Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“Come here,” she said.

He didn’t, of course.

“Come here or I’ll have to get my petite straight razor from my purse and attempt to cut that poor child’s duct tape off.”

She poured one tall flute too full of champagne, and waited.

He moved in her direction, around the front of the car, wondering if her anonymous driver had orders to run him down.

But the engine stayed dormant and only the bubbles in the long tall glass moved.

They spun frantically for the lip of the glass, pearly strings and ropes twirling up like deep sea divers trying to outrun the bends. Bubbles, tiny bubbles of frantic, tiny final breaths.

A tearful bound girl trapped in a stranger’s car with her mouth taped, breathing anxiously through her nose, fighting for each breath as congestion clogged her sinuses and nostrils.

“Let her go.”

“No.”

“Let her go, or I go.”

“You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”

He shrugged, walked away, turned his back on the bubbles.

“You don’t dare risk it,” her hoarse whisper called after him.

He heard furious heel clicks, rapid, angry.

The whirr of a car window opening. The driver showing himself? Pointing a gun?

He kept walking.

Heard a muffled cry.

Turned.

Kitty stood beside the rear car door, now gaping open, the young woman tumbled to the asphalt in a fetal position, still bound, still gagged. Eyes still wide open.

“There. She’s out. On her own. I’ll leave her here. Now, come back.”

Kitty strode around to the car’s long front hood gleaming like a black steel coffin and lifted the heavy champagne bottle, a hostess as impervious as patent leather.

“It’s rude to walk away when you’re the guest of honor.”

At least now the car couldn’t take off with the girl captive.

Matt obeyed, or, rather, did what he thought was best at the moment, which was to seem to obey.

She poured another shaft of champagne trembling with manic bubbles as he approached and handed him the glass, her hand rock steady.

She sipped. He followed suit, wondering what playing her game would get him or cost him.

Her payoff was instantly obvious. Satisfaction. She fairly purred with it, arched her dark eyebrows, licked the smoothly rolled glass rim of the flute as if it were jagged and she had a taste for blood, even, perhaps, her own. Or perhaps mostly her own.

Matt rolled that idea around on his tongue as he swallowed the madly fizzing wine. He’d never thought of champagne as a hyperactive beverage before, manic, bipolar, as ready to go flat as erupt.

Like Miss Kitty?

Could he drag her down to the dark side of her nature? Depress her? Paralyze her?

“This is a joke,” he said. “A scene out of a B movie.”

“My movie, not yours.”

So control was everything. She unholstered the remote again and aimed it at The Blue Dahlia, at the roofline along the building’s side.

Instantly, a few blue notes of sound came rolling over the parking lot.

“‘Someone to watch over me’,” crooned a homicide lieutenant, spreading her vocal wings after too long in a cramped cage.

Matt couldn’t help turning his head to puzzle out the illusion; the band sounded as if it had moved outdoors.

“How’d you do that? Never mind. Not telling me is half the fun. But why the sound effects?”

“You come here to hear the music, right? Can’t be the food?”

“It’s not too bad.”

Her shiny dark head shook. “Must be the music. Tell me the truth.”

“The music,” he agreed. “The name of the place. Getting away from anyone who knows me. I don’t know.”

“Liar!”

He kept quiet, wondering if she’d already figured out the connection between him and Molina.

“You’re trying to get away from someone you know,” she accused instead. “Someone who watches over you.”

Her smile emphasized a mouth painted rambling rose red, a pretty mouth, small and pointed, not particularly sensual, almost pleasant peeling back over those small pearly teeth.

Oh, the shark, dear…

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Protecting me?”

“Protecting my investment.” She came nearer, set her champagne flute down on the hood. “Let’s dance.”

“I don’t.”

“You will.”

“When someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away?”

“Of course. The whole world dances when someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away. Haven’t you watched the evening news? But don’t ruin our outing with politics. Aren’t you glad I didn’t come in and upset the help? We can have our evening out here, under the stars.”

She took the glass from his fingers and set it on the hood. The surface curved, so everything on it tilted, faced imminent falling, destruction. The whole world tilted, facing the same fate, particularly his tiny corner of it.

Had Kitty somehow learned of his long-ago “prom” expedition into the desert with Temple? But how? Impossible. Yet she was duplicating it in some devilish way. Maybe that was how; she was the demon Molina would never believe in.

Molina.

She might be closing down her set and coming out soon, but to a different parking lot.

Did he want Molina to come to the rescue? Could she end up a captive?

While he worried, Kitty had insinuated herself against him, broadcasting an elusive, probably expensive perfume. Her curled hand rested on his shoulder like a fallen blossom. Her other hand was slipping into his palm where the champagne flute had been.

…a face on a passing train

This was so bizarre, and to hear Molina’s voice wafting over the empty parking lot…

Kitty started swaying against him, seductive no doubt. Besides his deep disinclination to respond to anything she offered, despite the haunting image of that innocent girl as a mute witness to this insane scene, the real turn-off was her choice of music to seduce by, her Mantovani and Iglesias and Rod Stewart all rolled into one was a moonlighting homicide lieutenant’s dusky contralto.

“You don’t dance,” she was saying. “I’d shuffle a few steps, if I were you. Your faithful fan is out of the car but not out of reach.” She prodded a long fingernail into his chin.

Matt shuffled, resenting the infringement of her body, relieved that he felt absolutely no interest in mere proximity.

“Let’s do talk politics,” he said.

“As long as you dance.”

“You must sincerely believe in the Irish cause.”

“Must I? I mustn’t do anything, haven’t you figured that out by now? I could have a folded razor in the hand that’s on your shoulder. It would take a millisecond to cut your face to shreds.”

Her sensed her hand, a loose fist at the corner of his eye. It could indeed hold a weapon.

He suddenly took control of her other hand, so lightly laid in his, and spun her out, away from him. “Maybe we should swing dance.”

The sudden move surprised her, maybe even pleased her. She caught her breath like a teenager, laughing a little.

He suppose it had felt like being on a thrill ride, and Kitty the Cutter liked thrills. Maybe needed them.

She tried to close in again, but he took her other hand off his shoulder and kept moving away, remembering patterns he’d seen on PBS shows about jazz and swing music. That kind of dancing was a constant tension: pull close, push away. Not so different from the choreographed discipline of the martial arts. With Kitty the Cutter, dancing was a martial art and Matt had just figured out the steps.

Luckily, Molina had swung into an up-tempo song.

Jeepers, creepers.

She wasn’t kidding, and that kid’ll eat ivy, too.

“Apparently,” Kitty said, not unhappily, “you like fast dancing.” “I like anything that keeps you at arm’s length.”