As soon as the elevator door closed and she was alone, Jule pulled off the wig. She kicked off the heels and pulled joggers and Vans from the tote, yanked the pants on over the short black dress, and slipped the Vans on her feet. The wig and the heels went into the bag. She put on a zip-up hoodie and the doors opened on the tenth floor of the hotel.
Jule didn’t get off. As the elevator went back down, she pulled out a makeup wipe and peeled off her false eyelashes. She wiped off her lip gloss. Then she opened Shanna’s wallet, snagged the driver’s license, and dropped the wallet itself on the floor.
She was another person by the time the doors opened.
—
Four casinos down on the strip, Jule surveyed six restaurants until she found a place to order a coffee and chat up a lonely college student who was just starting work on the night shift. The place was a 1950s diner replica. The waitress was a tiny woman with freckles and soft brown curls. She wore a polka-dot dress and a frilly housewife’s apron. When a crowd of drunk guys barged in talking about beer and burgers, Jule put some cash on the counter to pay for her food and then slid into the kitchen. She snagged the most feminine backpack off a line of hooks and left through a back exit into the casino’s service hallway. Running down a flight of stairs and then out into the alley, she shouldered the pack and pushed her way through a group of people lined up for a magic show.
A ways down she rummaged through the bag. In the zipper pocket was a passport. The name on it was Adelaide Belle Perry, age twenty-one.
It was a lucky take. Jule had figured she might have to work a long time before she got a passport. She felt sorry for Adelaide, though, and after taking the passport, she turned the backpack in to a lost properties office.
Back on the strip, she found a wig store and two clothing shops. She stocked up, and by morning, she had moved casinos twice more. Wearing a wavy blond wig and orange lipstick, she lifted the license of one Dakota Pleasance, five foot two. In a black wig and a silver jacket she snagged the passport of Dorothea von Schnell of Germany, five foot three.
By eight a.m., Jule was back in the joggers and Vans, her face wiped clean. She got a cab to the Rio hotel and took the elevator to the roof. She had read about the VooDoo Lounge, fifty-one stories up.
—
When a battle is over, when he has lived to fight again another day, the great white hetero action hero goes somewhere high above the city, somewhere with a view. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Jason Bourne, James Bond—they all do it. The hero gazes out at the pain and beauty contained in the twinkling lights of the metropolis. He thinks about his special mission, his unique talents, his strength, his strange, violent life and all the sacrifices he makes to live it.
The VooDoo Lounge early in the morning was little more than a concrete expanse of roof dotted with red and black couches. The chairs were shaped like enormous hands. A staircase curved above the roof. Patrons could climb it for a better view of the Vegas strip below. There were a couple of cages for showgirls to dance in, but no one was in the lounge now except a janitor. He raised his eyebrows as Jule came in. “I just want to have a look,” Jule told him. “I’m harmless, I swear.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Go ahead. I’m mopping up.”
Jule went to the top of the staircase and gazed at the city. She thought of all the lives being led down there. People were buying toothpaste, having arguments, picking up eggs on the way home from work. They lived their lives surrounded by all that glitter and neon, happily assuming that small, cute women were harmless.
Three years ago, Julietta West Williams was fifteen. She’d been in an arcade—a big one, air-conditioned and shiny-new. She was racking up points on a war simulation. She was lost in it, shooting, when two boys she knew from school came up behind her and squeezed her boobs. One on each side.
Julietta elbowed one sharply in his soft stomach, then swung around and stomped hard on the other one’s foot. Then she kneed him in the groin.
It was the first time she’d ever hit anyone outside of her martial arts classes. The first time she’d needed to.
All right, she hadn’t needed to. She’d wanted to. She enjoyed it.
When that boy bent over, coughing, Jule turned and hit the first one in the face with the heel of her hand. His head flew back and she yanked the front of his T-shirt and yelled into his greasy ear, “I’m not yours to touch!”
She wanted to see fear on that boy’s face, and to see his friend crumpled over on a nearby bench. Those two boys had always been so cocky at school, afraid of nothing.
A pimple-face man who worked at the arcade came over and grabbed Julietta’s arm. “We can’t have fighting in here, miss. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”
“Are you grabbing my arm?” she asked him. “?’Cause I don’t want you to grab my arm.”
He dropped it fast.
He was afraid of her.
He was six inches taller than her and at least three years older. He was a grown man, and he was afraid of her.
It felt good.
Julietta left the arcade. She didn’t worry that the boys would follow her. She felt like she was in a movie. She hadn’t known she could take care of herself that way, hadn’t known that the strength she’d been building in the classes and in the weight room at the high school would pay off. She realized she had built armor for herself. Perhaps that was what she’d been intending to do.
She looked the same, looked just like anyone, but she saw the world differently after that. To be a physically powerful woman—it was something. You could go anywhere, do anything, if you were difficult to hurt.
—
A few floors down in the Rio hotel hallway, Jule found a maid who was pushing a cart. A forty-dollar tip and she had a room to sleep in until three-thirty. The check-in time was four p.m.
Another night of lifting wallets and another day of sleep and Jule was ready to buy an inconspicuous used car off a sleazy guy in a parking lot. She paid cash. She collected her luggage from the bus station and stashed her extra IDs deep under the felt that lined the hatchback.
She drove herself across the border to Mexico with Adelaide Belle Perry’s passport.
LAST WEEK OF FEBRUARY, 2017
LONDON
Three months before Jule arrived in Mexico, Forrest Smith-Martin was on Jule’s couch, eating baby carrots with his straight, glossy teeth. He had been staying at her London flat for five nights.
Forrest was Immie’s ex-boyfriend. He always acted like he didn’t believe a word Jule said. If she said she liked blueberries, he raised his eyebrows like he highly doubted it. If she said Immie had flitted off to Paris, he questioned her about where, precisely, Immie was staying. He made Jule feel illegitimate.
Pale and slim, Forrest belonged to the category of scrawny men who are uncomfortable when women are more muscular than they are. His joints seemed loosely attached, and the woven bracelet around his left wrist looked dirty. He had gone to Yale for world literature. He liked people to know he’d gone to Yale and often brought it up in conversation. He wore little spectacles, was developing a beard that never quite sprouted, and kept his long hair in a man bun on the top of his head. He was twenty-two and working on his novel.
Right now, he was reading a book translated from the French. Albert Camus. He pronounced it Camoo. He was draped on the couch, not just sitting, and wore a sweatshirt and his boxer shorts.