Identity Crisis (Sam McRae Mystery #1)

Chapter 19

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Made me wish I could have hidden in a supply closet instead. I considered the pros and cons of squeezing into a closet versus the more spacious, but stench-filled, bathroom stall.

I thought about a lot of things as I crouched on the toilet, waiting for everyone to leave. In order for this to work, I was assuming that Ash hadn't bothered to set up an inside alarm system. I hoped his presumed indifference extended to outside door alarms, too. When I was done here, I'd have to get away fast. It could be a silent alarm, so I'd have to move quickly, no matter what. Get to my car. Drive. I'd be the only car on the road, probably. The cops would spot me in a second. I'd need to find a side road, pull over. Then what? Hide in the bushes somewhere for an hour?

That was assuming I'd be able to get out without a key. Do they still have locks that require a key on the inside?

Even if the cops pulled me over, what would they find? I didn't intend to take anything, so there would be nothing in the car to link me to the club. Plus, for good or ill, a white, female in her midthirties didn't exactly fit the police profile of breaking and entering suspects. Still, I couldn't help but feel ridiculous. I was taking quite a chance.

Out in the hall, the sounds of conversation and movement were dying down. A door slammed. I heard footsteps, getting closer. The bathroom door opened. A click and the room went black. The door shut. The footsteps receded.

In the dark, I strained to listen and could have sworn I heard someone talking nearby. I thought it was my imagination, until I heard someone say, "Good night." I waited, I can't say how long. The room was so dark, I felt like I'd disappeared, become a noncorporeal presence in a black hole. I didn't like it, but didn't want to turn on my flashlight until I was sure everyone had left. The hard, but oddly comforting, rim of toilet seat was the only thing keeping me oriented.

Ever since my parents died, complete darkness has made me anxious. I can't sleep without a night-light or some small spark of illumination from a window. I think it was the night in the shelter that did it. I remember when the NYPD came to our apartment in Brooklyn. They explained that my parents were not coming home, because the plane they were on had "gone down." I remember their words. Gone down. I wondered if there was a reason they hadn't said it crashed. Maybe "gone down" meant it landed in a strange place, and they just couldn't find it. I asked them about that, several times, until they finally sighed and said "gone down" and "crashed" were the same thing. For a moment, I hated them for giving me that faint hope. Why couldn't they have just told me it crashed?

They took me to a shelter somewhere across the river. I slept in a big room full of cots with other children. It was dark, so dark I might as well have been alone, except I could hear the other kids breathing and the occasional squeak of bedsprings as someone turned over. I kept wondering if it was bedsprings or rats. At times, I thought I felt rats or something, crawling over my bed. When I told people about this later, they said I must have been dreaming. They said the health department would never allow children to sleep en masse in a totally dark room full of rats. Maybe I was dreaming, but that's how I remember it.

Back in the bathroom of Aces High, minutes ticked by. I guess it was minutes, because the darkness had effectively wiped my watch out of existence. I kept listening. Was that someone moving? Was it one last straggler, left behind to lock up? Or was it rats? I shivered. Anything but rats, I thought.

It occurred to me that Rhonda might have locked her office. I put my noncorporeal head in my unseeable hands. I wondered if my brain had disappeared into blank space also. OK, it was possible she didn't feel the need to lock her office. Yes, it would provide an extra level of protection for the computer equipment, but was someone going to break into a strip joint for that? Of course, the office probably had a safe, too. And important files that hadn't made it to the computer.