Page 30 of Under Cover
“His daughter. She went to the ladies’ when I called you. See, he keeps staring at the door.” The ladies’ room was on one back recess of the bar and the gentlemen’s on the other—that made sense. Their guy was closest to the ladies’.
“Any exits from there?” Crosby asked, and she shook her head and gave a subtle, flirtatious laugh. Their perp flashed her a look of both agony and hatred, and Garcia’s heart thumped double time.
“We need him to switch his focus somewhere else,” Garcia murmured. “Do you have any performers tonight?”
He watched a look of determination cross her face. “I sent most of my girls home,” Chartreuse said. “But I’ve got one trick left.”
“Honey, don’t put yourself in danger—” Crosby began, but she arched an eyebrow at him.
“Baby, I absolutely refuse to be shot out of my place one more time. Another asshole with a gun is not gonna keep this whore down.”
And with that she swung beyond the bar and sauntered up to the little stage across from it, whistling to get her DJ to switch the track.
“How you all doing here tonight?” she asked, and the remaining patrons clapped happily—it sounded as though Chartreuse was a favorite. She rolled her eyes at the applause. “Yeah, you say that. But we all know why you’re here. It’s ’cause ain’t none of you want to be someplace else for Christmas, amirite?”
Some more applause and some sheepish laughter greeted the statement, and the DJ pulled up the building chords to a time-honored Christmas standard.
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you. When it’s Christmas, you want to be with someone you love—even if it’s just for a night.” The mood shifted, a sort of desperate sentimentality filled the room, and Garcia swallowed. Without meaning to, he met Crosby’s eyes, and Crosby shrugged. They’d both volunteered for this duty tonight because damned if they had anything else to do. They could sympathize with the people here at the club, looking for a good time with a family of strangers because the family they’d grown up with might not be as kind. But Chartreuse wasn’t done speaking yet.
“’Cause if you’re with someone you love,” she said, giving a sultry look and a wink, “even for a night, then at least for a night, you’re home.”
With that, she launched into a surprisingly poignant version of “I’ll be Home for Christmas” that had everybody, even their gunman, turning toward her.
Crosby and Garcia met eyes, and both of them started to edge nearer to the gunman.
He seemed unlikely as a mass murderer, Garcia had to admit. His hair—blond, probably, in his youth—was still thick, curly, and graying. It was a little mussed, as though he’d been running his fingers through it, but still fashionably cut. His trench coat was newish, a practical beige, but it showed few scuffs and no rips at all. Lightly used, but not worn on the streets, made dirty by sleeping or too much distraction with thoughts of, say, murdering a bunch of people in a nightclub.
And underneath the trench coat were a pair of khaki slacks, shiny loafers, and a bizarrely bright and ugly Christmas sweater.
This man, hugging a semiautomatic weapon under his lapels, was very much somebody’s father, somebody’s husband. What in the hell was he doing at a drag club on Christmas?
Garcia was just about to cross his line of vision so he and Crosby could grab his arms when a miracle occurred.
Garcia hadn’t seen the woman come in; she suddenly appeared near the entrance, as spectacularly suburban and average as the man they were about to take down. She had frosted hair pulled back in barrettes and a skirt that came down to her knees over a pair of sturdy black tights.
She was wearing a garishly colored Christmas sweater that looked like a dead match to the one their guy was wearing, and next to all of the girls wearing glitter and sequins and not much else—or the guys in their leather pants and shiny satin shirts—she was so badly misplaced it was almost physically jarring to look at her.
And then she called out over the sound of the club, her voice shaking and frightened enough to make even Chartreuse quit singing.
“Glenn!” she called out, her voice ringing through the club. “Glenn, you’ve got to stop! What in the hell are you doing here?”
Glenn turned toward the woman, his hand under the coat falling to his side, the gun in plain sight now but held by the stock, his fingers nowhere near the trigger. “Patsy? Patsy, you don’t understand!”
“Explain it to me, Glenn—like I was five!”
Their boy’s face crumpled in anger and confusion. “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, Patsy. That’s what our son says when he’s… when he’s….”
“When he’s putting on his high heels,” Patsy snapped. “And his club dress. And getting ready to run away from our Christmas table because you won’t seeherfor who she is.”
Glenn’s face crumpled. “I just came to get him back. This place, this place stole our boy from us. You don’t understand—”
“I understand plenty.” Patsy started to walk across the club toward him, and Crosby met Garcia’s eyes before he looked up at the lights.
Garcia met Chartreuse’s eyes, and she nodded to the bartender, mouthing, “Lights,” softly, but neither of the two people who didn’t belong there noticed.
“He was our boy—you remember that? I took him to games, I taught him to play catch, how to work on the car.” Glenn’s voice trembled slightly, and his wife drew nearer, her face a mask of grief and of pity.
“I get it, Glenn,” she said, her own voice soft. “None of that is gone now—”