Girls in the next room. That bothered Izzy. Alicia only had two beds in her large house. She’d converted one of her four bedrooms to a gym and another to a computer room. So Amy had to decide who to sleep with and, since the girl had spent the first four years of her life sleeping with Izzy, Izzy assumed they’d be sharing the big bed. But Amy said she’d be more comfortable sleeping with her friend.
Izzy never would have suspected someone as beautiful as Alicia of being gay. She looked like every man’s fantasy. And she never would have known if the girls hadn’t told her how they’d tricked Tucker Wayne into letting Amy go without a fight.
She smiled up at the dark ceiling. That was actually pretty smart. Tucker had probably been flattered. She could just see him with his chest puffed up, bragging to his friends about this gorgeous lesbian who had chosen him to straighten her out.
She wondered if Tucker could call Lila off. And if he could, would he? He’d said on the phone that they were even now, so Izzy thought not. Amy had stolen from him.
“ Damn,” she muttered. She’d left home so quickly, she’d forgotten to take her guns. She hated guns, was thought of as an anti-gun nutcase by all who knew her, even though she’d been born into a family of hunters. Her father and brothers had all carried. She’d been shooting as long as she’d been walking. But when she’d helped work on two girls who’d suffered multiple gunshot wounds, during her second week as an intern, she’d changed. Those girls died and along with them Izzy’s love of shooting had died, as well.
But Lee, her husband and the love of her life, was best friend to her brothers, hunted with them, fought with them, loved them almost as much as he’d loved her. When he’d died, she gave her brothers all of his guns, save the Glock, which she kept in her safe. That safe also housed a wallet gun her nephew Jeff got at a gun show in Las Vegas.
Two years ago her family had gathered at her house for Thanksgiving and later that evening, Jeff had had a little too much too drink. When she’d helped him up to the bed in one of her guest rooms, he’d grabbed the pillow, hugged it, rolled onto his side and passed out. She saw the bulge his wallet made in his back pocket, so she took it out, thinking to set it on the nightstand next to the bed, when she discovered it wasn’t a wallet at all. It was a small gun, a little Ruger, cleverly concealed in a leather holster resembling a wallet.
She’d taken the gun, put it in the safe along with her passport, other important papers and Lee’s Glock. Jeff, along with everyone else in her family, knew how she felt about guns, so in the morning he didn’t mention it. Neither did she.
As much as she hated guns, they’d come in awful handy if Lila Booth were to catch up to them. She sat up, heard the dog stir. He’d been sleeping by the side of the bed, but he was on all fours now, alert.
Alicia lived on Ralston, near the university. Izzy could walk over to Sierra, go up a couple blocks, then go through the park and enter her house through the back gate. If she didn’t turn on the lights, anybody who might be watching from a parked car out front wouldn’t know she was there. She could go in the back door, up the stairs to her room, open the safe, get the guns and be back well before dawn, without the girls ever knowing she’d been gone.
She sat on the edge of the bed. It had been a chilly night, but still, and she hated a stuffy room, so she’d cracked the window. She’d been lying awake in sweatpants, sweatshirt and thick running socks, as a hedge against the cold. She pulled off the sweatpants, stepped into her Levi’s. She’d been wearing her favorite Wolf Pack sweatshirt and decided to keep it on. She loved the Wolf Pack, UNR’s football team, and never missed a home game. She’d been going for years and they’d called her their good luck charm. She hoped the sweatshirt would bring her luck tonight.
She picked up her Nikes, then started for the bedroom door with the dog at her heels.
“ No, boy, you’re not coming!”
But the dog was thinking along different lines. As soon as she’d opened the bedroom door, he shot through, scurried down the stairs and was waiting for her by the front door. The door was bolted shut. A sturdy bolt. Izzy thought for a second, she could lock the door after herself, but she couldn’t throw the bolt. Plus, if she did lock up after herself, how would she get back in.
She backed away from the door, went to the kitchen and on into the garage, the dog at her heels.
“ I said you’re not going!”
At the side door, she pulled back the bolt, opened the door and the dog shot out.
“ Well, maybe you are going.” She pulled on her Nikes and followed Hunter out into the night, thinking that at least she wasn’t leaving the front door unlocked. And she’d be back in less than an hour, so she wasn’t too worried about leaving the house unprotected.
Outside, the air was brisk, the sky clear. She looked up, sighed as she spied the Big Dipper. She’d always loved the stars and even at her age, she still gloried in the Star Wars films, even the badly reviewed, “Phantom Menace.” True Anikan should have been older in the film, but even George Lucas can’t get it right all of the time.
“ Beam me up, Scottie.” She hugged herself. Then said, as she’d done countless times before. “I just wish you were out there, that you could take me away.” It had always bothered her that some poor guy from Kansas would complain how he’d been abducted against his will, when she was down here dying to go. If they were out there, why didn’t they pick her? Like life, it was so unfair.
At Sierra, she checked her watch. A quarter to three and the street was deserted. She heard a car coming from the south and stepped behind a tree as it approached. Hunter seemed to understand, because he moved behind her as a police car cruised on by. In her past life, the life before yesterday, she considered the police as friends and protectors. She wasn’t so sure anymore.
“ Come on, boy.” She started up the street, headed in the direction the police car had gone. Two blocks later, she came to the park’s eastern entrance. The park was closed, the gate was down and barred against traffic, but a person could step around it and she did. Hunter did, too.
She’d heard that sometimes kids hung out in the park after dark, but the back of her house bordered on the park and she’d never seen them. Folks said coyotes crossed under McCarren from the hills and came into the park at night, looking to catch the wild geese that hung out there. She’d heard them often enough, but she doubted they caught many of the geese. They were tough birds.
But she didn’t see any geese as she moved along the road and that was odd, because lately they’d been out in force, slowing traffic to a crawl, daring the cars to run them down as they took their own sweet time getting out of the metal monsters’ way. Maybe they went somewhere else at night. Or maybe the coyotes were about and the geese had hightailed it elsewhere, not wanting to do battle with them.
All of a sudden she was glad she had Hunter with her. She didn’t know why, couldn’t wrap her mind around it, but she knew the dog would protect her, that that was why he’d been so eager to come along.
“ Good, boy,” she said.
The further they got into the park, the more eerie it became. The lights on the ranger station, club house and museum were out. She could see them from her bedroom window and she’d never been able to pinpoint exactly when they went off. It seemed no matter how late she stayed up reading, they were on when she fell asleep and when she woke, usually before the dawn, they were out.
There was no breeze. No sound. It was as if she were in another world. Her footsteps were silent, the sound seemingly gobbled up in the night, but when she got to the gate behind her house, the hinges creaked to beat the band, sending a screeching fingernails on blackboard sound jackknifing up her spine, chilling the back of her brain.
She stood stone still, listened to the night, trying to hear if other humans were out, wondering if she’d disturbed anyone, but the night stayed quiet. As far as she could tell, her neighbors were all safely snug in their beds, dreaming away.