Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [87]
“What is that?”
We had time, so I told her about Son Seals. And Magic Judy Henske. And Paul Butterfield. Gem was so obviously listening, really listening, that I would have gone on for a much longer time … but she finally tapped her watch and raised her eyebrows.
The metal implants in my skull didn’t set off the detectors like I’d thought they might—I wore one of those Medi-Guard ID bracelets, just in case I had to explain. I’d left the never-fired twin to the piece I’d put Dmitri down with at Gem’s, and made her leave her baby Derringer there, too, so I figured we were golden when our bags went through the conveyor without attracting any attention. But as we turned to enter the corridor to the gate, someone called out, “Sir!”
It was a guy in some kind of uniform. He motioned me over. “Sir, do you mind if we check your luggage?”
“Go ahead,” I told him.
But instead of opening my bag, he put it on a small, flat platform, then ran a wand over the outside. “Supersensitive,” he said. “It can detect the most microscopic traces.”
“Of what?” I asked him. “Cocaine?”
“No, sir,” he said, a thin smile on his face. “This tests for the presence of explosives.”
“That’s nice. So why did you decide to check my bag?”
“Well, sir, this was just a random check, you understand.”
“I understand you didn’t randomly check anybody else.”
“Honey, sssshhh. The officer is just doing his job,” Gem said, tugging at my sleeve as if she thought I was going to lose my temper.
“All finished,” the ATF cop announced. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”
As we walked away, I put my arm around Gem’s waist. She moved slightly closer to me. I dropped my hand to her bottom and gave it a hard pinch.
“Oh!” she said. Then: “What was that for?”
“Overacting,” I told her.
“Pooh!” is all I got in response. But she didn’t move away.
When you fly first-class, they let you board first, right along with the people with infants and the ones who need assistance walking. Not for me. You take your seat first, everybody passing through to the back entertains themselves by checking you out.
And they always have plenty of time to do that, because some certified hemorrhoid is guaranteed to stop by the first overhead, where they keep the magazines, and root through them one by one, taking his own sweet time before grabbing a whole fucking handful he can hoard for himself.
By the time we boarded, the overhead racks were crammed full. Gem said something to the flight attendant, and he opened a closet near the kitchen and placed our stuff inside. I climbed in first. Gem brought me a blanket and a pillow, then settled herself in.
The porthole next to me was dimpled with raindrops by the time we were cleared for takeoff, but it didn’t delay things.
Our flight attendant was a man in his forties, maybe, with carefully combed brown hair and a tight smile. He made the mistake of asking Gem if he could get her anything before takeoff. Me, I closed my eyes and tried to keep images of Pansy from opening inside my window.
When Gem finished her dozen sacks of peanuts and four bottles of water, she carefully spread a blanket over my lap. Then she slipped her hand under it.
We only had about a half-hour to catch our connecting flight, but Gem decided that was enough to make me buy her a frozen-yogurt cone topped with hot fudge.
It was just after eleven-thirty in the morning when we touched down in Albuquerque. I felt the tension go out of my body as soon as we got inside the terminal—you miss a meet with Lune, you might never get another.
I wanted to go outside to the parking lot right away, see if the tiger-striped car was where the message said it would be. But I knew better, so I just let Gem pull me through the airport until she found a place that sold a pair of boots she just had to have. That killed more than an hour. The search for just the right restaurant took some time off the clock, too. And by the time we’d finished there, we only had about twenty