"Population 1,201,800, it says here," J. T. continued, "but they say Vegas is growing by leaps and bounds, the fastest-growing city in America, a Mecca for jobs. Capital is-"
"Carson City, I know. Minimum age for casino gambling is twenty-one, driving sixteen."
The cab ride was hot and jostling and bone-jarring, the machine obviously in need of new shocks, and the Nevada heat created an ovenlike atmosphere, making Jessica Coran wish that she had the natural protection God gave an armadillo. With her natural defenses up, she actually felt armored and apart from all that was going on around her, felt like an armored knight in woolen underwear riding a cantankerous horse, in fact. It had been a long and difficult flight on the Delta jetliner, due in large part to the scarcity of legroom. They'd booked late, failing any chance at first class, both she and J. T. not sure until the last minute that they wanted to attend this year's function.
"Las Vegas, Nevada, of all the damned places on the continent. Why is the most prestigious forensic medical group in the country meeting here?" Jessica grumbled to hear herself, adding for the driver's benefit, "You ever hear of air-conditioning? Crank that thing up."
"I am so sorry, ma'am," the man replied in his most polite, most condescending tone, ''but it needs repair, and I'm putting three niсos through school, and my wife… she is on disability."
This made Jessica frown and close her eyes. Beside her, J. T., whose lopsided, boyish grin leaped ahead of his reply, said, "If you'll just temper that cool, critical eye with a bit of patience, Jess, we're almost there. After a change, you're going to love Vegas. Wait'll you get a look at the Luxor and the Excalibur and the MGM Grand hotels. You'll see Vegas is more than a collection of casinos along a strip, believe me."
Although J. T. was in his early forties, his dark hair, smooth skin, and energetic step, along with a quick, alert eye and a great sense of humor as well as a questioning, probing mind, were all qualities that made him seem younger; Jessica liked these qualities in her friend and colleague. Together, they had made a "mean team" for the FBI over the years. J. T. was her ever-faithful friend and collaborator against some of America's most horrific criminals. As a result, they had shared information, experience, and sometimes nightmares regarding such killers as Mad Matthew Matisak, Robert Kowona, the Hawaiian maniac, the Florida Night Crawler, the Claw of New York, and the New Orleans Queen of Hearts killer.
It had been at J. T.'s insistence that she had agreed to accompany him to the annual Forensic Science Association of America convention, ostensibly to seek out some much-needed R and R for both of them. J. T. had been ecstatic at the idea of seeing Las Vegas again, having visited a few years before with his then wife, whom he'd since divorced. "Some of my best memories are of this city," he'd confided earlier on the plane as they circled the city in search of clearance from the tower. ''My dad used to fly us out here at least once every few years."
She had replied that her best memories were of Greece and Rome. The recent separation from her lover, James Parry, still felt like a barrage to her soul; she'd been unable to get him from her mind. Her depression over her and Jim's situation hovered over every thought like an albatross, for when Jim had once again left her for his homeland of Hawaii and his duties there, she had vowed to find a way for them to be together, but the way had not materialized…
Here in the limo, J. T. reached over, took her hand in his, and squeezed it; he gave her hand a firm little shake and pointed out the back window at a cowboy on a horse riding down one of the main thoroughfares, adding to the congestion of bumper-to-bumper traffic. "There's one cowboy's got the right idea," he chimed, his voice firing off sparkles of enthusiasm for this Mecca on the desert floor.
Outside, in the blistering heat, construction sites all around them sent up strange, ghostlike clouds rising with the gusting, late-afternoon wind, each creating whirling dervishes of candy wrappers and discarded plastic bags and other debris. This would be trailed after by another, less encumbered, yellow dustbowl-like apparition made of sand and wind, yet the wind had no effect on the heat, except to slam it about.
"Come on, Jess. You'll have fun; maybe it'll get your mind off Parry and-"
"Leave Parry out of this," she sternly scolded, her eyes dimming.
"-and your other problems," he weakly finished. "Hell, cut loose a little, seize the moment, look around you! This place is a glitter dome at night! That's your problem. You haven't really experienced Vegas till you've experienced it by night, dinner clubs, shows, Broadway-style revues, dancing. You've got to give it a chance
… loosen up…"
"Maybe I'll do that," she challenged, staring out at the dust-laden streets of Las Vegas, across which desert sand continued to sweep from the multiple construction sites of this modern desert boomtown.
Odd, Jessica thought, how this place was growing both upward and outward: newer, taller, grander, gaudier casinos, show houses, hotels, and circuses being built in a city already overcrowded with so many casinos and lavish extravaganzas of one sort or another. There seemed no possible space nor need for another in this mechanized, industrialized contrivance of a holy temple to which the human race paid homage in the form of coin.
But Jessica's primary, thoughts wafted across her own shabby life. She was sick to death at having had to part from James Parry again. Their time together in the Mediterranean had been exquisite, but far too brief. They had talked for days about how they could work out the thorny problems of their long-distance love affair, but very little had been resolved. Rather, they were more deeply in love than ever and just as far apart as ever-he in Hawaii, she in D.C.
Two people couldn't get much farther apart than that, and Jessica, of late, had come reluctantly, onerously to the conclusion that she would never marry; and more sadly, more impaling to her heart, she had come around to accepting the fact that life, and whatever forces attended her fate, had never intended her to ever have children.
It was a conclusion that, though necessary to reach, to put behind her, remained no less painful for its finality. It was what her friend and favorite psychiatrist, Dr. Donna Lemonte, would term a not atypical female reaction to an expected and even instinctive event-having children. Almost every woman's inner soul and drive allowed for that tugging refrain of the womb, a refrain that had come down through the ages, paradoxically or not, genetic predisposition or not, that told a woman she was incomplete until she fulfilled the circle of life that she-created as she was, with the requisite equipment-was so much a part of. Jessica knew such thoughts were offensive to some women who proclaimed they need not have children to be whole, but for her and she imagined most, these thoughts were as natural as tears. You're born to give birth, from life comes birth; you can't dispute the fact that it's in you to do so, that you are equipped to conceive, incubate, nurture, and feed a growing life within you. You're "bred" to believe it's part of your identity to have children, you're raised on the belief. So, naturally, most if not all women either had to have children or confront the phantom child they failed to bring from within: face down the guilt and remorse and move on in an atmosphere of acceptance or be eaten alive by the penitence of regret.
Religious leaders and theologians claimed that while it was a powerful and painful process, guilt was a good, natural instinct, without which mankind would have nothing to clutch on to in times of darkness and loss. There was the belief that it was one's own fault somehow when a loved one committed suicide, or that the loss of a family member to a fire or cancer or to some other disease was due to a punishment meted out by a god one had somehow wronged over a lifetime. It all seemed somewhat foolish to Jessica, knowing as she did that disease and suicidal tendencies and fire had scientific causes, that they were actually more natural in nature and in the species than was guilt. But in a larger, social sense, maybe the theologians were right.