“I’m afraid to ask.”
“ ’Cause he likes to turn on the TV!” Cordy laughed until he snorted.
Serena shook her head. “Just keep that kind of crap between us, muchacho. “Jonny seems to like her. And hand over twenty bucks.”
“Uh-huh. Speaking of which, there’s a pool going on Stride. Most people think he’ll crash and burn in a couple of months.”
“Jonny’s as tough as they come,” Serena said.
“Yeah, but this is Vegas.”
Serena didn’t want to argue. Not because she thought Cordy was right, but because she could think of a lot of reasons why Stride might walk away that had nothing to do with the job.
“I suppose there’s a pool on me, too,” she said. “On whether Jonny and I will make it.”
“The odds on you are about as long as keno,” Cordy said. “Most of the guys, they still think you’re Barbed Wire.”
Serena winced, but only because Cordy’s words struck a nerve. Her reputation on the force-well deserved-was as the cool beauty, smart and unapproachable. Barbed Wire. She was the girl who cut men off at the knees, skewering egos with a sharp joke and building a tall fence around her emotions. A sexy package that no one could seem to unwrap.
As far as Serena was concerned, that was okay. She had never trusted men. In Phoenix, as her mother sank into a cocaine addiction, her father had skipped town, leaving Serena to fall through the ground along with her mother. They wound up living in an apartment near the airport with a half-Indian drug dealer named Blue Dog. Most of the time, her mother owed him money for her drugs. Serena became the currency.
She didn’t like to think about those days. The best defense was pretending they didn’t exist. Like Pandora’s box. Better to keep the lid closed and not see what was inside, because there was no going back. So she became a closed book to anyone who wanted to get near her. At thirty-six, she had never had a serious relationship, never really missed it, never really wanted it.
Until Jonny.
She didn’t know how Stride had broken down her walls so easily. Maybe because he was so unlike the men in Vegas, not slick, not a game-player who wore the face he thought you wanted to see. He was a cloudy pool of emotions himself, just like her, where you couldn’t see the bottom. That depth attracted her immediately. When he let her inside his own walls, told her about losing his first wife to cancer, her heart cracked into pieces. They barely knew each other, and yet she knew he had fallen for her, the real way, the hard way. And she had fallen for him.
But it was one thing to make love on the beach at midnight in Minnesota. That was a fantasy. Back here, this was life. This was day to day.
Pandora’s box was open. She didn’t like what she saw. Goblins from her past, flying out, following her in the dark. She prided herself on being tough as nails, but lately, she sometimes felt like a frightened teenager again. Frightened about love, about sex, about the future. She was more confused than she had been in years.
She had only told Jonny bits and pieces about her past and about what was happening to her now. Partly, she was used to relying on herself and dealing with her problems alone. She didn’t want help. Partly, she didn’t want to scare him away by showing him that she wasn’t solid to the core, that her armor had been pierced.
Besides, she knew he was struggling, too, trying to find his way. Homeless. That was as much as he’d been able to say to her. He felt homeless. Serena understood how he felt, being displaced from the only life he had known, but hearing him talk like that set off all kinds of warning bells in her mind. As if one day he would decide that home was somewhere else, away from Vegas, away from her.
Serena pulled into an open-air lot on the north side of the Meadows Mall. It was her mall, just a few miles from her town home; she had shopped there for years. No talking statues and giant aquariums, like at Caesars. No stores catering to celebrities who dropped a hundred thousand dollars a visit. It was just Macy’s and Foot Locker and RadioShack, the kind of ordinary stores where ordinary people shopped. Serena loved it, because the whole mall felt normal, like it could be dropped into any other suburb in any other city. There was nothing Vegas about it.
At five in the morning, the parking lot was a vast, empty stretch of pavement, just a handful of lonely cars spread out like pins on a map. The streetlights were still on, throwing pale circles of light on the ground, but dawn was near. Halfway across the lot, a patrol car was waiting for them. Its headlights were on, its engine running. As they pulled alongside, Serena saw that the officer at the wheel had his window rolled down, his arm dangling outside, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. The car they had come to see was parked twenty yards away, a midnight blue Pontiac Aztek.
Seeing them, the policeman scrambled out of his patrol car and reached back in to stub out his cigarette. He was gangly and tall, and his uniform was baggy at the shoulders. His blond hair was cut as if his mother still sat him in a chair and clipped him with a bowl over his head. He kept picking at his long chin as if he had a pimple that wouldn’t go away. Serena didn’t think he could be more than twenty years old, and she realized that he was both terribly earnest and terribly nervous.
Serena got out of her Mustang. “Good morning, officer,” she said. “You got us out here pretty early.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he told her, with a Texas twang in his voice. “I do realize that, and I’m real sorry. I’m Officer Tom Crawford, ma’am.”
Serena introduced herself and Cordy, and Crawford did everything but curtsy.
“How long have you been on the force, Tom?” Serena asked.
“Oh, coming on a month, I guess.”
Pretending to rub his eye, Cordy glanced at Serena and mouthed, “Shit.”
Serena shook her head and sighed. Rookies.
“Well, Tom, you’ve got a blue car here. We had a witness who thought she saw a blue car speeding away after the hit-and-run on the boy, but that was in Summerlin, which is several miles and a few tax brackets away from here.”
Crawford nodded, still scratching his chin. “Yes, ma’am, I read the incident report about that boy Peter Hale and the hit-and-run in Summerlin. Terrible thing. Word for word, I did. And I’ve had my eyes open all week for a blue car. See, we got a call overnight from the security company that patrols these lots, and they said this here car hadn’t been touched in at least a week or so, and they were figuring it was abandoned. They were planning on having it towed, and they wanted to know if we wanted to take a look at it first. The overnight super, he thought we should just let them yank it, but I heard it was blue, see, and we’re just a whiz straight down the parkway from Summerlin, and that accident was just about a week ago. So I thought it was worth checking out.”
“It took the security company a week to call it in?” Serena asked, shaking her head.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so. They rotate a lot, is what I think, and the guy who made the rounds tonight hadn’t been in the lot since last weekend.”
“Go on,” Serena told him, yawning, and hoping she hadn’t been dragged out of bed for nothing.
“Well, when I came out here, the first thing I did was check the front of the car. And sure enough-well, let me just show it to you.”
With loping strides, Officer Crawford guided them around to the front of the Aztek and used the big steel flashlight on his belt to illuminate the car. Serena sucked in her breath. The dead center of the hood was bowed, the grill punched in. The shell of the bumper was cracked and the license plate twisted as if it were on its way to becoming a paper airplane.
Crawford got down on his knees. “If you look real close here, you can see fibers stuck on the grill. There’s other stuff, too, could be skin and blood.”