"Hi!" Mich.e.l.le was dishing up grilled cheese and dolphin-free, packed-in-water, tuna sandwiches. "Did you have a hot date last..." She turned and stopped in dismay. "Oh, G.o.ddess, you look like death warmed over! Oh, Alison, if you want to play out some little bondage scenes go ahead, but please don't get into s.h.i.t where you're letting people beat up on you! I can't deal with that at all, it's not erotic, it's just plain sick...."

"I didn't let anybody beat up on me, you a.s.shole," Alison snapped. She held up a hand to forestall the indignant reply. "Okay, I'm sorry. I feel like death warmed over."

"What happened?"

In answer Alison unfolded her paper and sifted through the front section. There it was, buried on the tenth page. She tapped the article with the opal and silver ring that she wore on her left hand and got up to pour herself a cup of coffee.

"Oh, no, again?" Mich.e.l.le bent over the table, moving her lips as she read. "This is you, the officer at the scene?"

"That's me."

"Oh, I didn't see your eye before. You've really got a shiner." Alison remembered hitting her face against the handle of the Volkswagen as she went down. "Boy, the cops sure were lucky you were right there, weren't they?"

Alison took a sip of the hot coffee before answering. "They didn't think so," she finally said bitterly.

Mich.e.l.le's phone began to ring. After answering, Mich.e.l.le handed it to her with a look of warning which could only mean one thing.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Alison Jean? This is Dad."

Oh, s.h.i.t. She loved her father dearly, but he was one of the last people from whom she wanted to hear at the moment. She knew what was coming, and it would make her feel like a little kid being called on the carpet.

"Honey, what's going on? Your mom and I thought you were in the mountains staying with your friends, and then we hear a rumor," he said the word as if it hurt his mouth, "that you're not, and before I can get anything but your machine" (another source of contention) "I go into the station this morning and find out that you've been involved in a shooting!"

"Oh, Daddy." Oops, there she went into the little-girl-in-trouble role immediately. Gotta try to fight that. "You're making it sound worse than it was. All I shot was somebody's tire. I'm sure you read that in the report."

"Well, yes, but I don't understand why you changed your plans and didn't tell your mother or me."

Because I met a hot new woman, Dad, and I know that you and Mom won't approve of her. You haven't liked anybody I've dated since Sandy, and that was five years ago. Because I've been digging around on a case that doesn't belong to me, where they do not want my help, and I knew I'd get a lecture for that. Aloud she said, "Colleen got sick right before I was going to leave. It was too late to reschedule, so I just decided to stay home."

There was a long silence on the other end. He was deciding whether to pursue the hurt feeling, or whether to just accept the explanation so that he could continue questioning her about the incident last night.

"Well," he said finally, "it's a good idea to let your mother and me know where you are, just in case anything happens." Unsaid was, "Because it's not like there's anybody else to take care of you, honey." She wondered if he would have time to throw in the rest of the lecture. No, that was unfair. It was too caring to be called a lecture. It was more like concern that had settled into a few routine phrases. Why don't you settle down with some nice woman who will take care of you so we don't have to worry that you've had an accident and can't call? After all, you're over thirty. Look at how much happier Mich.e.l.le is since she's settled down. And whatever happened to that nice Sandy woman you used to go out with?

"Sorry, Dad, it's just that this is the first vacation I've had since Lydia moved out, and being alone really appealed to me." Bringing up Lydia, who had amused her father, but of whom neither of her parents had approved, was a response to the unvoiced criticism. Better n.o.body than a flaky dope-smoker, Dad.

"Hmm." He took the point and dropped the subject. "Honey, what exactly went down last night? How did you get involved?"

This could only be handled bluntly. "It was a d.y.k.e bar, Dad. I was just there to dance. That's exactly what I told those a.s.shole detectives when they asked me."

"Honey, please." She could hear the wince in his voice. "That att.i.tude is not going to help your career any."

"Dad, they were being totally unreasonable." Now she was back in grade school, explaining why she had smacked one of her cla.s.smates. "They were acting as if this woman had deserved to have her head sliced open just because she was hanging out at a gay bar. You know that's not right."

"Well..." Her father, as often happened when the subject of her lesbianism came up, was caught between a rock and a hard place. Secretly, she thought that he might have liked to express an opinion similar to that of the two detectives, though she knew, no matter what his personal feelings about anyone, he never would have allowed it to affect his work as they had. However, the only creed in his life that came before 'The Police Department, Right or Wrong' was 'My Family, Right or Wrong.' If his beloved only daughter, who had honored him by following in his footsteps, insisted that she really was h.o.m.os.e.xual and it was not just a phase she'd been in for fifteen years, then, by G.o.d, gay was good, no matter how he personally felt about f.a.ggots in public. She felt a rush of warmth towards him and hoped that somebody would have the nerve to make a remark about d.y.k.e officers to his face.

"Are you sure about that, honey? You weren't just upset? You know how you get when it's late and you haven't eaten...."

"Dad! Get serious! Are you really suggesting that I've gone from throwing temper tantrums at bedtime to shooting at people?"

"No, but maybe if you were upset you took some of the things the detectives said wrong "

"Dad, I've been around h.o.m.ophobia enough times to recognize it. Have you met these men? I don't even think they're admitting the deaths might be linked-it's just coincidental that three lesbians have been attacked in one week outside of bars."

"Well, why don't I ask around about it? I'm sure it's all a misunderstanding, but if not I'll find out what's going on."

Now Alison felt like the precious child whose daddy had come to school to straighten things out while all the other kids snickered. She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. If he could put a bug in the right ear, then let him. She didn't want more women to die because she was being proud.

"Your mother says hi." Oh, the official part of the conversation was over. "We got a letter from Eugene yesterday and he had some bad news. It turned out that Mary Lou did miscarry, but the doctor says it's really common with a first baby, and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong" He was starting to settle into a nice chat but she just wasn't ready to deal with it.

"Dad, I've got to go. I've got the tub running downstairs. I'll call you later to hear everything."

"Oh." His good-bye was rather cold, and she knew that it was going to take more than a phone call before he forgave her for trying to live her own life. She'd be over there for dinner within a week.

"So, are you going to get ha.s.sled at work for being at a d.y.k.e bar?" Alison felt a little annoyed that Mich.e.l.le didn't at least pretend that she hadn't been listening to her conversation, but then, subtlety had never been one of her strong points.

"I don't know. My opinion for a long time has been that everybody at the station knows. They'd have to be dense not to. 'Hi, my name is Alison Kaine. Notice the way I dress and look and the fact that I'm thirty-three and live with another woman, without any kind of husband or kids anywhere at all in the background. Does that give you any kind of clue, folks?'"

"Yeah, but a lot of people don't know because they don't want to know. Look at Janka's mom. We lived together for two years, we slept in the same bed in the woman's house, we made wills out in each other's favor; the woman knows all this and when Janka just happens to refer to me as her lover, she goes right over the top as if she didn't have a clue. People get very weird if you get in their face about something they're ignoring."

"Well, the official policy is no gay discrimination, but you're right, all the queers are very low-key. But I'll tell you what. The highlight of the whole evening was when Jones asks me, 'And can I ask what you were doing here in the first place, Officer Kaine?' and I say, 'I'm a d.y.k.e, Detective. I'm on a G.o.dd.a.m.n date, and I'll bet she doesn't ask me out again!' It was very freeing. Oh, and it goes without saying that they don't approve of women who swear, either. I believe there's a little note attached to the report about unprofessional behavior."

Mich.e.l.le laughed, then said primly, "You always did like to make things hard for yourself."

"Look who's talking! Ms Confrontation herself! Ms Why-can't-I-make-out-at-the-Linda-Ronstadt-concert-in-front-of-the-drunk-cowboys-and- show-them-we-really-are-everywhere? Oh, I don't care right now. I am just so p.i.s.sed off at the way these guys treated me-the way they treated everybody there! It was like, 'Well, you're the dregs of the earth, but this is America, where even queers have rights. We'll have to write our congressmen and see if that can't be changed.'"

"Well, did you tell them anything you've found out?"

"I tried. It didn't work. It was f.u.c.king embarra.s.sing. Here I go around all the time saying, 'Oh, cops aren't really pigs, that's a stereotype, we don't really get into the profession because we want power,' and these guys come along and say, 'Actually, we're just exactly like every bad TV show you've ever seen. We have rubber hoses in the car, we'll be bringing them out later.' "I hate it that all these women went away with that impression."

You know," Mich.e.l.le slipped in, "That's just how I feel about leather d.y.k.es representing the lesbian community."

Alison looked at her sourly. "Well, you can just give me the leather d.y.k.es any time at all over Jones and Jorgenson because they were right there in the parking lot when I needed them and they would have kicked a.s.s if we could have caught the guy. But we can go into that later when I feel better. Right now I've got work to do."

"What?"

"I'm going to go see the woman who was jumped last night. I want to ask her some questions."

"Why are you bothering with this if you can't tell the guys who are on the case? What good is it going to do?"

Alison sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. "You know, Ch.e.l.le, I can't tell you. But this can't keep on happening! It's got to stop before somebody else's lover gets it!"

"Do you know where this woman lives?"

"Yeah. She was pretty much in shock last night, blood all over and she knew she had just been lucky, so I went through her wallet. I knew I would want to talk to her today." She laughed. "Actually, there is one part that's kind of funny. She was being really pa.s.sive and letting people take care of her. So the ambulance pulls in with its lights flashing and the siren going, and all of a sudden she sits straight up and starts saying she doesn't have insurance, she can't pay for the ambulance, she wants somebody to take her to a Med Express place because they charge less and she just needs st.i.tches. So the other bartender starts going around with a hat, and women are chucking in five and ten dollars, and since there's a pretty big crowd she's got a big wad of money. So Carla is still fussing, and her friend bends over and says, 'Hey, don't worry about it, we've got it covered financially,' and she says, 'What if they undress me? I'm packing!'"

Mich.e.l.le looked somewhat disapproving, but laughed. "Kind of the equivalent of getting in a car wreck with dirty underwear, huh?"

Nine.

The weather was still holding, extraordinary for a town where it was not unknown to snow on Halloween. Alison untangled her bike from the junk on the back porch. She thought, as she coasted down Thirteenth, how curious that her father, of all people, had not warned her to be careful. Everyone else had. Even Detective Jorgensen last night had said grudgingly, "Well, you know what you can expect if you continue to hang out in places like this." Perhaps it was because somehow her father had never really a.s.sociated her and Mich.e.l.le and their friends (they were such nice girls) with gay bars which, she suspected, he pictured as sleazy and underworld. She sighed- educating was difficult.

Carla lived not far away in the gay ghetto. In fact, Alison thought that she recognized the house as one occupied by a former lover of Mich.e.l.le's ages ago. Once an apartment fell into lesbian hands in Capital Hill it tended to pa.s.s from one d.y.k.e to another for years and years until someone was evicted or died.

"Who is it?"

She recognized Carla's voice, cross and a little bit frightened. She wondered if yesterday Carla would have bothered to check before opening the door in broad daylight.

"Alison Kaine." Had she ever bothered to tell the other woman her name? Should she say, The woman from last night? The cop? She hoped that Carla would connect. Though she felt a little thrill when she thought of their encounter in the storage room, she didn't want to have to yell: "The woman you f.u.c.ked in the bas.e.m.e.nt!" It would be a particular blow to the ego if Carla asked, "Which one?"

"I brought back your jacket," Alison said, and those seemed to be the magic words that unlocked the door.

Alison had thought, looking in the mirror that morning, that she looked like death warmed over, but compared to Carla she looked like a beauty queen. Carla's head had not been shaved entirely, but there was a crooked bald path running from ear to ear across the top, crisscrossed with too many st.i.tches to count. Alison stared and then tried to look away.

"I brought your jacket," she repeated foolishly, trying not to allow anything that was flashing through her mind to show on her face. Like, Jesus, if Carla's head was carved up like a jack-o-lantern, what would have happened if her neck had been hit instead? She wouldn't have lasted the time it would have taken the ambulance to arrive. "Uh, I brought you a book, too. I thought you might be taking it easy a few days." She had dug out an old copy of Motherlines, which she read every year when she went to Michigan.

"I'm going to be taking it easy for a couple of months," Carla said sourly, closing the door behind her. "I can't go to work like this. Have you ever seen anything so ugly in your whole life? The only reason I even let you in is because you're a cop and you've seen worse, right?"

Not much, thought Alison.

Because it was obvious that they were not just going to pretend that everything was okay, she walked around Carla to get the full effect, handing her the jacket as she circled. The back was, if anything, worse than the front. A wide, vaguely oval-shaped s.p.a.ce had been shaved, and the bruised and puffy scalp was covered with small cuts. It looked as if Carla must have hit her a.s.sailant more than one time.

"Did they get anything off this?" Alison touched it gingerly. Her mother had spent a great deal of her childhood impressing upon her that human bites were much more dangerous that those of a dog or cat and she rather expected gangrene to already be forming.

"Of course not, I'm not made out of Silly Putty. I tried to tell them that, but n.o.body was listening to me. It was like the Barber Shop in h.e.l.l."

Alison seated herself without asking, looking around the living room. Why, what a treat! This was obviously a young cooperative type household like the ones she and Mich.e.l.le had lived in when they first came out. The furniture was battered and mismatched, and the posters on the walls reflected at least three different tastes. There was a chart dividing ch.o.r.es in the hallway, though it looked as if 'vacuuming the living room' had been skipped several times. Someone had left a woodworking project on a low table made of orange crates and a door with its hinges removed. The table, sans door, matched the bookshelves, which were crammed with every modern d.y.k.e novel ever written. Most of them had been written after Alison came out. She still remembered her initial excitement over that first purple, black and orange-covered copy of Rubyfruit Jungle.

She was glad to see that houses like this still existed, having lost track of them since she and her friends had gotten older and become more upwardly mobile. She herself had not lived with anyone (except Lydia, who had not ever been invited or officially announced that she had moved in, but had brought things over one at a time and then been conveniently evicted from her own place) since she had started getting a salary, but she treasured the memory of the years that she had roomed with two to four other women.

Carla pushed a grey tabby off the beat-up couch and sat beside her. During Alison's own communal period, most of the furniture had been secondhand from her parents, who could do little to hide their horror whenever they visited.

"So, you think it was a man?"

"Oh, come on. I can't believe a woman would do this. But, if you mean, do I have any reason to think it was a man by the way the body felt or anything I saw, no, I don't. We've been through that, believe me. I was up most of the night at the police station, after forking over more than a month's rent in the emergency room to get this number done on my head. I can't believe that anybody would attack me. I can't believe that I look like this and all they did was pat me on the shoulder and say, 'It will grow back.'"

Hmm, depressed. Alison tried to cheer her up before rushing right in with her questions.

"Hey, it's not that bad," she said. "Why don't you just...."

"Dye it pink and pretend I did it on purpose, right? That's what everybody has said. If I wanted to look punk I'd have a safety pin in my nose already. And I've heard the hat ideas, too," said Carla, sulking.

"You could shave your head completely. I'm sure there is a certain element who would be attracted to that."

"And I'm sure I want them to come on to me. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who is attracted to st.i.tches is somebody to stay away from." She crossed her arms, an 'I-dare-you-to-make-it-better look on her face.' "And I don't want to hear about how lucky I was, either. Why did it have to happen at all?"

In the daylight, and acting like a spoiled child, her age showed as it hadn't the night before. Oh, Alison had known she was young, but now she couldn't believe that she was old enough to have landed the bartending job, let alone that she had left her sobbing for breath on the floor of the storeroom. She had been chicken-hawking without even realizing it. She shook her head mentally, a little disgusted with herself, and then stopped. She had nothing to feel bad about. If nothing else, the experience had confirmed that she did not want any more of Mich.e.l.le's match-ups, nice but vanilla, for her next lover. She wanted someone like Stacy, like Carla ten years older. She really was one of 'those kind of girls.'

She gave up on trying to be cheerful, saying in a serious voice, "You're right, Carla, it shouldn't have happened, not to you, not to anyone. That's why I want to talk to you. I want to find out if you know anything that could help us keep it from happening again." She excused the plural by telling herself that it was cla.s.sist to allow only royalty to use the royal 'we.' Then she forestalled the standard objection. "We have to go over it again and again, because you might not know what you know, or you might not have remembered something because it seemed insignificant." She hoped the implication that she was allied with Jones & Jorgenson would not come back to haunt her later. Carla nodded sullenly.

"Do you know this woman?" Alison showed her the photo that she had purloined from the wall of the bar.

"I didn't know her name until the cops told me it last night. But I've seen her lots at the bar."

"Did you see her the night of the Ms. Colorado Leather contest?"

"Sure. She was one of the contestants, right?" Carla was pouting just the tiniest bit. Obviously she thought they should be talking about her, not something that had happened almost a week before.

"And do you know this woman?" Alison showed the photo of Dominique that she had lifted from their coffee table when Beth and Denise had left the room to find a box for the black kitten.

"Yeah. I know Dominique to talk to. She's in a lot, too."

"Have you noticed anything strange, anything different about her lately?"

Carla pulled her knees up beneath her chin and considered her bare toes.

"Well," she said slowly, "she's been in a lot of fights. Usually she gets along pretty well with everyone, but lately it seems like every time she comes in she's shouting at somebody."

"But you haven't had her eighty-sixed."

Carla shrugged. "She hasn't hurt anyone. She's a good tipper. And women come in looking for her. Customers of hers."

This was the opening for which Alison had been waiting. "You ever been a customer of hers?"

Carla looked at her as if she was crazy. "Are you kidding? I don't have-" She stopped in the middle of what she was saying as if she had changed her mind.

"You don't have what?"

"I don't have to pay for s.e.x." She seemed slightly embarra.s.sed, and Alison could see why, for the line that logically followed was, "I did it with you in less than an hour, didn't I?" She was embarra.s.sed herself. Well, that was what happened when you were a cop and had casual s.e.x with strangers. Sometimes you found yourself questioning them the next day.

"You've never been in any kind of scene with her?"

"No."

"Nothing?" Alison pressed. "Not a group thing? Not something where money wasn't involved? Not a quickie like we did?"

Carl looked a bit startled by this last question, as if the incident were something that should not be mentioned, or at least not outside a brag session. But she still answered, "No, nothing."

"Are you sure?" It didn't make sense if Carla were not an ex of Dominique's. Then Alison's whole neat theory went tight down the drain. If the connection was not Dominique, then what was it? "No. For one thing, she plays a whole lot rougher than I do. I don't pretend I'm in the big girls' league."

Carla didn't seem to be lying. She didn't really even seem to be very interested. So where did Alison go from here?