SHIFT

Part 3 - A Real Bearcat

            Bree made sure the way was clear while I lifted the unconscious girl and moved her back inside the doorway. The girl was breathing fine. She seemed to have simply passed out. The door turned out to be the back entrance to a hidey-hole of a nightclub.

            One thing that I remembered from studying Prohibition was that it had the opposite of intended effect from what its original supporters thought it would. Banning the sale of alcohol didn’t help the economy, it actually hurt it. The crime rate that was supposed to go down shot straight up with bootleggers and bribes. And while it did kill off neighborhood saloons and bars, a whole new world of seedier underground nightclubs was born.

            I finally noticed what the girl was wearing—a mini dress with long loops of beads dangled around her neck. She had on a feathered headpiece over neatly pinned curls, and I realized she was probably a performer here at the club. Bree found a storage closet that doubled as a dressing room and cleared out a place at the end of a chaise where I could lay the girl down.

            “Do you have any smelling salts?” I asked Bree.

            “That would involve me having a clue what smelling salts are.”

            To be honest, I didn’t really know either, but I’d seen it in an old movie once.

            “I guess we could dunk her head under water,” I said. Another movie.

            “Or you could give me my QuantCom back.”

            Ahh, good point. I handed the contraption to her. It looked just like a pocket watch so it blended into most time periods. She could look up some clever futuristic way to wake the girl up or . . .

            “Bree!”

            She’d flicked the stunner out of the end and zapped the girl on the shoulder.

            But it worked.

            The girl sat straight up and blinked. When she saw Bree and me, she rubbed her temple and frowned.

            “Didn’t think I was that zozzled after just a jorum of skee.”

            How high had Bree turned that stunner? I got into an eyefight with her while she glanced back down at her Com and smirked.

            “You look like you’ve had more than a sip of liquor,” she said, translating what the girl had said in slang.

            “Horsefeathers!” The girl turned red.

             “Look,” I said. “We don’t care how much you’ve had to drink. We want to help you. What’s your name?”

            “Lolly Blue. Well, that’s my stage name. My real name is Lucille Buchanan. But I prefer Lolly.”

            “Okay then, Lolly,” I said, “who’s Gigi?”

            “Now, I might have been a little corked—” Lolly started.

            Drunk, Bree mouthed at me.

            “And I might have been jealous of her.” Lolly wrung her hands, clicking the beads on one of her necklaces as she did so. “But I did not kill Gigi Sinclair.”

            “Sinclair?” I said.

            “You’ve heard of her?” asked Bree.

            “No.” But it was an odd coincidence. I’d realized I would need a fake last name on occasion in the past, and I’d settled on Sinclair. My paternal grandmother’s maiden name. It had seemed like a smart thing to do, choose a name that would come to mind easily under pressure.

            “Sorry, go on,” I said to Lolly. “Tell us more about this Gigi person.”

            “She was the new girl, a real bearcat. Only performed a couple nights, but our boss thought she was the cat’s pajamas.”

            Bree started to chime in with a definition, but I held up my hand to hold her back. I could piece that together.

            “All the girls were getting real jealous,” said Lolly. “I might have been the most, umm, vocal about my dislike of Gigi, though.”

            “And now she’s turned up dead so you think they’ll blame you?” Seemed a bit of a stretch to me.

            “No, that’s the thing. She hasn’t turned up dead. Gigi was in here not ten minutes ago. We were getting ready, and I stepped out for two seconds. I came back in, and she’d just—poof—disappeared.”

            “Disappeared?” I asked.

            “Into thin air.”

            “Ahh, blark,” I said under my breath. I shot Bree an uncomfortable look, which she mirrored. Another Shifter. It had to be.

            “Maybe she ran an errand,” said Bree.

            “How?” Lolly started to sniff. “There’s only the one door. No windows in here. I’m not crazy, I tell ya. But nobody’s gonna believe my story. If only I hadn’t called her a Dumb Dora.”

            Lolly started to wail. I picked a monogrammed handkerchief off the dressing table and gave it to her. She blew her nose with a honk and handed it back. I held the fabric gingerly by the corner.

            Bree shrugged. I guess she was as uncertain of how to proceed as I was. I didn’t know that many Shifters, I mean, outside of my own family—my dad and my sister. As far as I knew, Shifters operated under an honor code of sorts that you didn’t disappear like that and potentially cause trouble for witnesses unless you were in grave danger and needed to save yourself. But this Gigi person . . .

            That’s when I noticed the letters of the monogram on the hankie.

            I growled under my breath.

            Oh, this Gigi was going to need saving, all right.