Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“You can’t keep me there forever.”

“No, but this’ll do for now, while we talk.”

“What’s to talk about?”

“That girl. You’ll leave her here, unharmed?”

“This time.”

“So what do you want tonight?”

“Where’s your ring? I should say my ring? The deal is you have to wear it.”

“It’s here. In my pocket.” “That’s not ‘wearing’.” “I’m wearing it on my key ring. You didn’t say where I had to wear it. I suppose I could wear it around my neck.”

“Splitting meanings, just like a damn politician. Or a priest. How many angels dance on the head of a red-haired girl?”

Matt’s heart stopped, hoping that Kitty meant only the unknown girl she’d kidnapped from the radio station. Had she held her captive since then? Or only taken her tonight? How many angels danced on the head of Temple Barr? An entire chorus.

“Just one,” Matt answered Kitty, more blithely than he felt. “One guardian angel.”

“Who?” The jeer twisted her beautiful features — Snow White, the fairest of them all, suddenly the Wicked Stepmother. “You? You can’t even protect yourself from me.”

“Guardian angels are invisible, Kathleen. Don’t you remember that from catechism? No one can see them, not even the soul they guard. You have one, you know.”

“Fairy tales! Like Santa Claus.”

She was getting breathless from spinning in close and out far. Matt kept it up, relentlessly. She wanted contact, she would get it. He was in control, her hands in his, unable to wound. She had only her voice.

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” he said as they seesawed in and out, moving in small, furious circles on the asphalt. What would make her let him go, so he could help the young woman?

“The music’s stopped, so can we,” she said.

“Has it? I hear music.”

He moved to an unheard rhythm, like telling the beads on an endless rosary, rote motion. The car sat as if abandoned with the battery dead. He doubted there was a driver. Only Kathleen O’Connor, a one-woman terrorism squad. And now she was breathless putty in his hands.

She craved control. To use it and perhaps to feel the object of it, as well.

“They’ll be coming out. The band,” she said. “Now that they’ve stopped.”

“What do you care?”

“You…you’re crazy.”

“That’s projection.”

She tried to wrench her hands out of his. “Psychoshit! You’re all full of it.”

“All who? I’m only one guy.”

“No, you’re not. Your name is legion.”

He laughed. “Now I’m the demon.” He spun her quickly 360 degrees, lifting his arm so she twirled, a human top. Her long, snaky earrings flashed like comets.

She reeled a little as he resumed the relentless step in, step out, pull her close, push her away motions.

“You mean my ex-profession,” he said, a little breathless himself. “We priests are all alike.”

“Yes! Liars and hypocrites.”

“Some, I suppose. There are some of those everywhere. Are you so perfect then?”

“No, but I admit I’m bad. I know I’m bad. I don’t pretend to try to be good.”

“Sometimes pretending to be something is the only way to become it.”

“A liar’s way. Is that what you are, someone who pretended to be a priest?”

She glared as he pulled her in, her eyes pure hatred now, the seductive veneer rubbed away like a cloud of silver polish on a mirrored tray.

“And are you pretending to be a temptress, an assassin? I don’t think so. I think you’ve done all that. I think you’re exactly what you want the world to think of you as: a very bad girl.”

She finally was able to pull one hand free, although it must have hurt.

He let the other go. She was dizzy now, not only from the dance but from something inside of her he had released. It wasn’t pretty, but at least her actions were hurting her for a change, instead of somebody else.

“Then don’t mess with me. Don’t make me do something you’ll regret.”

“Either way, I’ll regret it.”

She smiled, tilted her small, dainty head. “Now you understand. It’s a lose-lose situation. You might as well get it over with.”

“Maybe you’re right. Where? When?”

She backed up, went around to the passenger side of the car. She downed the rest of her champagne in a long-throated gesture. Then finished his mostly full glass. She started stashing the equipment in the car’s rear seat.

“No. You don’t get to plan. To prepare. The next time you see me. I choose. If you want to enjoy it, you’re allowed, you know. But I think you’ll hate it. All I can say is just think of England. Or your landlady or that island mama you work for, or this little carrot-top wetting her Gap capris.” She gestured at the other side of the car, where Matt didn’t dare look because he didn’t want to remind her she was leaving him with another woman.

“What if I surprised you?”

“You can’t. That’s what’s so delicious about it. You couldn’t surprise me in a hundred years. So keep that ring warm for me.”

She darted into the front passenger seat and slammed the car door shut.

The engine started with a quick, quiet hum. The car pulled away, the tires peeling like black Band-Aids from the loose gravel on the surface.

Matt rushed to pull the girl away from the departing tires. Her ankles and wrists were circled in duct tape.

She mewed behind the silver gag.

“It’s all right. It’ll take a while to get this tape off without hurting you.” He looked around the deserted lot, then pushed his arms under her knees and back, picked her up, and headed toward the Blue Dahlia.

Main Course

“It’s a good thing they trust me to lock up,” Molina said, pouring lighter fluid onto a cleaning rag she had found behind the hall door, the one that didn’t lead to her dressing room but to a maintenance closet.

“If they couldn’t trust you to lock up, who could they trust?”

She gave Matt a look — a long, hard Molina look — then soaked the tape over the girl’s chin. “There you go. I know you want to sing out right now like Britney Spears, but ripping this tape off would give you a rug burn for a week. In the movies, they just tear away duct tape, but that’s make-believe. There. It’s coming. Just a bit more, and don’t lick your lips unless you like the taste of kerosene.”

While Molina calmed the captive and eased the gag off, Matt dowsed the girl’s wrists with fluid.

The reek was stomach-turning. He watched her pale face turn delicately green.

“Off!” Molina announced the obvious.

She squatted beside the girl they had propped on a restaurant chair, looking like a den mother in her jeans and vaguely Native American suede jacket with odd bits of beads and fringe.

“What’s your name?”

No “dear,” no “honey,” Matt noticed. Nothing infantalizing. She wanted this victim to feel like an adult. In charge again. Able to answer. Able to point fingers.

Matt started untwining gummy duct tape that had adhered to him as it released her.

The girl noticed the phenomenon. Her lips trembled into a small smile. “Guess I got Mr. Midnight into a bit of a jam.”

“You were in a bit of a jam,” Molina said, sympathetic but not enabling. “Your name? It’s okay. You’ve lucked into an off-duty cop.”

“You?”

“Yeah, me. Lieutenant Molina. Now…you.”

“Vicki. Vicki Jansen.” She glanced at Matt, almost apologetically. “I never expected to see you again so soon.”

“Same here,” he said.

“Who was that witch?”

Molina eyed Matt, curious to see what he’d tell an innocent bystander.

“A…rabid fan, I guess.”