Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

Temple suddenly saw through Jill like she was plate glass. This expedition to Temple Bar had been planned to distract Temple Barr herself from the ugly business at the Phoenix. But it hadn't worked; seeing Three O'Clock Louie in the flesh and fur had fixed that.

"I've got to get back and make sure Midnight Louie is in carp heaven and all's right with the world, for one thing."

"And for another?" Jill pressed her.

"For another, I better defend my skit from the forces of law and order, evil and Crawford Buchanan."

At her feet. Three O'Clock Louie seconded her announcement with a piercing meow of approval.

Chapter 24

The Good Father

Matt left ConTact preoccupied, his ears ringing with the multi-voiced, remote misery of the phone lines.

The drug overdose was all right; Matt had heard the ambulance siren wailing to a stop on the line's other end.

The suicide was another matter. Like alcoholics, suicide prone people promised reformation, then recanted barely after the telephone was hung up. They were also addicted to sudden terminations of calls, and of counseling: volatile, tortured people craving both attention and the numbing safety of anonymity.

How easy. Matt reflected, to deal with woe in a generic sense, to label people by their maladies. The distance of a counseling line worked both ways. It kept the caller from revealing too much, committing too much. It kept the counselor from feeling too much, bleeding too much.

No matter how specific the caller's anguish, it always fit into a universal mold, seen and shaken out onto the table to study a thousand times before: the suicide; the addict; the alcoholic.

Matt smiled wryly.

The Shoe Freak.

At least she fit a one-and-only mold, God-only-knew what size. Her obsessive documentation of the downfall of women's feet through the ages via the fiendish agency of high heels made for welcome comic relief. He must consult Temple about some of the Shoe Freak's complaints. Did she exaggerate, in the way of all obsessives, or was there a grain of truth, stubborn as a grain of sand rolling around inside a shoe, to her mania?

Only the sound of his footsteps interrupted the faint night music, the sawing-wing-work of cicadas and the gliding passage of unseen cars a block or two away.

But . . . Matt's shoes had rubber soles, he shouldn't be hearing the faint, gritty scrape of leather soles on sidewalk.

He mentally shrugged off his reverie, reflecting that he would rather be trailed by a stranger in a car than a stranger on a street.

The man in a car was visibly dependent on the accoutrements of civilization--tires and car keys, gas pumps and street lights. The man on foot seemed a more sinister figure, a throwback: the stalker, the hunter, convinced he needed nothing against the night but himself, and what he could carry. What would he carry?

Yet . . . someone as innocent as Matt could also be out: walking. At three-fifteen a.m?

Matt thrust his hands into his pants pockets--to imply he: carried something else in them beside his fists and some small change, and turned.

A man scuffed along the street fifty feet behind him, moving purposefully, a man in a suit, oddly formal apparel for this deserted shopping area at this time of night. Lauds.

Still, a suit was better than more Gothic garb, say a cowled monk's robe.

Matt grimaced at his religion-ridden imagination and turned, unwilling to have a stranger gaining on him along this lonely street, loath to challenge or to flee.

Instead, he drifted closer to the dark storefronts, until he reached an expanse of plate glass that was bathed in a reflected streetlight.

Now Matt himself was the Gothic figure, with the strong overhead light washing his features in skeletal shadows.

In the makeshift mirror of a dry cleaning establishment Matt watched the figure appear in the window's far corner, move within ten feet, and stop.

Oh, Lord. Matt turned to look, suspicious but not unduly alarmed . . . yet. The suit could be a decade old, and the man could be a homeless panhandler. He certainly wasn't a gang member.

"You're pretty hard to track down," the man said.

The particular vocal timbre plucked a long-unused string of Mattes memory.

"Not really," Matt said carefully. ''I just work late."

"Luckily, so do I. Sometimes."

Matt could have sworn that a smile touched the voice, but the man was all shadow, and still a stranger.

"Why are you tracking me down?" Matt asked.

"You wanted me to."

Matt shook his head in annoyance. This conversation was going nowhere. "Who . . . ?"

''How soon they forget." The man stepped into the brighter light near the window, nearer to Matt than he liked.

Matt studied a lean, fit figure, one not to mess with, but an older man, he sensed. Was this was an associate of his late stepfather's, who had heard Matt was looking for Cliff Effinger and wanted to know why now that the man was dead? Maybe this person thought that Matt had something to do with that death. . . .

"Hey," the man prodded, ''I can't decide if you're too trusting, or too wary. Which is it?"

"Unless you want to find out, don't come any closer until you identify yourself."

"Ah, Matthias, and I was supposed to be such a permanent influence on your life . . ."

Stupefaction froze Matt just when he should be most alert.

The voice, the use of his full given name evoked a mental snapshot of a bland office, of cluttered bookshelves, of a tree dotted campus outside the single window, quite beautiful really.

"It's Bucek," the man said abruptly, ending Mattes misery in racking his memory.

"My God, Father, I forgot! I left a message at St. Vincent, but they were so unforthcoming, I didn't expect to hear from you."

"You wouldn't have, except business brought me to Las Vegas, of all places, and your message had been forwarded. Why don't we keep on walking; the Circle Ritz isn't getting any closer."

''You know where I'm going?"

''You left your address."

"My home address, yes, but not ConTact's. How did---"

"I travel a lot, so I check things out rather thoroughly. For my job."

Matt fell into step with the slightly taller man, his mind flashing between similar walks on that bucolic Indiana campus and this shadow stroll some ... ten years later.

Despite the other seminarians' edgy discomfort at Father Bucek's acerbic manner and stern intellect, Matt had always admired him. Until ...

"You left," Matt said. Accused.

"So did you," Bucek shot back. "I must say I was surprised, Matthias. Surprised and sad."

"It's Matt now, and save the guilt trips for somebody with a ticket to ride."

"Humph. Back there just now. I couldn't decide if you were up to facing off a possibly dangerous stranger, or just a nice Catholic boy about to get creamed."

"I can take care of myself. No one's ever bothered me on my walks home. Before."

"Martial arts. You were a veteran even in seminary. What was it? I didn't pay much attention then. Tae Kwon Do? Karate?"

"Whatever feels right at the moment, and I don't mean just that I've had martial arts training. I had that then. I mean I can take care of myself now." Bucek nodded.

Father Bucek, Matt's mind kept insisting. You expect certain things to stand: the parish church you grew up near; the Pope in Rome; the priest who was your spiritual director in seminary. You might fail, might deny like Peter, might end your oath at the ironic age of thirty-three, but these things stood. Bucek the sometimes terrifying, the always-wise, with his intellect so acute he seemed to see through excuses. Father Furtive, who knew what every seminarian was afraid to confess.

"There's a Burger King a couple blocks down," Bucek said now. "Want a cup of coffee?"