“Understood,” Stride said.
The four of them made a beeline for the door. Stride pulled it closed behind him as they left, Cordy shot an evil glance at Amanda, who winked at him and gave him a tiny wave with a crook of her index finger. He stormed away.
“What did you do to him, anyway?” Stride asked.
Amanda giggled. “I pinched his butt”
THIRTEEN
Amanda drove over to the south side of McCarran and parked in a lot where she could watch the jets landing on runway 25 Left. She was driving her aging Toyota rather than the Spyder, which she reserved for weekends and road trips. She turned her radio to the frequency of the tower and listened to the chatter between the pilots and the traffic controllers. Tierney Dargon’s United flight from San Francisco was scheduled to land in half an hour.
There were a few other plane nuts parked around her. Some people made checklists of the incoming and outgoing flights and ticked them off as they watched the planes come and go. Amanda wasn’t that extreme. She just liked to sit here with a latte and a cigarette. She didn’t smoke often, not anymore, but she allowed herself one cigarette when she came here and kept a pack in the glove compartment for those occasions. Something about the smoke and the sweet coffee, and the roar of engines and the smell of jet fuel, made time stop for her, like a kind of hypnosis, when her mind could wander. She didn’t even take Bobby here. This was her place.
She had found it when she came to the city from Portland five years ago. Back when she was Jason Gillen, a smart Oregon cop who became a smart Vegas cop. Back when she was thinking about killing herself. She remembered sitting here with her gun on the seat beside her, wondering if she had the guts to do it, and finally realizing that it took no guts at all to run away. The courage was in sticking around and facing down the people who were afraid of her because she was wired differently from others.
So Jason died, and Amanda was born.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, exhaled a trail of smoke out the window, and smiled as she saw the lipstick ring on the white wrapper.
People always thought that it was about sex. That to be her, the way she was, she had to walk on the wild side. That she could only do that to her body, and gulp down hormones every day, if she were obsessed with sex. They never believed her when she told them that she and Bobby were pretty conservative at heart, in or out of the bedroom. They were the ones who were obsessed with sex. They were titillated by her. Aroused by her. Men and women alike. They wanted to know how she did it, in what positions, and how often. They wanted to see her. Taste her.
The worst were the he-men on the force. People like Cordy. She got under their manly skin. They were so scared of the fact that she turned them on that they ran like hell from her. It used to bother her. Now she had fun with it. It was her way of showing them that she did have guts, that she wasn’t going away. Maybe it was a little payback, too.
She knew the jokes hadn’t stopped, just gone underground, because the brass had told the other cops to stay cool. Seven-figure settlements had a way of making people behave, at least to her face. No one wanted her around, though. She knew that. They ignored her, talked behind her back, and waited for her to take the money and run. It killed them when she stayed.
She had been worried about Stride. She could deal with the others for the most part, but a bad partner could make your life miserable. Worst of all, he was a heartlander, from the Midwest. She thought of people from the ag belt as narrow-minded, quick to judge. She figured he would look at her as if she were an alien. But Stride surprised her. She understood what Serena saw in him. He was attractive, no doubt about that, but he also seemed to have a soul a mile deep. Once he got over the shock, he simply treated her like a person. He was curious-everyone was curious-but she felt respect from him for what was in her brain, not what was between her legs.
That was rare.
Beyond the fence, a Southwest 737 angled gracefully upward and soared toward the sky. She knew that most of the people on the plane were going home, with lighter wallets, leaving the fantasy world behind and winging back to reality. To her, it looked like freedom. One day, she might really take the money, climb into the Spyder with Bobby, and run. Not because she couldn’t take it, but because she wanted to be somewhere where no one knew her, where people didn’t stare.
Bobby deserved that, too. He probably didn’t tell her half the shit he got for living with her, or the abuse he took, but he had stood by her and slept beside her for more than three years. She had avoided sex with him for months when they were dating, because she had assumed she would lose him as soon as he found out the truth. When she finally told him, she had lost him, at least for those two weeks while he came to grips with what he felt. Then he had come back, and he had stuck around, never once asking her to be anything but what she was.
She had never wanted to have the SRS surgery, to take the final step. She was afraid that things would go wrong, that the parts wouldn’t work, that she would be left with no sexual sensation whatever. She didn’t need it to define her as a woman. She had been willing to have it for Bobby, though, to make herself a little more normal for him-except he said no, that he didn’t want it, not unless she wanted it for herself. She loved him for that.
It sounded so appealing, to run away with him someday, to escape all the cruelty. San Francisco maybe, where Tierney was coming from. No one would give them a second look there. Not in the City by the Gay.
Amanda tossed the cigarette butt out of the car. She laughed at herself and shook her head. She was as guilty of fantasy as the people on the plane. The truth was, she would never leave.
The radio crackled to life. United 1580 was cleared to land.
Amanda fired up the engine. Tierney Dargon was coming home.
She spotted Tierney in the baggage claim area, standing apart from the crowd, a cell phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear. She was stick-thin and pretty, with a loose pink top that let her breasts sway and rose-colored tight pants, but other than her Vegas body, she wasn’t making any effort to look glamorous. Her brown hair hung limply to her shoulders in a mess of curls. She hadn’t put on makeup or jewelry, except for a gold bracelet that she twisted nervously around her wrist with her other hand. The whites of her eyes were lined with red.
Amanda began to approach her but found her way blocked by a giant Samoan in a Hawaiian shirt, obviously a bodyguard. She discreetly flashed her badge. The man asked if she could wait, then lumbered over to Tierney and whispered in her ear. The girl studied Amanda, murmured something to the Samoan, and went back to her phone call.
“Mrs. Dargon wonders if she could talk to you in her limo,” the bodyguard told Amanda. “It’s waiting outside. There’s a picture of Mr. Dargon on the door.”
Amanda shrugged. “Okay.”
She found the limo without any problem. Samoa had obviously radioed to the driver, who was waiting for her with the door open. He was in his sixties, and he tipped his black hat to Amanda as she got in.
’There’s champagne if you’d like,” he told her. “We have muffins, too, but don’t take the blueberry oatmeal muffin. That’s Mrs. Dargon’s favorite.”
Amanda smiled. “She eats carbs?”
The driver laughed but didn’t reply. He closed the door with Amanda inside.
She had never been in a stretch before. Her ass slid all over the leather seat as she tried to get comfortable. A television was built into a corner unit toward the front of the car, with a stereo and DVD player on shelves underneath. A rap video was playing, with the sound muted. The opposite corner included a refrigerator and a circular glass serving tray with sweets, fruits, an open bottle of champagne, and a carafe of juice.