Fugitive Nights(16)

Breda had never married again and tried not to date cops unless she was absolutely desperately lonely. The last time she was that lonely was shortly before she'd decided to pull the pin and take her pension.

That guy had been a gorgeous lieutenant who specialized in those intense gazes he thought were real spoon-benders. She recalled an evening in the coffee room at Hollywood Station just before her retirement, when he'd shared with her his opinions and philosophy on police discipline.

It seemed that one of the officers had been caught in his patrol car getting serviced supremely by a cop groupie who had balled half the night watch and most of the morning watch during her groupie career. In that the groupie was not a professional prostitute, Breda's lieutenant thought that firing Charlie would be a harsh penalty. After all, in the good old days (cops were big-time reminiscers) even he'd committed an indiscretion or two. Wink!

Breda said to the gorgeous lieutenant, "It's okay with me if good old Charlie skates, but tell me something, what if it was one of our female officers? How would you feel then?"

And the lieutenant, an otherwise liberated supervisor, made it plain that he'd never entertained such a thought. A female officer? Female officers were different. He'd always been pleased with his reputation as a nonsexist police supervisor (pro-choice all the way), but Breda Burrows had just pitched one up there that he couldn't hit. The fact is, it was unthinkable.

"That's unthinkable!" he said.

"Why is it?" she asked. "What if it was me out there in uniform listening to Ravel's Bolero on a ghetto blaster, getting done by some guy in the front seat of a radio car? Would you think I should be fired?"

He blinked and stroked his handsome jaw and stared at Breda Burrows, this woman he'd dated! as though she'd just offered to jerk off a gerbil. He had to come up with an answer, especially after the first words to slide out of his mouth had been the dreaded, sexist: "It's different."

"Why do you think it's different?" Breda persisted, with the little grin that annoyed him.

"Because . . ." He turned pomegranate-pink and sputtered, "because . . . your trousers would be down! And your Sam Browne! You'd be disarmed! And out of uniform!"

Breda decided to turn it off, all the bad-time memories, when she drove her Z into the driveway. Her house was a three-bedroom stucco with a composite roof, air-conditioning, two and a half bathrooms, and a yard big enough for a pool that she couldn't afford to build. Seven thousand pools around there and she had to cool off with a lawn sprinkler, but at least the house was in Cathedral Canyon, well protected from the winter winds that could blow the paint off a car and the tits off a kangaroo rat, or so the realtor had told her when she sold Breda the house back in the protected cove of the mountain range. There was no big church with spires or Gothic arches in Cathedral City. The town got its name in 1850 when an army engineer-probably drinking fermented cactus juice-saw something in the canyon that resembled a cathedral. But it was an affordable town for cops.

Breda decided she needed a bike ride, and there was enough daylight left. Aside from her Datsun Z, her other luxury in life was a Tour de France-class custom bicycle with a Holland frame. She'd saved up a long time for the bike, and had ridden it in a fifty-mile endurance run down in Baja California, from Rosarito Beach to Ensenada. Every time she'd passed a shabby Mexican kid watching that race she'd wondered if her $2,500 bike was worth more than the shack the kid lived in. Gringo guilt had ridden on her shoulder that day and slowed her down a bit.

Even in a pack of bikers she felt alone, and that was good. Breda's favorite place to ride was in the Indio Hills, where she could gain downhill speeds up to fifty miles per hour. But she never went biking without a seat pack. Her .38 two-inch revolver was in the pack.

Once, while biking on a lonely road near Desert Hot Springs, two dirtbag rednecks in a raggedy pickup truck had played bumper tag, forcing her off the road. They were the kind that rushed out to shoot a spotted owl as soon as it was designated an endangered species in order to get theirs while they had the chance. The kind who hung signs that said "Rattlesnake Farm" on their front gates to ensure privacy, as though anyone wanted to see them in the first place.

One of them had slouched toward her with a beer in his hand, and said, "Hey, pretty baby, you're a long ways from home. Put that bike in the back. We'll take you where you're goin."

Before she could get her bike back onto the asphalt, the other guy, whose only clean flesh was along his upper lip where he'd been licking off the suds, said, "Get in the truck, sweet stuff."

Breda heaved a sigh and opened her seat pack. By the time she'd bicycled away that afternoon, they were both lying face down on the sand behind their pickup, fingers interlocked behind their heads, whining about how they were only kidding. She'd told them she realized it was awfully hot, but their radiator had enough water in it and the antifreeze probably didn't taste as bad as some of the swill they'd consumed in their time, and maybe they should keep their traps shut or she just might forget to keep reminding herself that they were all fellow mammals here.