Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“And my mother wasn’t his ex-wife. They’d never divorced.”

Molina put a finger to her lip. “Keep those personal facts to yourself. My first thought is that maybe you’d want to off Effinger to free your mother from a rotten marriage.”

“Effinger had moved on to Vegas years before I came here. Besides, it took more than one person to do him in that way.”

“True. Not that you don’t have loyal groupies here in Vegas now. What was in the lockbox the Chicago hoods didn’t get?”

“That’s just it. Nothing much. Tax returns, probably doctored. An old high school yearbook, some school stuff a mother would have saved.”

“Speaking of mothers, why did yours get mixed up with a rotter like Cliff Effinger?”

“He came from the same neighborhood. I was heading off to preschool and you couldn’t have single mothers in my Polish Catholic neighborhood then unless they were widows.”

“Oh.” Molina sat back. She was a single mother too.

“That wasn’t a problem, with you?” Matt asked. “You and Mariah, I mean? You grew up in L.A.”

“Yeah. Latino Catholic community.” When Matt tilted his head, wanting more, she delivered. “My mother was like your mother. Unwed. I always fantasized my father was Paul Newman.”

“The blue eyes.”

“He sure wasn’t Latino. When she married, she made sure my stepdaddy was.”

Matt pulled out his cell phone and held up a photo. “Mom just got married again. Here in Vegas last weekend.”

Molina took the phone. “That’s a very familiar-looking wedding party … you, Temple Barr, Electra Lark as justice of the peace. Even Midnight Louie present and accounted for. The groom looks like a nice guy, but if the blond woman in the middle is your mom, she looks like your slightly older sister.”

Matt took the phone back to survey the shot. “Louie was ring-bearer. Mom was very young when she had me. ‘And naïve’ is the expression.”

“Not my problem,” Molina said. “I was old enough to know better and protect myself, but it didn’t work.” She sat back again. “Easy for me, I just got the hell out of Dodge and changed jobs and locations. Lots of cops get divorced.”

“Being a single mother can’t ever be easy.”

“Easy in that I was too old to be shamed with the ‘unwed mother’ label, and I was pretty distant from my family by then anyway.”

“Yeah. Mom and me were the odd ones out too.”

“Thing is, I was just old enough that I got to babysit all six of my younger stepsisters and brothers from the time I was practically a toddler myself.”

“I would have loved to be ‘lost’ among a family of other children.”

“Try it before you convert.” Molina tapped a folder on her desk. “Back to the undying rumors of the mob. So you and Temple Barr are now the chaperones of this interesting treasure chest of Effinger’s?”

Matt hesitated, not sure how much he wanted to reveal. Certainly, talk of the Synth and Ophiuchus would get him laughed out of Molina’s spanking new office and destroy this new personal rapport over their lives as bastard kids, an echo of his recent sessions at the Goliath.

Molina wasn’t lingering on personal revelations anyway. “Aren’t you two setting yourselves up to get the unfriendly attention Effinger and your mom got?”

“That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“If there is anything suspicious going on in your family link to Effinger, it always defaults back to Vegas, where you and Temple Barr and even that annoying cat live. That should have been the first thing on your mind.”

It would have been, Matt thought, if he hadn’t been distracted by becoming the sole target, he hoped, for the unfriendly attentions of Kathleen O’Connor.

Could the mob or any undying remnant really be any worse?

Chapter 35

Black Ops

If anybody had told me I would be playing the role of co–cat burglar with my maybe-baby Miss Midnight Louise in order to break into the Metro morgue … well, I would have taken them off at the anklebones, or hocks, depending on the species.

We have interrupted our tour of the outer limits of a low municipal building on the southern fringe of Downtown, where the nightly light show is bright. Here are silence and shadow.

Morgues tend to be sedate sites, and the residents even more so.

Still, this is a morgue in a city teeming with celebrities and paparazzi. Every window is shuttered and locked tight, and the entry door requires checking in and ID. The only “ID” me and Miss Louise could ever have is that brand name of medically approved canned pet food only the terminally ill would deign to touch with a pooper scooper.

The warm Las Vegas night seems to have been put to bed early around this place. I led the perimeter search and now we are sitting by the parking lot door planning our next move.

At least this is one occasion on which the know-it-all Miss Louise has not a clue.

“You admit,” she tells me, “you have never been inside the morgue.”

“But I have often been on very close terms with individuals destined for the morgue.”

She sniffs. “I was closer than you to the current victim under discussion.”

“My dear girl, the dead man—or whatever species, domestic or feral alien—and I fell ten stories together. That betokens a closeness a mere postmortem sniff cannot match.”

“Boots on the ground count more than aerial displays, Daddy-O. I was first to reach the body and the first to detect those ‘unusual cryptic marks’ all the tabloids are making a front-page fuss about. Laughable. Even bad journalism has slipped to the level of fish wrappings.”

“You simply recognized the Cat Pack’s handiwork. That was no leap of brain power. Some commentators have come closer to the truth.”

“ Chupacabra tracks!” Louise’s longish jet-black best coat is having an electric static hair attack, she is so outraged. “These dumbskulls are too blind to see the obvious.”

“Look at it their way, Louise. They have already been conditioned to think that the dead guy fell out of the sky or at least a revolving high-rise restaurant-to-be. Who would suspect that an avenging pack of domestic cats would have scratched him up one side and down the other, and his partner-in-crime too, and disarmed them both?”

“The Cat Pack is not composed of domestic cats,” she growls. “We are all feral and semiferal, except for the one indoor lounge lizard of our acquaintance, you. And you are not the boss of us. Ma Barker is.”

“And you are a floating member, as am I. You do your lounge lizarding under a tanning bed by the Crystal Phoenix pool, so that exempts you from true feral status. Whatever the fine points, you all need a link to the ruling human class, and I am the expert at that.”

“You mean the dominant race. Cats rule—dogs just wish they did, and people are fooling themselves.”

“Now is no time to talk politics. I am thinking up a plan to storm this jail of the dead and get a good look at the ancient alien.”

“My testimony is not good enough?”

“I see the big picture, Louise. That is my job. Now, here is the plan. We need to stake out the back entrance and make like we rode in on a Black Maria.”

“A black Maria? What kind of jimsonweed have you been masticating now? You always were of the slacker generation.”