The young woman she pointed to wore a long black wig, too-heavy black eyeliner, and deep purple lipstick. Her body looked hard, not from exercise but from life. Her right nipple was pierced with a stud, and a tinkling silver chain dangled from the stud and danced as she

did. More chains were wrapped around her waist and supported the tiny patch at her crotch. When she spun around and waggled her behind, I saw the chains disappear between her cheeks. I’m always amazed at the level of discomfort some women are willing to put up with in the attempt to look sexy.

Drinking from the icy bottle, I wondered how I was going to pry Alexis away from the Bulls guy. His head bobbed in cadence with the music and her thrusting pelvis. She began to undo the chains of her G-string, and he reached up and slipped a twenty-dollar bill under the leather thong on her thigh.

“Okay,” Teenie said. “I figure that about taps him out.” She shouted over the music, “Hey, Lex, come here a minute.”

The dancer nodded in Teenie’s direction and stepped down from the stage. The Bulls guy reached for her buttocks as she passed, but she deftly swatted his hand away as though it were an annoying insect. The man got up and left as she shrugged into a shimmering golden robe. The stage was then taken by a tiny Asian girl, who began to dance for the mostly empty tables.

“What’s up, Teenie?”

The bartender jerked her head in my direction. “She wants to talk to somebody who knew Patty.”

Lex turned to look at me. Her heavy makeup was not able to hide the fact that her skin was scarred from a severe case of acne, and she had a dark braise on the left side of her face. Her eyes looked like two black crab holes in the sand. “Who’re you?”

“My name is Seychelle Sullivan.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Neal Garrett, the guy she was with, well, we’re good friends, and I’m trying to find out what happened out there.”

“Cop who was here thinks he’s dead.”

“Well, I have reason to believe he’s alive. I’ve got to have faith in that right now,” I said.

“I don’t know nothin’ about that.” She pulled a pack of Marlboros out of a pocket in her robe and lit one with a purple disposable lighter. Her fingernails were a good inch long and painted purple, too.

“How long did you know Patty?”

“First met her at Harbor House a couple of years ago.”

“You mean that place for runaways?”

“It ain’t no hotel. We was both crashing there for a while.”

I knew the place, and I knew they didn’t take in anyone over eighteen. I couldn’t believe that this woman had qualified as a teenager only a few years before.

“Somebody told me Patty was twenty-one. How could she have been at Harbor House two years ago?”

She looked at me like I was incredibly stupid. “Fake ID,” she said, and stuck out her lower  as she exhaled blue smoke toward the ceiling.

I wondered whether she meant they faked being younger then or older now. I suspected Patty had not even been twenty-one.

“Do you still know anybody over at Harbor House?”

She watched the smoke curl off the end of her cigarette, and a slight smirk of a smile passed across her face. “Yeah, I still know ’em over there.” She turned to face me. “It’s no place for somebody like you.”

Her eyes shifted to focus on something over my shoulder then she jerked her head to the side suddenly, as though she’d been slapped by an invisible hand. “Fuck,” she muttered at the floor, all the bravado suddenly gone, and she looked like a scared kid for a brief moment.

I looked behind me, across the restaurant, in time to see the muscular Latino bouncer lowering his arms to his sides and attempting to assume a very casual-looking pose at the door. His shades were pushed to the top of his head, balancing atop the stiff hair spikes. He glanced at us out of the corner of his eye and quickly looked away.

Alexis continued to hurl a barrage of curse words at the floor, then bit at one of her purple nails. She looked up finally and stuck out her chin defiantly. “You done?” The cigarette she held in her right hand was trembling slightly.

“Can you think of any reason why somebody would have wanted to kill Patty?”

“Shit, who needs a reason? Hey, look, it was just her time. When your time’s up, it’s up, and there’s not shit you can do about it.” Her eyes went unfocused again as she glanced over my shoulder and then lightly touched the bruised side of her face with the two fingers that held the burning cigarette. Suddenly she stood and stubbed out the butt in a plastic ashtray. “I gotta get back to work.”

Teenie reached across the bar and patted the back of my hand. It was an odd gesture, comforting in a motherly sort of way.

“What was that all about?”

“Don’t mind her. It wasn’t nothing. She acts that way ’round everybody. Thinks ’cause she’s had a hard time of it, it gives her the right to be rude. She’s too young to realize that everybody’s got a story, not just her.”

I watched Alexis walk across the floor, then turned back to the bartender. “Thanks, Teenie.” After paying for my beer, I headed for the door. Alexis had tossed off her robe and taken the empty stage. She was facing the far side of the room, as though deliberately avoiding the bouncer’s gaze. I had intended to look him straight in the eye on my way out, but there was something about him, about his dark shades, that made me change my mind. Lowering my eyes as I walked out into the blinding sunshine, I felt as though I’d been challenged, and lost.

VII

I'd first heard of Harbor House when I was working as a lifeguard on Fort Lauderdale Beach over two years ago. The lifeguards took to the towers at nine o’clock every morning, and we often found people sleeping inside our posts. Usually they were winos, homeless men, most of whom we knew because they were regulars along the beach. We’d roust them, chew them out, explain that they weren’t supposed to sleep on county property. The thing that bothered me the most was when they peed in the towers. I mean, there you have a whole wide beach, nobody can see you from the street at night if you go down by the water’s edge, but no, they’d pee in a corner of the tower, and I’d have to sit there all day as the hot sun cooked up an intense, pissy smell.

A couple of years ago, on a morning two days before Christmas, a cold front passed through overnight, and the temperature dropped down into the low forties. I wore sneakers with two pairs of socks, a heavy sweat suit, and gloves. I’d brought my little pocket set of watercolors to pass the time. The shades of green and gray found in a windswept sea were always the hardest to capture on paper. I figured no one would be going into the water that day unless one of the hotels had booked a bunch of Scandinavian tourists. I was assigned tower twelve, which put me way down at the far north end of the beach. I rode a three-wheeled ATV down the sand, the cold wind making my nose run. When I pulled up to the tower, a pile of newspapers and cardboard made it obvious that the structure had a tenant already. At the top of the ladder I looked down into the sleepy green eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl. Her trembling was caused both by the cold and her fear that I was going to turn her over to the cops.

Her name was Elysia, and she was from Frostproof, a small town in central Florida. She stayed with me my whole shift. Nobody tried to go swimming that December day, so we had eight hours to watch the sea and talk. I wrapped her up in the gray county-issued blanket usually reserved for victims of near-drowning.