With a Twist (Last Call #4)(13)

But when the time came, make no doubt, I was ready to display trashy Andrea to the world.

I mean …  trashy Nikki O …  my new alias. The "O" stood for Oliver, but I was prepared for it to stand for "Orgasm," which was my even trashier stripper name.

Nikki O.

Nikki Orgasm.

Ugh …  I didn't have to deal with something so terribly perverse when I stripped through college. There I was just good ol' Andrea, dancing her way to a higher education. I showed up to work in my faded jeans and UVA t-shirts, and went home dressed in the same with my pockets stuffed full of green, green cash.

Sliding my gaze to my watch again, I see it's now 1:27 AM, and I let out a tired yawn.

"He should be here soon," SA Mike Gomez says from his seat at my kitchen table. He's typing away on a laptop, his blue sport coat draped over the back of a ratty recliner that sits perpendicular to my couch and his tie loosened.

Mike arranged for this meeting with my undercover partner, who I've only been told is a member of a local police department on the east coast of North Carolina and has been undercover at The Platinum Club for just shy of four months now. I don't know much about him other than his real name is Wyatt Banks, but his undercover name is Charles Hawkins, but as with any good criminal alias, his nickname is Raze.



       
         
       
        

So much cooler than Nikki O, I have to admit.

Standing up from my couch, I raise my hands over my head and arch the stiffness out of my back. My vertebrae pop one by one, straight up my spine, and I groan in relief. I'd been on that couch for a good three hours.

Padding into the kitchen, I open the rusted, avocado-green fridge and snatch out a Diet Coke. "Want one?" I ask Mike, holding up the slightly chilled can because the refrigerator only works sporadically and I don't trust it to keep any actual food in there for safety reasons.

"Sure," he says as he looks up from his computer.

I pull another one out and take a chair next to him at the table, popping the top of mine and pushing his can across the table toward him. "Anything else I need to know about Wyatt before he gets here?"

"Raze," Mike says sternly. "Purge the name Wyatt from your vocabulary."

"Right …  Raze," I mutter, my cheeks turning warm over such a stupid mistake. I had been told from the minute I walked into this craphole apartment that I needed to assume my role completely, which means I should have ditched the FBI suits and started wearing my Lycra.

I had spent hours and hours over the last four days, going over my backstory. I was Nikki Oliver, age twenty-six, born and raised in a podunk town in western North Carolina. My mom was a drug addict who had OD'd when I was seventeen, and I'd been on my own since then. I didn't graduate high school but had made somewhat of an attempt at an honest living, at least, that is what my fake work records show. Little stints at fast food joints and gas stations. But my criminal record shows an arrest for petty larceny when I was nineteen, and then solicitation when I was twenty. Since then, I've worked at various strip clubs around North Carolina, and even one in Georgia when I supposedly followed my no good, drunk, abusive boyfriend down there when I was twenty-three. Now I was back in my home state, where I had been fired from my last stripping job for selling drugs to the other dancers and shed of my no-good, drunk, abusive boyfriend,

This spotted history, I was assured, would get me hired on the spot at The Platinum Club.

That is …  Mike told me …  if I could do a half-assed job at dancing.

Luckily, no one in the FBI required me to prove those skills and just accepted my word and my history that I was good enough to hack it.

"Not much to tell about him," Mike answers my original question about Raze. "He's a cop with the Nags Head Police Department over in the Outer Banks. We needed someone that wasn't local, and he was highly recommended. Had done undercover work before. He's been working for Simon almost four months and was brought into the slave-trade operation just about a week ago. He's been tasked with finding some new girls for Simon to sell. He wants to move one pretty fast …  within a few weeks, is what he told Wyatt." 

"Raze," I correct automatically, and Mike shoots me a grin.

"Good girl," he praises.

I swallow hard, because I happen to be one of those new girls. "And how is Raze going to ensure that I'm the one that Simon will want to sell?"

Mike shrugs. "We're just going to have to assume Raze has enough pull. But he knows exactly what Simon is looking for. He's the one that helped to create your new identity, and I'm assuming a key component is that you don't have any family members who would notice you missing. That seems to be the pattern so far. Plus, the fact you had an abusive boyfriend means you'll probably swear off men-aka attachments-for a while."