Juggernaut by Nancy Springer Page A

herself into danger playing Muggable Mary.
    Huh. Nobody better try to snatch the purse tonight. In it were guns, handcuffs, radio, all the equipment Bill might need if he found out anything. Some sort of kinky homo sex motivation, Homicide thought. They profiled the Crusher as a blue-collar male, hefty enough to muscle his victims into some sort of machine press to torture and kill them, strong enough to dump the bodies afterward. Bill had to be hugging his gun. Where was he? They kept it so dark in here it was hard to tell. Marietta scanned the straggle of men around the dance floor—funny, most of the women were sitting at the tables chatting with one another, while most of the men stood staring in parallel, not speaking. And what a selection of men—round men in fuzzy sweaters, edgy men in suits, cadaverous old men in pleated slacks and crepe-soled shoes, men trying to look sporty in Nikes and collared T-shirts, a black guy in dreadlocks, a Don Johnson pretender in a Miami Vice hat, for God’s sake, and a ponytailed biker type in leathers, lean men and teddy-bear men and bearded men and boyish men, and— and I’d like to get to know every one of them, Marietta realized, surprising herself. I like men. All kinds.
    And she felt a stab of guilt at the thought, as if she’d been unfaithful. Throughout her years of marriage, she’d trained herself not to look at other men.
    A tall gray-haired man headed toward her. She stiffened in anticipation; would he ask her to dance? But he walked past her without a glance, stopped at the next table and spoke to a tawny young woman in a very abbreviated dress. Together they walked to the dance floor.
    A hefty blond woman in a make-me-look-slim-please black tunic sat down on Marietta’s other side. “Hi, I’m Deb,” she said to Marietta. “Yo, gang,” she called past Marietta toward Pat. “Wearing your shoes out dancing?”
    A general chuckle ensued. Marietta glanced over her shoulder. The table had filled with women about her age, their hair mostly various shades of blond, some round, some skinny, some comfy and some dressed to kill, all kinds, and Marietta imagined the men looking them over the way she had looked over the men, thinking, wow, I like them all.
    She watched a fat man dancing with a perfectly-endowed blonde half his age. Marietta wanted to dance. The deejay was playing “Crocodile Rock,” damn it, and it had been years… She demanded, “When do they ask us to dance?”
    Quite a lot of laughter erupted, and Deb patted her hand. “You’re new, right?”
    “Is it that obvious?”
    “Honey, everybody starts the same way,” Pat said. “The old guy in the suspenders, by the water cooler,” she added, “if he asks you to dance, say no. He puts his hand on your butt.”
    “You’re brave, coming by yourself,” Deb said.
    Deb seemed nice, Marietta thought, at the same moment as she finally spotted Bill talking with the bartender. Stalking a murderer. Was it the distinguished-looking older man with the younger woman, or the bald guy dancing with yet another mini-skirted girl, or the fat man? Inspired, she told Deb, “A friend told me about the dance.” She described the most recent murder victim. “Guy named Bob. Fortyish, overweight, beer belly, balding. You know him?”
    Deb laughed. “Honey, you have just described half of the guys here.”
    The deejay announced, “Paul Jones time.”
    “Now you get to dance,” Pat told Marietta. “Sort of.”
    Coached by Pat, Marietta joined the women on the dance floor circling clockwise around a smaller circle of men. When the music changed from fast to slow, she stopped opposite a man about her own age. He looked straight at her, then reached for the woman next to her, who was younger and thinner.
    Huh. Marietta stood out, feeling very much like the leftovers pushed to the back of the fridge. She wasn’t the only one; with her stood a woman from her table, Muriel; on her name tag the i was dotted with a heart,