Chapter 6
CINDY
For three days I try to climb back into my old life like it’s a pair of jeans that still fits. It doesn’t.
The first thing that doesn’t fit is the car.
There’s a sedan parked across from my building that wasn’t there before.
Dark. Clean. Too nice for my block, and inside it a man in his thirties who is very bad at pretending to read a newspaper.
Nobody reads a newspaper anymore. Nobody reads one for three days straight in the same parking spot without ever turning a page.
I spot him the first morning. By the third I could draw him from memory.
The flat haircut. The coffee he refills but doesn’t seem to drink.
The way his eyes track me to the bus stop, then back.
He never follows me. He doesn’t have to.
He just makes sure I know that someone, somewhere, has decided my whereabouts are their business now.
The second thing that doesn’t fit is the card.
It’s under my door on the second morning.
A black rectangle, the kind of cardstock that costs money, no name, no logo.
Just a phone number written by hand in dark ink, the strokes hard and certain.
A man’s writing. I don’t have to wonder whose.
I stand in my own doorway in my work sneakers holding it like it might bite me, and I know that if I call that number it rings straight to him.
There’s no front desk on a number like that, no secretary, only the line between me and the man who left a body in the desert, then left me alive on purpose.
I put it in the kitchen drawer with the dead batteries and the takeout menus.
I take it back out. I put it back. I am not a stable person this week.
The third thing that doesn’t fit is the money.
It’s still on my nightstand. I can’t spend it, because spending it makes me the thing he says I am.
I can’t return it, because returning it means calling the number or finding the man, and finding the man is the opposite of what my whole body wants.
So it sits there, a brick of somebody else’s certainty, while I eat ramen, skip the electric bill, lie awake working out how long I can hold out before I have to touch it.
The fourth thing that doesn’t fit is me. I’ve started checking the mirror before I take out the trash, which is insane, because the only audience is a man pretending to read box scores in a sedan. I hate that I checked. I hate worse that I fixed my hair.
When my shift finally comes around, I’m almost glad to go to work, which tells you exactly how bad the week has been.
The Wet Sunset smells like every other night, spilled beer over floor cleaner, and the second I’m through the back door the girls are on me like gulls on a dropped fry.
“There she is.” Joss gets to me first, grabbing both my arms. “Okay. You have to tell us everything. All of it.”
“Tell you what?”
“Cindy.” Stevie appears at my other side, eyes huge. “There was a man. In a suit. In a car worth more than this whole building. Marco said he set down a stack of cash like it was a cocktail napkin, then walked you out like he owned the place.”
“Marco talks too much.”
“Marco is a hero and we love him,” Joss says. “Who is he?”
“How rich?” Stevie asks. “Boat rich or plane rich?”
“Rich rich.”
“Did you google him?” Joss demands. “You have to google him. That’s due diligence.”
“His name doesn’t google.” Which is true. Which is its own piece of information.
Then Crystal shoves between them, her whole face lit up and worried at the same time, hands flapping.
“Is he okay? Like, is he a good one? Because a man with that kind of money is either a fairy tale or a true-crime podcast, there’s no in-between, so which is he?
I need to know if I’m happy for you or if we’re calling somebody. ”
There it is. The question. The one I’ve had three days to build an answer for. I built it. I hate it. I open my mouth and let it out smooth as anything.
“He’s a guy with money who saw me dance and decided he likes me,” I say. “He’s taking care of me for a while. That’s all.”
The back room goes quiet for half a second.
Then Joss makes a sound like a kettle, Stevie breathes “a sugar daddy” like it’s a holy word, and just like that, it’s done.
I watch the whole story slot into place behind their eyes.
The oldest story on this street. The one that happens to some girl every single night on the Strip.
A rich man. A pretty girl. An arrangement. Nobody blinks at it, and nobody digs, because it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, a dancer who caught herself a wallet. That ordinariness is the entire point. It’s the reason the lie works so well it barely feels like one.
It works so well it costs me something I didn’t expect to miss.
Here’s the thing about me none of them know.
I’ve spent seven years at the bottom of this business keeping exactly one thing for myself, the private knowledge that I never sold it.
Whatever I do up on that stage for tips, I never crossed the line into being bought.
It’s a stupid line. Nobody else can see it.
Nobody would respect it if they could. But it’s mine, the last scrap of the girl I used to be, and I just watched four women I love decide I traded it for a nice car.
I let them. Letting them is what keeps me breathing.
“Good for you,” Stevie says. She squeezes my hand. She means it. It’s the kindest knife anybody’s put in me in a long time.
The back room smells like hairspray, burnt coffee, ten perfumes fighting in a phone booth. Home, in other words. I do my eyes at my station and listen to them invent my new life for me, richer, funnier, dirtier than anything I could afford to actually tell them.
The worst part, the part I don’t say to anyone, is how close to true it already is. His cash on my nightstand. His card in my drawer. His man outside my building. His name in my mouth at four in the morning. The lie is just the truth running a few days ahead of me.
I go out and work the floor. I’m halfway through a tray of well drinks for a bachelor party when the room changes.
I feel it before I see it, that drop in the noise, the way a crowd of drunk men goes quiet when something walks in that their animal brains flag as bigger than them.
I turn. Sevastian is in the doorway of my crummy little club in a suit that has no business being here, filling the whole frame the way he filled my apartment, and every drop of blood I have goes somewhere I can’t use it.
He came. To my work. For me. I told him to leave me alone, so instead he put on a thousand dollars of wool and walked into the Wet Sunset like a wolf strolling into a petting zoo.
Before I can get to him, before I can do anything at all, Crystal gets there first.
I watch it happen the way you watch a glass tip off a counter. Too far away. Too slow. My sweet, fearless, no-filter best friend plants herself directly in front of the most dangerous man in Nevada, cranes her neck all the way up to look at him, and starts talking.
“Hi. Oh my God, hi. You’re him, right? The one taking care of Cindy?
” She doesn’t wait. She never waits. “Okay, you should know some things about her, because she will not tell you herself, she’s the worst about herself.
Her real name’s Cynthia. Cynthia Boon. Isn’t that pretty?
She goes by Cindy but I think Cynthia’s gorgeous. ”
I want the floor to open and take me. “And she’s not just a dancer.
She was a real dancer, like nationally ranked, the actual real thing, before she wrecked her knee in a car accident.
She was going to go pro. She’s too good for this dump, everybody knows it, she just won’t say it, so somebody had to. ”
I am going to die. Right here, on the sticky floor of the Wet Sunset, holding a tray of warm vodka sodas, I am going to die.
He says nothing. That’s the part that makes it so much worse.
He just looks down at Crystal with that still, attentive nothing on his face, and he listens.
Takes in every careless word she hands him.
My real name. My dead future. The whole shape of the person I’ve spent years not being.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t laugh her off.
He collects it, all of it. I watch the two most private things I own walk out of Crystal’s mouth and straight into him, free of charge.
“Thank you,” he tells her, grave as a priest. “That’s very useful.”
“I know everything,” Crystal says, delighted. “Ask anybody.”
Crystal beams like he handed her a medal.
Under my mortification, under the wanting-to-die, there’s a colder thing I don’t have time to look at, a small flicker of unease, because Crystal will say anything to anyone.
She always has. She’d tell a stranger our address, our schedules, the pin to her phone, if the stranger smiled nice enough.
It’s the most loveable thing about her, and tonight it just handed an armed man the keys to me.
I don’t like the shape that makes, even while I’m dying of embarrassment over it.
“Crystal,” I manage. “Go check on table six.”
She goes, delighted with herself. Then it’s me and him in the middle of my own ruined night. I haven’t even gotten to be angry yet when the driver appears at the door, the big silent one from the club, the one who never says a word. Sevastian looks at me. “We need to talk. Not here.”
Nothing he says is ever a request.
The back office at Dust to Dust is bigger than my apartment and quieter than a church.
Black walls, a desk you could land a plane on, a window over a gaming floor that glitters like a dragon’s hoard.
It smells like leather and cold cash up here.
Below the glass, a thousand people are losing their paychecks in perfect silence.
He shuts the door. Now it’s just us, and three days of fear, helplessness, that man parked outside my home, all of it comes up my throat at once.
“No,” I say. “Whatever this is, no. I’m not doing it.”
“You’re already doing it.”
“I’m not your kept woman.” My voice shakes.
I push through it. “I don’t want your money.
I don’t want your card. I don’t want your guy reading the same newspaper outside my building for three days like I’m too dumb to notice him.
I have a life. It’s a garbage life, but it’s mine.
You don’t get to buy it out from under me because you feel guilty about not shooting me in the desert. ”
Something moves across his face I can’t read and don’t trust.
“You think this is about my guilt,” he says.
“I think you’re used to people doing what you want.”
“They are.” Flat, no brag in it, just fact.
“That’s not what this is.” He comes around the desk, slow, and I make myself hold my ground, chin up, even as he stops close enough that I have to look up at him.
“Let me tell you what you walked into out there, since clearly nobody’s said it plainly.
The man who put a gun to your head in the dark.
His name is Timur. He works for people who are at war with me. He is not dead, Cynthia.”
My real name in his mouth. Crystal’s gift, already being spent.
“He’s alive. Wounded, because of me. Humiliated, because of you, because a stripper watched him fail and lived to tell it.
Men like that don’t let that stand. And the people he answers to do not leave a witness breathing, ever, for any reason.
You saw a face you weren’t supposed to see, which in their world is a death sentence, signed, waiting on a date. ”
He lets it sit. “That was true before I ever set foot in your club. It stays true whether you take my money or throw it back at me. The only thing on this earth between you and a grave in that desert is me, plus the story we’re selling that says you belong to me.
Take the deal or don’t. But don’t pretend you’ve got a life to go back to.
That life ended the second you came over the rise and looked down. ”
There’s nothing to say back, because it’s true.
Every word. I’ve felt it since the desert, the cold certainty under all my fury that I’m not free anymore, that something out there has my name now.
He just said it out loud, plain, the way you’d read someone their own autopsy.
He took the thing I’ve been refusing to look at and set it on the desk between us.
I’ve got no argument, because there isn’t one.
“Fine,” I say. It comes out small and I hate it. “Fine. What are the rules?”
He tells me the rules. The detail stays.
The card stays. I call the number if anything feels wrong, anything at all, day or night.
I play the part in public, his woman, taken care of, nothing to see here.
I never go to the police, because the police can’t save me from what’s coming and will only get me killed quicker.
“And the number,” he says. “If anything feels wrong, you call it. A car. A face. A sound on the line when you pick up. Anything.”
“What counts as wrong?”
“You’ll know. You’re the most suspicious woman I’ve ever met.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m pacing myself.”
I agree to all of it, standing in a black office over a floor full of other people’s money, signing my life over to a man I’ve known three days, because the alternative is the desert.
The driver walks me out through the casino, through the gold and the noise, past the cocktail girls in their tiny costumes who are doing the exact job I do in a much prettier room.
He holds doors like it’s a martial art. I thank him twice, get nothing twice.
I decide to make him my project. The night air hits cool after the floor.
I stand on the curb a second just breathing, trying to feel like a person again.
That’s when I see it.
Across the wide bright drive, past the line of cabs and the valet stand, there’s a car.
Not the dark sedan from my building. A different one, parked where it shouldn’t be, engine off, a shape behind the wheel I can’t make out.
It sits angled wrong for a fare, nose pointed at me.
At the entrance I just walked out of. At the watchers Sevastian put on me, watching them right back.
The driver opens my door. I get in. I don’t say anything, because I don’t have the words for it yet, just a cold thread sliding down my spine and a single clear thought I can’t shake the whole ride home.
Sevastian’s people are watching me. Somebody else is watching Sevastian’s people.
And whoever they are, they don’t drive a car that turns heads. They drive something built to disappear.