Carole Douglas - Cat in a Red Hot Rage

“A parentally approved sleepover, Morrie. All girls. Only who knows what those girls will get up to today?”

He chuckled. "So you didn't sleep a wink during Daughter Darling's sleepover."

“Not a wink," she answered with absolute conviction.

“That's me all over again. Say listen, I'm gonna come down hard on that big convention scene and come up with some other suspects, so help me, Sleeping Beauty."

“Thanks, Morrie." Her voice had faded at the end there.

He raised an eyebrow. They didn't call her the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD for nothing. Her voice never faded.

“Kids," he said. "You kill 'em with kindness and they kill you with worry.”

She didn't try to answer this time, just nodded briskly. That was the Molina they all knew and tolerated while leaving her personal life alone.

She breathed a big sigh of relief when Morrie left . . . and nearly shrieked at the pulsing, splitting feeling all along her side. Knife wounds hurt like hell until they fought off the infection and started closing. She'd have to move like a real iron maiden around here until the stitches took hold.

The phone rang.

“Yes," she barked. The pain helped her stay in character better than anything.

It was the desk sergeant. A tipster named Hyde was asking for her, and her alone.

“Freak or geek?" she asked.

“Looks like a fairly solid cit."

“Send him up.”

Molina wanted to sigh, but she swallowed the gesture. Anything from coughing to hiccuping would be agonizing for a few days, maybe a couple weeks. So much for Dirty Larry's bedroom fantasies.

Minutes later a shadow loomed in the half-open maple-blond door to her narrow office.

Dark.

And then in walked Rafi Nadir. Just the last person in the whole wide world she'd want to see on her office threshold right now.

“Impersonating a snitch?" she asked. "You used to impersonate an officer.”

They were fighting words, and they shot out of her current pain and wariness, and from some old unhealed wounds as well.

She pulled her forces together: observation, and that old police authoritative attitude that controlled anyone who might resist or bribe or cry wolf at the drop of a shield.

Despite her own problems, she saw that Rafi had a new resoluteness. That's what had conned the desk sergeant. How? Maybe the black denim jacket paired with black denim jeans and a burgundy T-shirt that read SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. He was thinner, harder, more pulled together. Maybe even confident. For a so-called police confidant. Confidential snitch.

Every muscle in her body tightened at her own assessment. Danger, Wilhelmina Robinson! Rafi was looking in control while she was running on anemia, adrenaline, and nerves.

“Can I sit?" he asked.

“ May."

“ Can. I speak real life, not off some blackboard. You always wanted me to pass as something you weren't.”

She shrugged. Ouch!

“ I know why you look like you swallowed a peach pit," he said, sitting before her desk. "Why?"

“You know why I'm here, admit it, Carmen.”

She had no idea. Her side and head ached abominably andDirty Larry was enough encroaching male to deal with in one week.

“Why?" she asked.

His face puckered in disbelief, maybe disgust. "The kid, of course. Like you didn't expect this. I can count, Carmen. I know when you left L.A. I know how old the kid is."

“I didn't leave L.A. I left you. And she isn't 'the kid.' "

“No. She's my kid too.”

Odd, how a chair she'd sat in for years could just melt and vanish. How the distance between her desk and the door could suddenly telescope in and out, as if she were being jerked forward and backward in time like a yo-yo.

How her fingers could curl into the papers on her desk and still not find anything solid to dig into.

How her side felt the swift, long score of a sharp knife blade, and also pulled at stitches like a seam splitting, morphing into a splitting headache. A head wound.

“That came after," she heard her voice say from a long distance away.

“Naw. I don't think so. I can see myself in her."

“No."

“My eyes."

“No. My mother's eyes."

“You got your father's eyes. Anglo. Northern European blue. Why shouldn't Mariah have gotten my eyes, Middle Eastern brown? Don't that fact make your blue eyes bluer?" he paraphrased the old hit song. Bitterly.

“You didn't want her, Rafi. A daughter. You wanted me tied to her, tied down, off the force."

“Wait. We talking L.A. here? I didn't even know you were pregnant. And I didn't want her?"

“You made sure I was pregnant. Daughters aren't valued in Muslim society. Remember that suicide? The Anglo girl who got involved with an Arab foreign student and jumped off a bridge because her baby was a girl, and he completely rejected it, and her?”

Rafi was leaning nearer, his almost-black eyes intent, shocked.

“That was a shitty case, but I'm not that foreign student. You wouldn't even have known what gender the baby was in those days, so can that excuse. I'm a half-breed, sure. Like you. Did I resent it, being Arab-American? Yeah. Every day. It wasn't a fashionable mix, nobody was fighting to get my kind represented on the force, not like Latinas and black chicks, and that was years before 9/11. Then it really got fun. The looks. The stops. I used to stop people when I was a cop. Now I'm a stopee.”

Molina started to put a hand to her forehead, to block the overhead fluorescent glare that felt like the lights of a third-degree interrogation room in the bad old days, but the hand started up, then stopped. A weak, hesitant gesture. Not a good message in a situation like this.

“I won't discuss this on the job," she managed through the throbbing in her head and side.

“Then where? And when?"

“I . . . don't know. This is not a good time."

“It wasn't a good time fourteen years ago when you walked out on me without a trace. Without a reason."

“You were a bastard!" Was it her shouting? "That's all the reason I needed." Was that her lurching over the desktop and collapsing?

Even Rafi Nadir looked shocked. Concerned. Right.

“Hey." Morrie Alch was in the doorway. "You're outta here, fellah.”

Nadir rose, spinning, ready to fight.

“I can call for reinforcements," Alch said, standing his ground, "but I'd rather beat the crap out of you myself.”

Nadir was ten years younger and a lot taller, but Alch was all infuriated street cop at the moment. Both Nadir and Molina knew better than to tangle with him just then.

“I'm gone," Rafi said, spreading his empty hands. "Just like she was all those years ago.”

Alch shut the door behind Nadir and came to the desk. "Carmen? What the hell's wrong? Oh, Jesus.”

She looked down at her desk, where he was staring. Her side was bleeding all over the crumpled paperwork.

Chapter 49

Getaway

Molina was under the glaring fluorescent lights again, feeling a lot weaker and with a lot fewer places to hide this time. This time she sat on a bathroom toilet.

And yet another man was trying to get into her clothes. Dirty Larry, the Dirty Doctor, now Morrie Alch of all people. At least it wasn't Rafi Nadir.

“Stop fighting me, Carmen:' he said firmly. "I've done more scraped knees than are on an octopus. Jeez, who sewed this up, Dr. Frankenstein's assistant, Igor?"

“Barrio doc. Dirty Larry was"—she didn't want to say "with me," because it wasn't precisely accurate and she didn't want Morrie ragging on her like an overprotective dad about hanging out with a narc. They were known to be wild cards.

“Dirty Larry came along afterward. He realized I couldn't go to a regular facility without answering questions neither of us wanted to answer."