Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

She was tall, she was dressed like an aging flower child, she was talking to a guy at the other end of the bar who looked as much like a regular as anyone here tonight. And she glanced in the mirror at herself as if noticing a stranger, then her eyes ran down its length as fast and smooth as fingers whisking a run off a piano keyboard.

Max hunched over his drink, turned to the guy on his left, put his right hand with the clumsy college ring on it in front of his face, almost knocking his phony glasses off.

They made a perfect triangle: He and Molina at opposite ends of the bar and Rafi Nadir at the apex in the middle of the room, holding forth amid his harem, perfectly placed to spot either one of them, should the fates permit. Rafi Nadir on top of the world, which in this instance was a pyramid. A pyramid scheme, so to speak.

Molina’s ears, feet, and—now that she had sat down at the bar—butt were killing her. But the eyes felt fine, except for the burning irritant of secondhand smoke.

But that was Las Vegas. No way would smoking be banned.

“You related to any of the girls?” Don, the regular, was asking.

She was relieved that she wasn’t being mistaken for one of the girls, but miffed that he thought she might be somebody’s mother. Or big sister maybe.

“No. I’m a PI, just following up some leads.”

“Oh.” He was a stocky blond in JT10: jeans/T-shirt/tennies. Roofer, but harmless enough. Roofing was your number-one occupation for transients with crime in mind.

“You’re not kidding?” he asked. “About the PI part?”

“Who’d kid about that?” She glanced in the mirror again. This guy was dry; time to sink another well, but no good candidates presented themselves.

Then she noticed that Rafi was gone.

She stood up, scanning the mob. “Look, Don, I’m slowing down your action by sitting here. Thanks for the info.”

“I didn’t tell you much—”

“More than you think.” Bystanders always did.

She knew from five minutes with Don that Kitty City girls tended to stay put here, that it was always this busy, that Rafi was a familiar figure around the place, and now—that he was gone.

She rose and headed for the strippers’ dressing room.

Nobody noticed her as she beat her way through the heavy black velvet curtains at the side of the stage, then went down the hall, through the women’s john, and into the long, ugly, bare room behind it.

The usual three or four girls waiting to go on were busy peeling off their street clothes and pulling on what amounted more to accessories than clothes: boots, spike heels, thigh-high hose, garter belts, G-strings, body stockings the size and shape of intertwined rubber bands.

“Say, I missed talking to Rafi,” Molina said. “He leave with anyone?”

They looked blank and shrugged and questioned her in turn.

“Can you help me with this hook?”

“This new thong look all right?”

It was girls’ dorm, only the dorm backed onto a strip joint.

Molina hooked, nodded, and beat her way out of there.

“Rafi never plays favorites with the girls,” one voice singsonged after her as she left.

Never plays favorites . So what was his angle?

Reentering the club area was like walking into a sonic boom. Her ears, eyes, nose, and throat burned from acrid smoke and one foul, gasoline-slick vodka tonic she had nursed for far too long.

Her watch said it was long past coach-turning-into-pumpkin time, but the kid in the sound booth was still nodding and shaking to the music only he could hear at normal volume.

Molina eyed the entire scene one last time, and gave up.

If just seeing Rafi (and him not seeing her) was an achievement, then the night was not a waste. But she needed much more than that. It might be time to delegate, let her own people follow up her suspicions, which had not one shred of evidence behind them but instinct.

She moved under the irritating mirrored ball that raked her face with spinning spitballs of light. Looking away, she glimpsed herself streaking past the end of the mirror behind the bar. Brown eyes. So different. Such a good disguise. At least she’d learned that tonight.

Pushing the superheavy door open—why did they always make it so hard to get in and out of these places? Never mind. Pushing the door open with all her weight, she moved out into the untainted air, still slightly chilly before spring abruptly became summer and the air was always as warm as bathwater, and more often hot-tub water.

No smoke to breathe in, just air. She took a deep, singer’s breath, expanding her lung capacity to its fullest, drawing in from her diaphragm. As she exhaled, slowly, with control, a woman’s scream hit a high note and sustained it until abruptly ending.

The sound came from…behind the building, which gave her three sides to choose from.

She raced around to the left, digging the gun from the paddle holster in her purse. The scene of the scream: parking lot on three sides, jammed with cars but deserted of people, who were all inside deaf as posts to any ugly noises outside.

That’s why he struck in strip-joint parking lots, alone in a crowd. She had to be here to see it, hear it. A perfect setup if the timing was just right for everybody to be inside yet, whooping it up.

He had to know the pulse and timing that made strip clubs predictable in their own erratic way, Molina thought as she moved cautiously through the lot, scanning parked cars, hunting for a wrong motion, a glint of reflected streetlight on something, someone in the wrong place….

The streetlights were few and far between, of course. Strip club visitors were as cagey as gamblers about not wanting to be seen coming and going.

The abrupt cutoff of the scream echoed in Molina’s mind. Not good. A killer could be doing anything now, down on the warm asphalt between the cars…raping, strangling.

She moved unheard on the well-used moccasins she had found at the Goodwill, but she could hear no one else moving either, not even a distant blast of noise as Kitty City’s door opened and closed. It remained shut.

The neon from the sign up front cast pink and blue images on the roofs and hoods of the trucks and vans and cars filling the lot.

Then…something scraped. A shoe.

Someone moaned.

Over there.

Suddenly footsteps, running.

From two directions.

She paused at the building’s rear corner.

The parked vehicles had thinned back here.

She peered around the building’s sharp concrete-block edge, then broke into the open, weapon lifted, feet and hands braced.

A man was bending over something on the unpaved sandy soil surrounding the rear Dumpsters.

Something thumped sand. Footsteps. Another man was rounding the opposite edge of the rear wall, almost like a partner forming a pincer action.

Except that she had no partners here, just suspects.

The man on the ground jerked his head around and up into a sliver of blinking neon.

Rafi Nadir.

The man who’d rounded the corner was heading right for him.

“Stop. Police.”

She didn’t shout it, but her low, deep tone had such a shocking note of parental, paternal authority that both men paused, one in rising from the ground, one in heading toward him to keep him on the ground.

“Stop. Both of you.”

The gun was held two-handed, by-the-book style, ready to fire.

Both men recognized that. They stared at her.

Then Rafi continued rising, turned and ran, heading for the cars.

“Stop!”

The second man pursued Rafi, crossing her direct path of fire.

She bellowed, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”

He glanced her way, saw the gun was pointed dead-on at him. “He’s getting away.”