After Midnight

“How old you say you was again?” BJ asked.

“Eighteen.”

BJ studied her from behind his desk, although her driver’s license lay beside his glass of cognac. The photograph matched. So did the date of birth. He had already checked both. It was fake. Definitely fake. He leaned back in his chair. Diamonds flashed from his wrist, fingers, neck, and ears.

“And you wanna dance here?” he asked.

The young woman nodded. “If you’ll let me.”

“Let you?” He smiled. “Baby, I can make you the reason motherfuckas come here.”

Music pounded through the office floor. Beneath them, hundreds of bodies moved beneath red lights and artificial smoke. Every few seconds, the bass rattled the bottles behind BJ’s private bar and made the framed photographs on his walls tremble—BJ shaking hands with politicians, police officers, athletes, and men who would swear under oath that they had never met him. The young woman glanced through the tinted window overlooking the club. From this side, she could see everything. Nobody downstairs could see her.

“You said I could audition,” she said.

“This is the audition.”

Her nervous smile vanished. BJ stood and walked around the desk.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I thought I’d dance for you.”

“In due time, baby girl.”

She looked toward the door. BJ reached past her and turned the lock. The click was quiet. The music swallowed it whole.

“You came all the way up here,” he said. “Now you acting scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Good. I don’t put scared girls on my stage,” he replied.

He lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes. She wore too much makeup for someone whose face still held traces of adolescence. Her silver dress had probably cost less than the bottle he had opened for her, but BJ had already imagined what it would look like on his office floor.

“What about your girlfriend?” she asked.

BJ laughed. “What?”

“Miss Rochelle can come up any minute. I don’t want to disrespect her.”

“Rochelle don’t come upstairs before midnight,” he replied.

“But she’s here.”

“So? She’s always here. Don’t worry about her. Worry about me and what I can do for you. Chelle won’t know you’re up here, much less what you’re doing.”

The answer did not reassure her. BJ placed one hand against the door beside her head. His rings caught the low light.

“You want that stage or not?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“You want the money?”

She nodded.

“The clothes? Men downstairs throwing hundreds at you just because you walked past them?”

“Yes.”

“You wanna stop asking people for shit and start making them ask you?”

Her eyes returned to the tinted window. Onstage, Carmen moved beneath a white spotlight while money floated around her ankles. Carmen did not dance as though she needed anyone’s approval. She danced like the room had already voted and she had won. The young woman watched her.

“I could do that,” she whispered.

BJ followed her gaze. “Then stop being timid and let’s get on with this audition.”

He kissed her before she answered.

Downstairs, Carmen reached the edge of the stage and lowered herself into a slow split. The club erupted. Men surged forward with bills folded between their fingers. Women screamed louder than the men. A married councilman loosened his tie while pretending not to recognize the police captain sitting three tables away. Near the bar, a man threw his rent money onto the stage and would probably blame everyone else but himself in the morning.

Carmen rose without touching the floor. Her black jeweled corset captured the light each time she turned. Her short hair had been sculpted into glossy waves that remained perfect despite the heat. Sweat glistened across the tattoos covering one arm, and every controlled movement made the room believe she had selected each person inside it for private attention.

While the customers watched her, Carmen watched the club. The bartender on the west end had poured three drinks without touching the register. One of the cocktail waitresses had disappeared into the restroom fourteen minutes ago. A man near the stage had been warned twice about grabbing dancers. Security should have removed him after the first warning, but he was spending heavily and BJ believed rules should bend before money did.

Carmen caught the bartender’s eye and tapped two fingers against her wrist.

Ring it up.

He immediately opened the register. Carmen smiled for the crowd. Most men mistook beauty for distraction. It was one of the reasons she understood their money better than they did.

From the VIP section, Rochelle Hayes stared at BJ’s empty chair. She had spent most of the night pretending not to notice it.

Rochelle was beautiful in the expensive, exhausting way BJ preferred. Her red dress had been made for standing, not sitting, and the slit running up her thigh had already attracted three propositions, two business cards, and one marriage proposal from a man whose wife was dancing near the bar.

Rochelle kept the ring from the proposal. It might be worth something. She checked her watch. Eleven forty-three.

BJ had told her he was meeting someone in his office. Business, he said. BJ conducted business loudly. There were usually men walking in and out, phones ringing, liquor being poured, and somebody leaving angrier or poorer than when they arrived. Tonight, nobody had come down.

Rochelle stood. The security guard near the private staircase suddenly became fascinated with the ceiling.

“Reggie.”

He kept looking up.

“Reggie, unless Jesus is descending over the men’s bathroom, look at me.”

Reggie lowered his head.

“Where is BJ?” Rochelle asked.

“Meeting.”

“With who?”

“Not sure. Business.”

Rochelle glanced toward the staircase. “Business got long legs and heels?”

Reggie said nothing. That was an answer.

Rochelle pushed past him.

“Chelle,” he whispered. “Don’t go up there.”

She turned on the first step. “You planning to stop me?”

Reggie looked down at the floor.

“Then shut the fuck up, respectfully.”

She climbed the staircase.

Onstage, Carmen saw her go. She also saw Reggie remove a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe sweat from a forehead that had been dry ten seconds earlier. Something was wrong.

Carmen finished her turn and looked toward the DJ booth. Two fingers pointed down.

Cut the music.

The DJ nodded, misunderstood her completely, and made it louder.

Upstairs, Rochelle reached BJ’s office. She heard the desk striking the wall before she touched the door. Once. Twice. A woman gasped inside.

Rochelle tried the handle. Locked. She stepped back and hammered both fists against the door.

“BJ!”

The movement inside stopped.

“Open this motherfucking door!”

For three seconds, there was nothing but the bass coming through the floor. Then the lock turned.

BJ opened the door with his trousers unfastened and irritation—not shame—on his face. Rochelle stared at him.

Behind BJ, the young woman stood beside the desk, pulling her silver dress back into place. One heel lay near the overturned chair. The other had disappeared beneath the desk. A framed photograph of Rochelle rested facedown beside BJ’s cognac. The girl looked barely old enough to be outside when the streetlights were on.

Rochelle’s voice dropped. “How old is she?”

BJ stepped into the hallway. “Go downstairs.”

“How old is this fucking girl?”

“I said go downstairs.”

Rochelle shoved past him. The young woman backed toward the wall.

“You know me?” Rochelle asked her.

“I—”

“Chelle,” BJ warned.

Rochelle looked at the driver’s license on the desk, then at the girl.

“Eighteen?”

The girl nodded quickly.

BJ reached for Rochelle’s arm. “She grown.”

Rochelle snatched away from him. “You nasty motherfucka. This ID is fake!”

“Watch your mouth,” BJ warned.

Rochelle turned toward the girl. “How old are you really? Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“Sixteen.”

“You brought some sixteen-year-old baby into your office to fuck while I’m sitting downstairs?”

“She came to me,” he replied.

The young woman flinched. Rochelle saw it. Her anger shifted completely toward BJ.

“You’se a dirty motherfucka. That’s someone’s baby. You sick motherfucka. You promised her a job, didn’t you?”

BJ smiled without humor. “What happens in my office ain’t your business.”

“Last I checked, I’m your woman. Fuck is you talkin ‘bout?”

“You my woman when you act like one. You can’t feed me every time I’m hungry. There’s enough to go around.”

Rochelle grabbed his glass of cognac and threw it. BJ ducked. The glass exploded against the wall, showering one of his photographs with liquor and crystal. The young woman screamed.

Rochelle swept both arms across the desk. The bottle, telephone, ashtray, and BJ’s gold money clip crashed to the floor. She grabbed the framed photograph of herself and flung it at him next.

BJ caught it against his chest.

“You lost your goddamn mind?” he asked.

“I’m about to lose it on your ass!”

She lunged for him. BJ seized both her wrists. Rochelle kicked him in the shin, tore one hand free, and raked her nails across his face. Three red lines appeared along his cheek.

For one brief second, BJ looked surprised. Then he struck her.

The slap landed flat and vicious. His largest ring caught Rochelle near the mouth. Her head snapped sideways, and she collapsed against the edge of the desk before falling to the floor.

The room went still. Even the young woman stopped crying. BJ touched the scratches on his cheek and examined the blood on his fingertips.

Downstairs, Carmen saw Reggie run toward the staircase. She did not wait for the song to end. She stepped from the stage, money sticking to the bottoms of her heels, and crossed the club floor. Customers reached toward her as she passed. One man caught her wrist.

Carmen twisted free without slowing.

“Touch me again,” she told him, “and you’ll be drinking through a straw.”

The grin fell off his face.

Reggie met her near the stairs.

“Chelle up there raising hell.”

“Why?”

He looked away.

Carmen shoved past him and climbed the stairs in six-inch heels faster than most men could run sober. She reached the office as the young woman slipped through the doorway, clutching her shoes against her chest.

Their eyes met. The girl looked terrified.

“Go home,” Carmen said.

The girl ran.

Carmen entered the office. Rochelle sat crumpled beside the desk with one hand pressed to her bleeding mouth. BJ stood over her, fastening his trousers as though nothing important had happened.

Carmen crossed the room and shoved him with both hands. BJ staggered backward.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

His eyes widened—not because she had frightened him, but because nobody put their hands on Christopher Greene inside his own club.

“She needs to learn her motherfuckin’ place.”

“Her place ain’t on the fucking floor. You shouldn’t be putting your hands on a woman, BJ.”

“That’s my bitch. I do what the fuck I want.”

“She’s bleeding.”

“She should’ve thought about that before she came up here breaking my shit.”

Carmen looked at Rochelle. Her friend’s entire body trembled. Tears streamed silently down her face, cutting through makeup she had spent an hour applying for a man who had just knocked her to the floor.

Carmen turned back to BJ. “You’re a sick motherfucka.”

BJ took one deliberate step toward her.

“Put your hands on me again.”

Carmen did not move. “I’m not afraid of you, motherfucka. Try me if you want to.”

For several seconds, neither of them spoke. The music continued beneath their feet, obscenely cheerful, while employees crowded outside the office and pretended not to be listening.

BJ looked at each of them. Every face disappeared from the doorway.

That was his real power. Not the jewelry, the club, the guns, or the cash stacked inside his safe.

Silence.

He could do almost anything because everyone around him had learned how not to see it.

Everyone except Carmen.

She knelt beside Rochelle.

“Come on, Chelle.”

Rochelle tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Carmen caught her beneath both arms and pulled her upright.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Rochelle sobbed.

“Yeah. A’ight bitch. I’ll see you at home,” BJ said.

“I swear to God—”

“You can kill him after we fix your mouth,” Carmen said.

Despite everything, a broken laugh escaped Rochelle. It immediately became another sob.

Carmen placed Rochelle’s arm around her shoulders and guided her toward the doorway.

“Carmen,” BJ called.

She stopped but did not turn around.

“Your set ain’t over.”

Carmen tightened her arm around Rochelle. Then she walked her best friend out.

BJ watched Carmen guide Rochelle through the doorway. He waited until they disappeared into the hall before touching the scratches on his cheek again. His fingertips came away wet with blood.

“Reggie,” BJ called.

The security guard appeared at the office door but did not step inside. His eyes moved across the broken glass, overturned chair, and everything Rochelle had swept from the desk. He looked at BJ’s open shirt, then quickly looked somewhere safer.

“Clean this shit up,” BJ ordered.

Reggie nodded. “You want me to get somebody to check on Chelle?”

BJ stared at him.

“Never mind,” Reggie said. “I got it.”

The fake driver’s license remained on the desk. The girl had run out so quickly that she had forgotten it. BJ picked it up, studied her photograph for another second, and tossed it into the trash.

“Find her and make sure she don’t come back,” he said.

Reggie glanced at the trash can. “What if she starts talking?”

“To who?”

The question answered itself.

Christopher “BJ” Greene was not misunderstood. He knew the difference between right and wrong. He simply believed those rules were written for people without money.

On paper, he owned a nightclub. The city knew him as a businessman, a generous host, and the smiling Black man photographed beside politicians who needed his money but did not want their names spoken in the same sentence as his. Police officers drank free at his bar. City officials entered through the private door. Athletes, drug dealers, lawyers, and married men with respectable families shared bottles inside the same VIP section and pretended not to recognize one another outside.

BJ kept photographs of all of them.

They looked like memories.

They were insurance.

The club was the cleanest part of BJ’s business, and even that depended on which set of books someone opened. One ledger contained liquor purchases, payroll, cover charges, vendor invoices, and enough legitimate revenue to satisfy anyone who came asking polite questions. The other tracked money that never touched a register—drug proceeds washed through inflated bottle sales, payments to corrupt officers, missing product, private debts, and agreements BJ intended to honor only until breaking them became more profitable.

Cash entered the building dirty and left looking respectable.

Carmen understood both ledgers. She knew which vendors were legitimate, which invoices had been inflated, which police officers received envelopes, and how much money could disappear from a Saturday night before the numbers began looking suspicious. BJ trusted her with the books because she could make chaos balance by morning. Trusting someone with his money was the closest he came to respecting them.

Her value to the business was one reason BJ tolerated her defiance. It was not the reason he kept his hands off her.

The father of Carmen’s child was in prison, but prison had not made him powerless. He and BJ had once been close—close enough for BJ to know how many men still answered his calls and how quickly a message could travel beyond the prison walls. If BJ ever put his hands on Carmen, her child’s father would have him killed. Being locked away only meant he would not have to do it himself.

BJ could threaten Carmen. He could curse at her, fire her, or remind her that the club belonged to him. What he could not do was strike her and expect to survive it.

Carmen knew that.

More importantly, BJ knew she knew it.

His younger brother, Anthony, knew enough to understand that BJ was involved in crime, but not enough to understand the size of it. Everybody called him Ali. BJ kept him close enough to claim family loyalty and far enough away from the books that he could deny knowing anything useful. Ali understood that drugs moved through BJ’s world and that certain police officers protected him. He did not know how many people BJ owed, how many partners he had betrayed, or how much of the club’s success had been built on money belonging to somebody else.

BJ preferred it that way.

He did not believe family needed honesty. Family needed loyalty, and loyalty meant accepting whatever version of the truth he provided.

The same rule applied to everyone else.

BJ was not merely unfaithful, abusive, or crooked. He was a pedophile, a rapist, and a murderer.

Girls entered his club carrying fake identification and confidence they had borrowed from women older than them. BJ could recognize a false license almost immediately. He knew which numbers looked altered, which photographs had been replaced, and which girls had practiced saying eighteen until they almost believed it themselves. He never turned them away. Their lies gave him something he valued more than consent—an excuse.

He promised them auditions, money, clothes, and protection. Once the office door locked, those promises became leverage. If a girl changed her mind, BJ treated her refusal as ingratitude. If she fought him, he used force. If she cried afterward, he reminded her that nobody would believe an underage girl who had entered his club with fraudulent identification.

The girl who had just run from his office was sixteen.

She was not the youngest.

Women who threatened to expose him were offered money first. Those who refused were threatened. Those who continued talking sometimes disappeared. One dancer had told several employees that BJ raped her after closing. Two days before she planned to speak with police, she was found dead inside her car with enough drugs in her bloodstream for the medical examiner to call it an overdose. Everyone who knew her also knew she did not use drugs. The detective assigned to her death drank free at BJ’s bar and appeared in one of the photographs hanging inside his office.

BJ killed men for simpler reasons. A dealer once accused him of stealing product and threatened to embarrass him inside his own club. BJ invited the man upstairs to discuss it. The dealer entered through the office door and left through the service elevator wrapped in table linens. The carpet was replaced before the club opened the following evening.

Nobody asked what happened. Questions were dangerous around BJ, and answers were worse.

Carmen had not heard pieces of the stories. She had seen all of it.

She knew which girls BJ had forced himself on, which women he had paid afterward, and which ones had disappeared when money failed to buy their silence. She knew which officers changed reports, which detectives buried complaints, which cars had transported bodies, and where some of those bodies had eventually been left. BJ trusted Carmen with the books because the books were only one part of what she kept for him. She also carried the names, dates, payments, and secrets that could destroy everyone connected to his operation.

Carmen knew exactly what kind of man employed her. She had remained beside him anyway. That did not make her innocent, and she had never confused survival with innocence.

Rochelle believed she had caught BJ cheating.

Carmen knew she had interrupted something far worse.

BJ bent down and retrieved his gold money clip from the floor. He counted the cash inside before checking whether anything else had been damaged. The photograph of Rochelle remained where it had landed near his feet. He picked it up, wiped cognac from the glass with his sleeve, and placed it facedown on the desk again.

“Music too damn loud,” he complained.

Reggie stared at him. “You want me to tell the DJ to turn it down?”

“Nah. Tell him Carmen better be back onstage before the next song.”

“Carmen probably taking Chelle home.”

BJ slowly turned toward him.

Reggie corrected himself. “I’ll tell her.”

BJ poured another cognac from the private bar and examined his reflection in the tinted window. Three scratches marked his cheek. He adjusted his collar, straightened his chain, and smiled at himself.

The city ran on cash, pagers, favors, and people too frightened to repeat what they had witnessed. BJ controlled enough of all four to believe consequences were merely another expense he could force someone else to pay.

Most nights, he was right.

At eleven fifty-two, he still believed this would be one of them.