Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

Maverick eyes the heaped bowls of Free-to-Be-Feline that now outnumber the cats around the place.

“What can they all eat and drink in the wilderness?” he asks.

“We have scouted a leaking water pipe near the flood channel, and Miss Midnight Louise is a very vigorous, ah, cook. If you like desert sushi.”

Maverick nods sagaciously. “Sushi is good. Miss Savannah has brought us boxes of it lately.”

“Where are the sisters?”

“With the greater number of people coming and going, they have hidden.”

Oh, Great Bast’s earring! I will not only have to convince them to accompany me into the great outdoors, I will have to find them first.

In minutes, Maverick and I have searched the house, floorboard to furniture, to no avail. Even the occupied main room, which he covered because he’s a known resident, is not hiding the Persian sisters. We are stumped.

Then I recall rule number ten of feline behavior. If a door is opened, you are through it, and the less you are noticed, the better. That is how all Miss Violet’s cats are wandering out of the house, through deliberately ajar exits. The Ashleigh girls would never venture outside alone, though. I rush to the hall and employ my street-sharp shivs as a crowbar under the Asian cabinet doors.

Presto, pussycats! Four fluorescent green eyes blink back at me. They slipped in when Miss Temple turned her back to slip the purloined goods into her tote bag. I was so busy watching her, they even evaded my keen private eye.

“Bonjour, chéries,” I say. “I have come to escort you out of this unhappy domicile to a fine new nightclub down the street. It serves sushi.”

“Oh, Louie,” says Yvette, forgetting her snarled hairdo. “You look very handsome in your freshly washed tuxedo.”

“And,” says Solange, “Miss Savannah often brought us sushi when we were with her.”

“Well, you are with me now, mademoiselles, and we have only to slip outside and be on our way.”

Solange’s pretty face looks worried. “Oh, Louie. I do not know if we can, without permission.”

“Of course you can,” I say, nudging each along by the shoulder. “You are French. And so am I.”

Chapter 37

Prime-Time Tail

Max sat in the rented winter-gray Prius almost as dark as the night itself and wondered if he’d ever had this thought before: Molina had been right.

Grabbing Dirty Larry and marching him into her house had had its satisfactions, but following the undercover narc now that he knew Molina had him under surveillance made the job much harder.

Nobody ever expected a tail to be driving a Prius, though, making an ecological statement. Max also wore a funky little tweed cap, one that a guy who played golf or listened to folk music might wear.

“Layers,” Gandolph had always said. “The best disguises have layers.”

If Podesta was in danger of noticing the guy in the Prius, Max could doff the cap, circle back from a different direction, and still get in some useful tailing time.

One thing he knew: Dirty Larry was indeed dirty. He’d lied to Molina three nights ago at her house. Not all the time, about everything, but about a lot. Max could hear a lie the way musicians hear a single sour note.

Cynical C. R. had taken everything either of them had said with a grain of salt. Max wondered what the R stood for. He could see how someone with a first name like Carmen could have been kicked off the law-enforcement career ladder. He thought of the opera. Opera? Did he like opera? Most men would think of some hot Latina chick.

Larry had been visiting the scenes of the Barbie Doll Killer’s two Vegas crimes. Max saw the pattern early and kept the Prius on the farthest circling shopping-mall roads. Larry’s big, bruising seventies Impala made him easy to be seen despite the deep-bronze-brown body color. D. L. expected to be predator, not prey. Visiting crime scenes was an uncool thing to do, especially now that he knew he’d been watched. Serial killers did that sort of thing. They couldn’t keep away from the stage of their secret triumphs. They drove around at night.

So did cops.

And ex-magicians.

Max noticed the Impala disappearing between rows of parked cars and toddled the Prius—not his speed—along the access roads toward an exit.

He caught the car’s taillights accelerating onto the freeway and had to goose the Prius’s gas pedal, cheered by the swift, if quiet, response. Dirty Larry was either trying to lose any tail or was feeling a need, an intense need.

Holy St. Mackerel! Was he following a killer to a new crime site?

*

Ten minutes later he was playing catch-up, as Larry left the freeway on an exit he’d never taken before. Max’s heart wanted to race in time with his car engine, but the damn thing was too quiet. He was on the trail of something dark, something secret in Dirty Larry’s life, he knew it.

The scene at Molina’s house had made Larry less cautious, not more. Max sensed an emotional ebb and flow in the man’s driving that said he was losing control. Max was Irish; he understood how charm and fury could coexist. Podesta. Dirty Larry’s father had to have had Italian or Sicilian blood, but something stubbornly Celtic was in there, too. Maybe Scots.

They were driving through a gently aged neighborhood, passing the occasional corner church or convenience store at the bigger intersections. Max doffed the hat, sat it like a memorial on the Prius’s passenger seat, and felt a moment of grief too dark to bear.

Not too close, a voice in his head cautioned. Not now.

He forced his hands to relax their strangling grip on the steering wheel, even as Dirty Larry’s wallowing Impala took a wide, sloppy left into a small parking lot.

Max and the Prius cruised on by, eyes and headlights front. Max glimpsed a long, mostly one-story building, institutional yet in a residential neighborhood. New, but pre–Great Recession. Blond brick, lots of outside security lights, damn it.

Max checked his watch: 9:30 P.M. Even late suppers are over and TVs are on prime time. He spied the flickering, cozy halos in almost every window. An apartment building? One-story?

He parked the Prius on a side street and shut down everything, silent-running motor, headlights. No radio. And waited. A half hour later the bad-neighborhood rumble of Dirty Larry’s Impala notified him his subject was leaving the property.

Max knew he was now trailing a “subject.” He waited ten minutes then guided the Prius around to the front portico and the central two-story core of the building, where matte steel letters over the entry doors read ST. ROSE’S NURSING HOME.

Max frowned and parked the Prius right out front, where it looked very at home. He paused in leveraging his legs out of the driver’s seat, still a slightly hard physical—and a very emotional—move for him, when he paused to lean back to reclaim the tweed hat.

A wee dorky look would do for him here, he thought.

If things had worked out differently in Belfast, he might have been visiting Gandolph here, or vice versa. Garry, I hardly knew ye.…

The large lit circular lobby echoed his footsteps, magnifying the minor hesitation in his gait.

The woman at the desk looked up with compassion on her face.

Every little bit helps, Max told himself. “Dashing” was not his high card at the moment.

She had soft, pretty features and was in her late fifties. Her name tag read BARBARA. Max checked the clock above Barbara’s head: 9:40 P.M.

“Yes? Visiting hours are almost over,” she told him, “but you have a few minutes.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Max said a bit breathlessly with the shade of a brogue. “I’m from out of town … the country, really. My international flight was late and I missed meeting my cousin Larry at his condo to drive here together.”