Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

High heels were supposed to be sexy, and he supposed they were. The culture had seen to that. Yet there was a world of difference between Reno’s spikes and Temple’s high heels, and he’d have to be somewhere else to explain it to himself.

He glanced at the bar. Rick was there, waiting for Godot, or Ilsa, or Claude Rains. Rick was looking at Max…Vince…when he looked Rick’s way.

A bad sign.

Max slid off the armless chair, built for lap dancing.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the rolling gait of an overmuscled man heading his way.

He didn’t even look to see if it was Rafi Nadir.

He was out the door, in the still of the night. Around a corner. Another corner. Back in Dumpster Row, where the neon didn’t shine.

He had seen Reno arrive in a banged-up Toyota. His luminous watch dial, pure ‘50s, told him it was only 1:40 A.M. How much longer could Reno shake it for the dollar-bill fools?

He’d wait.

He heard the front door wheeze open, then hold the position. The bouncer looking for him.

After a while the muffled sound of music softened, then cut off.

Door closed.

Max edged around the building to the end of the parking lot that hosted Reno’s Toyota.

He moved into the scraggly brush edging the asphalt. Looming over it was a two-headed streetlight as sleek and sinister looking as the Martian ship probes in The War of the Worlds . But both lamps were dead, blind, only faint moonlight reflecting from their burned-out reflectors. They made an odd but apropos metaphor for the stripper club called Secrets and everybody in it. He settled into the shadows to wait.

* * *

She came clicking across the parking lot on her four-inch hooker heels. Swaggering.

Apparently a good night.

Halfway to the car, a pursuing shadow bolted from the dark hulk of Secrets and caught up with her, hard.

It spun her around.

“Reno.”

Max heard the name, heard everything, as the words hissed across the dry asphalt like a sidewinder snake.

“You want?”

“Had a good night.”

“Okay.”

“Not over yet.”

“It is for me.”

“You haven’t shared.”

She shook off the man’s arm. “You work here, like I do. You don’t get a cut.”

“I can take it any way you like.”

“Nothing!”

He reached for something: her, or where he thought the money was.

Reno’s arm struck out.

He backed up. “You—”

“You work here, just like I do. You don’t own anything about me.”

Max was easing over on silent shoes, but they were facing off and didn’t notice anything but their own anger.

“Your roommate thought the same thing, and look what happened to her.”

“Mandy? That mouse? She was dumb and sweet, but I ain’t. Let me be!”

By then Max was there.

“Trouble?” he asked.

They both rounded on him.

Maybe he had sounded too much like a cop.

“Get outa here!” the man warned.

The woman said nothing, especially not thank you.

Something hissed besides footsteps on dry asphalt. Something high and shrill.

A pop like a gun made everyone jerk, but nothing more happened.

Except that one of the dead streetlamps strobed into life again.

Thin blue light painted their faces a sickly color.

“You!” Rafi Nadir’s hand dropped its viselike grip on Reno’s elbow. “The cops sent someone in to get your mug down on paper. They must want you bad for something.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Max said, claiming Reno’s released elbow. “Now I’ll give you one. Call it a night before someone calls the vice squad. Do you want your face on the mug books?”

Nadir’s mouth worked. He was the kind who was always spoiling for a fight. Max was ready, though he didn’t look like it.

Nadir ignored him and addressed Reno. “This guy probably killed your roomie. Some white knight.”

She was staring at Max as if Rafi Nadir didn’t exist.

Before Nadir could get excited about being irrelevant, Max steered Reno to her car, took the fistful of keys from her hand, opened it and watched Nadir as she got in.

“I’ll see you at home,” he said affably.

In the slanted streetlight rays, her face looked hard, but curious. “You’re Vince.”

He shut the door on her, heard the oncoming scrape of shoes and turned to face Nadir, not so affably.

Reno started her car and drove away, leaving the two men plenty of room for…whatever.

“You’re not leaving,” Nadir said. “Not until that girl is long gone. I should call the police.”

“But you won’t.”

“I don’t need backup to deal with you.”

“What’s to deal with. I’m leaving, aren’t I?”

Nadir stared down the street. Reno’s beater was out of sight, out of hearing. He stepped back with an elaborate gesture of permission.

“Go ahead. But you gave me trouble with another stripper, and she ended up dead the next day. If anything happens to this one, it would look bad for you.”

“That works both ways, doesn’t it?”

Nadir stared sharply into Max’s face, puzzled by his calm, unsettled by the implication.

“I don’t ever want to see you at Secrets again,” he said.

“You won’t.”

Max turned and crossed the parking lot to the street beyond, where he had parked the Maxima two blocks away.

At first he listened for Nadir following him. When he was in the dark between streetlights he finally looked for him.

Nothing.

Max was free to move on to the next low point of the evening.

Chapter 24

Chuck Wagon

You would think Miss Midnight Louise was a casino owner showing off a new armored truck.

There we are gathered in the delivery area behind a wholesale grocery establishment far from the shake, rock, rattle and roll of the Strip, our only audience a circle of Dumpsters and our only spotlight the sickle moon-on-the-half-shell, peeking over the rippled edge of a corrugated roofline.

There is just me and Miss Louise. Oh. And the two noses with fungus among us, name of Golda and Groucho.

I cannot believe that I am out here of a chilly March night with my dearly beloved not-daughter, Midnight Louise, and two pieces of dandelion fluff that have been foisted upon me by my erstwhile assistant, Nose E.

“What did you say these two are?” I hiss at Louise as we all hunker down near ground zero, eyeing the object of our expedition.

“Yorkshire terriers.”

“Well, this is not Yorkshire anymore,” I say, inhaling a bit of desert sagebrush on the wind and exhaling it with an untimely sneeze.

“ Shhhh !” Louise hisses back at me. “And you say they are noisy.”

I eye our objective: the truck.

It is big, white, and nondescript, in fact a refrigerator on wheels.

Miss Louise is trying to sell this anemic pumpkin on ice as our coach to the palace. Or our buckboard to the ranch.

“Think of it as a chuck wagon,” she urges. “Meals on wheels. You can snack on the way.”

“And freeze our tails off,” I growl. Then I look at Golda and Groucho. I realize that I am not sure if they have tails. “Ears off.” Do they have ears? “ Noses off.” I know they have noses. Those I can see, those shiny wet-asphalt blobs dead center under the perky little red bows on their noggins. I think there are matching eyes behind the waterfall of silky gold and gray hair dangling from the bows.

“These two will be frozen Vienna sausages before we even get out of Vegas,” I say. “Noses on ice are worth nothing.”

“The unit is not fully refrigerated. They do not wish to deliver ice cubes, merely keep the fresh meat from spoiling.”