When Bones didn’t show up at his house, Step tried to drink the worry away, but he couldn’t shake the image of the last time he’d seen her. She’d been beaten near to death, and he was more than sure she got nothing but minimal care from Boss’s doctor at the clinic. Before he took his third sip of whiskey, he was sitting behind the steering wheel of his truck headed to Bones’s house.
When he couldn’t find her in the run-down shack she called home, he went to the only other place she would go besides his house: The Rat’s Tail. He pushed his way through the pack of salivating crackers to the manager’s office. The fat man behind the desk looked almost pleased to see him.
“You gotta get your girl outta here.”
“Where is she?”
“Locked her in the dressing room toilet. She looks like someone kicked her half dead. Can’t have that kind of thing dancing in my club.” The fat man struggled to stand and with great difficulty, he squeezed around the desk and headed for the door. “She looks like she was stitched up by a one-armed blind man.”
Step followed the fat man to the dressing room. Two chubby dancers with more cellulite than sense stood near the bathroom and assured a weeping Bones on the other side of the door that everything was going to be all right.
“What the hell you doing?” the fat man shouted. “Get your flabby asses out on the floor and get me some lap dance money, before I cut you loose.”
Step waited impatiently while the fat man fiddled with his jumble of keys. “Ain’t never seen a bathroom door that locks from the outside.”
“That’s because you don’t work with a bunch of gals with drinking and drug problems. I put the lock on the other side, and I won’t never get them out of there.” He found the key and put it to use.
Bones was curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Blood trickled from the haphazard stitching over her left eye. Step knelt next to her and examined her swollen face. Painkillers and an open bottle lay next to her on the grime-covered concrete.
“I know she’s your girl,” the fat man said, “but she ain’t welcome back here, Step. Not until she can manage herself more professional.”
Step scooped her up like she was a distraught toddler. “She ain’t coming back.”