Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [73]
“Not until—”
“No. Right now, but we can talk later. Not here. Not like this. I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust some of these people.” She waved at the door, indicating the people on the other side of it in general, maybe Fanny in particular. “And I don’t trust you, exactly, but I get why you’re holding back, and maybe we can help each other. I don’t know. But I’m willing to talk.”
“Later?”
“Later,” she said as the knocking on the dressing room door commenced afresh. “When I’m off tonight. Around the corner and down the street there’s an all-night diner. Meet me there.” The knocking grew louder and grouchier, and it was underscored by obscenities. “I won’t talk here. I can’t talk here, and you shouldn’t talk here.”
“Me? What do I have to do with anything?”
“Maybe plenty,” she said, eyes narrowed. She grabbed the door’s tiny hook fastener and slapped it into place, as if it could stand alone against the wrath of an impatient drag queen. She lowered her voice to something wholly unladylike and menacing when she said, “My sister might’ve run away, but after that she was taken. And I know who took her, and I know why they took her. So you’re no cop and Bella was no runaway, and neither one of you is alive.”
Now it was my turn to be shocked into a slack-jawed drool-drip of confusion. “You think your sister’s dead?” I asked, because it was the only thing I could think to stutter.
“I’m coming in there!” announced Fanny from the other side, and she shoved against the door. The hook-lock held for the first assault, buying just enough time for Rose to lean down into my personal space.
She said, “Oh, she’s dead all right. I just want to know if she’s any deader than you.”
The door burst open and Fanny strolled inside with a glare and a sneer. “You’re supposed to be in the bar, asshole, and it’s my turn for the mirrors. Who the fuck is this? This the cop you’re talking to? She doesn’t look like a fucking cop. She looks like a fucking real estate agent.”
I started to say, “And you look like—” but Rose cut me off with a very large hand, pushing Fanny aside so I had room to leave. It was just as well. I couldn’t think of anything suitably catty anyway. I was in over my head in the catty department, I just knew it.
“Get out,” Rose reiterated. “Tonight. After three. Around the corner. We’ll talk.”
7
Sister Rose turned back to Fanny and started swearing in Spanish, flinging her arms around like she was guiding a very flamboyant airplane onto a very bumpy runway. I squeezed out through the narrow space where the door was half blocked by their bickering bodies and shimmied out sideways into the corridor, which seemed unaccountably dark after the brilliant face-painting-worthy glare of the dressing room.
My eyes adjusted accordingly and I stumbled out down the hall until I found my way back to the foyer. There, the front doors had been opened (a few minutes early, I thought) and a couple of people had milled inside, past a smallish man wearing ordinary man-clothes. He was sitting on a bar stool that had been dragged over to the entrance, in order to check IDs.
I scooted past him with an “Excuse me” and darted back into the street, where I felt like I could breathe again.
I stood on the sidewalk and oriented myself, scanning the blocks for a twenty-four-hour diner and spotting what looked like a sign for one down at the end of the street. I made a mental note of it and went back to my car.
You may recall that I tend to keep a change of clothes in my trunk. You may also recall that among these clothes are such diverse elements as a hot skirt and heels. I didn’t intend to stick around the drag bar all night, but if I was going to hang out in this part of town, I wanted to look less like a fucking real estate agent. Because really, Fanny was right and I knew it.
I wished I had something more like party clothes handy, but there was no way in hell I was going to drive all the way back home, then all the way back out to the Poppycock Review. Not on a weekend night. I’d rather suck it up and wander around looking