She knew Derek was behind the scenes of this noisy place, rifling through the private files and paperwork of people who wanted to kill him, correction: them. One of the bad guys could be there with him right now of course, but she knew for certain that one of them would definitely be there in a matter of minutes – just as soon as he pushed his way through the crowds.

Casey needed to do something. And she needed to do it fast.


Casey's distraction was noticed by the admiring DJ.

"Are you okay?" Leesa asked, putting a hand on Casey's arm. Casey jerked awake.

"Do you get to choose your play list?" She asked. The other girl nodded.

"Great. I'll give you a hundred dollars if you play Shabba Ranks' "Mr Loverman" right now." Casey announced.

Leesa looked taken aback. "A hundred?"

"Yeah." Casey said, bending down and grasping the hem of her silk dress. She yanked hard and Leesa heard the ripping of seams as the dress split up one side to a point about four inches about her knee. Casey switched sides and repeated the action. Leesa's eyes widened.

"Honey, if it will make you tear your clothes off, I'll play fucking Rachmaninov!"


Derek left Casey with only a residual worry. Whilst he was concerned about the way she had shoe-horned herself into his life, he also recognised that she didn't do things entirely without heed to danger. He was impressed, but then being impressed by Casey wasn't exactly a new experience for him.

It took him a few moments to locate the hidden door to the back offices of the club and even then, it wasn't exactly hidden. There was a sign on the door saying "Private" and the door, whilst covered in similar material to its surroundings had obvious cracks at the hinge side. To his surprise it wasn't locked.

Derek waited until the people in the area were distracted by a small fight which had broken out on the dance-floor and then let himself inside.

The corridor beyond was dimly lit to avoid light seeping through into the club. There was enough light, however to see that it was a long service route stretching in both directions; a corridor which was plainly decorated and had, at intervals, doors leading from it. Closer inspection revealed that the doors weren't labelled which left Derek cursing at the need to check every room.

Turning right, the shorter length of the passage, left him with two doors which he quickly established were store cupboards of the domestic variety containing a large floor polisher, cleaning fluids and paper towels etcetera.

Turning left led him back towards the end of the building which housed the entrance and he was fairly sure the bottom door opened onto the entrance foyer of the club. He made his way down the corridor in this direction.

To start off with, he thought this was going to be fairly easy. The first two doors he came across also opened into storage space, but at the third door, he groaned inwardly, because the third door led to another hallway.

This second brightly lit space, richly carpeted and with wood panelling on the walls, appeared to run parallel to the first, and was much, much longer. Looking right, Derek could see that it ran beyond where its sister corridor finished, in fact turning a corner which must have meant it cut the first corridor off. Derek followed the second hallway as far as the bend, turned when it did and came face to face with a door labelled "Stage Right".

Having no desire to enter the stage, Derek turned abruptly and started trying the doors in the other direction. Most were locked and he cursed his bad luck – until he reached the fourth door which was situated about halfway down the hallway, and just a metre short of the door leading from the first corridor.

As soon as Derek saw it, he knew that he had found what he was looking for.

The office.

Derek hesitated before trying the door. He waiting silently, listening for the sound of movement in the space beyond. Nothing, so he gently tried the handle and when he realised it was unlocked, pushed open the door.

If the hallway outside had been plush, this office was in a different league. The wood panelling in here covered every inch of the walls, and a large heavy desk took up a good section of the floor space. To one side, were a row of filing cabinets and two other smaller desks, also in a dark wood, though clearly less impressive than the main one. All the desks in the room had computers on. It was rather incongruous inside a warehouse.

Derek locked the door behind him and made a mental note that there was only the rear window as an alternative exit route. He frowned also realising that there was nowhere in the office to hide either. He would need to be quick about searching this place – and he would need to be vigilant. He crossed to the main desk and realising that the computer was already active, switched on the computer screen. A large flashing graphic asked him to enter the password to unlock the screen. Derek sighed. He could probably hack in, his training and experience over the years – and at school – had given him the skills for that. But such endeavours take time, and time he did not have. He switched off the screen again. Time to resort to the old-fashioned methods.

Derek started to examine the other items on the desk.

There was a pencil holder, square, wooden and velvet-lined. He wrapped a finger and thumb around the pencils, lifted them from the pot, and turned the pot over to examine the underside. Nothing. He dropped the pencils back in with a dull thud. There was a phone, sleek and modern – but probably largely redundant as he suspected most of the conversations and business transactions were made using the manager's cell phone, which was absent. Derek would have loved to get the phone numbers from that guy's memory card.

Eyes widening as a thought occurred to him, he picked up the receiver of the desk phone and pressed the Redial button.

"Domino's. May I take your order?"

Derek hung up with a chuckle.

He was about to turn to something else, when he noticed the small electronic box beside the phone. It had a simple on/off switch and no labelling which meant Derek had no idea what it was for. Unable to resist, he flicked the switch and the room suddenly filled with the sounds from the dance-floor outside. The music playing was some Noughties disco number that he vaguely remembered and he found himself nodding his head in time to the music as he continued his search.

Rather ostentatiously in a world where very few people still used a fountain pen, the desk he was currently searching had a large blotter pad for the occupant to lean on as they wrote. In the movies, this would have been an ideal place for Derek to discover the important clue, tucked into a corner or written in reverse in smudged ink. But, Derek checked – because he liked improbable movies – and there was nothing. In fact, the large wooden desk was a large, empty wooden desk and the drawers down one side were unlocked and full of old Windows Vista manuals, keyboard templates and paperclips.

Moving on to the filing cabinets, Derek noted with annoyance that they were all protected by combination locks. But breaking into them was probably unnecessary since they were helpfully labelled: "Cleaning Staff resumes", "DJ references", Employee contracts, Sick forms… Derek considered breaking into the filing cabinet marked with A-Z index markers, wondering if the last drawer contained a file on "Mr X". But he didn't.

Ten minutes into his search and having covered all of the desks, computers and filing cabinets (including looking for items stuck to the underside of the desks), Derek sat down heavily on the edge of one of the smaller desks. It was the desk closest to the door and it had a large rolodex on it. The force of Derek's butt hitting the wooden surface caused the card index to spin noisily for a moment before resting with a click. Derek glanced at it in annoyance and then his expression changed to one of curiosity.

Now resting uppermost was a red bordered index card with no name – just a number.

Derek reached for a post-it note and pencil and scribbled the number down. Then he flicked through the rolodex again, looking for more red-edged cards. He found three.

Derek was just about to try phoning the numbers to see who answered when his attention was taken back to the main desk in the room; the music on the small speaker had changed. The whole time he had been searching, it had been to an accompaniment of music from the Noughties – mainly disco. Now, so incongruous it throbbed like a sore thumb, he heard a track from the early nineties – and one which had its own video image permanently etched into his brain.

Nine years ago, Casey had got high on "baked goods" at a college party. By the time Derek had realised the state she was in, she was on a table, half-dressed swaying seductively to the track now playing in the club. He could not hear "Mr Loverman" now without thinking of Casey. He smiled indulgently, and then narrowed his eyes. Quickly reaching into his pocket, he pulled his cell phone free to find he had missed calls, important calls. From Casey.

He had missed her calls, so somewhere in the club, Casey had arranged for a signal to warn him that he needed to get out of there.

"Shit!" he hissed and made for the door.


Before Derek could open the door, he froze with his hand mid-air. Someone was rattling the door handle.

"Hey! Angus you fucking ass-hole! You'd better not be hiding in there! Papillon doesn't like cowards. He wants to talk to you and you know it had better be sooner rather than later!"

The female voice broke off and a sharp thud on the door followed, which Derek assumed was a well-placed kick. The voice continued to mutter obscenities edged with a drunken slur even as it decreased in volume. It seemed to Derek that the girl (for she sounded quite young) had moved away from the door and if he had to hazard a guess – which he did – she was still moving away from the door.

Quickly, aware that Casey had tried to warn him of something and it probably wasn't Papillon's young messenger, Derek unlocked the door and eased it open.

He was just in time to see the girl disappear through a door further down the hallway.

Derek was struck with a strange sense of recognition as he looked at her in the distance. He had been right she was young, possibly not yet twenty. She was gorgeous and she was drunk. Fortunately she didn't see him because he had stopped and stared, trying to put a name to her face, or a location for where he had seen her. He wasn't even sure he had seen her in person before.

He shook himself awake from his musings, aware that time was pressing, and stepped out into the hall.

There was a moment of indecision for Derek as he stood there. Here, outside of what was obviously a very well insulated office, Derek could hear the sounds from the dance-floor, and what he heard made him uneasy. Firstly, it was definitely Shabba Ranks currently being played and secondly, the clientele of the nightclub were cheering and cat-calling. Derek's mind flashed back nine years to when he had walked in on Casey in her underwear strutting her stuff on the table.

The indecision came about because, whilst he desperately wanted to go and reclaim his partner in crime and stop whatever insanity she was perpetrating, he knew he should follow the other girl.

Conscience getting the better of him, he took off after the younger girl, quickly reaching the door she had disappeared through. He pushed it open tentatively. Derek immediately relaxed slightly. The girl wasn't behind the door. Behind the door was an external alleyway – and it was empty. In the distance, he could see diminishing tail-lights.

Derek let the door close without passing through it. Duty done, he started to jog back up the long hallway, passing the entrance to the first corridor, the office he had searched and eventually reaching the bend in the hall. He knew that Casey was up to something, and if the cat-calls were a sign, everyone in the club was watching her. That meant only one thing; Casey was on the stage. He stepped forward and pulled at the door marked "Stage Right".

Derek didn't see the door to the first corridor open behind him. He didn't see the small posse of large guys, including BBG enter the second hallway and make their way to the office. If he had, he probably would have stepped up onto the stage, darted across grabbing Casey on the way, and tried to push his way through the crowds to the exit.

Instead, he opened the door slowly, stepped up on to the stage and stared, his jaw (figuratively) hitting the floor.


Casey's new best friend/admirer / aka the DJ had quickly complied with Casey's request, selecting the Shabba Ranks classic from her on-line library and cue-ing it up. She nodded at Casey who walked, unnoticed across the stage to a raised section where a pole was fixed for a solitary dancer to "entertain". Leesa watched her go, her heart and libido racing in anticipation.

As the first "Mr Loverman" of the track was called out, Casey grabbed the pole firmly, hooked her right ankle around its base and swung herself into her first moves. She circled her hips and pushed out her breasts as she leaned back, letting her unrestrained hair fall behind her. With a thrusting wiggle of her chest, she pulled herself back close to the pole and slid down it, the metal brushing against parts of Casey most men could not reach. As she perched on her haunches, pole still pressing tight to her body, she slid long, straightened fingers seductively up the pole, pulling herself back up with a roll of her head.

The crowd cheered and Casey was vaguely aware that they had stopped dancing and were now crowding close to watch her. She swung herself round and leaned back towards the crowd, one hand holding the pole, and her right leg hooked around it. Casey reached up with her free hand and ran it through her long hair in a manoeuvre that wouldn't have shamed a porn actress and the whistling started.

The routine continued, Casey trying to make it look like she was getting intimate with a fireman's pole in order to get the crowd making as much noise as possible. She hoped, if the noise was loud enough, Derek would leave what he was doing and come to investigate.

Preferably, without bumping into BBG and friends.

She made the show as good as she could using her right leg to hook her close to or step her away. (There was a reason she wasn't using her left). She slid her back down the pole and then when she reached the bottom and bounced on her haunches again, ran her flattened fingers down to where her silk dress hung in a flap between her knees and stroked the hand up over her crotch and higher up her body.

Derek appeared in the wings at the point where Casey undulated her body against the pole in a manner that looked as though she thrusting against it. She was leaning back again, tousled hair hanging free, one hand holding the pole while the other one palmed her breast. Casey pulled herself upright suddenly and she was staring right at him.

"Fuck me!" Derek gasped involuntarily under his breath.

Casey's eyes widened, she winked at him and then she grinned, relieved to see that her performance was successful in getting his attention, in more than one way.

Leesa caught herself holding her breath, noticed that the music was drawing to a close and cued up Lady Gaga's "Starstruck" in the hopes that Casey would keep going.


Derek crossed the distance between them as Casey continued to dance. He caught her waist and pulled her to him. Casey smiled.

"You called?" he quipped with a smirk.

Casey laughed and pulled him into her routine which had now left the pole and become slightly more "Casey-esque".

"I spotted an old friend." She explained, letting him tip her back dramatically and then twisting away from him in a graceful and seductive manner.

"Oh?" Derek asked moving close to her again, his hands itching to grab her, though they stayed by his side, even while they performed their little two-step.

"BBG." Casey said dodging him again.

"Shit." Derek swore quietly. "Where?"
"In the crowd. He's gone through to the back now. Where were you?"
"The offices." Derek explained.

"Did you find anything?"

"Not sure. A couple of phone numbers. It's all locked up tighter than my granny's…"

"Derek!"

He smirked as he caught her again. Casey back-flipped out of his arms, her tiny purse on its long chain flapping slightly at the movement. Derek rolled his eyes and grabbed her again.

"Always the drama with you." He commented.

"You wouldn't have it any other way." Casey retorted.

Ain't that a fact? Derek muttered to himself and then growing serious, "We need to get out of here. If BBG is here, with you up on the stage, it's only a matter of when they spot us."

"I know." Casey said, letting him pull her close. "Shall we take this one home?" She asked, referring to their dance routine.

Derek was about to reply when a shout from the dance floor drew his attention.

"Shit!" he gasped. "Too late. They found us!"

In the midst of the crowds, evidently returned from their brief trip behind the scenes were BBG and his cronies. It was obviously from their gesticulation that they had seen Casey and Derek, and that they knew who they were. Fortunately, they were in a sea of drunken revellers.

Unfortunately, they were now pushing their way through.

Derek grabbed Casey's hand. "This way!" he shouted, pulling her toward the stage door which he had used earlier. Casey nodded and let him lead her, purse still bouncing against her hip towards the only realistic exit. In the dark of the stage wings, they stumbled down the couple of stairs and Derek pushed hard against the door, tumbling them out on to the plush carpet of the hallway.

"Where are we?" Casey asked, still letting herself be dragged.

"The hallway with the offices." Derek explained. "There's a door down here to an alleyway outside."

There was no time for hesitation as they fled down the panelled hall. Derek drew his gun and counted doors even as he grasped Casey's hand firmly. Behind them, they could hear a door slam above the continuing sound of Lady Gaga. BBG and his men were following them.

"How much further?" Casey asked.

"That door down there." Derek explained nodding. Casey quickened her pace and Derek squeezed her hand in gratitude.

Moments later, and still pursued, they burst out of the building and into the alleyway. Derek turned and led them towards the open end – and then he realised.

This was the alleyway where he had found Jazz.