Chapter Seven
WINCHESTER
The schedule needs rebuilding. Whoever rebuilds it needs to know which girls will work a private, which ones won’t, who owes a favor or is owed one, and how to ask in a way that gets a yes instead of a no.
“I’ll be there at noon,” I tell Dani.
“Okay,” she says. A pause. “One thing.”
“What?”
“Nova already called me and said she’d handle it.”
Silence on my end.
“She knows everyone’s numbers,” Dani says. “She’s good with the girls. Winchester. She’s… I figured you’d want to know, in case it was already done by the time you got here.”
“I’ll be there at noon,” I say again.
Nova.
The name sits in my head with more weight than a name should have.
She’s been on the schedule for eight months now.
She comes in, works her set, goes back to her dressing table, and opens her laptop.
The other girls talk about her nursing courses the way they talk about a foreign country, with mild disbelief.
She doesn’t talk about them. She just works.
Her stage name is Storm because Dani said Nova sounded too close to Novo and made men think of the pharmacy, but everyone backstage calls her Nova.
She corrected me once when I called her Storm.
Quietly. Not aggressive. She just said that’s not my name, went back to her laptop, and I stood there for a moment feeling like I’d made an error in a document I’d filed wrong.
I drive to Bare Assets with the windows down.
The club in daylight is a different building from the club at night.
Night, it has the particular energy of any place where people pay to watch other people—dark, lit in red and blue from the stage, the sound system running, the particular smell of a full house.
At noontime, it is a large room with chairs stacked on tables and the cleaning crew running mops across the floor in long, patient strokes, the bar empty, its bottles reflecting the working lights—a business. Mine to run.
I enter through the staff entrance.
The hallway behind the stage is narrow, always is in clubs, always has been in every club I’ve ever walked through, as though the architecture is reminding the workers that the show is out there, and they are back here.
Two girls pass me coming out of wardrobe, say morning, and get a nod.
The bulletin board at the end of the hall has the schedule posted. The schedule I came to fix.
There’s already a new page pinned over the old one.
Printed with clean margins, the whole night has been restructured.
The Delgado party is blocked for the main stage from eight to eleven.
Sadie and Carina are pulled to cover Mia’s slot, and Rio has moved to the second stage so the room can keep a show running while the private event has the main floor.
At the bottom, there’s a note in small, level handwriting.
Carina confirmed. Owes Mia from the March conflict.
Rio agreed to the swap for Tuesday off in return.
Sadie is a yes. Called at nine this morning.
Whoever did this made three calls before the workday started and built a schedule that doesn’t fill the gaps.
It uses the existing debts and favors in the right order so nobody feels used, and everybody gets something back.
I’ve been running this club for four years.
The schedule logic is sound. Better than what I would have done, if I’m honest about it.
I would have called the girls Dani suggested.
Nova called the girls who actually owed each other something, which means the yes came more easily, and nobody had to be asked twice.
My hand is on the bulletin board frame.
The paper is standard printer weight. Her handwriting is small and even, the kind that comes from someone who takes notes fast and has learned to make them legible under pressure.
The note at the bottom, ‘Carina confirmed. Sadie is a yes,’ is precise without being formal.
No sign-off. No name. No reason to sign it, since the work speaks for itself.
Dani appears from the direction of the bar with two coffees and the expression of a woman who has been in this industry long enough to recognize when a situation has resolved itself and knows better than to comment on it.
“Told you,” she says.
“You told me.”
“She called me at 9:05 this morning. Said she’d seen the group text come in last night about Renee’s accident and Mia being sick, and she’d already started working on the problem.
” Dani puts a coffee on the edge of the bulletin board shelf.
“She said she didn’t want to overstep. I told her to step. ”
“Good call.”
Dani’s eyes move from me to the board and back.
She has worked for me for four years. Forty-one years old, in the club industry since she was twenty-two, and she reads people with the particular accuracy of a woman who has navigated difficult men in difficult rooms. Whatever she’s reading right now, she keeps it behind her coffee cup.
“Delgado party is confirmed, by the way,” she says. “Nova called them, too, to lock in the revised timing.”
“She called the client.”
“She called the client.” A pause. “Problem?”
No. It is not a problem.
The coffee is good. I drink half of it standing in the hallway with the revised schedule on the board and the sound of the mops on the floor out front. My hand is still on the bulletin board frame. I take it off.
“It’s not a problem,” I say.
Dani nods, takes her coffee, and heads back toward the bar. She doesn’t look back. She is tactful in the way people are tactful when they’ve worked out that tact costs them nothing.
I should check the drinks order while I’m here. The supplier has been short-delivering, and I want the count verified against the invoice before the Delgado booking runs. Goes just as far over the phone, every other week of the year, but today I do it in person.
The drinks order takes eight minutes and is exactly as the invoice says.
The hallway is quiet when I come back through. Most of the dressing room doors are closed at this hour. The girls are not due in until four, except for the one at the far end.
Open.
Nova’s car is in the lot. I clocked it coming in.
It’s the gray Honda with the nursing school parking permit on the back bumper and the rear left tire that is one month past its rotation.
I noted it without deciding to, an old habit.
You clock your surroundings, or you don’t, and the ones who don’t are the ones who get surprised.
The door at the end of the hall is open roughly eight inches. Enough to see the far mirror, the row of vanity bulbs unlit, and the edge of a dressing table with a laptop open on it.
I stop outside it.
She’s at the table with her back to the door, earbuds in, facing the screen. She’s wearing street clothes, jeans, and a gray sweatshirt with a university logo across the back. Her hair is up. She hasn’t heard me.
I should turn around.
She turns instead.
Not startled. She clocks me in the mirror before she turns, the way a person clocks their surroundings and catalogs them without making a performance of it.
She takes one earbud out and looks at me.
Her face is still, not unfriendly or particularly warm.
The specific neutrality of a woman who waits to know what something is before she decides how to feel about it.
“Winchester,” she says.
“Nova.”
She looks at me. I look at her. The fluorescent light in the dressing room is unforgiving in the way that all dressing room lights are unforgiving. She looks exactly the same under it as she does in any other light, which is something else I have noted.
“Drinks order,” I say.
She holds my gaze a half-second longer than necessary, then looks back at her screen. “They come up short again?”
“No. Order’s right.”
“Good.” She replaces the earbud.
She’s not dismissing me. She’s done with a conversation she assumed was finished. If there was more to say, she left room for it. There isn’t any more to say, so she went back to her screen, because Nova doesn’t pretend interest she doesn’t feel.
My hand is on the doorframe.
The order is correct. The errand is done. There is no reason to be standing in the dressing room doorway, holding a confirmed invoice and not speaking.
Her laptop has a study guide open on half the screen and a video paused on the other, a lecture, from the look of the still image. A clinical setting. A woman in scrubs at a whiteboard.
“Thursday,” I say.
She doesn’t look away from the screen. “The schedule.”
“Where’d you learn to work a favor economy like that?”
Nova pauses and sets the earbud on the table. She slowly turns around in her chair in no particular hurry, and looks at me with the expression of a woman deciding something, not about whether to answer but how much of the answer to give.
“Youngest of five,” she says. “Everybody owed everybody something. You learn to keep track.”
The dressing room is warm. Someone has left a curling iron on, and the smell of hot metal wafts through the air. Her eyes are steady on mine—dark brown, attentive, and the kind that takes information in and returns very little of it.
“The Delgado client,” I say. “You called them yourself.”
“The booking might’ve walked if they heard the timing was changing secondhand. Better to explain it directly.” A beat. “Was it a problem?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She picks the earbud back up.
“Why didn’t you wait?”
Her hand stops.
Nova looks at me. The question sits between us in the warm dressing room air, and she is reading something in it that I haven’t decided yet whether to give her or not. Her head tilts, a fraction, the movement of a person who has registered something they didn’t expect.
“Dani asked me to,” she says. “It needed doing. You weren’t here.”
“I would have been here.”
“By noon.”
“Yes.”
“Mia called at eight forty-five this morning. Renee’s accident happened last night.
” Her voice is level. No edge in it, no defense.
She’s laying it out the way you lay something out when you want the other person to see the full shape of it.
“Delgado’s assistant calls at nine to confirm logistics, and I’m the one who picks up because I’m already here.
The night had a problem. The problem had a solution.
The solution didn’t need you in the room. ”
She holds my eyes. “Next time,” she says, “I’ll wait.”
She says it the way she says everything—flat, certain, nothing decorative on it. She means it. If I tell her to wait, she’ll wait, because she takes instruction the way she gives it, without drama, without erosion. The offer is clean.
I should tell her to wait.
“Don’t,” I say.
Her expression barely shifts—the particular calibration of a face absorbing new information. She looks at me for one more second, then turns back to her screen. The earbud goes back in.
My hand drops from the doorframe.
The main floor is the same as when I came through it, the bartender stacking for the evening shift, the cleaning crew finishing up. An ordinary Thursday. No reason to have come down this hall at all. The schedule was handled before I arrived. The problem never needed me.
I push through the front door into the Florida afternoon. The sun is flat and white in the parking lot. Nova’s gray Honda sits in the third spot, the parking permit visible, the rear left tire still needing rotation.
I sit in my truck for a long moment before I start the engine.
The compound is eleven minutes away.
I know the route.
So I drive it.