Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

“Killing you ,” Kathleen said, “was never my intention.”

“Yes, that would have interfered with my ability to suffer for loving you and leaving you right after, but seventeen-year-old guys are fickle.”

“Did you?” she asked sharply.

“What?” Love me would always go unspoken with her.

Her jaw muscles tightened. “He said you said you had.”

“Matt Devine the radio shrink, you mean?”

Your fiancée’s new fiancé.”

“He’s a pretty good shrink,” Max admitted.

Kathleen licked her bright fuchsia color lipstick, a rare nervous gesture. “He said because I’d lacked ‘all positive social connections’ growing up I couldn’t understand close bonds. Or the guilt and responsibility you owed your cousin when he was blown up in the pub bombing while we were…in Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park.”

“You know, Kathleen, my memory is still really screwed up. Belfast was almost twenty years ago. The answer you want may never come to me. What about my answers? Were you behind sabotaging my bungee cord act at the Neon Nightmare club?”

“No.”

“Did you ever don a Darth Vader mask and cloak to join your longtime IRA ally, Santiago, then threaten those disgruntled unemployed magicians who owned Neon Nightmare?”

“Is it truly serious you’re being?” She sounded indignant. “Santiago liked over-the-top stunts, and those Synth freakos were meddling with old IRA business in North America, but me, indulge in any such fakery? If I threaten, I act.”

“There were two Vaders. Both were attacked and marked by a pack of cats. You know the ones I mean. Santiago’s body bore the track marks down his back and legs when he was autopsied.” Max’s forefinger drew a soft line under Kathleen cheek scars. “Are you marked someplace other than this?”

“Is it possible you’d like to find out for yourself?” Her words were part taunt, part seduction.

“It’s more than possible you’d like to find that out for yourself. No one human scarred you, in that instance.”

“Those feral cats! They pack and attack like dogs. I’ve seen them hunting that way in the barrios of the major South American cities, more so than in the U.S. You saw it. Your girlfriend’s housecat can don the ‘mask’ of a carnivore and the cloak of darkness and be as feral as a black panther. And if you want to see my scars, you’ll pay dearly for the privilege.”

Strong emotion had pinked her marked cheek, her small, strong body had tensed even more, and Max felt it, the adjacency, the intimacy, the mind’s-eye photographic still of them lying almost side-by-side and, more than a memory, a feral desire to embrace heat and danger and sin and maybe even death.

“Your three a.m. shrink,” Max said to change the subject, the emotional rush, ASAP. “He said you were cat-track free.”

She frowned, distracted. “So that’s what he was up to that night? Trying to see my backside without committing a mortal sin?” Her small cascade of laughter startled Max as much as a machine gun spray of bullets, but he kept still. “Father Straight-and-Narrow broke a sweat going undercover, all right. My God, he’d almost got me to admitting there had been some good priests, but he had to ruin it by going off and leaving. All men are alike.”

Max found himself smiling along with her, mentally clinging to the fact she was a psychopath made not born, but still a psychopath. Going off and leaving her was a cardinal sin in her mind.

Kathleen shifted her seat to the recline position so abruptly that Max jerked upright by reflex, every muscle tensed.

“Relax, Max,” she purred, turning her face so close to his he smelled the lemon from the Atlantic cod on the dinner menu. “We’re going home, to where ‘our hearts have ever been’. Or, rather, to where our young hopes have been left dead and buried, like Danny Boy’s abandoned love. You think you hold my daughter’s name and location hostage. I certainly hold your sainted cousin Sean’s location hostage. All these years, and kin still separates us, and joins us. I’ll take you home as no set of ruby red slippers could, not even on the munchkin feet of Temple Barr.”

He leaned back and tilted the hat brim lower over his eyes, done with jousting. “Where do you wish to go first, my wild Irish rose? To meet my lost kin or your own?”

“To Hell, where Jack the Ripper claimed he was from.”

“Fair enough,” Max said. And yawned.

He knew the next step now.

He hoped those he’d left behind in Vegas were making the right moves too.

16

Off, Off and Away

“This certainly is a…squat…main terminal,” Matt said.

He turned in the car’s passenger seat to view Minneapolis-St. Paul airport through the rent-a-Ford’s rear window. Temple kept her eyes on the road as she drove around continually curving exit lanes.

“Don’t look back,” Temple said. “And I’m pleased you’re not nervous with me driving.”

“Why should I be? Glad we got some sleep on the flight, though. Even you, who doesn’t work nights.”

Temple swallowed an urge to lie and over-explain why she’d been shy of sleep the night before. In daylight, that midnight Araby Motel expedition with Electra looked even more loopy than it had at the time.

Matt turned to face front and the passing freeway flora. “I like the coolness, but it sure is hairy here, like in Chicago.”

He was right. Minnesota greenery was aggressive. Temple had forgotten that after living a couple years in a desert community like Las Vegas. Still, she was pleased. Most guys, even the best of them, had trouble relinquishing the steering wheel to a mere girl. Her brothers had been the worst at that.

“Don’t diss the terminal, Chicago boy,” Temple said. “My mother was an extra there when they filmed Airport .”

“ Airport ?” Matt repeated.

Temple sighed. Airport , yes, the major motion picture of 1970. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had gone crazy at being the film’s site. For Temple’s mom, it was the highlight of her college life. One day she’d spent the afternoon hours until dawn “milling” left and right in the main concourse area, depending on whether her birth date was an odd or even year. Repeated examinations of the final film’s stopped frames had revealed no glimpse of her telltale fire-engine-red hair.

“Being an extra sounds hard on the feet,” Matt said after Temple explained.

“My mom felt no pain. She glimpsed star Burt Lancaster and even saw a scene-stealing cameo by the ‘First Lady of the American Theater’, Helen Hayes.” Temple cranked the steering wheel hard left as they glided under an underpass. “That terminal has been built onto since then. Back in that day it was considered ultramodern and exciting.”

Matt shook his head and faced forward. “All this greenery seems claustrophobic after doing time in Las Vegas.”

“It is pretty hairy around here.” Temple grinned as she spurted the rental car into the pulsing westward traffic flow.

“Do you mean ‘hairy’ as in masses of flowing leaves or scary ‘hairy’ as in what meeting your extended family will be like for me?”

“Both.” She spared him a glance from the crowded lanes. “Don’t worry. Your blond coloring will fit right in with all the Swedes and Norskys in Minnesota.”

“Your brothers too?”

“Kinda.”

“Where did your red hair come in?”

“Must be some Scots-Irish in the mix.” Temple smiled. “You don’t look too edgy for a prospective son-in-law. We’re on the Interstate and you’re still not nervous about me driving.”