Free Solitary Dancer by John Lawrence Reynolds

installations.” Then she added, like an afterthought, “Before that, I’d met some rough people, hung out with them for a while. It’s not something I’m proud of. And when I found myself all alone I kept thinking about Joe so I wrote him . . .”
    She reached to pat the back of her hair. “Anyway, I came out of work one day and there he was waiting for me, sitting in some car he’d rented.” A smile that stayed this time, glowing with the memory of him. “He looked good. He looked really good. He’d lost some weight, had a great tan, smiled and laughed a lot. We had dinner and, um . . .” A shrug. “Went down to the Keys that weekend, stayed in a motel on the gulf side. It was nice. It was really nice.” Still smiling. But crying now too. “And then, just like that, when Sunday came he took me back to Coconut Grove and caught a plane to Nassau. I haven’t seen him since.”
    â€œHe’s changed,” Tim Fox said. He told her about the Bahamian police report, McGuire’s near-fatal beating on the yacht, the hospital stay, the deportation and the tiny room over the strip club whose patrons came to do more than just look at the young women.
    She listened with her mouth partially open and her eyes darting back and forth. “That doesn’t sound like Joe,” she said. “God, that’s not Joe, that’s somebody else.”
    â€œLike I said, he’s changed.”
    Micki stared down at her coffee before lifting the cup to her lips. “You don’t really think he killed Heather,” she said in a low voice.
    Fox shook his head. “But some people would like to.”
    She set the cup down without drinking from it and said, her head lowered, her eyes avoiding Fox’s, “Some people will be happy to know my sister is dead too. Happy and worried at the same time.”
    Fox sat back, folded his arms and raised his eyebrows, urging her silently to continue.
    She flashed her smile at him in embarrassment. “I know what my sister’s been up to for the past couple of years,” she said. “She didn’t make all of her money from being a photographer’s agent. Not by a long shot.”

Chapter Five
    Grizzly tossed a handful of old shingles on the fire blazing inside the rusting forty-gallon drum. When the black smoke and flames roared out Grizzly laughed and held his hands, large and brown like catcher’s mitts, in front of him to feel the heat.
    â€œCops don’t like it,” the Gypsy muttered, wrapping her arms around her for warmth, huddled inside Grizzly’s stained gray parka with the raccoon fur trim on the hood. Strands of her greasy black hair spilled out from around the fur trim, hair as dark and shining as her eyes. “Makes too much smoke. Might come by, just to raise hell.”
    Grizzly laughed again and rubbed his hands together. He was wearing a blue kerchief tied tightly around his head, a denim shirt open nearly to his navel, and brown army surplus pants. “We’ll tell ’em we jus’ sendin’ smoke signals to your brothers ’cross the way. Maybe that’s First Amendment rights.” He looked across the flames at Django. “You figure that’s maybe what it is?”
    Django nodded and smiled, shifting his weight to one side and then the other, doing a shuffle around the blazing fire in the steel drum, sliding his feet in his white Reebok high-cuts. Django’s black leather trench coat hung open and moved with his motion. A tweed pork-pie hat managed to remain propped at a sharp angle well back atop his small head. His eyes closed, he did a sideways step around the drum, staying near its warmth that softened the damp chill of the gray air.
    Out on Washington Street at the end of the alley, a black Mercedes slowed to a stop. Its driver, an overweight balding man with an unruly salt-and-pepper beard, stared open-mouthed down the lane at