Levitating Las Vegas(12)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Her vexation melted away as he glanced at her from across the seat with guileless brown eyes that sagged a bit at the corners. He’d worked all day, he’d had to wait until her parents’ show ended at 10 p.m. to take her out—and then she hit on the real problem.

“I’ll bet you worked that suicide today, didn’t you?” she asked. “That girl who jumped off the Hoover Dam?”

He turned forward. The traffic light reflected red in his eyes. For a split second, he was a handsome demon.

“Fuck this,” he grunted. He reached between them to flick a switch on the dashboard. The police siren wailed to life, startling Holly. Blue lights from his cop car leaked down the roof and spilled across the windshield. The cars in the middle of the intersection paused, then inched backward to make room for him. He stomped the gas and sped through the traffic light. Half a block down, he reached to the dashboard again to flick off the siren.

He put his hand on the knee of Holly’s jeans as if he’d done nothing unusual, which . . . maybe he hadn’t. Maybe all cops used their sirens and risked causing an accident just because they didn’t want to wait at a light.

“Sorry I stopped listening and drifted off like that,” he said. “I need to leave work at work. What were you saying?”

Holly sighed. Rob wasn’t going to share secret cop info with her. Since she’d seen the suicide reported on TV that morning, she’d replayed it over and over in her mind: how empty and awful that twenty-year-old girl must have felt to take her own life. But how cool, actually, to do it in such a dramatic way. If you were going to do it, you might as well do it right. That girl must have stood on the brink of the dam, the vast expanse of concrete below her and the Colorado River snaking darkly away like drying blood, the red canyon all around her, the blue sky above, and thought: Now, once, I am powerful, and let go.

Of course, that was just Holly being all mental adolescent dysfunctiony. If Rob didn’t want to talk about the state of the body, Holly shouldn’t ask. With effort she dragged her mind back to her small-scale problem and repeated a short version of her story. “My dad promised he’d clue me in on all the family secrets, but it’s been a week, with no clueage.”

“Clueage?” Rob’s dark brows knit. “I don’t think that’s a word.”

“Really?” she asked. No shit, Sherlock, she thought. She’d hoped that after seven years of hardly dating at all, she would be swept away by Rob, but she kept getting hints that she wouldn’t be. He didn’t understand when she was kidding—which was bad, because she was usually kidding.

“Have you bugged your dad about it?” Rob asked.

“No. He has this big stunt coming up next Tuesday. You probably saw the posters advertising it when you were at the casino last week. An impossible feat of physical stamina. He’s going to stand on a one-foot-square platform a hundred feet above the back lot of the casino for twelve hours. Not as long as David Blaine, because my dad likes his beauty sleep at night. To make up for that, the platform’s smaller than Blaine’s, and my dad won’t have ‘those pansy safety cables,’ as he calls them. Anyway, he says he wants to concentrate on training for that stunt and get it out of the way, and then he’ll teach me how he does it.”

“What’s the prob?” Rob asked. “You think he’ll splat on the pavement and take his secrets to the grave with him?”

This hadn’t occurred to her. True, her mom wasn’t as limber as she used to be, but Holly hadn’t ever thought her parents could be seriously hurt during their act full of knives and flames, because they’d never gotten hurt. She stared at Rob in distaste, talking herself down, telling herself that what he’d said wasn’t crass. She’d been the one to bring up her parents.

“No,” she said. “I just think it’s bullshit. I love my dad, but let’s get real. I’ve lived with him all my life. I’ve seen what goes on. He doesn’t train for stunts, unless you count sitting on the couch watching sports and eating fried pork skins as training. The way he eats, it’s a wonder he doesn’t weigh six hundred pounds. And I think next Tuesday, when his ‘training’ ”—she made finger quotes—“is over and it’s time for him to teach me what he knows, he’ll give me another excuse not to.”

“Why would he do that?”

She frowned. “I just graduated from college. They let me move into my friend Kaylee’s apartment a year ago, but gosh, she’s head of security at the casino. What could be safer? I wonder whether my parents have made me this promise of magic as a ruse to keep me close and obedient.”

“And you want to be disobedient?” Rob’s thumb moved on her knee, sending a jolt of awareness up her leg. She’d forgotten his hand was there.

She ached to explain the real problem: that she had a mental illness. But of course this would scare away a potential boyfriend. Besides, it was hard to feel close to him when he turned everything into a sex joke. Not that she didn’t want sex. She did, when she found herself in a real relationship.

Which explained why a girl made to work as a bikini-clad Las Vegas showgirl at fourteen was still a virgin at twenty-one. Many times she’d contemplated a one-night stand, just to see what it was like. The thing was, she wanted it to be with a dashingly handsome man who didn’t know who she was. Everyone knew who she was, courtesy of the billboard over Interstate 15.

Then, last week, Holly had met Rob. He was good-looking in a clean-cut, self-satisfied, frat boy way. He’d just moved to Vegas from Chicago. Now he was gainfully employed as a Clark County Sheriff’s deputy. So he was taking her on this date in his cop car because he was too cheap to buy his own civilian vehicle. So what? Nobody was perfect. She had a mental illness.

Therefore, she was able to overlook his latest sex joke. She even allowed his hand to remain on her knee as she explained, “I just want to be a magician. My dad hasn’t told me how he pulls off his impossible feats of physical stamina, but I’m brainstorming for something cool I could do for my debut. Walk a tightrope across the canyon at Hoover Dam?”

“Hoover Dam is a high national-security risk,” Rob said sternly. “That’s why they built the bypass bridge. It would be impossible for you to get a permit.”

Holly didn’t like being told her idea was impossible. Who did he think he was, the police?