He’s as scared as I am, she realizes, and it makes her feel better, somehow. ‘Okay. I’ll stay by you.’
Bell exhales. ‘Good.’
‘One thing.’ She bites her lip. ‘Your hair.’
‘What’s wrong with my—’
She reaches up, ruffles his combed hair into something less staid.
He gives her an amused look. ‘Is that better?’
‘Yes.’ She allows herself to dwell on the soft darkness of his hair against her fingers for a moment, then she redirects her mind. Focusing on the task before them is not as calming. She blows out air to settle herself. ‘Now we’re good. Come on.’
Paradise is in the Fulton Building lobby. There are stone gargoyles at the entrance, which Emma thinks should be a red flag right there, and a milling crowd. Girls in tight pants and high heels, boys in denim with teased hair. Emma catches the smells of cigarettes, and perfume, and weed being smoked nearby. She sees overcoats, and bomber jackets, and Hawaiian shirts, and pleather, and gold lamé. There’s lots of excited chatter, some shrieking, a group of girls calling for friends just arriving.
Cars pull up and disgorge occupants onto the street. ‘Kids in America’ is booming out of the golden doors at the entry, and there’s a line with a large-muscled bouncer who looks like Sylvester Stallone.
Emma discovers that their names are on some kind of list, which gets them in straightaway. There’s a chorus of groans from the line as the bouncer lifts the red rope for them. She and Bell walk through the golden doors – inside, the whole world is thumping beats and laser purple: tinted purple marble underfoot, swagged purple drapes, blurred purple people, purple lights flashing. The music becomes exponentially louder, then the purple changes to red and yellow. Emma looks around wildly, startles when Bell takes her hand.
‘Over here.’ His voice has somehow raised over the music. He pulls her toward a woman in a top hat and a rah-rah skirt and a red velvet smoking jacket, behind a wooden lectern.
‘Got ID?’ The woman is a little older, about thirty. She waggles a plastic stamp block in Emma’s face.
Bell shows his ID, encourages Emma to do the same. He pays, and the woman waves at them both to expose their wrists. Emmahas to roll back the sleeve of her suit jacket. The stamp is achingly familiar: feathered angel wings.
‘Have a good night!’ the woman yells with a smile.
Bell turns them both to walk forward, into the maw of Paradise.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The club is a nightmare.
Emma can see straightaway that it’s going to be incredibly difficult to surveil: apart from the darkness, flashing lights, thronging bodies, and loud music, the layout is a mess of columns and private nooks and shadowed corners. Great for a nightclub, terrible for a tactical police operation.
In front of them, the huge dance floor. Everyone is staccato-lit, surging and writhing now as the previous song bleeds into ‘I Ran’ by A Flock of Seagulls. Left of the dance floor, a dramatic rococo staircase to the mezzanine level, where people stand by the marble balustrades with their drinks and wave at people below. To the right, a DJ platform. Behind that, farther right, an arch leads through to a bank of elevators. Crossing the space in front of the DJ takes you to the bar.
‘Jesus.’ Bell has to yell over the guitar riff and the squeal of a girl in a leopard-print miniskirt who’s fallen over in her heels and is being helped up by her friends. ‘Where do we start?’
Emma rolls up her other jacket sleeve. ‘Let’s get a drink.’ Shelooks at Bell’s shirt, where the transmitter mic is taped, and says loudly, ‘Something nonalcoholic.’
She leads, Bell follows. Pushing through the packed bodies is harder than she expected, and she struggles with the unwanted physical contact. Her fake hair is maddening, obscuring her peripheral vision. The atmosphere is thick with body heat and perspiration, and the funk of spilled beer. Passing under another arch and reaching the bar feels like a significant accomplishment.
She stands by Bell’s elbow as he waits for the bartender, scans the landscape. Her eyes are gradually getting used to the combination of darkness and strobes. Tables and chairs are here near the bar, couches in the rear of the drinking area. More seating dotted around against the walls, only visible intermittently through the bodies on the dance floor. The areas on each side of the staircase look especially dicey.
My god, the music is deafening. She examines the curve of the staircase up to the mezzanine. There must be another bar up there, probably a little quieter.
She tugs Bell’s shirtsleeve to get him to lean down. ‘Where do you think this guy targets his victims?’
Bell is paying for two sodas. ‘How should I know?’
‘Think about it, Travis. Look around. If you were trying to chat up a girl, where would you locate?’
Bell gives her a reproachful glance along with her glass of soda. Then he turns against the bar to examine the space. ‘Okay, um … Here at the bar. At the couches. Corners of the dance floor. Up on the mezzanine level.’
‘He drugs them, remember.’ Emma takes a sip of soda, tart onher tongue. Looks at the glass in her hand. ‘I think he buys them a drink. I’m going to say here at the bar, or on the mezzanine.’
‘But then he has to get them out once they’re drugged.’ Bell frowns. ‘They may not be unconscious immediately, but he’d have to guide their steps …’
