Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

Chapter 40

Dead of Night

Molina had to agree with Larry’s reported opinion.

Bland, boring neighborhood. One-story, ranch-style houses. Only the Asian rat-tail sweep up at the roof’s corners gave the place some flare. Not that it didn’t cost three times what her modest bungalow in the Latino area did.

The house was fifties vintage, dark and shrouded like all the firmly middle-class homes in this aging subdivision.

The traffic swish of the Strip was almost audible here, it was so close in compared to more modern suburban developments in Henderson and environs.

No garage out front, but discreetly tucked at the back, as functional things were then.

The shrubbery was low and trimmed, unlike its neighbors.Someone knew the rules for discouraging lurkers. The lights at the corner eaves were motion-triggered.

She’d be better off to climb the cedar-wood six-foot fence at the side and try entering by the back. It had been a long time since she’d scrambled over a wall in pursuit. Desks didn’t require much scrambling.

But she kept her martial arts up and should still be fairly limber … shoot! Literally. She’d almost snagged her ankle holster on one of the pointed boards.

The backyard was lit on the fringes by rows of low lights. Probably solar-powered. She quickly padded out of their glare toward the house and the bulk of a hot tub on a patio.

If this place was what she thought and fervently hoped it was, she could dream up some steamy scenarios for that now-covered aquatic playpen. She had to crouch along the hot tub’s bulk to near the back door without triggering the corner lights.

And then she saw the red gleam near a potted hibiscus plant, matched by one from the opposite pot.

Right. Laser light security. Or guard cats. Given her suspicions, the cats wouldn’t surprise her. But if she wished to surprise anyone still in residence, it was up the fence to the roof, like a cat, and over the tile shingles to the back door, then down. Where she expected to find other barriers.

She did.

Steel shutters. And on the windows too.

She pulled out the small computerized device she’d “borrowed.” Max Kinsella was making her break a lot of rules, not to mention laws.

The device ran through endless codes from the major manufacturers of security barriers. Kinsella might have modified and customized the codes, but this probability device was tireless.

And she knew this was the right place now. The security level screamed that fact. This was the one innocuous residential address at which TempleBarr had stopped the day Molina had asked Larry to tail her.

Her heart was beating with the excitement of a hunter who might suddenly become prey. If Matt was right, Kinsella was an international-level spy. Breaching even a few of his defenses meant only that more awaited her.

This was way out of the range of her normal operations. She’d been a desk jockey for too long. Still, she loved being back in the field, flying on nerve and adrenaline. She loved … breaking the law in the law’s cause. One-upping Kinsella. Proving him guilty of something. Proving him the lying bastard she’d always seen him for. Proving TempleBarr a deluded little girl.

Matt an idealist.

Herself right.

Kinsella wrong. Dead wrong.

The device blipped and then the flashing light stayed red. The back door shutter opened slowly, with a low, grinding sound.

She tested the outer glass door, twin to a million others. It swung ajar.

She stepped into the black empty hole the shutter had left in its stead, into the heart of darkness.

Nothing is as haunting as the landscape of an unlit, presumably empty house.

Every breath you take sounds like the wheeze of an iron lung. Every soft, hesitating step crushes minuscule grains of sand underfoot, as if you were smashing shells in a driveway.

She passed through some utility room or pantry onto a hard-surfaced floor, probably the kitchen. She had a small, high-intensity flashlight in the tiny inner pocket of her supple knit pants, but she left it there.

The house seemed to breathe with her. Someone could be here. He could be here.

She hoped he was.

Step by step, she edged around the altarlike bulk of a kitchen island, her eyes adapting to what little light sifted through the back door into the interior dimness.

Ovals of metal pots glimmered above the island and her head. This was a reflective, metallic chef’s kitchen, so unlike her expectations of Max Kinsella. Crook, yes. Never cook.

Was she wrong? Was this the wrong place? Was it some paranoid citizen’s bunker against imagined assault?

No.

The slim scimitars of light glanced over a butcher block impaled with an expensive array of long, dangerous kitchen knives, something odd about their presence here.

The refrigerator was a matte silver mirror of stainless steel. She glimpsed her own figure as an impossibly narrow fence-post of wrought iron, moving out of range.

From the kitchen she moved into utterly dark inner space, probably a dining room. She edged outward until her hand felt a stucco wall and followed it. A waft of air told her a door or a hall intersected it.

She was moving on primitive instinct now, mostly sightless, her ears straining at every sound she made. It had taken maybe seven minutes to get to this point.

And she sensed a presence. Someone besides her was in this house, in these rooms. Nothing proved it. Nothing could deny it.

She moved even more cautiously. Yes, into a hall. Her long arms could span it, touch each side. The long arms of the law.

You can run, but you can’t hide, Max Kinsella. You are mine! A floorboard creaked ever so slightly.

To her right and behind.

Molina flattened against one wall, felt down it until a doorknob butted against her hip. Had she been moving faster she would have collided with it and huffed out an audible breath of pain.

As it was, she felt the small round disk, the kind you find on louvered wooden doors on closets, and pulled. A panel opened silently. She slipped behind it into folds of clothing. A closet, yes. She pulled the flimsy door shut. It was too light to creak.

Some light sifted through the louvers, striping the darkness with horizontal bars. A jail cell on its side.

Shelter? Or trap?

She heard sounds, motion. The subtle grind of footsteps not hers on the hard-surface floor of the kitchen. A subtle, scraping sound, faintly shrill, reminded her of something she couldn’t name. A faint bellows of someone else moving and breathing now that she was still.

Her heart was thundering in her veins and chest, at her ears and throat. Bending down to draw the Beretta would be damned awkward. She’d butt her head on the louvered door so close. She should have drawn it when she was in the larger hall, damn it!

She heard a door opening, a solid-core door across the hall.

Then a tiny sound, minute but long, like … like something tearing. Again and again. There was a rhythmic, sawing motion to the sound. Across the hall, in another room. Someone breaking into something? A cabinet. A magician’s cabinet?

And breath. Getting louder as the small gnawing sound continued. Heavy. Breathing. Someone else was definitely in here. And not a resident.

Someone secret, like herself.

Who?

The tearing sound stopped. The minuscule grains of outdoor sand crushed again. Breathing, harsh, passed her louvers. She held her own breath until her chest burned and she feared an exhalation would sound like a tsunami.

She clapped her hand to her mouth and used her singer’s strong stomach and chest muscles to expel the air, silent bit by silent bit.

Whoever was in here was dangerous. And it wasn’t Max Kinsella. He wouldn’t move like a thief in his own rooms. No one had sensed her yet. Yet she knew she wasn’t alone.