Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

At least he assumed that was what Kitty O’Connor was. An odd, sadistically seductive hit woman, with a modus operandi of introducing herself to her victims. And, in his case, she had an even odder price. Or was it only his case? Was he part of a longtime pattern with her?

She had been Max Kinsella’s Waterloo years ago, when he was still a teenage tourist propelled into the lethal jig that politics, bombs, and the IRA had played for decades in Ireland. Now Kinsella, all grown up, was Matt’s personal bane, ever since he’d come back and taken Temple back, not that Matt had ever had her. It was easy to blame Max for Kitty’s brutal entrance into his own life. And wrong.

Wanting to resent Kinsella for every loss in his life, Matt tended to overlook one key fact: Kathleen O’Connor had first approached him during his hunt for Effinger. To this day, she still didn’t seem to know that Matt had become infatuated with Temple while Kinsella was among the missing. So Kitty was stalking him long before she could suspect any connection between him and Max, via Temple. She still seemed blind to the faint outlines of a former romantic triangle, and Matt would do anything to keep it that way. Temple must be protected at all costs. That was probably the only issue he and Kinsella would agree on.

The howl of the Vampire’s famously loud motor mimicked the chaos of his thoughts. The bike almost took its head like a willful steed. Soon the powerful motor was idling in another parking lot, this one utterly empty, except for the cold puddles of blue-green night lights.

A large, low building huddled like a bunker in the moonlight.

Matt locked the bike, hung the silver moon of his helmet on one handlebar, where it reflected its twin sister in the sky. Then he ambled across soundless asphalt to the sidewalks leading into the man-made Garden of Eden beyond the building.

Well, part Garden of Eden, he corrected himself. The other part of the Ethel M candy company’s famous cactus collection was Garden of Gethsemane. Garden of thorns. Where Jesus had spent his last hours before submitting to the mockery of trial, torture, and death.

Naturally, an ex-priest in Las Vegas needed to find someplace lone, harsh, and absolutely natural for contemplation. The area was meant for self-guided tours, kind of like life itself, and was a no-man’s-land at this hour, even in around-the-clock Las Vegas: 24/7, like they said. Everywhere was getting onto Las Vegas time nowadays: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Somewhere in that blur of time, Sunday had been swallowed up. Were God interested in creating Las Vegas, which Matt was pretty sure He would pass on, as He had on Sodom and Gomorrah, He’d probably skip taking the seventh day of rest off. Las Vegas and the Internet never slept.

Matt’s footsteps ground slightly against the paved walks someone had slipped into his Garden of Woe when he wasn’t looking.

When he’d first moved to Las Vegas, straight from leaving the priesthood, Matt had come here often, especially in the punishing summer heat. It reminded him of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness before he began his ministry, and struck him as fitting that he should tarry in a cactus garden at the end of his own ministry.

Tonight, though, Matt found that someone had paved purgatory (if not put up a parking lot, as the song said) since his last visit. Instead of raw sandy footpaths, broad sidewalks meandered among the cactus specimens. He couldn’t read the small identifying markers impaled in the ground by moonlight, but the plants’ bristling forms were somehow even more satisfying half-shrouded, their exact identities hidden.

A handsome wooden bench was now the centerpiece of an artistic break in the gently hilly layout. Matt sat on it, surrounded by shadow and silence.

He didn’t know if he sat in a paradise about to be lost forever, or a garden of thorns, of the uncertain angst that precedes the final agony.

He knew he was at a crossroads. Someone actually wanted his soul besides God. That’s what a religious vocation was, giving your soul to God. What happened when you walked away from that path? Did God return your soul, slightly used? Was it now up for grabs? Not that many people aspired to soul robbing these days.

That made Kitty O’Connor unique.

Was she the Devil then? Or just his private edition? He had to take her at her word. She wanted to force him to do the thing he least wanted to do. With her, anyway. Her weapon was to threaten those he cared about, anyone around him, really. Even a mere acquaintance like Sheila had been injured at the New Millennium Hotel only a few days ago. So Temple, Lieutenant Molina’s preteen daughter, Mariah, anyone he associated with, was in danger.

Therefore…he would associate with no one.

And she had won.

Or…he lived his life as before, took his chances. And gambled with the lives of everyone who touched his.

Temple. Sheila. Mariah. Electra Lark, his motherly landlady at the Circle Ritz. Another name joined the roster. Janice. He’d forgotten about her telephoned invitation to dinner Monday night. Tomorrow.

Who else would be coming to dinner?

Sitting there, alone in the dark, he heard the occasional hiss of tires on a nearby thoroughfare. When he’d first come here, the world had seemed so remote. Now it crowded in, smelling and sounding like city.

Or was he just now hearing the civilization that had always hemmed in his private piece of wilderness?

The civilization, and the corruption.

Okay. What did Miss Kitty want? Nothing any teenage boy wouldn’t gladly give in a Las Vegas twenty-four-hour second. His body. His virginity. The unblemished record of his priestly chastity. Since coming to Las Vegas, Matt had actually come to consider his sexual inexperience an encumbrance in dealing with a secular world. Kitty O’Connor wasn’t, as she pointed out, ugly, so why agonize over it? She probably wouldn’t kill him anyway, because once having forced him to do what he didn’t want to do, she’d want him to live with the aftertaste. Why not? The answer in his gut was simple: because it didn’t matter the issue or the history or even whether it was him or some other guy or girl: forcing someone against his will was coercion, and in the sexual arena, it was assault, molestation, rape.

So was that any worse suffering than the Passion of Christ and Way of the Cross? Identifying with Jesus was hubris, or delusion, but the issue Matt faced was simple self-sacrifice. What made his innocence so precious that one hair on one other person’s head should be harmed by it?

Kitty the Cutter had sliced right to the heart of the matter: pride. He was proud that he had left the priesthood not a fallen priest but a mistaken one. Why not be proud that he’d honored his promise of chastity, along with obedience and poverty? Maybe because—although any kid knows what being obedient and poor meant, being powerless—Matt had never really understood what chastity meant. Or, rather, what not being chaste promised.

His Achilles heel. Achilles was another of mythology’s indestructible demigods with one small, nagging vulnerability. No wonder the world had embraced the notion of a destructible God who chose to share human frailty, if not fallibility. Although even Jesus had hesitated in the Garden of Gethsemane. If this cup…

But…blasphemy! He wasn’t Jesus. He wasn’t here to prove he was either godlike or frail. He was here to…what? Do the best he could. Be the best he could be. Be in the army? Army of God.

Dying for the Cause was an honored act for both messiahs and martyrs. Living for a cause was sometimes trickier.

Matt had often thought that the old-time religion had emphasized too much self-abnegation. The Good Friday psalm came to mind, Jesus intoning as he walked meek as a lamb toward the Cross, “for I am a worm and no man.” Such self-abasement would not go over well with the human potential movement today.