Third Strike by Zoe Sharp

the guns up. An Asian girl with long straight blond hair came through, wearing a smutty pale pink negligee. She froze for a second when she saw us, then started screaming.
    I was closest. I reached her in one long stride and, following Sean’s earlier example, hit her with my upswept elbow under the jaw, aiming for the sweet spot just to the side of her chin. The effect of the blow was magnified by the fact she had her mouth open when I delivered it.
    Her teeth clacked shut as her eyes rolled back and she dropped, graceless enough that I didn’t have to check if she was faking. She and the blond wig parted company, revealing short black hair, badly cut, beneath it. Close to, she was neither as young as she was supposed to be, nor as old as she had become.
    I turned to find Sean watching me.
    “What?” I said. “You think the ‘Harry sent me’ line would have worked on her?”
    “Maybe not,” he agreed, “but let’s try and leave the next one awake enough to answer questions, shall we? Like—where’s your father?”
    I turned away without answering. As soon as we’d entered the place I’d been fighting the underlying sense of panic. My father might be many things, but indiscriminate was not one of them, and the last thing you could possibly be in a place like this was choosy. Surely, if he’d really wanted the services of a prostitute, he would have picked somewhere more upmarket than this. On sanitary grounds, if nothing else.
    He’s dead. My God, he has to be dead.
    Shaking my head did little to dislodge the recreant idea of it. I flexed my fingers round the pistol grip of the illegal gun. If anything had happened to my father, I vowed I would find the men in the Lincoln, and I would watch their bodies fall.
    My only disquiet was that it wouldn’t be the first time.
    “Let’s find out, shall we?”
    The brothel was laid out on five narrow floors that branched out from a musty central stairwell. Each floor had rows of doorways along a thin partition wall, leading to tiny, lightless cubicles. Sean and I swept the building from the ground up.
    The occupants were nearly all female and mostly alone. The majority of the workforce looked Asian—possibly Korean or Vietnamese. The girls seemed to live in the rooms where they worked, their few shabby possessions hidden behind a curtain or in a flimsy plywood wardrobe.
    The place had a smell all of its own. Old cooking fat that had been overheated one time too many, mingled with stale sweat and other, more earthy odors, all not quite masked by the false cheer of cheap fabric freshener and the thin reek of even cheaper perfume.
    And desperation. The only locks we encountered were on the outside, which probably accounted for the browbeaten lack of reaction to our arrival. If any of the girls spoke English, they weren’t making a big thing of it, but I suppose it was unlikely they were being paid—in any sense—for their sparkling conversational skills.
    On the fourth floor up, we kicked the lock off the inside of a door this time and found a woman older than the others, a fact which was obvious even in the low light. Her larger living quarters spoke of middle management rather than labor.
    We caught her bending over an old square sink in one corner of the room, and she straightened with an expletive that was pure homegrown Brooklyn. Statuesquely built, her most startling feature was a pair of massive breasts that, to my cynical eyes at least, were so clearly man-made they probably had a “Best Before” date stamped on them. Her dress was gaudy without even the excuse of being cheap.
    Very recently, someone had caught her a belter across the left-hand side of her face and she’d been trying to negate the aftereffects with a cold wet cloth pressed against it. She went deathly pale at the sight of us, but stood her ground, putting the cloth down slowly.
    “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded. Her eyes flicked to the doorway behind us a couple of times, waiting