Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"What is the scoop, Big Boy?" she asks, nothing infantile about her baby-blues now that I am closer. "How did a he-man like you bust into this sideshow'? Are you an escapee from the Household Cat Division?"

Chapter 12

Wakeup Call

A ringing sound in his ears awoke Matt. He sat up in the dark, his body pounding with sudden alarm, his mind trying to remember. He often dreamed of the phone ringing, natural enough when his working life was spent answering it. Had that awakened him, or--

Another ring of the phone, a falsetto wobble from the main room. No dream, but who would call him at---he focused on the bedside clock-radio's LED numerals--four-thirty in the morning? Who even knew his phone number besides the hotline?

Awake and even more alarmed now, he got up and stumbled into the dark, trying to avoid the boxes of books he still hadn't unpacked, trying to find his way quickly through the rooms that still didn't seem his.

"Yes?"

He expected a pause and a hang-up, wrong number, or someone looking for a crack-of-dawn pizza.

"Matt?"

No mistake. Woman's voice he couldn't quite place.

"Yes?"

"Thank God!"

"Sister Seraphina! What--?"

"You've got to come."

"Come . . . where, why? Now?"

"Now, to the convent."

"What's wrong?"

"Our neighbor lady--a very old lady--is terribly ill, and Father Hernandez . . ."

"Yes?" he prodded.

"Father Hernandez is not functional. I need your help."

"Have you called an ambulance?"

"It may not be necessary, but you must come at once. More is needed."

He didn't want to get caught up in this, couldn't get involved in this. "Can't you handle it?"

"She's an old, old lady, Matt; from a generation that trusts only men in a crisis. It would be better if you came. Please, Matthias--Matt. "

He kept silent again. He had been asleep for only an hour;

Waking up so suddenly put his brain in deep-freeze. "I--l don't have a car, no transportation." Even to him, it sounded like an excuse, although it was true.

"Oh, Matthias, you must come quickly!"

He had never heard Sister Superfine sound so out of control, an old woman with a dysfunctional priest, an obscene phone-caller and now an injured neighbor on her hands.

"I'll get a car," he said, "and be there as fast as I can."

"Please hurry."

It was the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but even before she had hung up, he had switched on the small lamp by the phone and opened his almost-empty address book to a number at the beginning.

Chapter 13

Extreme Urgency

Temple was waiting outside her apartment door in a double-knit navy-blue jumpsuit, with her car keys and a tote bag, two minutes after Matt called.

"Of course you can have my car in an emergency," she had told him, not taking time to ask why.

Now she wondered. He hadn't sounded panicked, only deeply distracted beneath the haste, and oddly reluctant.

Footsteps pounded down the distant stairs and Temple went to meet them. At least he had remembered to forget calling the fatally slow elevator.

The low, night-wattage of the hall sconces made the Circle Ritz's interior seem eerie and isolated, like the limitless maze of corridors on an ocean liner. Temple almost expected the floor to lurch. What could be so urgent?

She met a running Matt by the elevator, where he reached for her car keys like a drowning man for a line.

She pulled her hand away. "I'll drive."

"You don't have to---" He reached again.

"Matt--no! This is an emergency; you might have to go fast. It's my car; I'll drive. Come on."

Temple headed for the door to the stairs and bulled through, Matt following and arguing too loudly.

"Temple! I don't want you involved." he insisted behind her. "I can drive fast--and safely, for heaven's sake. Give me the keys."

Even with their voices lowered to hoarse whispers, the words echoed up the concrete stairwell and buffeted at the safety doors separating them from resident sleepers.

Temple kept going--fast, clattering down the hard stairs in her slide on wedgies, the loose shoe backs slapping the soles of her feet as she skittered tight around each turn of the stairwell.

She charged out into the still, hot Las Vegas night, heading for the Storm until Matt caught up and hooked her arm, stopping her and spinning her around to face him in one economic gesture.

"You don't need to go." he said, insisted.

He must have dressed as quickly as she, yet in appearance he was the same unruffled Matt she always saw in his knit shirt and khaki pants, casual, calm. Except that now his voice vibrated a hint of exasperation she had never heard before, maybe even . . . desperation.

She hated to 'fess up--she didn't need to rise in the dead of night like a misdirected zombie on an errand of mercy--but if he wanted, needed, her car, she would have to admit what she knew.

"Yes, I do need to go, Matt, because you don't have a driver's license and I'm responsible if anything happens."

Stunned, he froze for a moment, and then followed without protest as she made for the car again. "I forgot, but--how . . . did you know" he asked over the Storm's top as she unlocked the driver's side.

Temple leaned across the seat to open the passenger door. "Lieutenant Molina." Matt really froze at that one. She was sorry the nearest streetlight was too distant to illuminate faces.

"Come on, get in." Temple started the car so suddenly the ignition gargled a protest. "Where are we going?"

Her question seemed to interrupt a series of questions he was asking himself. He shook his head to clear it. "Do you know where Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is?" He sounded resigned now. "Seguaro and Del Rey?"

"No, but I know the intersection, just tell me where to turn when we get there."

Even at five in the morning, Las Vegas streets sported traffic: if Chicago was the city that never shut down, Las Vegas was the one that never shut down or shut up. Temple guided the Storm along the fastest route at a slightly racy forty-five miles an hour. "What'll I say if the police stop us?"

"How did Molina know?" asked Matt. still dazed that she knew about his status--or lack thereof--with the Nevada State Motor Vehicle Department.

"How did she know about your license? Or your absence of same?" Temple flashed Matt a glance as a streetlamp flared overhead. His habitual calm looked more like numbness.

"She checked you out. Bet you didn't dream that I would be so dangerous to know. Yes, sir, Lieutenant Molina has a nagging curiosity about men of my acquaintance."

"Damn," he said, the only time she'd heard him swear. Why he said it was not clear.

"Yeah, Molina makes me say that a lot, too," Temple put in to lighten the atmosphere. "She is one stubborn daughter of a dork."

"Daughter of a dork?" That had shaken his unnatural calm.

"Well, son of a bitch is sexist, and besides, Molina's the wrong sex for it."

Matt's laugh sounded less like amusement and more like surrender. Obviously, things weren't going his way tonight, and Temple was one more unpleasant surprise. She wasn't supposed to know about his errand, and she wasn't supposed to know he didn't have a driver's license. Why? She was becoming almost as curious as Molina. Temple reflected.

"What are we riding to the rescue about?" she asked as she turned onto Seguaro.

He laughed again, wearily. "I don't exactly know. I recently . . . heard from an old grade-school teacher of mine from Chicago. She called out of the blue a few minutes ago, begging for help. l don't even know how she got my number?!

"Chicago? I thought you were raised on a farm."

He turned to face her at last. "What do you mean?"

"That's how you knew Midnight Louie was a he, you said on the day he came, that day we met by the pool. You said you learned that animal-husbandry sex stuff growing up on a farm."