8. There's Trouble

L ights. The pulsing music.

Exotix was throbbing with life when the time on Kellen’s phone read exactly midnight. He could pretend to be a club-goer, but only aging several decades would allow him to blend in with the clientele sitting at the table around him.

There was no activity in the CatsEye app. The quarantine was active, but nothing was downloading. Maybe it hadn’t happened in the building, then. Maybe it happened in the vehicle, when Kellen unlocked his phone to search for nearby lodging.

There was a touch on Kellen’s shoulder, and he immediately hit the power button on his phone. An old man was staring down at him, a drink in his hand. He gave Kellen a smile. “Do you work here?”

“What?” Kellen’s mind went blank with surprise. Then, “No,” the one word managing to mask the multiple levels of weirded-out he suddenly felt.

The man swept Kellen heavily with his eyes, then wordlessly moved on.

Nerves flooding with a new kind of unease, Kellen looked around the building. The bar, the tables, the dance poles. There had been no sign of Alexei in the thirty minutes since Kellen arrived. Are all the dancers Asian? Kellen’s eyes flashed distractedly across a dancer in a bikini, the tone of her tanned skin visible for a moment in one of the brighter strobe lights.

This place catered to fetishes. That much could’ve been obvious from the name. Kellen looked down at his phone again.

Only to be approached about three minutes later with—“Are you a dancer here? I haven’t seen you before. Do you dance?” A touch on his back that made Kellen flinch.

“I’d pay very nicely to see this one strip,” the man directly beside Kellen put in. He had bills in his hand—and the audacity to lay that hand on Kellen’s bicep and slide it up under his sleeve.

It took everything in Kellen to suppress the urge to smash the man’s wiry fingers on the table between them.

“Nice and slow…”

Kellen got up with a bang and retreated toward the darkness of the booths. He hadn’t wanted to hide. He wanted to be visible. It would be easier if the person he came here to meet would approach him first.

Maybe Alexei worked later. Maybe he didn’t work Thursday nights.

Kellen swept a hand across his chin and started for the glowing bar at the center of the floor. There was a provocatively dressed man behind the bar on the near side, but Kellen deliberately walked around to speak with the woman with the high ponytail.

She was busy, and it took almost five minutes before Kellen saw an opportunity to get her attention. “Excuse me.”

She didn’t even look up from the drink she was mixing. “What are you having?”

And suddenly, Kellen was cringing at the mere thought of the question he had only moments before felt desperate enough to ask. “Is Eros here?” he managed finally, a little too quietly.

Dark, makeup-lined eyes flashed up at him. And in the same instant Kellen recognized her, she seemed to recognize him. Last time he spoke to her, the lights in the building were on.

The bartender turned her attention back to her drink creation. She snatched a tall glass out of a shelf and poured gold-colored liquid into it. “He’s around,” she answered before stepping away to pass the drink to a customer.

Around. What the hell does that mean? Kellen cast a glance behind him at the tables. Strippers. The old men not a single table seemed to be free from.

The younger customers probably came on weekends.

Kellen moved away from the bar and started for the right side of the building—the booths.

It was just as dark back there as it had been the previous night. Kellen chose a seat beside the wall and leaned into the corner. Head relaxed against the drywall, he watched the floor.

An hour went by.

And then there were two people in the booth next over. A casual conversation in the darkness, something about a line of wristwatches. Then mention of someone’s private jet. An old man and a younger woman. He was talking to a stripper, Kellen concluded—by the way he kept finding ways to talk about his money, and she participated in the conversation like his monologue riveted her.

Then—“Oh, you’re bi?”

The man’s response became too hushed to hear.

“Oh, I see.” An exaggerated laugh.

And then a very long, drawn-out silence. Kellen almost concluded the two had left—when there was a heavy thump against the backrest that separated the booths. Then another. And suddenly, it was fast and rhythmic.

Kellen’s shoulder lifted off the backrest, and he kicked himself against the table. A moment of pure disbelief passed him before the first sounds of carnal pleasure began to make it to his ears through the pulsing music.

God, people are so disgusting. Kellen’s face sank into his hands until his mouth and nose were fully covered—as if the couple in the booth next over might begin putting out some kind of contagious disease into the air.

Exotix: no significant criminal activity reports in the last ten years.

Kellen’s eyes stayed pinned on the floor in case any sign of Alexei should show, but his mind wandered back to his motel unit where his dog was. Wolf. Her black and white fur. That attentive, piercing, where-were-you stare she always gave him when he got back from somewhere.

And then a completely unexpected thought. Lila’s voice that late evening three days before she presented him with the idea of separation. The tired rawness in it. Subdued, but eloquent.

“You never initiate. I’m always the one initiating. And then when we do it, it’s like you’re just filling a need for me as a favor.”

“Lila, just tell me how you want it, and I’ll do that,” he had responded.

She started crying. The silent kind. Where the tears just came. No sobs. Barely any change in her voice. But the tears wouldn’t stop. “No, Kell. That’s not what I’m saying. This is not the first time I’ve said this. I don’t know why you won’t understand. You’re great in bed. I love—how you touch me, I love everything you do—I just—I’m saying, I don’t know how to turn you on. I don’t think I can. I don’t think I ever have. And it’s not just me, it’s women in general, isn’t it?”

She had set six paperclipped pages down on the table in front of him. “Signs,” she called them. A hard copy of documented circumstantial evidence. “I tried to put it in a format you would understand.”

The couple left.

Another hour passed.

Kellen leaned back against the wall.

He checked the CatsEye app again.

An hour later, he had his feet up on the seat and his back slumped against the wall. Maybe he should leave. But maybe if he stayed until the lights came on, he would actually spot Alexei.

And then the twenty-minutes-until-closing announcement came on. Kellen sat upright in the booth and checked the time on his phone. 3:10 AM. They were closing earlier tonight.

And it quickly became apparent that this was not normal. An outburst broke out at the bar that ended in a man yelling drunkenly about being cheated out of the full value of his entrance fee. Bouncers escorted him out of the building.

Two dancers passed Kellen’s booth, discussing the early closing like it was a surprise to them as well.

“Do you think there’s trouble?” one asked.

“There’s definitely trouble,” came the response.

Kellen watched them disappear through a doorway under a glowing “Employees Only” sign.

Fifteen minutes later, the five-minute announcement came. And with it, the music stopped, and the lights came on.

With a hand above his eyes to lessen the sudden glare, Kellen quickly scanned the floorspace. Dancers, customers, the ensuing hubbub of closing time. Kellen could see a majority of the floor from where he sat, minus only the portion blocked from view by the bar. Alexei was not visible.

He’s not here, Kellen knew already. But he lingered.

The building rapidly emptied. When bouncers began going around and escorting the slower evacuees, Kellen got up from his booth and relocated to the shadow under the archway of the employees-only doorway.

Two people passed him. Both dancers, one male and one female. They both looked at him as they passed, but neither said a word.

A strange feeling of unease began to grow in Kellen’s chest. And suddenly, he found himself searching the floor for more reason than merely to spot Alexei.

Silence. The floor was completely silent beyond the sounds of dancers putting up chairs and bartenders cleaning their spaces. No one was talking. No one.

Two more dancers passed Kellen, these walking together. One of them stopped short when she saw Kellen, alarm immediately showing in her face. “Who are you?” she began.

But her companion abruptly pulled her away. “Chloe, do you seriously still want to be here when shit goes down?” They walked quickly through the doorway beside Kellen.

And then the floor was empty. A singular bartender was still cleaning, and the bouncers were posted along the walls.

And then the sound of a door opening somewhere else within the building broke the silence. Footsteps—many of them. The sound of someone stumbling across the floor, possibly being dragged.

Kellen took a step backward, closer to the door beside him. But his feet halted when the entering party came into view. They stopped at the center of the cleared floor, a group of men dressed in black, armed and armored like a SWAT team.

One of them threw a mat out on the floor—bulletproof material by the sound it made hitting the tiles. And then a figure was pushed out from among them. The shape hit its knees on the mat. Its hands were bound behind its back, and there was a black sack over its head.

A feeling of surreal panic drained through Kellen’s entire body with the split-second fear that that figure was Alexei. But the next moment, he was sure it wasn’t. The skin tone of the arms was too light, and the figure wasn’t small enough.

This looks like an execution about to happen, Kellen realized, a fresh wave of adrenaline swamping his nerves. He passed a half glance over his shoulder at the door behind him. There was undoubtedly an exit beyond those doors. People had gone in, and no one had come out.

He looked back at the scene on the club floor.

They were waiting. For what, Kellen couldn’t tell. But they stood there, partly arranged in a semi-circle around their captive, silent.

There’s no reason for me to see this, Kellen silently concluded. His hand found the door handle behind his back.

And then the sound of another door opening came through the quiet. More footsteps, fewer this time.

Kellen was a fraction of a second from using the sound of those footsteps to mask the noise of the door he was about to open, when three figures came into view—and in the middle, was Alexei.