Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,9

go work out, I was supposed to watch the desk. He was supposed to do the same for me.

I had never shown quite so much of myself to so many strangers, on a day-to-day basis. Even before what I labeled my "bad time," I'd been modest. But I had to blend in with the other employees, most of whom were younger. If any of them had had a body like mine they would have flaunted it much more than I was doing, Jack had assured me.

To minimize my self-consciousness about appearing in this getup, I kept my makeup to a minimum, avoided direct eye contact with the men, and tried to squelch any interest manifested by any of the guests.

Since the front door had been opened already, I knew the manager was there. Sure enough, the light in her office was on. Linda Doan didn't like me and was determined to get rid of me the first chance she got. But Linda couldn't fire me, though she didn't know that yet. She didn't know why I was really at Marvel.

I was under cover. The very term had a tendency to make me snicker, but it was true. Since its opening seven months before, the gym had been plagued by a thief. Someone was sneaking into the changing rooms and stealing items - cash, jewelry, cell phones - from the guests. It wasn't impossible that the thief was a guest, but Jack thought the culprit was one of the staff, given the territory the thief had covered.

"The men's changing room, the ladies' changing room, the storage cubes outside the sauna," Mel Brentwood had moaned. "Drinks, watches, chains, cash. Never a lot, never anything awfully expensive, but it's just a matter of time. And the guests will hear about it and they won't come. If we don't find out who's responsible, I'll fire everyone working there and replace all of them, I swear I will."

I was pretty sure such drastic action was illegal, but it wasn't my business to say so, and I noticed Jack glanced out the window and kept his face blank. Mel couldn't be the idiot he projected himself to be. He had started this string of gyms with money he'd begged and borrowed from skeptical friends of his parents, and he'd made the gyms prosper by thinking of ever-new ways to get them in the news without actually burning them down.

"Can we install a camera in the changing room?" Jack asked.

"Hell, no! How do you think these people, most of 'em trying to take off weight, would react to discovering they'd been on camera? There's no way to put one in there that no one would notice." But I could tell the idea had caught Mel's interest. "If I didn't want to take the thief to court..." he said slowly. "If I just wanted to catch the bastard and fire him..."

"The camera would never come up," Jack said. "We could take it out, destroy the tape, no one the wiser. I can run by Sneaky Pete's. I'm not crazy about the idea of filming people who don't know about it, but it would work."

"So, do I need Lily?" Mel Brentwood eyed me like I was a gunslinger who might draw on him.

"Sure. There are things cameras won't catch," Jack said. "And we have yet to figure out a way to disguise them."

"Okay, girl," Mel said, whacking me on the shoulder to get me fired up for the big game. "You start work as soon as you can get your tights on."

I eyed him balefully. I wasn't happy about working for Mel, but I'd worked for plenty of people I hadn't liked. I told myself to ease up. Politically correct he wasn't, but Mel would pay Jack to do this, Jack would have another client who would call him when he got in a jam, and Jack's business would prosper.

So there I was, in Marvel Gym, in glorious leopard print Spandex, making sure guests swiped their green plastic cards as they came in so their presence would be recorded on the computer. I handed out small towels to the guests who'd forgotten theirs, I checked the supply of bath-sized towels in the locker rooms, and I sold the expensive "health" drinks displayed in the cooler behind the counter. Those tasks were constants, but every day there was some specific problem to solve. In the first hour I worked today, I unstuck the weight-setting peg on a leg-extension device. Then