Chapter 14
Haven’t I always been honest with you? Haven’t I warned you more than once? Didn’t I love you with all my heart, even passionately, and did I conceal the fact from you, that it was dangerous to give yourself into my power, to abase yourself before me, and that I want to be dominated?
—L
EOPOLD
V
ON
S
ACHER
-M
ASOCH
,
Venus in Furs
G
ina Larsen had been his partner for seven years, his lover for three of those, and his best friend for all of them. He thought he knew her completely—until the night she was led from a downtown hotel in handcuffs.
Vice hadn’t been after her; they hadn’t even known her name until it was too late. She was just a minnow caught in a net cast for a much bigger fish: a whale named Howard Tunney, Republican candidate for governor.
The governor’s race that year was a mud-spattered cluster-fuck. Tunney accused the incumbent of awarding DOT contracts to friends, and he had leaked documents to the press.
Then, two weeks before the election, when polls were showing the incumbent behind, the vice squad got an anonymous tip about an escort ring operating outcalls in the very upscale Union Hotel. The source even supplied a room number.
The anonymous source was probably the Honorable William R. Denton, incumbent governor, but no one was ever able or willing to prove that. Insiders also knew that Milton Daubs, chief of police, was deeply in Denton’s pockets, as only the son-in-law of Denton’s sole daughter could be. Daubs had personal and professional reasons to give this anonymous tip his full attention via his pet vice squad.
Daubs had been appointed after a campaign of heated rhetoric about corruption and immorality, endorsed by the most powerful coalition in any Bible-Belt Southern state: the Christian Right. In a city like theirs, with a church on every corner and many with membership in the thousands, morality was still in the majority, at least in public.
As soon as Daubs had taken office, he began a righteous crackdown on every strip club, massage spa, adult bookstore, and nightclub in town. Even cops were taking their bachelor parties over the county line for fear of getting caught up in some sting.
Daubs must have been tickled pink at catching Howard Tunney not just with a call girl, but a genuine leather-clad dominatrix.
That is, until the dominatrix turned out to be an off-duty homicide detective named Gina Larsen.
All charges were dismissed the next morning. No one cared about Gina since the primary objective, the political ruin of Howard Tunney, had been satisfactorily accomplished as soon as the press had a photo of him being led away in handcuffs.
But that photo ruined Gina’s life. That photo changed everything.
One side of Tunney’s face was barely visible; he had both hands up and appeared to be hiding behind the woman between him and the photographer. The woman, also in cuffs, was good-looking with a mane of reddish curls. She stared coldly and unapologetically into the camera. She was wearing a long trench coat, but her shapely legs in seamed black stockings and high heels were clearly visible, caught in swift, strong strides.
There was no escort ring and no prostitution, either. Only professional domination, a gray area that rarely got much police attention because there was little of it in their conservative, smallish city, and because it was difficult to prosecute without proof of actual sex taking place.
Professional dominatrixes were careful to walk that line. Some of them never even touched their clients.
Gina claimed she wasn’t a serious professional; that she sometimes did it “just for fun” and that she’d only been doing it that night as a favor for a friend who was Tunney’s regular playmate. Even Tunney said he’d never met Gina before that night, when his regular called and said she was sending a substitute instead.
Neither ever named the “friend.” No one ever admitted to tipping off the press, either.
The press loved Gina from the start, but when they discovered she had a badge as well as a whip, the story exploded. Gina was still getting ink and YouTube hits weeks after Howard Tunney was forgotten.
She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but the total package came together in a way that made men stare after her, even if women claimed they couldn’t quite see the attraction. Hanson thought they could see it, all right; they just didn’t like Gina, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. Whenever Gina stepped into the break room for coffee, the roomful of secretaries would lift their heads and sniff the air, as if catching a whiff of a predator.
She was tall, with long legs, and a surprisingly muscular body softened by modest but more than adequate breasts. She had full, wide lips—almost too wide for beauty—and a nose that was a bit too sharp. Her shoulder-length hair was a natural auburn that burned brilliantly in the sun. But it was her eyes that had rendered him speechless the very first time they met.
Her eyes were enormous, and slightly tilted, like a Siamese cat, and just as inscrutable, reflecting everything but giving nothing away. They seemed to change color, depending on the light and whatever emotion lurked behind them. Pale sea green in sunlight, a deeper shade of hazel under fluorescents; a cool gray-green when she was angry.
With Milton Daubs at the helm, nobody doubted that Gina would lose her shield eventually. Daubs was furious—
rabid
even—that this victory for his father-in-law had shot his own department in the foot.
Hanson himself had been dumbstruck. Their affair had been over for nearly two years by then. Things had been strained between them for a couple of months after they stopped sleeping together, when it became clear to Hanson that he could not give her what she wanted. Hanson had been far more wounded than he ever let her know—how could he, when they still had to work together? Things had gradually gotten better, though there was still a big hole left in his life and a frequent ache that could not be remedied.
He had known that Gina was kinky, of course; that was one of the unspoken things that had come between them. But to take money for beating a stranger in a rented hotel room? That was a whole other level of kink, one that he couldn’t quite get his head around.
The woman he’d bailed out of jail that April night was someone he didn’t know. She didn’t seem to be able to speak for the tight clench of her jaw, and she wouldn’t look him in the eye. Neither of them spoke until they reached the privacy of the elevator.
“Tell me what the fuck you were doing there,” he had hissed, frustrated by her stony silence. “Do you know what everybody is saying?”
“I can imagine,” she had said flatly.
He didn’t think she could. He could hardly believe the conversations he’d overheard in the hallway of the courthouse, in the squad room. Fellow officers, some of whom he knew, had been laughing, talking about her with the ferocious joy of men talking about a woman they wanted to fuck but who wouldn’t fuck them.
Then the elevator opened, and the two of them had to walk through a gauntlet of their fellow detectives. Men who had worked with Gina for seven years, Hanson thought, and respected her competence as a fellow officer.
But as he and Gina edged past and walked down the corridor, their words struck him as hard as if they’d thrown actual punches.
“Do you got a law enforcement discount, Gee?” Bingham had called. “Do I hafta wear handcuffs to get a blow job? I cum in your mouth, does that cost extra?”
Gina had not looked at them; did not, in fact, seem to be aware of them at all. She seemed to move in some impenetrable bubble, while his own skin grew hot and moist.
“Nah, Bingham,” Griggs had called out. “Swallowing is probably standard. I’ll bet those golden showers cost plenty, though.”
“Hey, Gee,” Mercer had joined in. “What does piss taste like, anyway?”
Gina just kept walking, and Hanson simply followed her, hoping they made it out of the building before the itch to draw his gun began to seem like a good idea. How could they?
How dare they?
“Hanson, you get a discount, or does she make you pay full price?”
He had Bingham up against the wall before he knew he was doing it, his right arm shoved hard up against the man’s windpipe.
Griggs had been the one to pull him off.
“Just a joke, man, just a joke.” Griggs grinned, slapping his shoulder.
Bingham stood there coughing and glaring, rubbing his throat. Hanson had stared at him a long moment before turning on his heel just in time to see Gina disappear through the door to the parking lot.
He drove her home, and still she wouldn’t say anything until he pulled the car to the curb, and then it was only to tell him not to bother getting out.
She was out of the car before it came to a complete stop. Hanson had no choice but to follow her across the lawn.
“Why won’t you talk to me, damnit?” he shouted, grabbing her arm. “Don’t you have anything at all to say?”
She had stopped, turned, and looked at him with an expression that made him drop her arm.
“I don’t owe anybody anything,” she said. “Not even you.”
Her gaze had drilled into him, until he looked away.
“This isn’t like you! I know you, Gina—”
“This is
exactly
like me. There are things you don’t know about me, things you didn’t want to know then—”
And he knew she was talking about two years earlier, when he had stalked out of her bedroom, confused and heartsick—
“—and you don’t want to know now, either.”
Then she was gone.
He had stood there in the yard for some time, watching the light come on in her bedroom window. He wondered, idiotically, about the sheets on her bed. Did she still have the pale lavender ones, or had they been replaced by now? The lavender set had been his favorite, the oldest and softest, infused by her scent through years of use.
Hanson spent two hours the next morning with a knot in his gut, waiting for Gina to emerge from Daubs’s office.
“Did he ask for your badge?” Hanson asked when she reappeared.
“The charges have been dropped,” she told him. “But I’m on desk duty until . . .”
Her voice trailed off as she picked up some papers from her desk and started to file them.
“Until what?”
“Until he finds a way to make me quit,” she said without looking up.
In the days that followed, Hanson was paired up with John Griggs, while Gina was held hostage inside a department bent on breaking her.
Someone scribbled “Pig Whore” on her locker with a permanent marker. A dildo was left on the front seat of her car; pictures cut from S&M magazines were taped to the mirrors in the ladies’ room.
One day she found a used condom, still sticky, in her desk drawer.
She stormed into the men’s locker room and flung the condom at Bingham.
“This yours?”
The condom hit him in the face. He flailed at it, then roared as the men nearby started laughing. Bingham charged her, slamming her into the row of lockers.
No one moved to stop either of them. Everyone just watched, slack-jawed, as the laughter died and something much uglier took the stage.
Hanson watched. The rage radiating from her scared the hell out of him, and the violent unreality of it all kept him from moving.
Bingham had a handful of her hair, one fist cocked back. Woman or not, he was going to punch her. She kneed him and he bent double. Before he could recover, she grabbed a nightstick from an open locker and brought it down on his left knee.
“Fuckin’ cunt!” Bingham screamed, writhing on the floor. “You busted my kneecap!”
“You lay a hand on me again,” Gina panted, staring down at him with wild eyes, “I’ll cut your fuckin’ dick off. Swear to God, I’ll castrate you.”
It was Griggs who grabbed her and pushed her to the door. Whether it was to save Bingham’s dick or Gina’s ass, Hanson wasn’t sure.
“Are you all right?” he asked when he caught up with her.
Even asking felt like a lie. Did he care, really? If he was honest with himself, he was relieved not to be partnered with her anymore. He could hardly bear to look at her. And she knew it.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
Reporters and “fans” stalked her, went through her garbage, snapped photos on their cell phones at the grocery store.
When she picked up the phone at her desk, she got heavy breathing, death threats, offers of money for her story, her photos, her services, her underwear.
Hanson saw it all, felt himself pulling away from her, and wondered what that said about him. He knew he should reach out to her and find a way to backfill the gulch he felt opening between them. But then he heard the snickers of the clerks as she passed, and saw their eyes slide over to him with curiosity, as if he were somehow suspect, too.