Kyle tugged at the rearview, hoping for Tony's Jeep to squeal heroically into view. The motion was rote by now, but Tony rarely came. Right now she could just see his brake lights at the curve in the road. She guessed he must be grandstanding to double-file joggers on the main boulevard.
Across the lot the windows of the Pontiac had fogged. Kyle could feel the faint buzz of its stereo's bass in her heels. She turned on her green lights and pulled up alongside it. Forcing her shoulders back, she threw open the door, straightened her badge, and pulled the pose Tony referred to as the dykey Napoleon.
"Excuse me, but I'm going to have to ask you to confine your illicit drug use to�"
Kyle stopped as the white window opened. Her throat rattled a little. The pose collapsed. A pair of beetlebrows and a sweaty receding hairline greeted her with a pant: "What the fuck you trying to do?"
Another little rattle.
"Could you just... let us do this in peace?"
In the passenger seat, a girl finished hiking down her miniskirt, put out a cigarette and began dabbing at her lipstick in the sideview mirror. Kyle kept rattling. "I'm sorry� I thought�"
The beetlebrows straightened a little. "You're fucking sick, man. Sick bitch."
The window had risen before Kyle could explain herself, and the car had lurched away before she could regain her posture. She could feel crabapple chunks stuck in the soles of her sneakers and knocked her feet against the concrete to dislodge them. She pressed her cheek to the warm hood of the car and picked at her soles with blunt fingernails. At the opposite end of the parking lot, Tony was making his way past the rhododendrons toward her, green lights flashing.
{read}