disarming grin. "Can I help who my friends are?"
His answer made me even more suspicious. Ric usually slipped into Spanish when mentioning friends, but doing so now would clearly have to indicate gender. Amigo or amiga. He'd just been twitting me about rival Vegas guys. Maybe I really was going to meet an old FBI flame of Ric's.
I touched the silver familiar on my chest, still posing as an art-gallery-class piece of turquoise-embedded Native American jewelry.
"That silver shape-shifter sure knows how to complement your eye color," Ric said as he noticed my gesture.
Quicksilver barked in the backseat.
"Your baby blues too, Gray Shadow," Ric twisted around to tell my dog.
"This is awfully Southwest style for Kansas," I said doubtfully, fingering the familiar, which warmed to my touch. "Although Coronado did mosey this far north hundreds of years ago, searching for silver."
"Coronado? The conquistador?" Ric sounded sharply surprised.
"Ooh, say that again. It sounds so sexy with the proper accent."
"Coronado?" Ric repeated in an are-you-nuts tone.
I wasn't about to confess that his authentic pronunciation of the lovely rolled r and soft d of the Spanish language was quickly becoming my instant aphrodisiac.
"No. Conquistador, hombre," I cooed.
"Don't flirt so hard when you're at the wheel, Delilah. Dolly might end up in the ditch."
I laughed, feeling good about going back to Wichita for the first time.
Now you're getting it, Irma said. We've got nothing to fear here but fear itself.
She was right. Wichita was my home, "sour" home. It housed my orphanage and group homes, my fancy private high school on scholarship, my old job, the empty lot of my destroyed rented bungalow, and my old enemies. All "former."
"Take this next exit," Ric said.
"Are we heading for the horse pasture or the cow pasture?"
"Neither. I hope we stay on the road. We're aiming at the state highway junction with the county road, where the 'gas' and 'grub' signs tower. I didn't know Kansas looked so Western east of Dodge City."
"Millions and millions of longhorn cattle have been herded over this earth since the mid - eighteen hundreds. We are in 'bleeding' Kansas, city boy, the Free State that started the Civil War over the slave issue."
"Then it fits that vampires should show up here early and often after the recent millennium meltdown. All that historic blood spilled."
"Interesting point. I never thought of those greaser vamp gangs that hassled me in the group homes before puberty - mine - as early adaptors."
"That's what I'm here for," Ric said, redonning his sunglasses. "To give you new insight on your unhappy childhood history. You're not the only bleeding heart in this car."
I slowed Dolly to take the exit ramp, again wondering if I wanted to know more about a past that included repeated assault attempts and some unknown event or events that had made me too paranoid to ever lie on my back again.
"Rape survivor" wasn't a convincing piece of personal history I wanted to claim. I shivered in Dolly's sun-warmed red leather interior. Usually she felt womblike, and - after I'd met Ric - sexy. Now, she just felt damn bloody. Like Kansas.
RIC AND I sat outside at a wooden picnic bench, slurping giant paper cups of root beer, soaking up early summer sun. I'd bought a corny straw cowboy hat inside the Red Ryder Ranger Station to shade my face.
"You put on your high-SPF sunscreen this morning?" Ric asked, eyeing my blazing white forearms.
"Yes, dear. Gallons of it. Isn't that citified silk-blend blazer hot without Vegas air-conditioning to duck into?" I asked in turn.
"Yes, dear. I'll dress down for the job later."
I looked around, hearing an oncoming horsy clickety-clank and then spotting a bleached-blond-maned woman in gold lame spikes and bun-hugging capris, heading into the restaurant. She was layered in brass jewelry - on neck, wrists, and ankle.
Hardly a Fed.
Unless ... she was a CI, a confidential informant. Maybe she was a gangster's wife in the witness protection program. In her place, I sure would want Ric for a contact agent on that detail.
Me too, would-be mob honey, Irma said.
Ric's sunglasses were not following her tail, but aimed at other ones in the adjoining pastures. Grazing cows don't do much for me, though I find a mare and foal pretty to watch.
In a bit, my eyes spotted and followed a tall, lean man with a kick-ass belt buckle holding in a faded denim shirt over a significant belly. He bent through the wooden fencing to amble his Justin boots across the road to the restaurant asphalt.
When