Kylie rested her head against the steering wheel. Shit. “Phone the club and tell them to wait.”
“I’ll call right now. Hurry!”
“I’m…hurrying,” she said to a dead line. Calling herself every kind of idiot, she drove back to Deuces. The club was dark by the time she pulled into the parking lot, but the full moon and the perimeter lights got her up the short flight of stairs to the back door. She tried the handle. Locked. Banging on the door produced no response.
A scraping noise from across the parking lot drew her attention. She squinted into the distance. Was there something, or someone, by the Dumpster?
Impossible to say, but one thing was suddenly all too clear. Hanging out alone behind a strip club at two thirty in the morning qualified as a bonehead move. She’d get the boots tomorrow. If they disappeared, too damn bad. Stacy could buy a new pair of boots. A sister would be tougher to replace. She ran down the steps and back to the car, flip-flops echoing like gunshots on the asphalt.
As she pulled away, her headlights washed over the back of the lot, bringing the Dumpster into view, as well as—oh, jeez—a prone figure on the pavement. It looked like a man, though his head was turned away from her.
A passed-out drunk? The unnatural angle of his body worried her. She slowed and honked. Not a twitch. A dark puddle of…liquid spread over the pavement around his head. Maybe the poor man had slipped, cut his head on the Dumpster, and knocked himself unconscious? Probably a barback from the club, taking out a load of empties.
She put the car in park and lowered the window. “Mister? Are you okay?”
Smart Kylie. If the horn didn’t rouse him, your voice should do the trick. Okay, okay, okay. Just go take a look. She got out and stood on wob
bling legs, clutching her phone.
God, it smelled awful. Like a Dumpster and…something else.
“Mister,” she croaked, touching his shoulder. He didn’t respond. She gave him a little shake. Still nothing. Carefully, she stepped around him and crouched by his head.
“Sir?”
Vacant eyes stared at her from a battered, bloody face. She screamed, stumbled back, and slammed her skull into something solid. Stars exploded before her eyes. A hollow clanging rang in her ears. She screamed again, even as she realized she’d run into the Dumpster and not a bat-wielding thug. Biting back hysteria, she scrambled up.
Adrenaline flooded her system, jolting through her like an electrical current. She overshot vertical, landed on her knees, and clawed her way to the car, trying to outrun the vision of the man’s bruised, swollen face.
Not even a face anymore. Whoever he was, she didn’t recognize him. Nobody was going to recognize him. Ever again.
In the car she wasted several moments frantically searching for her phone before remembering she already had it in her hand. Dialing 9-1-1 took three tries. Finally an operator answered.
“Please,” she whispered, so breathless she sounded as if her lungs had sprung a leak. “Please send an ambulance. I think he’s… I think he’s…dead.”
Things moved dizzyingly fast from there.
A cavalry of cops and paramedics arrived within minutes. Lights flashed, radios crackled, uniforms moved in and out of her line of vision. Somehow she ended up sitting in the back of an ambulance, holding a bag of ice to her head, watching with dreamlike detachment while activity swirled around her. Tracking it made her eyes hurt, so her attention strayed to something stationary—the body. For someone who’d probably gasped his last breath alone in a parking lot, he had a lot of company now.
A couple of paramedics knelt beside him first. With a few frighteningly efficient touches, they pronounced him dead. Then the police moved in, displaying the same frightening efficiency. They taped off the scene, took pictures, asked questions.
She answered as best she could, but there wasn’t much to tell and she struggled to concentrate with all the buzzing in her ears. Did she recognize the man? No. Had she seen anyone else? No. Did she work at Deuces? She hesitated. Did she?
A deep, strangely familiar voice answered. “Yeah, she works at the club. She’s worked there two years.”
Kylie turned, and keen brown eyes captured her gaze. The same deep, all-seeing eyes she’d stared into during her very first lap dance.
Chapter Two
Trevor McCade cursed fate as he met shell-shocked blue eyes. He knew those eyes traveled in close company with the most heart-stopping albeit fake smile he’d ever seen, and the most mouthwatering—and beautifully real—body. Instead of the biker-girl bikini, she now wore a white T-shirt and cropped pink workout pants, but the comparatively sedate ensemble didn’t much distract from the spectacular curves beneath.
He’d been trying to get the whole irresistible package out of his head since leaving Deuces hours ago. Eight months ago, sanitation workers had found a businessman named Alex Montenegro in an alley a block away, beaten to death. Trevor had inherited the cold case just last week. With no solid leads, he had decided to check the club out on an unofficial basis, pretty much because it was the only edgy establishment in the vicinity. He’d walked out of Deuces feeling like his gut might have been wrong this time, but now, because he’d been masochistic or just plain stupid enough to answer his phone on his night off, here he was, investigating another homicide. And here was Stacy, in front of him again, this time in an official capacity. Or, more accurately, in his official capacity.
He’d been a cop for nine of his thirty years, and a homicide detective for the last three. He’d seen plenty of violence and depravity, but it hadn’t erased his compassion for the innocent or the vulnerable. And for whatever reason, something about the woman in front of him struck him as innately innocent and inherently vulnerable. A neat trick, considering her profession tended to leave its practitioners as hardened and dispassionate as, say, homicide cops.
“Stacy?”
She gave him a strange look and started to say something, but then caught herself. Nerves, he judged. Understandable. Cops made people jumpy. Homicide cops made people very jumpy.