Winning Texas by Nancy Stancill

twined her legs around the pole on stage. She looked pretty good, Annie thought, and seemed to know how to dance. After the first two numbers, though, the novelty of her performance wore off. Annie chugged the rest of her beer, feeling restless.
    The tempo sped up, Carmine smiled knowingly and a man in a leopard bikini danced on to the stage. He looked handsome but seedy, like Matthew McConaughey in the strip-club movie, Magic Mike . The man moved closer to Carla Carmine and they began dancing together.
    Suddenly the lights went out and Annie heard worried murmurs. After a few minutes of uncertainly, a stage light went on and Monica Gardiner, the policewoman she ’ d met earlier, spoke briefly.
    “ The Houston Police Department is closing this establishment for the rest of the night, ” she said. “ Please leave by the normal exits in an orderly fashion. ”
    Annie got up with Matt and they began walking to the door.
    “ What happened? ” Annie asked.
    “ The man on stage with Carla Carmine is also a porn star, ” Matt said. “ We agreed that if he appeared, we ’ d have to shut down the show. Heard rumors that there might be a sex show in the making. Houston ain ’ t New Orleans, you know. ”

CHAPTER 13
     
    Annie sat in her glass cubicle office editing one of many stories she needed to send over before the afternoon news meeting. Her day had started off with a couple of editors ’ meetings, lagged until after her solitary lunch at her desk, and gathered speed as the afternoon wore on. Assigning editors always had to wait for reporters to file their daily stories, some at the last possible moment. Annie couldn ’ t begrudge their last-minute work because as a reporter, she ’ d done the same thing, hoping for one last phone call to be returned. But her tension would mount as the stories piled up, and today she felt winded, as if she was running a race she couldn ’ t possibly win. She wondered if she ought to have her blood pressure checked. She looked up and saw Travis Dunbar standing outside the door.
    “ Hey, boss, ” he said. “ Can I come in? ”
    “ Sure, Travis, ” she said, trying to sound welcoming. “ What ’ s going on? ”
    “ You remember the floater in the Ship Channel? Finally got Sharpe to talk on the record about what they found. ”
    “ Was it a Russian Mafia smuggling deal? ”
    “ No, ” Travis said, plopping his bulldog body into a creaky chair. “ He thinks the body is that of a young woman from Eastern Europe. They found a label in clothes fragments that they traced to a shop in Tirana. ”
    “ Tirana? Where ’ s that? ”
    “ The capital of Albania. Has about a half-million people. Not a common hot spot for trafficking, though the Russian Mafia has tentacles everywhere in Eastern Europe. But Sharpe doesn ’ t think it was the Mafia. ”
    “ Why not? ”
    “ The body was basically in good shape. Some of the girls who get tossed overboard have broken bones and worse. The Mafia treats them like garbage and throws them away. ”
    “ So how does he think the girl got here? ”
    “ A stowaway, perhaps a girlfriend of a seaman. He ’ s trying to trace the ships that have moved in and out of the port in the last few weeks. ”
    “ Doesn ’ t sound like big news, ” Annie said. “ Maybe a six-inch story? ”
    “ All right, ” Travis said. “ But I think there ’ s something bigger behind it. It smells rotten to me. ”
    “ Keep tabs on it, but you ’ ve got lots of other things going. What about that drug lord from the Valley who landed in jail here yesterday? Can you get his lawyer to talk? ”
    “ I ’ m trying. I ’ ll write the other story and send it to you. Then I ’ ll head over to the courthouse. ”
    She resumed her editing, noticing it was almost 4 p.m. She ’ d be here really late if she didn ’ t hurry, but it was hard to concentrate with the interruptions. She noticed Maggie Mahaffey tapping on the glass. Drat, she thought. Maggie wasn ’ t