“Can we install a camera in the changing room?” Jack asked.

“Hell, no! How do you think these people, most of ‘em trying to take off weight, would react to discovering they’d been on camera? There’s no way to put one in there that no one would notice.” But I could tell the idea had caught Mel’s interest. “If I didn’t want to take the thief to court…” he said slowly. “If I just wanted to catch the bastard and fire him…”

“The camera would never come up,” Jack said. “We could take it out, destroy the tape, no one the wiser. I can run by Sneaky Pete’s. I’m not crazy about the idea of filming people who don’t know about it, but it would work.”

“So, do I need Lily?” Mel Brentwood eyed me like I was a gunslinger who might draw on him.

“Sure. There are things cameras won’t catch,” Jack said. “And we have yet to figure out a way to disguise them.”

“Okay, girl,” Mel said, whacking me on the shoulder to get me fired up for the big game. “You start work as soon as you can get your tights on.”

I eyed him balefully. I wasn’t happy about working for Mel, but I’d worked for plenty of people I hadn’t liked. I told myself to ease up. Politically correct he wasn’t, but Mel would pay Jack to do this, Jack would have another client who would call him when he got in a jam, and Jack’s business would prosper.

So there I was, in Marvel Gym, in glorious leopard print Spandex, making sure guests swiped their green plastic cards as they came in so their presence would be recorded on the computer. I handed out small towels to the guests who’d forgotten theirs, I checked the supply of bath-sized towels in the locker rooms, and I sold the expensive “health” drinks displayed in the cooler behind the counter. Those tasks were constants, but every day there was some specific problem to solve. In the first hour I worked today, I unstuck the weight-setting peg on a leg-extension device. Then I discreetly sprayed cleaner on a weightlifting bench after a particularly sweaty guest had used it, and got the vacuum out to suck up clods of dirt tracked in by a guest who’d been running in the mud yesterday.