Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  Although night never really had a firm grip here. It was the land of the neon sun.

  He stared down at Boni’s old casino, across the street, its roof about ten stories below him. The building itself was black, stripped of life. On street level, a hurricane fence and a makeshift plywood wall gated off the property; no more hotel guests, no more high rollers. In the weeks since the property closed, the demolition teams had already moved inside, ripped out the guts, drilled holes in the walls to plant cylinders of dynamite. In another couple of weeks, with a push of a button, a simple electrical charge, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.

  Stride thought of the photo in the newspaper. Girls onstage. Men in tuxedos. Martinis. Money. All ghosts now.

  He let his eyes travel across floor after floor, all of them quiet and dark.

  Except for the roof. The roof was aglow.

  It was such a Vegas thing to do, Stride thought, to leave the light on after the party was over.

  He could see scalloped Middle Eastern icons stretching across the parapet like tiny onion domes. Where the roof notched downward in the very center of the hotel, he saw faintly the tiles and trees of what must have once been the garden of the casino’s penthouse suite. All of it was reflected in the glow of the casino’s sign, which still blazed out of the darkness in flashes of red and green neon that gave the ghosts inside a reason to believe they were still flesh and blood. No one had told them it was time to go.

  Every few seconds, the sign would fade to black, and then each letter would illuminate again, one by one, as if nothing had changed, as if the floors below still pulsed with life.

  One by one, letter by letter, until the entire name blinked on top of the roof.

  Sheherezade.

  FIVE

  Serena could see that Cordy was down. When she picked him up at his apartment in North Las Vegas, he wore a hangdog expression, like a kid who had been forced to stand in the corner. As they drove back south through the city streets, he stared sourly out the window without saying a word. Even his hair was having a bad day. Normally, it was greased back on his skull like a jet-black lion’s mane, but this morning there were tufts sprouting out in odd places like grass growing through the sidewalk. Not like Cordy at all.

  “What’s up with you?” Serena asked, while they waited at a red light. There was almost no traffic at Cheyenne and Jones. They were in the short stretch of dead hours when the midnight crowd was finally in bed, and everyone else was drowsily starting to come awake.

  Cordy gave a long, dramatic sigh. “Me and Lav,” he said. “We’re history.”

  Lavender was a gorgeous black stripper who towered over Cordy by at least six inches. During the time Serena and Cordy had been partners, he had used up girlfriends like tissues, going from one to the next, each one tiny, blond, and young. Lavender was different, and when they had started dating, Serena thought Cordy might finally have met his match.

  “What happened?” Serena said.

  Cordy rolled down the window of Serena’s Mustang and spit. He cursed in Spanish, “What do you think, mama? I fucked up. I screwed one of her friends. Lav found out.”

  “Shit, you are a stupid man.”

  “I blame it on this goddamned city,” Cordy told her irritably. “All this fucking flesh. I mean, put a guy like me in a room full of sweet chilies, sooner or later I’m going to take a bite.”

  “Only this time, the bite came out of your ass.”

  She let Cordy stew silently as she turned onto Jones. She wanted to tell him that the real problem was that Cordy listened to his cock, not his brain. He wasn’t entirely wrong about Las Vegas, though. She knew that. You couldn’t put so much sin in one place and not tempt people across the line.

  Serena had spent more than two decades in Las Vegas, including ten years on the job as part of Metro. There were plenty of ex-showgirls on the force, and most people assumed Serena was one of them because of her tall, lean physique. But Serena had lived through a much less glamorous side of the city in her early days, arriving in the dead of night from Phoenix with her girlfriend Deidre when she was sixteen.

  There were about a thousand roads to ruin for young girls coming to Vegas. Stripping, hooking, gambling, drinking, stealing, fighting, doing drugs, filming porno, or just winding up in the wrong man’s bed. All of them led to the same end, turning pretty young flowers into garbage floating amid the green algae of a swamp.

  Like Deidre. Her best friend, her savior, the girl she owed her life to, the girl who said she needed Serena more than anything in the world. Dead.

  Sometimes it amazed Serena that she hadn’t died, too. She had chosen a back-office job in one of the casinos when she could have made ten times that in the strip clubs, looking the way she did. She had stayed in school, first studying to get her GED, then working nights and weekends to get a degree in criminal justice at UNLV. It took her ten years to make it that far. When Deidre died, the guilt sent Serena spinning into an alcoholic stupor that cost her two years of her life and almost everything she had worked for.

  Eventually, she climbed back, dried out, and went back to college.

  She wasn’t sure where the determination came from. Maybe it was because, when she escaped from Phoenix with Deidre, she had made a promise to herself that what she had gone through at home would not destroy the rest of her life.

  But Cordy was right. Las Vegas didn’t make it easy.

  “I can make you laugh,” Serena told him.

  “No way. I’m in mourning. I’m wearing black.”

  Serena glanced at him. Cordy wore a black silk shirt with two buttons undone, tapered black dress pants, and buffed leather shoes-but that had nothing to do with Lavender. Cordy was a creature of style, a small but slick package. Serena herself liked to be casual, not fancy, wearing jeans, T-shirts, and weathered cowboy boots on most days.

  When she dressed up, she knew, she could pop men’s eyes out. She remembered meeting Stride for the first time at the airport in Duluth, when she flew in as part of the investigation of a girl’s murder in Vegas. On a whim, she had worn one of her hot outfits, baby blue leather pants, silver belt, midriff-baring T-shirt, black leather raincoat. That was the only time she had seen Jonny at a loss for words.

  “Twenty bucks,” Serena said.

  “You’re on. I ain’t laughing today.”

  “Sawhill put Jonny on the street with Amanda,” she told him.

  Cordy laughed despite himself. “Oh, mama! Amanda? You know, her breasts are even bigger than yours.”

  “News flash, Cordy. She’s got equipment bigger than yours, too. Or so I hear.”

  “It gives me the creeps just thinking about it.” He added, “Hey, how do you know that Amanda’s boyfriend is a couch potato?”

  “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 see
m 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.”

  Serena had seen half-eaten corpses in the desert without her stomach turning over, but something about the damage to the car-not much damage at all, really, for what it had done-left her swallowing back bile. “Good work, Tom,” she told him somberly.

  Cordy was silent, but his copper skin paled. He kicked the ground with the toe of his shoe, his hands shoved in his pockets. Only Crawford seemed unaffected and even enthusiastic about what he had found-but he was young, and this was a big deal, the kind of story he’d be telling the other rookies for the next year. He hadn’t been in the Summerlin street last Friday afternoon to see Peter Hale’s broken body, blood puddling under his head. To hear his mother wailing. To see the vacant, dead grief in his father’s eyes.

  It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood, the kind where both parents had good jobs and twelve-year-old boys were latchkey kids, taking the bus home after school, letting themselves inside to watch television and play video games. Linda and Carter Hale thought they were lucky. Linda Hale didn’t work. Peter had someone to open the door for him after school. He had been playing outside in the driveway, tossing a tennis ball against the door and catching it in his mitt, when Linda Hale heard the thump all the way inside the kitchen. And she knew, the way any mother knows that something catastrophic has happened. She found Peter outside, half on the sidewalk, half on the street. No one around. No witnesses. The most they found was a maid three blocks away who caught a glimpse of a blue car racing through the neighborhood around
the time of the accident. The lab was dragging its feet figuring out the model from the blue paint and the pieces of grill. Serena knew that didn’t matter now. It was an Aztek. It was this car.

  “Did you search inside the car?” Serena asked.

  “No, ma’am, I sure didn’t,” Crawford assured her. “The car was locked, and that wouldn’t be procedure anyway. I didn’t touch a thing.”

  “How about running the plates?”

  “Well, that I did do. Yes, ma’am. The car is registered to Mr. Lawrence Busby. He doesn’t have a sheet. Thirty-four, African American, six-foot-two, two hundred forty-five pounds. Or that’s what his driver’s license says. Mr. Busby reported the car stolen at eight thirty last Friday night.”

  “Several hours after the accident,” Serena said. “Isn’t that convenient?”

  Crawford offered her a shy, country-boy smile. “I thought so myself. A little too convenient. That’s why I offered Mr. Busby a free ride over here to collect his vehicle.”

  “You did what?” Cordy asked.

  “I got the supervisor to send a patrol car over to Mr. Busby’s home on Bonanza. You know, in case he decided to make like a prairie dog and scamper. Then I called him. Told him we had found his car and we’d be happy to bring him over to the scene. He should be here in a couple minutes.”

  “You’re one smart Texan, Officer Crawford,” Serena told him.

  “Thank you, ma’am. That’s what my mama says. My wife, she’s not so sure.”

  “How did Busby sound on the phone?”

  “Well, the first thing he asked was whether there was any damage,” Crawford said. “Guess that’s natural, but I thought it was interesting. I told him it was nothing a good body shop couldn’t make go away.”

  Serena thought about it, trying to put herself in Busby’s shoes. He’s just killed a kid. He’s afraid someone saw the car, or that he left evidence behind at the scene that would lead them right to his doorstep. Another perp who watches too much CSI. So he ditches the car at the mall, then hops the bus home and reports it stolen. If he’s lucky, no one ever connects it to the accident. If they do, he’s laid the blame on someone else.