Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

work and nowhere out on the job. “How about a drink en route?”
    “How about an ID? And... no.”
    He laughed then. “You’re usually onto this stuff. Tough case on your desk?”
    “They’re all tough. What’s your name?”
    “You really don’t recognize me?”
    He cocked his head, and then she had him.
    “Dirty Larry?”
    “All cleaned up.”
    “Gone Chamber of Commerce! To what do I owe—?”
    “How about a drink on the way home? Some noncop bar.”
    “Why?”
    “Personal police business.”
    She didn’t like the way he drawled that out but checked her watch. Mariah had stayed after school tonight. Sock-hop committee at another student’s house. Her baby daughter! Thinking about dancing with wolves. All harmless teenybopper stuff, hopefully. Staying at the Ruizes’ for dinner until eight or so.
    Dirty Larry, the Mr. Clean edition, waited. He watched her with an amusement that hinted he knew the pushes and pulls of her private life.
    Bastard! Her vehemence, unjust, pulled her back from the brink. This was a colleague, after all. An undercover narc. Maybe he had something for her. He’d be used to private rendezvous in public places.
    “Okay. Five minutes?”
    He nodded, got up, and ebbed into the hall. She speed-dialed the Ruizes and got a commitment that they’d keep Mariah until ten, just in case.



Spooks

    In a city built on urban fantasy hotels with sprawls that rivaled the King Ranch, the Palms bucked the hotel-casino trend and lived up to its name. It was an off-Strip cylinder of gilded construction, like a tower of giant golden coins.
    “I am not dressed for this,” Molina said, meeting Dirty Larry at the Palms’s side entrance, as agreed, their separate vehicles parked in whatever spot could be found.
    “What are you dressed for?” He had an annoying knack for taking her simplest remark as a springboard for some deeper meaning. Dirty Larry the Existentialist?
    “A crime scene,” she said. “You going to deliver?”
    “Not here. Not now. I’m off undercover.” He looked around. “It’s kinda nice to be escorted by an obvious cop. Like having a bodyguard.”
    “I’m that obvious?”
    “Like you say, you’re not dressed for the Palms.”
    “A psychologist could speculate that you want to get me off my own turf, at a disadvantage.”
    “Off your turf, right. Is that really a disadvantage?”
    She shrugged and turned for the door, moving into a stream of tourists in tropical print shorts and shirts.
    She knew what she was and she knew what she wore: low-heeled oxfords. Espresso-brown pantsuit. Oxford shirt, faintest baby blue, open at the collar. Semiautomatic in a paddle holster at the small of her back, steel blue. Talk about fashion coordination. Supermodels had nothing on a modern female cop.
    They entered the usual jam-packed, ultra-air-conditioned smokehouse of a Vegas casino, an atmosphere lit by blinking slot machines that broadcast bling-bling bluster and the clatter of coins spilling into metal troughs.
    In the craps area, Larry stopped to schmooze a pit boss who passed him some VIP comps. Comps papered the town, if you knew who to ask. The passes sent them to the head of a line that had formed even though the Ghost Bar had just opened, then onto an express elevator. Eerily, once aboard, all sound suddenly stopped, the casino’s endless clatter replaced by the customary silence of halfpickled strangers packed together like kippered herrings in a tin.
    The Ghost Bar perched fifty-five stories above all the hustle, a tourist attraction of the first water. Three of the four walls were glass and the view was jaw-dropping. Inside, the place was a 2001: A Space Odyssey sixties wet dream of blue neon, streamlined silver seating pieces, and lime green accents. Icy in color and exclusive in attitude.
    Molina took it all in with the same cool distance she used at crime scenes. She checked out the VIP clientele already seated as well as the ambiance and spotted several vaguely familiar faces. It took a moment to realize that they were stars, actors and singers, not escapees from Most Wanted lists. Odd, the jolt of false familiarity you could get from a household face.
    “What do you think of the place?” he asked.
    “Playboy, Penthouse, circa nineteen sixty-five.”
    “You talking the magazines or improper pronouns?”
    “Both.”
    Posh or Mosh the Spice Girl wannabe did the waitress dip to lay two cocktail napkins on their sleek tabletop. Bowing to the power of