the corner of the door they’d been chatting behind a moment earlier. The newcomer was going for an Elvira thing, and it was comical, but I couldn’t say it didn’t look good on her.
I nodded and pulled out my badge. “I am a cop. I’m a cold-case detective from the APD, and I’m looking into the disappearance of a teenage girl a few years ago. Rose might have a little information for me. Or then again, she might not. But I’m low on leads, so here I am. Can you point me in the right direction?”
“The right direction’s right around the corner, baby,” the blonde said. “First door on the left. She shares it with a couple of other girls, like we all do—you know how it goes. But she’s working tonight and her shift starts in half an hour. She’s in there.”
“Thanks,” I said, and did a stiff little half bow that implied I was finished here. I navigated the narrow, claustrophobic corridor with all its dense, dark wood and deeply piled but matted carpet until I’d passed both of the ladies and reached the indicated door around the corner.
I planted myself in front of it, feet splayed and ready for action, and I knocked. Twice. Real loud, very authoritative, if I don’t mind saying so myself. “Sister Rose?” I called, hoping I came off as less Itchy Trigger-Fingered SWAT Team than Concerned Authority.
“What?” came the answer from inside. It sounded irritable, impatient, and somewhat aggravated—at the world in general, or maybe at me in particular. “What do you want?”
“I’m looking to have a word with Sister Rose. My name is Raylene Jones; I’m a cold-case detective working for the Atlanta Police Department,” I said, laying out my story and my pseudonym, since it’d served me well so far. “You’re not in any trouble, I only want to ask you a few questions about someone else.”
The door opened swiftly and violently, before I’d heard anyone within make a peep or a step toward the knob. Inside the room, with one rather intimidatingly beefy arm slung lazily over the door’s latch, stood the most insistently innocent drag queen I’d ever set eyes upon.
She was tall—taller than me by nearly a foot, which would put her around six-four or six-five—and she was wearing a mermaid-inspired blue-sequined dress that left little to the imagination, and much to the imagination’s Department of WTF? I knew she was packing under that bikini bottom with the dangled sparkles, but I’d be damned if I could tell you where she’d put it. On her head sat a black Amy Winehouse wig that was just as tall as the British singer’s do, but less cracked-out and more tidy. Around her neck was a flamboyant fake necklace that would’ve been worth seven figures if it’d been real.
With a diva voice that neither matched nor contradicted her appearance, she asked, “Someone else?”
I was so taken aback I only stared for a second before asking, like an idiot, “What?”
“Someone else. You said you were here asking about someone else. Not me?”
“Not you. No. But …” I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing, but I didn’t trust that the walls had no ears. “Could we have a moment in private? Is it private in there?”
“As private as anywhere.” She shrugged. “Come on inside, if you’re gonna.”
I let her hold the door ajar while I passed into the inner sanctum, where it smelled like talcum powder, wax, and hair spray. I waded through knee-deep piles of stockings and playbills before excavating a seat in front of the largest mirror with the smaller set of lights. The smaller mirror had brighter lights, and Sister Rose