they kind of crowd closer until Roger has to step in and make them behave.”
“And this guy at the back of the crowd got too close?” Maggie asked.
Jeanna shook her head. “Just the opposite. Everything about him was just the opposite. He was too straight for this place, too well dressed.” She hesitated. “Too clean.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Sure. And that’s the scary part. He was standing in a dark corner at first, I think he wanted to be hidden a little, and I just figured he was some perv, you know, who needed a dark corner for what he was doing. Wouldn’t be the first time at the Double D.”
Ugh. Roger’s job had its drawbacks after all.
“But there’s this crazy kind of mini-searchlight that Roger turns on when you really get going, just to whip the crowd up and get the booze and money flowing. It turns in a circle, all through the bar.”
Maggie nodded. She’d seen it in action. So had I. It had always added a touch of surreal World War II escape-from-prison-camp atmosphere to my arrests when the spotlight was sweeping over me while I was handcuffing someone. But the crowd had loved it.
“So, I’m standing to one side of the bar, waiting for my time up, turning down guys that think I’m some kind of whore.” She cast another quick glance at Maggie, then looked back at the neon signs. “And I notice that every time this searchlight scans the room, it sort of freezes on this guy, just for a couple of seconds, before it moves on. And he can’t hardly move, you know, because he’s wedged in between a lot of hollering fools, and I don’t think he likes that this spotlight is stopping on him, but it’s all preprogrammed and no one really notices anyway and I don’t think there’s much he can do about it. The guy’s real tall, did I say that yet?”
Maggie shook her head.
“Well, he was. Real tall. So I can see his face and I noticed that he’s staring at Becky and Nan kind of funny.”
“Becky and Nan?” Maggie asked.
“They go on before me. Roger puts them both up there at the same time, hoping to draw a bigger crowd. They do this rubbing up against each other and pouring tequila on each other stuff. It’s kind of lame, I mean, take a good look at them. Would you really want to see either one of them naked, much less both of them at the same time? But I guess late at night, with everyone drunk, and the lights kind of low and those spotlights flashing around, well, people can make them into anyone they want them to be.”
She was smarter than she looked, I decided. I hoped she was smart enough to get out while she could.
“And this man?” Maggie prompted.
“It was the way he was staring at them that got me. I mean, I am halfway across the room but I can’t stop staring at him because even from there I can see his eyes. They were mean. They were really dark. Black, mean, hate-filled eyes, and he was just staring at them on the bar, and his whole face was real still, frozen, and real creepy and white each time that spotlight stopped on him, and he was just staring at Becky and Nan and I knew what he was thinking.” She paused. “He wanted to hurt them bad. He hated them. He didn’t even know them and I could tell he hated them. He looked mean and hungry and like he wanted to pull out a blade and start cutting them up into ribbons.”
She stopped, her voice quavering, and took a drag on her cigarette, inhaling deeply and holding the smoke in. I wondered how she knew what a man looked like when he was in the mood to cut. I figured she probably danced here so she could wear those low-slung jeans most of the time. They’d hide a lot of scars. But I didn’t question her authority. I knew she’d seen that look in men before.
“What happened then?” Maggie asked.
“It was my turn to dance. Roger puts me up there alone on account of I like to dance all over and, well, people like my dancing.”
“So I’ve heard a few times tonight,” Maggie said with a smile. She wanted the woman to keep on talking. Or maybe she was just being nice. She didn’t have the need to tear down others like