Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

The dog snorts, which is what you can expect from the breed while eating. "People are easily misled by milk-sucking parasites like him. He has done nothing for this hotel except decimate the fancy fish supply." The animal snuffles among a selection of orange rinds and apple cores before pulling out the butt end of a hot dog. "Besides, from what I hear, he has moved on to another establishment."

"Oh?" Caviar says in a way that begs for answering.

I have got to hand it to the kid. She manages to sound supremely uninterested just as the dumb cluck is spilling the info she wants the most.

He scarfs up some odds and ends I would not deign to bury, then feeds her the info while his mouth is full. "New place. On Lake Mead. Eatery called Three O'Clock Louie's.' Sounds like your friend has found a new gig with a better water view and more carp, where he can stay up later these days."

"He is not my friend," Miss Caviar is quick to establish.

"Then why do you want to find him?"

"Personal business," she answers, flexing her hardware.

The dog eyes the glint of her front claws stretching and retracting in a rhythm no one could mistake for expressing contentment. He backs away, dragging some of his ill-gotten gains with him.

"Yeah, well, I do not intrude in vendettas, lady. I doubt you could do more than nick a few loose hairs off his chinny-chin-chin, but I would like to see that lout get his comeuppance, so I will let you off easy this time. Now get out of here before I lose my appetite and forget I swore off cats!"

He lunges, feet braced, ears back, his loud and uncouth barker at full cry.

Caviar lunges too, fluffing her hair into a fat black aura, and arching her back like a midnight rainbow.

"I have had enough of you, too, fellow," she says in a tone between a growl and a hiss. "You should know that I am the new house detective at the Crystal Phoenix, and I do not welcome passersby of the wrong sort. You will have to do your snacking elsewhere from now on."

"Or else?" he snarls.

I tense, readying myself for a leap to the rescue. Much as Miss Caviar deserves a lesson, I cannot allow even maybe-kin to lose all nine lives to a dirty dog in my presence.

"Get back to the Araby Motel where you belong," she screeches, executing some swift and subtle moves she probably learned off an Oriental shorthair, which is exactly what that breed of cat usually get their opponents by.

The dog's threatening growl has escalated to a howl. He is backing away in big, bounding jerks, rubbing his long ugly snout in the dirt. Four dark furrows now tattoo his nose. Even as I watch, they well with bright red blood.

He dashes off; leaving a trail of droplets a near-sighted wombat could follow.

The triumphant Caviar drags his leavings back to the Dumpster, pantomimes burying the mess and ambles off, no doubt to attend to her beauty routine and cadge another disgusting hand-out from Chef Song.

I remain in the shade, mulling the cruel twists of fate. I am not only rumored to be living elsewhere under a pseudonym, but I have lost my old job to a female. What is this world coming to?

Chapter 28

Missing Connections

The water, warm and velvety, felt like partially set Jell-O.

Matt pulled himself through the pools turgid length, rhythmically angling his shoulder and face toward the overhead sun as he took a deep breath every other stroke.

Swimming was always a surreal experience. Immersed in an alien element, he battled to remain part of it, yet apart from it, moving with a shark's constancy.

His every breath came on a smelling-salt slap of chlorine. Through blue-tinted goggles, he glimpsed the world moving in a way that couldn't be sensed by walking on Mother Earth. A slash of palm frond waving against a blazing blue sky. A flash of the Circle Ritz roof spinning away as he made a splashy turn at the pool's far end. A black dot oared across the sky just as he rolled for a gulp of air, then submerged again.

Doing the Australian crawl was a fractured experience united by the water's tepid, seamless presence, an amniotic fluid buoying a rather restless fetus.

On the twenty-third lap, Mattes routine twist for air showed a man's face masked by sinister wraparound sunglasses hanging over him.

Matt wrenched himself into a full roll and came upright, treading the gelatinous water, trying to focus through droplet-spotted goggles.

"Frank!" he said, as much with relief as recognition. Temple's tales of shady characters and dark doings at the Crystal Phoenix had gotten to him.

With a wry grimace of acknowledgment, the man retreated to the shade while Matt drew himself, dripping, onto the hot concrete bordering the pool.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

Matt's wet feet left Friday footprints on the concrete. He collected his towel from the elderly lounge chair beside the one Frank had settled upon with gingerly reluctance.

''Quite a quaint place," Frank said instead of answering, pocketing the intimidating sunglasses to squint at the Circle Ritz's black marble bulk shining like a mausoleum in the sun.

''Even a little sinister looking."

"Speak of the Devil." Matt looked Frank up and down, from the gray suit and tie to the wing-tip shoes resting so incongruously on the cement.

"Unwritten FBI dress code." Frank loosened the utterly unimaginative tie. "Out of the church and still in uniform."

"Still on duty?" Matt asked, throwing his damp towel on the lounge seat before sitting.

"Always. You still keep in good shape."

"Always. And swimming is so routine, it's good for meditation."

"Yeah," Frank said, "routine has its uses. Once we go the suit route in the hot, humid Virginia summers, the heat elsewhere doesn't bother us. And priests are used to overdressing."

Matt self-consciously dabbed chlorine-perfumed droplets off his shoulder. His damp bareness suddenly symbolized the vocation and past that he had thrown off like an itchy black suit.

''I still can't believe you're an FBI agent." Matt said.

"You'd be surprised how many ex-priests end up in law enforcement. Makes sense. We've acquired the education, the people skills, plus a highly overdeveloped sense of right and wrong.

We know how to knuckle under to rules and authority. We believe we can change the world, or at least the dirty under soul of mankind."

"Speak for yourself. So what brought you here besides rank curiosity?"

Frank laughed apologetically as he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his suitcoat pocket.

"Bad habit. Every good celibate deserves, or develops, a compensatory but less condemnable vice--food, drink or these. Mind?"

Matt shook his head, actually enjoying the acrid odor of the freshly lit cigarette Frank soon inhaled as hungrily as a man breathing air through a straw.

"What are your vices?" Frank wanted to know.

"Nothing. Yet. My greatest weakness was always my lack of weaknesses."

"Granted. Everybody is entitled to a weakness," Frank mused. "Makes us human. Maybe your apparent perfection was why you could leave with laicization. Few of us need apply for that rare status, because we won't be granted release from our promises."

He regarded Matt with piercing, almost painful curiosity. "Besides, the only allowable conditions are so humiliating. Either admit lacking free will and maturity at ordination, or confess to such insatiable lust for women that you can't live without one, or be dying in an unauthorized married state and facing eternal damnation without emergency laicization. Ugly, bureaucratic word, isn't it?" Frank eyed Matt. "You don't look like you have terminal anything, and didn't have a wife already. You certainly don't strike me as possessed of a manic lust for women as the church defines it, and you were the most mature seminarian in your class. How did you manage it?"