Stride was on the highway by the edge of the wilderness. It was the chase dream again, where he was running after a girl he couldn’t find, but this time, after pursuing her along the trail and hearing her laughter luring him on, he did find her. He found Rachel in the middle of a clearing, dead in a ruby pool of her own blood. Surrounding her, looking down at the body, were Cindy, Andrea, and Serena. All of their hands were stained in red.
“Who did this?” he shouted.
Each of the women, in turn, raised a finger and pointed at him.
He started awake.
Serena was next to him, reading the airline magazine. She looked at him. “Bad dream?”
“Sort of. How did you know?”
“You called out Rachel’s name.”
Stride laughed. He rubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, trying to escape the fuzzy feeling of waking up. “Did I really?”
“No. I’m teasing. You just looked like you were somewhere you didn’t want to be.”
He leaned over and kissed her. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”
Stride could feel the plane descending. He craned his neck to look out the window, but their seats didn’t allow a view of the city. He saw only a bright glow suggesting an enormous source of light somewhere nearby. As they touched down, he could see little in the darkness but the guiding lights of the taxiways. When the plane turned toward the terminal, however, he caught a glimpse of a shimmering gold tower, angled toward him like a boomerang.
“That’s Mandalay Bay,” Serena said. “Amazing, huh?”
As they exited the plane and made their way inside the gate, Stride stopped, assaulted by the flood of color and neon that flashed everywhere. He couldn’t help but smile, thinking of Serena in the quiet Duluth airport, comparing the terminal to the spectacle here in Vegas. It was another world.
In the baggage claim area, he noticed a man detach from the crowd and approach them. Serena gave the man a quick hug.
“Jonathan Stride, this is Cordy Angel, my partner.”
Stride shook his hand. “That was a terrific break, making the connection between the body and the boyfriend.”
“I am an extraordinary detective,” Cordy said, winking.
“A lucky bastard is more like it,” Serena said.
Cordy turned to Serena. “We’ve got trailer-man staked out. He left earlier this afternoon and drove to the liquor store. Got himself stocked with more gin. Then he went home, hasn’t moved since.”
Serena scowled. “Shit, that means he’ll probably be incoherent tomorrow. I wanted him to have at least one foot in the real world.”
“I don’t think he spends a lot of time there.”
“Well, we can always sober him up at the station,” Serena said. “How about the warrant? You got that?”
Cordy nodded. “We can go in and tear the place apart. But I’ve been there. It ain’t going to be me going through that pit of a trailer.”
Stride interrupted them. “Did you find out any more about this guy’s background with Rachel? Or Christi, I guess I should say.”
Cordy smoothed down his slick black hair. “Nada. His so-called shop is unlicensed. Lavender only saw him once and said Christi never talked about him. He’s one of those Vegas drifters, came from nowhere, going nowhere.”
“Well, he had to come from somewhere to land a girl like Christi,” Serena said. “We’ll head out with a team first thing in the morning. Can you drop us off at my place?”
Cordy raised an eyebrow. “Whatever you want.”
Stride deliberately didn’t meet Cordy’s stare, which was probably an admission of guilt as far as the other cop was concerned.
“You ever been to Vegas?” Cordy asked.
Stride shook his head. “First time.”
“A Vegas virgin,” Cordy said, chuckling.
Stride sat in the back seat of Cordy’s PT Cruiser, staring out the window agog at the parade of mammoth casinos on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard. Cordy didn’t want to take the Strip, but Serena insisted, to give Stride a view of the city. They were stalled in bumper-to-bumper Saturday night traffic, crawling between Tropicana and Flamingo. On his left, Serena pointed out, was the Monte Carlo. On the right was the Aladdin. Up ahead was Paris, then the Bellagio, then Bally’s. The size of each property overwhelmed him.
He couldn’t believe the heat. When they stepped out of the airport, it hit him in the face like a fire, sucking oxygen from his lungs. It was night, but the temperature still hovered near ninety. He could taste desert grit in his mouth with each breath. Fortunately, Cordy had the air conditioner at full power, and it was now cold enough inside the car to make him shiver.
“Greatest city in the world,” Cordy said proudly. “Who’d want to live anywhere else? This is the tops, man.”
“People live here?” Stride asked, only half seriously.
“Now, now, Jonny,” Serena murmured. She glanced back over the front seat and winked at him.
“You know what makes this town tick?” Cordy asked, as he pounded the horn at a limousine cutting in front of him.
“Oh, shit, not the breast thing,” Serena said.
As if he hadn’t heard her, Cordy explained, “Las Vegas is all about breasts, man.”
Stride laughed. “What?”
“Breasts! It’s true. You see more breasts in this city than anywhere else on earth, okay? That’s what makes it special. That’s what gives Vegas its character. It’s not gambling, it’s not drinking, it’s not eighty million hotel rooms. It’s walking down the street and having all these breasts quivering like Jell-O in front of you. All shapes. All sizes. Spilling out of everything they wear. Cotton, Lycra, nylon, bikini, tankini, halter, I don’t care what, you know? Just so long as it’s tight or see-through or shows lots of skin or lets you see their nipples, they’ll wear it. Women come here so they can show off their breasts, and all the men walk around so horny they can’t see straight.”
“Cordy’s something of a sociologist of tits,” Serena explained dryly.
“Am I wrong? You tell me if I’m wrong.”
Serena didn’t have a chance to reply. Three women in their twenties, two blondes and a brunette, ran through the stalled traffic in front of them. The brunette passed closest to Cordy’s cruiser, and Stride’s eyes were drawn instinctively to her chest. She wore a low-cut T-shirt, from which her breasts overflowed. Cordy honked the horn and gave her a thumbs-up. The girl stuck out her tongue at him and wagged it lasciviously.
Serena sighed. “I didn’t say you were wrong.”
“Uh-huh. Good thing, mama. The only reason this town can put so many strippers through college is that all of the men are so wired from watching the rest of the girls, they’ll pay anything to see what’s underneath.”
Serena just shook her head.
When they passed Flamingo, traffic loosened slightly. Serena pointed out the next wave of mega-resorts, stretching from Caesars at the southern end to the Stardust in the north. As they passed the Mirage, the resort’s street-side volcano exploded into action, cascading columns of water, steam, and fire into the air before a crowd of gawkers. He had never seen a city that pulsed with life the way Vegas did. The sensation was electric, watching the streams of people flowing in and out of the casinos and jostling to cross the street. Cordy was right: There were loose, jiggling breasts everywhere, plus the smell of sex, cigarettes, and money.
Even so, Stride noticed that the glitzy aura of the Strip faded quickly the farther north they went. Instead of expensive casinos catering to high rollers, he noticed porn shops and massage parlors, bars with nickel video poker signs, and motels with burned-out neon signs. The crowds of tourists on the sidewalks thinned; most of them were smart enough not to explore these neighborhoods. He saw hookers on every corner, grinning at them from behind garish lipstick and dyed hair. Several homeless people slept in doorways.
“No volcanoes here,” he murmured.
Serena shook her head. “We call this the Naked City. And that’s not a breast joke. You’ve got the Stratosphere tower, but all around it, there’s more drugs and murder here than anywhere else in the city.”
After another mile, they turned off the Strip on Charleston, leaving both the casinos and the Naked City behind them as they headed west. Out here the town looked like any other inner-ring suburb, with strip malls, discount stores, and chain restaurants. They reached Serena’s town house complex in less than ten minutes. The gated community was a beehive of bone white, two-story stucco buildings with bright red roofs. Serena waved at the guard, who opened the electronic gate and let Cordy’s Cruiser slide in. Cordy, who was obviously familiar with the grounds, navigated a bewildering maze of intersecting roads and driveways, pulling up to a unit at the far back of the complex.
“Home sweet home, mama,” he announced.
Stride and Serena recovered their luggage from the trunk. Heat radiated from the pavement. The stiff, dry breeze out of the mountains offered no relief. Stride felt the urge to wipe his brow, but he realized the arid landscape was too dry even for sweat.
“Let’s meet here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” Serena told Cordy. “Alert the search team to meet us at the site at ten.”
Cordy winked at Stride. “You sure you want to stay here? We could hit some clubs I know.”
“Good night, Cordy,” Serena said.
“But hell, mama, how can you let him stay in your boring town house? It’s his first time in the city. The man deserves to have some fun.”
“He’ll have fun,” Serena told him.