Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Primed to dodge any sudden move on her part, Matt was careful to amble inside as coolly as James Bond.

He moved into the opulent bedroom with burgundy carpet the color of welling blood, with its marble-topped furnishings. The immense brocaded bed was draped in insanely costly linens and various sized pillows so elaborately embroidered, they seemed to be wearing suits of metallic fabric armor.

He passed the hall’s choke point opposite the entrance to the bathroom, which was lined with marble and mirror, and approached the precipitous view of incandescent Las Vegas Strip laid out below.

“See any ghosts in the glass?” she asked.

One.

This was the same room where he’d come to lose the virginity Kathleen coveted, and ended up counseling the troubled call girl, Vassar, instead. He’d been in deep but unconfessed love with Temple by then and immune to other women. He knew he’d had nothing to do with Vassar’s fatal plunge off the balcony outside the room later that night, after he’d left. Except for being a suspect. He couldn’t say the same for Kathleen O’Connor.

“Ghosts,” he repeated. “No. You know I only believe in one spirit.”

“The Holy Ghost,” she mocked. “What a ludicrous concept. And he isn’t here.”

“The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. He is everywhere. Especially here.”

“Truth.” He heard a slashing sound and turned. Her razor had ripped open the seat of the upholstered desk chair.

Matt shrugged. “You rented the room. I didn’t.”

“I put your name on the reservation.” Her tone was childishly spiteful.

He eyed the destroyed property. “It can be repaired.”

“And you’ll pay for it.”

The glare in her blue green eyes was laser-intensive. Matt was reminded of the wicked queen in Snow White. Jealousy. Was that Kitty the Cutter’s prime motive? He’d smiled at Temple’s apt and quick-witted characterization of the demon haunting them all. Kitty the Cutter.

His calm angered her more. “I can cut you again as easily.”

“Surface wounds. For show. Your own run deeper.”

“So that’s what you’re here for? Comparing scars? Show me yours. Show me mine on you.”

“It’s shrunk to a thin white line, Kathleen, bloodless. Not interesting at all. You are interesting, though.”

“Oh.” She threw herself onto the pillow-mounded bed, her tight mesh skirt riding up to show white thigh and iceberg-sharp knees, seductive, the straight razor stropping back and forth on the encrusted comforter fabric, as if being wiped free of blood. “Mr. Midnight, counselor of the idiot wind, the Dysfunction Nation airwaves. You want to psychoanalyze me?”

Matt sat on the defaced chair, bracing his arms on its carved gilt arms. “I think ‘psycho’ is the operative word.”

She laughed, mocking him. “You’re trapped. You’re trapped because you worry about other people when you should be worrying about yourself. You’re trapped because you think you can still do good and be good. You’re trapped because you know I can do anything.”

“No, I don’t know that, Kathleen.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Rebecca, then?” he asked deliberately.

She sat up. “Where’d you get that name?”

“Or Shangri-La?”

She relaxed back against the pillows. “Just how many people do you think I can be?”

“As many as you need to be, but that’s an interesting question. You could have multiple personality disorder. Or just be an extreme drama queen.”

“You’re one to call me names. An ex-priest in an unsanctioned relationship. You’d do anything to keep your little redhead safe, wouldn’t you?”

She rose, set the razor on the marble nightstand with a sharp click, and oozed across the bed toward him. Taffeta crinkled like dead leaves under a boa constrictor.

Matt couldn’t help thinking his “drama queen” diagnosis was right on. A slinking femme fatale was pretty predictable, except he knew this one was no TV cliché, but a woman who had liked to play with her prey since her teens.

That meant she at least needed her victims alive to squirm.

Kathleen was fixated on tormenting men and he knew the reasons why. The question was, did she ? On the surface, maybe she did, but deep down everyone has a “story,” some deep personal blind spot. And around it they construct a distorted world view to justify what they need to believe of that world.

He stood and spelled out his terms. “You set the time and place for this session. I set the parameters. Temple is off the table. You mention her or her name and I walk.”

“Oh, going all terse and manly. You knew when you came here that I can put you up against the wall with one slash of my razor on someone else’s throat.”

“No. You can get me to come out and play shrink with you, but one more threat and it’s your neck that’s in jeopardy.”

“You’d kill me, Father Be Good?”

“ Ex -father, and even if that weren’t so, there’s no vow against justifiable homicide.”

“And since when did priests keep vows of poverty, obedience, and, particularly, chastity? Look at you, Mr. Ex. You’ve become wealthy listening to whiners on the radio.”

“Poverty is not a vow made by parish priests, only within certain orders, such as Jesuits and Franciscans.”

“So it’s all right to rake it in on the miseries of others.”

“I donate ten percent.”

“Paltry.”

Matt sat down, taking a negotiating tone again. “You’re right. I set up that percentage when I wasn’t making much money or anticipated doing that. I’ll up it. Twenty-five percent strike you as fair?”

“You’d, you’d do that because I challenged you? Wishy-washy, aren’t you?”

Of course, anything you’d say to a psychopath became a lose–lose for you.

“Not at all,” Matt answered. “You’ve put your money where your mouth is. From all accounts, you’ve spent a good part of your life raising money for a cause. It was a just cause of human rights violations even if the IRA resorted to terrorism before the al-Qaeda terrorist extremism so appalled them that both sides in Northern Ireland saw the light and struck a peace.”

Kathleen cast herself on her elbows at the foot of the bed, displaying deep cleavage three feet from his chair. “I put my mouth where the money was. Is that not a sin even in the service of a just cause? Can you absolve me of sin?”

Matt mentally kicked himself for using a careless expression that she could sexualize, this woman who’d used sex as a lethal weapon since adolescence.

“I can’t absolve anyone now, not even myself,” he pointed out. “Besides, chastity was a vow for me at one time. You took no vows.”

“And you honored none. No priests do. Chastity is a joke to that tribe of kiddie-diddlers, and obedience is only for their victims.”

She was deep into the twisted truths of her “story” now, the lifelong narrative formed at dark moments of childhood that justified her hatred and anger and envy.

“That’s not true of the majority of priests, Kathleen.”

“Of course you ’re in that saintly number that goes marching in to heaven.”

“I was.”

“But you ran away from your position as God Almighty’s favorite son.”

“I became laicized. I didn’t just walk. I went through the full process of officially leaving.”

“Mr. Ex, the rules follower.”

Matt smiled. “Exactly your opposite.”

Her precisely plucked raven black brows swooped into a frown. “You think you know all about me.”

“I know nothing about you but your history.”

“My history? Am I some kind of ‘country’ to you? A book you can read and figure out by this place or that event? You’re making a huge mistake to underestimate me.”