Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Max scratched his cheekbone where the asphalt burnsfrom last night were hardening into scabs. Chalk up another nasty surprise to Molina.

“Molina can really get that mean?” She nodded at his face.

“Cops who don’t make collars fast and hard risk losing their weapons, and their suspect.” Max shrugged. “I have no complaints. I asked for it, and she did it by the book. Well, maybe she enjoyed it a bit too much, but I suspect she enjoys so little of anything that I don’t mind giving her a thrill.”

“Oooh. Odious idea. She seems to despise you even more now than before. Just because you got away?”

Max’s shrug was slightly uneasy the second time. Temple had the oddest notion that he wasn’t telling her something.

“I threw every trick in the book at her to get away in time to race to your rescue.” He shook his head at the memory. “That probably didn’t sit too well. She just thought I wasn’t fighting fair, and anyway, she didn’t believe me that you were in danger … until the news came over her car radio.” Max chuckled. “She was not happy with it.”

“What, that I was alive?”

“No, that you were alive and the uniform cops had the Stripper Killer in custody.”

“My being alive didn’t tick her off at all? Then what’s the use?”

“She doesn’t want you harmed, Temple, just out of her hair. I, on the other hand, want you in my hair, so let’s stop talking about Molina.”

At this welcome invitation, Temple ran her fingers through the thick dark hair at his … well, temple. Max flinched and she jerked her hand away.

“Guess that’s another spot that kowtowed to parking lot pavement last night,” he admitted.

“That must have been some fight. I wish I’d seen it.”

“No thanks. One car did come by, shining its headlights on us, but otherwise that fiasco was dark-of-night anonymous. It wasn’t a shining moment for either of us.”

“Speaking of shining moments, what’s happening with your new writing career?”

“I was rereading my expansion of Gandolph’s book. I had no idea putting one word down after another could be so frustrating. It’s not saying what I want to say, it’s not saying what Gandolph would want me to say. Trying to finish his book was a nice idea, but I don’t think I’m up to it.”

Temple, busy eating, nodded.

“Exposing fake mediums had become Gandolph’s life work,” Max went on. “Now that he’s dead, I wanted to fashion a worthy memorial for him. But—” He spread his large bony hands that must have overwhelmed a keyboard. “The student is not worthy of his instructor. Maybe I don’t care enough about exposing frauds. Maybe I feel they are us.”

“Well, after this morning, I don’t know that I can disagree with you.”

Max had only played with the omelet of his creation. Temple watched his fork tines draw stucco-like patterns on his plate.

“You’re feeling betrayed,” he said.

“Ye-es! Everybody I know was talking to everybody else, except me. What’s wrong with me that none of you trust me?”

“It’s not that we don’t trust you. We don’t trust ourselves to do right by you.”

“Molina?”

Max smiled, as she had hoped he might. Even when she had a legitimate grievance she couldn’t stand to make someone she cared about glum.

“Not Molina,” he said. “Molina would never insult you by treading around your feelings. It’s not that we don’t care about you, Temple. It’s that we care too much.”

“We, White Man?”

“Me.” Max made a face as he carved bloody inroads ofchipolte sauce into his untouched omelet. “And probably Matt Devine.”

“Great. So being an ignorant idiot becomes me. It’s the way you guys love to see me.”

“Being alive is the way we love to see you.”

“You really think that was at stake?”

“You don’t know Kitty O’Connor like I know Kitty O’Connor. And, I suppose, as Devine does now.”

Temple thought about that. She swigged a bunch of cranberry juice and thought about it.

“Oh, my God.”

She looked into Max’s eyes, mild blue now, unabetted by the magician’s panther-green contact lenses that he had used as a professional adjunct. “It’s a parallel, isn’t it? You, and now Matt. What … seventeen years apart? Did you see it the moment I called?”

“No. I had to brood about it while you were on the way over.”

“Writer’s block will do that to you. Make you brood.”

“So you’re saying, paradoxically, that in writing, a block is a sign of progress?”

“It’s a sign of no progress. But … you have to not get anywhere to get somewhere.”

“So where have you gotten, my darling ignorant idiot?”

“You’re sorry, aren’t you?”

“Yes, especially now that you’ve caught us out protecting you. Mea culpa.”

She had heard the Latin phrase from Matt, the ex-priest, and knew what it meant. My fault.

“Mea maxima culpa,” she retorted, having heard the ritual follow-up, also from Matt.

Max, good Irish-Catholic lad that he had been, only nodded. Mea maxima culpa. My most grievous fault. He got up and poured two cups from the coffeemaker, dosing them with swigs of Bailey’s Irish Cream.

Then he came back and waited for her to piece out the truth that had been kept from her for her own good, the kind of truth that hurts worse than any deliberate attack.

“Matt hit on it, way back when,” she began. “When he said that maybe Kitty had arranged your cousin’s death. There you and Sean were in northern Ireland, back there before any hint of truce between the Protestants and the Catholics. Two naive American teenagers visiting the Auld Sod. And there was Kathleen O’Connor. God, I wish I’d seen her, Max. I know she’s been lurking around now, but she must have been really gorgeous back then, teen angel symbol of the beloved country’s tortuous history and noble fight for freedom from hundreds of years of British domination. And you and your cousin Sean, kicking up your heels from an American high school graduation. Drinking in pubs! Flirting with the colleens. On your own, together. Cousins and Irish-American soul brothers getting your ire up about centuries of injustice in the Auld Country. Away from your parents, the nuns and priests, and so hoping to get laid. Have I got it?”

“Amazingly well for a Protestant and a Scots/English/ French lass and a grown girl.”

“It was spring break, European-style. Irish Spring. And you, Max, you devil, you amateur magician who may have been a twelve-year-old geek but you were growing into your post-adolescent sexy guy, you were dueling Sean for who could drink the most and get the girl. And Kitty let you be the one.”

“Stupid adolescent competition. We were like colts in a field, kicking up our heels, too young to know what any of it meant, the sex or the politics.”

“You won the lady fair. While you were dallying with her, Sean consoled himself with a pint of Guinness. In a Protestant pub that had been targeted for an IRA bomb. So you lost your innocence, in every possible sense of the word. Except you didn’t lose anything, Max. She spoiled it.”

He nodded. “Yes, she did. Forever. You could say I did some good with my years of covert counterterrorism work later. I saved lives. I know I did. But none of them were the one life I wanted, needed, to save. I never loved. Untilyou. And then I couldn’t be there when you needed me because of that past. Then she came again, and, indirectly, she was threatening you.

“If she knew how much Devine cared about you, you would be Sean. Dead. That is the one thing that he and I believe in common.”

“You … believe that he cares that much about me?”

“Who could not?” Max shook his head, as if angered by an invisible gnat that never stopped flitting in front of his eyes. “Temple, I worry that you don’t really know how much I care about you.”