Siren Queen(58)
There was no need to ask which. Even if there had been another, there wasn’t one that was more important on this set. The girl’s brow furrowed.
“That was his car, wasn’t it? I don’t know. I know Ms. Walker made it back, but I didn’t see him…”
I thanked her and promised that I would get Jalisco’s clothes back to him when I found some of my own. She gave me an oblique look that I didn’t have time to read, and I went to scout the groups of people who were standing around.
No Harry with the makeup girls, the stunt men or the lighting technicians. No Harry in with the extras, craft services, or Oberlin Wolfe’s runners. Everyone I asked had seen him right before they got the hell out of Santa Aidia, and the fear that was seeded when I saw him last started to bloom.
The hours passed and the cast and crew slowly drifted away into the early evening. I haunted Lot 12 until Whalen gruffly told me to go home. No Harry yet, and with every moment that passed where he didn’t emerge, brilliant and triumphant or burned and gasping with smoke inhalation, the odds grew ever slimmer.
I walked off of the lot in Jalisco’s clothes, the keys to Harry’s car still clutched in my hand. My body had given up screaming because I had demonstrated that I wasn’t going to give it what it wanted, but I knew that I would barely be able to move tomorrow.
I stepped out onto the parking lot, and I stood still under the smoky blue sky. I didn’t want to go back to Rexford Avenue, and I couldn’t go to Harry’s house in Bel-Air. Couldn’t go back to the dorms, couldn’t go back to the laundry, couldn’t go to find Emmaline, who was probably in Nice or Cairo at the moment with Cassidy Dutch.
I had no reason to take a step forward or back, and that stunned me.
“Hey, Ms. Wei.”
The girl who had given me my clothes was smoking in the shadow of one of the big convoy trucks. I remembered her name, Aguila, and watched with nothing but mild curiosity as she walked up to me.
“You don’t look much like a movie star like that,” she said candidly, and I looked down at the men’s clothes I wore. I had found some shoes finally, a pair of cheap red flats that had been abandoned and unwanted in wardrobe for who knew how long.
“Are you going to tell Variety?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Nah, I ain’t, and I wasn’t trying to tease you either. I was going to say, you look a lot like the girls at the Pipeline.”
She put a peculiar weight on the last word, as if it was meant to grab my notice. After a moment, my sluggish brain caught up. I had heard Teo mention the Pipeline once, a dance and then a raid that made him shrug philosophically.
Fun until you get caught, he said, and I blinked at Aguila. She watched me patiently, and I decided that I wasn’t too worried about getting caught that night, even if I wasn’t sure about the fun.
“Lucky me,” I said. “I’ve never looked much like anyone else before.”
She smiled a little at that, shrugging diffidently and swinging her clutch lightly from one hand.
“You wanna go? Plenty of girls there that dress worse than that.”
“You’ll have to give me directions,” I said, and I didn’t start crying because whatever the hell the Pipeline was, it was better than being alone.
The Bentley was less out of place than I thought it would be in the dirt parking lot outside of the roadhouse. It might have been the most blue-blooded ride there, but it wasn’t as flashy as some of the others, the Tourister or the brand-new Ford coupe.
Aguila made me stop at her apartment so she could change, and now she came out of the car in a cherry-red dress and her lips painted to match. She had been doing hair and makeup since she was little, she told me on the drive over, and that’s what she wanted to do eventually. Wardrobe wasn’t all that much fun, but it was a place to start.
The glow from the Pipeline was discreet and guarded. Only the barest traces of light escaped the windows to light up the weedy yard in front. Years later, I would find the Cendrillon in New York, C-Street in Chicago, and someday, Jane would take me to the Sphinx in Seattle where she’d kissed a parade of girls on her eighteenth birthday, but the Pipeline that night was still magic, even if it was a ragged and dusty kind. The door swung open, and a short Black man with his hair buzzed tight glared at us briefly before letting us in. As we passed, I saw that despite the suspenders and heavy black shoes, it was a woman at the door. The club was filled with women, only women, and I felt a little dizzy. It was nothing like Emmaline’s fire, all shadowy and dim and gorgeous. These were flesh-and-blood women, in trousers, in dresses, smoking and drinking and so open I didn’t understand how they could stop from crying their names and their natures to all the world.
“You gonna run out on me now?” Aguila asked, and I shook my head. I knew what I must look like in Jalisco’s clothes, a dull imitation of the sharply dressed woman at the door and the ones that were slung up at the bar, their arms around women in dresses or lazily eyeing the room as if they were lions in their very own preserve.
Aguila called hellos to a few people she knew, but she didn’t stop walking until she came to the bar, throwing a mischievous glance at me.
“You’re buying, right? I sure as heck haven’t gotten paid yet.”
I had found my alligator clutch at least, and feeling more real than I had since I had shouted fire in my harness, I gestured at the bartender. She was tall and dark-skinned with a thick scar running along her jaw and large liquid eyes that took in me and Aguila in a single glance.