Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

Neither would he.

It was tentative at first, like a knife fight. They danced around, determining each other’s reach, reflexes, speed, strategy.

Eerily, the first inward rush to engagement was simultaneous.

The moves came fast and frantic then.

They grappled silently, all their limbs twisting to find a hold that would last, but each move resulted in an effective countermove.

Breaths became pants and then grunts, but neither resorted to martial arts cries, though both had done the drill. At nearly six feet, Molina was solid and surprisingly strong. Max was a steel eel, tensile and limber. Their fighting styles were as violently different as their personalities and made them serious opponents. Molina’s determination to subdue a suspect she had hunted for months, come hell or high water, met the skilled desperation of Max’s need to end this contest and rush to Temple’s aid.

It ended in Max’s pinning Molina against the van wall, enforcing a temporary truce as they caught their breath, boxers clenched in each other’s arms like dizzy waltzers before breaking away to pound each other to oatmeal.

“We’re well matched, Lieutenant,” Max admitted between discreet pants.

Not good news. He couldn’t count on getting this over quickly and moving on to Temple.

“It’s not over,” she gritted between her teeth.

“No.”

He wasn’t really holding her. His hands had flattened against the metal beside her shoulders, one knee was braced between her legs. Technically, she was pinned, but he could see her mind reviewing a half dozen things she might try for the one right move, when he surprised her by speaking again.

“Don’t spoil the moment. This has been incredibly erotic.”

She broke their eye contact by whipping her head to the side, cheek to the smooth metal. “You’ll try anything,” she said, contemptuous.

“Yes.” He knew he sounded amused, but he meant to startle and irritate her at one and the same time.

She whipped her head to the opposite side. “Get out of my face.”

“That’s not what you really want.”

That brought her eyes forward, blazing. “Right. Next you’ll say that what I really need is a good screw.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated! No. This is simple. Me cop, you crook.”

They both knew the truce was temporary, that either one could lash back into attack, and that both would be ready for it.

“Sure it’s simple. A simple matter of control, Lieutenant. Or overcontrol. It goes with your job. You’re on the job, all the time. You’re in charge, all the time. After a while, there’s no way not to be in control, in charge, on the job. Except this.”

“I can be out of this any second I want to.”

“But do you really want to?”

The Third Man

Temple nursed her decidedly flat club soda and the sample-perfume-vial-size drop of scotch that went with it.

Your midlevel strip club barware was so tacky: narrow glasses clogged with ice like a backed-up sink. No lowball glasses, no delicate-footed cocktail glasses. Just thick cheap giveaway glass, cloudy ice, squinky drink.

Not that she wanted anything alcoholic. The noise, i.e., music to strip by, had already given her a headache.

So she sat on her barstool, her feet hooked around the top rung, the gaudy selection of monokinis covering her lap, and kept an eye out for her most likely suspect.

It wasn’t a brilliant piece of deduction, but talking to Lindy had spurred some ideas.

For one thing, both Cher Smith and the girl whose attack had been interrupted, Gayla, were both new to the Las Vegas strip scene. It could be a coincidence, but Temple thought the killer might be oneof those asocial guys who are only bold when they’re over-the-top aggressive: no nerve, or all nerve. Someone who explodes. She’d seen so many wimpy guys here, mooning at the strippers like besotted computer nerds in front of a porno-site screen…. What if the worm turned? Maybe he picked new girls because they were fresh enough to still be stupid. Maybe they hesitated and talked to him, just to be nice to someone who seemed to need it. Maybe they needed to feel glamorous and desired. Two people meeting with so much to overcome, their separate expectations igniting instant disappointment of the other’s fantasy, and then…violence.

Temple sucked her ice cubes again. There was so little drink in the glass it stayed puddled on the bottom.

That was her theory that saved the neck of everybody she knew. And wrote a satisfying “The End” to the episode that had begun with Cher Smith’s dead body being found in this very club’s parking lot.

Or, if she wanted to depress herself, there was the Terrible Troika to consider: Max, Rafi Nadir, and Lieutenant C. R. Molina converging seconds apart over the fallen form of Gayla in another strip club parking lot more recently.

Had one of the two men attacked Gayla? The victim couldn’t say who had barreled into her in the dark. Temple thought she could eliminate Molina as the perpetrator. That left Max and Rafi. She knew she could eliminate Max, so that left Rafi.

Unless…a third man had been there just before these two natural enemies.

So who was the third man?

Temple had an idea, and she was looking for him tonight.

The migraine music stopped.

Temple glanced at the stage.

Temporarily vacant.

In the glassed-in sound booth, she saw a man standing and talking to the kid who ran the sound board. Not the man she was looking for.

Who do you overlook at a strip club?

The man who is looking at you, but from behind a mask.

She was looking for the man in the mask.

The music started up again, so suddenly it nearly snapped her head back. The strips of tissue she had stuffed into her ears barely muted it.

She figured if the guy was a regular, and he probably was, he’d come back to Baby Doll’s. To allay suspicion if nothing else. Or just to relive his big moment.

Temple had read the true crime books, some of them anyway. She knew the profiles, yucky as they were.

She knew something else as she scanned the constantly moving crowd of customers: that head of dark, slightly wavy thick hair.

Darn! Rafi Nadir was here too. Of all the gin joints…

She spun back to the face the bar, hunkered down. When she’d told him this was her next thong gig, he was a suspect worth watching. Who’da thought that Lindy would later tip her off that a new hot suspect would be here tonight?

Unlike Nadir, this was somone too nondescript to describe, although she’d glimpsed him once, more than once when she reviewed all her forays into the clubs.

He was like a mailman, someone made invisible by his function.

Tonight she wanted to spot him, and then really see him.

And she didn’t need Raf Nadir playing Big Man to her Little Girl to get in the way.

An off-duty stripper (were they ever off duty?) who was cruising the house paused to twine her arms around his neck.

He must like that, being greeted like a Big Spender. The male ego could be a slippery slope to being taken, and then expected to take it back in spades.

Oh, the music! It was worse than forty alley cats caterwauling. Temple liked high-octane rock, the best stuff, but this was jacked up so that the bass became a punishment.

She glanced in annoyance at the gangly kid in the glass booth, his head bobbing on his scrawny neck (which she’d like to wring), staring sightlessly at the stage where a girl slithered out of her second skin (courtesy of Tess the Thong Girl, as they’d started calling her already). Temple was struck by how fast and easy it was to establish yourself in a subculture like this. Well, easy for her as long as she wasn’t masquerading as Suzy Stripper.