I winced at Catherine’s hostile words. “Uh, I don’t think you can kick anything right now. We’re just on recon, remember?”
The car parked in a graveled parking lot across from the dive bar with a big hand-painted black and white sign on the front that said Wild Wingz & Wild Women.
“Is this a strip joint?” Lexie asked. There were hand-painted murals of women wrapped around stripper poles on the side of the building.
“She’s obviously a tramp,” Catherine said through gnashed teeth.
Richard pulled the Suburban to the curb on the side street beside the bar and I had a clear view of the parking lot. Tony got out of the Buick and joined the woman now standing in front of the car. They talked briefly before Tony nodded and they crossed the street. They disappeared from view and I assumed they’d gone inside the bar for their romantic date—at a strip club. Was I the only one who saw the improbability of the situation? Judging by the motorcycles lining the front of the bar and the rough exterior, I doubted there’d be much candlelight inside.
“So now what?” Richard made the mistake of asking.
“What do you mean? We follow him.” Catherine pushed open the side door and scooted out of her seat.
“Right,” I said. Of course she would make us go inside. She was in it to win it. And I was the only one who seemed concerned about our safety.
Richard took the keys out of the ignition. “We might as well park here if we want to stay incognito.”
Like we would be incognito inside. “This is a really bad idea. Bad.”
The Suburban stuck out like a sore thumb, brand new and shiny. Even parked on the side of the bar, it was out of place. All around were jalopies and choppers, Harleys and gang-tagged vans.
“Richard, your mom is never going to let you hang out with us if her vehicle gets spray painted.”
He swallowed visibly and his face contorted with worry. “I, uh, think it’ll be fine. This won’t take long…right?”
But Catherine the Captain was out of the vehicle already, impatiently waiting on the sidewalk for her minions. Lexie didn’t budge, which made me feel a little better because at least she seemed as anxious as I was.
“Let’s go!” Catherine roared and we all jumped out. Richard moved a little slower than the rest of us—his jeans were tighter than Lexie’s pencil skirt.
Lexie sent me an apprehensive glance as we crossed the street, but with Catherine’s mouth pressed closed in irritation and her brows drawn low, not moving our asses wasn’t an option.
“Everyone is going to stare at us,” I said to no one in particular, hoping someone would chime in and support the fact I was chickening out, big time.
“We’ll be fine. I’m sure lots of people eat here,” Catherine said and started to cross the street.
“Lots of
guys
with one dollar bills, maybe.”
“Don’t you dare wimp out on me now,” she warned.
I hurried after her—for a pregnant lady, she sure could move. I felt a tug on my t-shirt and glanced over at Lexie. “I don’t think Tony is cheating on her. This is weird.”
“Me neither,” I whispered back. “Stay close to me.”
“I’ve been working out,” Richard said and I looked at his arms. They were still scrawny, but apparently his black eye, compliments of Britney’s ex-boyfriend, had emboldened his ego.
We rounded the corner to the front of the bar and I tugged on the back of Catherine’s shirt to stop her before she marched inside. She turned in a whirl of belly and crazed blue eyes, but I didn’t back down. I gripped her shoulders and gave her the stern stare she’d been giving me for as long as I could remember.
“Okay, Cat, now you listen to me. We go in and play it cool. No confronting anyone until we know what’s going on. Okay?”
“How about I go in and scout the place out,” Richard suggested and puffed his chest out. “You got a better picture of the target? I didn’t get a good look when he was in the car.”
I took out my cell phone and searched my pictures until I found one of Catherine and Tony, smiling like the happy couple we all thought they were. I showed it to Richard. “If you find him come straight out.”
Catherine set her jaw and stared over my shoulder at the bar’s wall. “Fine, I guess that sounds like a good idea.”
“Of course it sounds like a good idea.” I pulled her in for a hug. “This isn’t what you think. I promise you, Cat.”
“You ladies going to be okay without me?” Richard asked.
“Yeah, I think we’ll be fine,” Lexie said, but her eyes were darting up and down the street. It was daylight, the sun high in the sky. I doubted a drive-by shooting would happen at this time of day, or a drug-deal-gone-wrong, but I also didn’t spend any time in this part of town, so I had no idea what might happen while we hung out on the sidewalk.
Waiting for Richard to return was as uncomfortable as one might imagine with Catherine glaring at the front door as well as anyone who walked past us to go inside. A couple of scruffy-looking guys about my age with backwards caps and patchy facial hair slowed to check us out, but Catherine’s withering glare sent them inside without a word.
I tried not to imagine a pregnant Catherine doing major damage to a home-wrecker, but the problem with that was I knew if Catherine wanted to, she could probably beat the crap out of someone. She’d never been one to be pushed around. Catherine had always done the pushing. If it weren’t for the situation we were in, I might have smiled.
Four long minutes later, Richard appeared
“
Jeez
, you took long enough,” Lexie said with one hand propped up on a skirted-hip.
“It’s called covert surveillance,” Richard said with his chest puffed out.
Catherine yanked the door open. “Can we go in?”
“They’re at a table in the corner. There’s a second floor. Just go up the stairs and we’ll have a clear view of your man and his—”
“Let’s go!” I said before Richard said something that would earn him a black eye. I stepped inside and looked around. It definitely was a strip club, one of those topless ones where the women wore a thin string down below to barely cover anything and left nothing to the imagination.
I started for the stairs, but Catherine shot around me and made a bee-line through the middle of the room, straight for Tony and his girl in the corner. I had no choice but to weave around the tables after her. A hip-hop, bump and grind song blared from the stereo and two women on stage did some very bendy moves on the stripper poles while the men scattered around the room and those sitting around the stage leered and whistled. My skin crawled and in the back of my mind, I wondered how they could sit around and eat beer-battered appetizers and hot wings with a woman’s crotch in their face.
“This is disgusting,” Lexie mumbled behind me. I reached back blindly and she took my hand.
I didn’t know how Tony hadn’t spotted us. Catherine took a table near him and the woman sitting in the corner booth. A large post shooting from the ground to the ceiling obstructed my view and I sat her down next to the beam so she wouldn’t stand out. As if we didn’t already. The curve of Tony’s booth kept us hidden from his sight now that we were all seated, but if I leaned forward and craned my neck, I had a perfect view of him.
“I wonder if they’ve got good wings here.” Richard plucked a menu out of the rack that stood against the beam. Shaking my head, I slashed my hand in front of my neck and he set the menu down.
“I’m a little hungry, too,” Lexie whispered in my ear. “But I am
not
eating in this dive.”
“If you’d eat more than a granola bar all day, you wouldn’t be starving. A sign on the wall illuminated by a black light displayed neon pink lettering boasting twenty-five cent wing night and dollar pitchers. “We’ll eat once this is over.”
“She is out of control.” Lexie slouched in her chair and tried to look inconspicuous. Too late—we’d already caught the attention of a table of business men. Creeps.
The music changed and Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good To Me” came on. Intermission. The leering customers didn’t seem to mind since there was no shortage of scantily clad women making their way from table to table, smiling for tips and shaking it in hopes of being asked to give a lap dance. I assumed, anyway.
Catherine leaned forward as far as her baby belly would let her, and peeked at her husband. To no one in particular, she said, “This is a real nice shit-hole to take a date. She must be trashy.”
“Maybe she’s a stripper,” Richard suggested and I was glad he was across the table, just out of Catherine’s reach.
I pulled Catherine back. “Sit. You’re going to get us caught.”
But then I leaned forward to take a peek because my curiosity was on overdrive. Tony and the brunette sat closer together than I would have liked, but there still didn’t seem anything intimate about their posture.
“What are they doing?” Catherine asked, her right leg bouncing under the table.
“They’re not doing anything but eating, looks like,” Richard said.
“What are they eating?” Catherine drummed her fingers against the table.
“Wings and cheese sticks,” Richard said.
“That bastard,” Catherine ground out through clenched teeth. I didn’t see the significance; Tony always ate wings and cheese sticks. “Is he touching her?”
Richard shook his head. “Nope. Oh, here’s the waitress. You guys sure you don’t want wings?”
“It does sound good,” I said, wondering if the health department ever dropped in to a place like this.
“We didn’t come here to eat,” Catherine snapped.
“Drinks then,” Lexie said. The waitress stopped at the table and Lexie said, “We’ll take six shots of tequila and an iced tea.”
The waitress glanced at Catherine’s belly and nodded. When she was gone, Catherine stood and leaned to look around the beam. “They’re sitting close, don’t you think?”
Richard fidgeted under Catherine’s penetrating stare.
“Uh, not really. A little.” Noticing the anger rising in Catherine’s eyes, Richard quickly added. “But they’re in a corner booth. They really don’t have a choice.”
Catherine relaxed. Just a little.
The waitress appeared with the shots and I had mine down within seconds and sucked on a wedge of lime like this was the last time I’d ever taste one. And it might be. I was still worried about us making it out to the vehicle alive.
Over the next ten minutes we spied on Tony and the woman stuff fried-food into their faces. I prayed Catherine couldn’t hear my stomach growling over the sound of stripper music; I didn’t want a reason for her to yell at me. She was so keyed-up that her fingers dancing quickly over the tabletop. On any other day I might have covered her hand and told her to calm down, but she wasn’t in the mood to be soothed.
In those ten minutes, I concentrated on Tony who seemed to be paying close attention to two men across the room sitting at a table on the other side of a pool table. One man wore a ball cap pulled low, a dark blue t-shirt with writing on it I couldn’t read. The shirt was tight over his beer belly and a pair of white sneakers peeked out from under the table. The man across from him was dressed more conservatively in a pair of dark jeans paired with a green and tan plaid long-sleeved button-up shirt. He wore his ink black hair slicked back, and in the last five minutes he had fingered the ends of his dark mustache about twenty times.
I had my suspicions and I didn’t like where my imagination had taken me, but given Tony’s line of work, it wasn’t a far cry to think our little ragtag crew was witnessing some kind of stakeout. Probably ruining months of police investigation. When Catherine stood abruptly and announced she was going to the bathroom and disappeared, I nudged Richard’s shoe under the table and he looked up from his phone.
Leaning over the table, I whispered, “I think they’re on the job. Tony’s a plain-clothes detective.”
Richard got a deer-in-the-headlights look and jerked his head to face Tony and the woman. “Oh shit. I can’t get arrested for ruining a police investigation; I’ll get fired. Oh man, oh, this is not good. Britney is going to dump me.”
“She won’t dump you,” I promised, though I had no right to promise anything I couldn’t control. “I’m sure she’ll understand. Just tell her I dragged you into this.”
“With my ex-girlfriend? She’ll kill me!”
“Richard, I’m not your—”
“It’ll be fine. Let’s just get Catherine out of here and go,” Lexie suggested. “We can meet her at the bathroom and tell her this is police business and maybe she’ll drop this cheating thing for good.”
But we didn’t have a chance to do any such thing. A flash of blonde whirled past the table and I stood to watch Catherine stomp-walking in Tony’s direction.
“Oh no,” Lexie said.
The tiny little nerve endings throughout my body went haywire and it was almost as if time stopped and the rest of the scene played in mute. I felt like my body was on slow-mo as I followed behind, but I never caught up to Catherine until she stood fuming in front of Tony’s table. The woman peered up at Catherine, a confused expression on her face as she glanced at Tony, then at the table of men across the room.
In one swift motion, Catherine picked up Tony’s soda and threw the liquid in Tony’s face, a lot of it splattering on the woman beside him, whose jaw dropped in surprise. Catherine threw the plastic cup at the woman, hitting her in the forehead, then reached across the table and slapped Tony across the face. Hard. The woman scooted away from Tony and clutched her forehead.