Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

Those celestial blue eyes blink. In a wink, shy, reclusive Karma has a napkin full of A La Cat’s best between her sharp white teeth, and is sliding down the palm trunk like it is a magic carpet.

The last I see, she is laying it all out for Gimpy, and pitching tasty nuggets into his tuna-hole. Meanwhile, I am the chef du jour, clambering to the countertop, teeth tearing packets open, kicking them into the microwave, then using fifteen-second bursts to release their full, fishy aroma.

Manx! Cooking for a crowd is murder.

Chapter 39

Dangerous Curves

Dirty Larry hunched forward in Molina’s visitor’s chair, his hands loosely clasped.

It was an oddly tense posture for a man with a style cool enough to chill ice. Maybe he sensed that she wanted to know something she didn’t want him to know she wanted.

What a tangled web undercover work involved! If Max Kinsella really was the super-spy Matt claimed he was, he must have been one hell of a multitasker. She knew she was too direct and authoritarian to match wits with a seasoned undercover operative like Larry Paddock. But she needed to do just that.

“My favorite redhead-gone-blond is up to her tiny tush in the murder and attempted murder at the Crystal Phoenix,” she told him. “I dug out the surveillance report you did on her for me a couple weeks back.”

“You want a vintage shop sized-up, she’s your woman.”

“I know her routines look all girly and innocent, but I don’t buy appearances.” Her hard look implied that might apply to him as well.

Larry shrugged. He had that inborn indifference to authority of any kind that made him such an apt candidate for a drug runner or other specialist in the criminal arts. Molina figured it was a native talent, honed through a prefelonious boyhood in some urban slum. Then military, probably special branch, then undercover in L.A. or Las Vegas where crime was as spectacularly intense as the scenery and social ambiance.

“Anything innocuous could be a cover,” she told him. “You didn’t give me the addresses beyond the general locations.”

“You want addresses of local vintage shops?” He grinned crookedly. “I thought Carmen the chanteuse habituated those places.”

“Not for years. Her thirties and forties era is out of fashion in the vintage shops now.”

“Too bad. Them’s ritzy rags.” He gave her a male once-over that stripped away the khaki pantsuit and attired her in dark liquid velvet.

Darned if she didn’t mind that. There was something feral and sexy about Dirty Larry. What used to be called devil-may-care in the torch song era. He’d aimed that at her when no one else dared. She hadn’t made up her mind about who was using who here, or if either of them cared.

She did care about getting a deeper interrogation of him on the matter of TempleBarr’s movements around Las Vegas, without him catching on, which was tricky.

“Mind this store for the moment,” she admonished him, lightly enough that it sounded as much like a come-on as a rebuke. “This is police business.”

“Sure, Lieutenant, you can pull rank on me anytime.” The tone was insolent.

“Like you’d ever take that.”

He shrugged, his smile tight. Then he shifted in the chairand pulled out a small cheap notebook, half the pages pulling out of the spiral binding.

“I took down the addys, just figured you didn’t plan on stopping by these nothing places.”

He started by spitting out the date, then shop names and addresses. Molina could barely jot them down fast enough.

‘That’s the vintage shops, all along or near Charleston, as you know. The residence was 1200 Mohave Way

, kinda like High Noon. The hotels I think you know well enough to dispense with street addresses. And the funky round residence—”

“That one I know all too well,” she said, waving a hand as she finished jotting down the vintage store addresses she didn’t want or need as if they were manna from heaven.

“What’s the deal with this old stuff?”

She looked up to see that the notebook had disappeared. She bet Dirty Larry had a lot of stashing places on his person, almost as many as a magician.

She felt her face flush. Guilt maybe. But Larry was good. He’d read every flicker of her expression, her thoughts.

“You want to search me, Lieutenant?” He spread his arms and hands, inviting.

“Not today.”

“Tonight?”

“Maybe.” Damn it. She needed to distract him. Sexual banter might do that.

His head tilted, like a bird who’d heard a worm wiggling underground.

“I was thinking Carmen needed to put in an appearance at the Blue Dahlia,” she said.

“Tonight?”

Now she would have to. “You’ve been a good boy with your math questions. But I hope you weren’t using a crib notebook.”

He laughed, easy and contented, all male satisfaction. It’d be hard to lose him tonight, but she had to. “Admit it. Those velvet gowns make you hot.”

“And they don’t make you hot?”

He rose, leaned forward, tapped the top of her hand with the pen in it. “I’ll be there.”

Some emergency with Mariah. That would be her out. Dirty Larry paused at the door to her office. Cut her a dirty blond Sting look. Maybe she didn’t want an out.

It was too bad her appearance at the Blue Dahlia was a sham.

The trio was really smoking and her voice had been just unused enough to have a throatier edge that matched them.

Dirty Larry had been lounging at a corner table drinking Madeira on ice like it was cough syrup meant to be taken by teaspoons, sober but undressing her with his eyes.

He was impertinent, unprofessional, arrogant, and oddly attractive. Maybe it would take an outlaw like him to breach her formidable defenses.

But not tonight. She had other business in mind.

She was crooning out the song’s endless last bars when the slimy-looking guy who was as twitchy as a coke addict sidled up to Larry’s table.

Larry frowned, big time. He gestured the lowlife away, brought his eyes back to her so she could breathe the last “you” of “It had to be you” right at him.

His lips pantomimed the word “Shit.” Then he rose and made a royal wave with one hand that meant “and all that stuff we cops do.”

And left.

Thanks to the inside info she had on the drug deal at the Opium Den going down, he was outta here. And so was she.

Molina bowed her head slightly to the enthusiastic applause, winked at the guys in the band, and beat a retreat to her tiny closet of a dressing room.

In front of the big round mirror on the vintage dressing table, she wiped off the dark carmine forties lipstick shade from an online company of vintage cosmetic shades called Besame. Kiss me. Not tonight. She dusted her face with dark brown face powder in a random camouflage pattern. The velvet gown, peacock-green, went on a hanger. She was wearing black yoga pants underneath. The dark green satin platform forties sandalsgave way to black high-top tennis shoes. Black turtleneck. You’d think she was a Max Kinsella fashion clone.

If she was lucky, thanks to that Mojave Way

address from Larry, she’d be invading Max Kinsella territory tonight. The Glock was too heavy for this gig. A small black Beretta nine-shot semiautomatic, perhaps in tribute to the Fontana brothers, was in her black nylon ankle holster.

She glimpsed herself in the round mirror before she ducked out of the dressing room and out the Dahlia’s back door. She looked lean, dark, and dingy.

Maybe this wasn’t Max Kinsella. Maybe this was more Midnight Louie, Allah bless his tribe.

Because she was going to solo as a cat burglar tonight, God willing. Not exactly what Larry’d had in mind, but what she’d planned from the first. Her lips managed a tight feline smile.