Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

While I am figuring out how to save Midnight Louise without her or me losing face, I notice, speaking of faces, that the Havana browns have turned a beiger shade of brown. Say…milk chocolate.

They are retreating, their ring growing wider and sparser.

I decide that my dilemma must have put a fearsome expression on my face, then decide to look over my shoulder.

It is a sight to uncurl the hair on a curly-coated Rex. Even I momentarily consider a craven retreat.

They come stalking up on us like Old West gunfighters: Osiris and Mr. Lucky and at their head Ma Barker.

The Big Cats place one deliberate foot in front of the other. Each pace covers two feet of ground.

“That is our cub,” Mr. Lucky growls with a sound like they use in movies to represent demons talking.

Even the evil Hyacinth pauses, her spiked hair wilting a bit.

Midnight Louise has not paid a moment’s heed to any of the action around her. The minute Hyacinth backs off, she is on her like a black tornado, feet whirring, fur flying from her shivs.

Hyacinth screams with fury and pain, twists like a pretzel, and rockets across the lawn to the house, driving the craven wave of Havana browns ahead of her.

Midnight Louise sits licking fiercely at her chest ruff, surrounded by tufts of cream fur.

I rush over. “Did she nick you? If we get you to a vet fast enough, and if I can figure out a way to tell Miss Temple you are a victim of curare poisoning — which I will, somehow — we can get you an antidote. If they have antidotes to curare in Las Vegas.”

“Relax,” says Miss Louise. “She did not lay a lavender-point glove on me. Besides, you are old enough to know that you cannot believe everything that a feline fatale says.”

She looks up from her grooming at the Big Cats. “Thanks, boys, but I had her on the run even before she saw you.”

Not one mention of my contemplated desperate dash to sacrifice myself! Talk about ingratitude.

Ma Barker stalks forward. “Very impressive, young lady, but you could interrupt your bath to give your elders a nod of thanks.”

“Are you claiming to be an elder?” she asks.

“Only if you are claiming to be a descendant of my son.”

Here they both glance at me.

“I do not know about that,” Miss Midnight Louise says with a hard look at me, “but I do have a partner who had the smarts to break me out of prison so I had a chance to whip the vibrissae off that witch, so I will say thank you very much to all concerned. Now I really must wash that purported curare out of my hair. Although, according to my connoisseur’s tongue from a life of attending Dumpster sales, it is no more toxic than Revlon’s Mean Green Glitter nail enamel that is available at Wal-Mart.”

While my jaw drops, everybody does not quite laugh, but would have, had they been human enough to indulge in such bizarre expressions of amazement.

The Morning After

Max awoke, still dressed at three A.M., in Temple’s bed, with Midnight Louie.

He felt stiff all over, in all the wrong places.

The night lights plugged into outlets on all four walls for Master Midnight’s nocturnal convenience cast a moonlit glow on the room.

Midnight Louie blinked reflective amber irises at him — proceed with caution — then the black cat assumed one of those show-offy, impossibly limber cat positions — hindquarters stretching in one direction, extended forelegs reaching in the other, torso torqued in between like a twisted rope.

The black cat yawned, wide and long, flashing white fangs and crimson mouth. He almost seemed to be sticking out a tongue at his crippled human littermate.

Max refused to rise to the bait.

He had earned his strains and bruises, and Temple had tended his scraped face last night with wincing care while they exchanged war stories.

“So my pepper spray was ready for the rescue?” Max asked, glad he had been there to defend her in absentia, somehow. “And Nadir finished that guy off? I would have been there to do it if not for that damn Molina.”

“Rafi was a real little gentleman about the whole thing…other than decking the Tyler kid. What would make a teenager into a crazed killer?”

“Rafi?”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sure that the newspapers will dig up the usual background predictors, as the sociologists say. Abusive family situation. Antisocial history. Assumption that women are there to be used and knocked around. Rafi!”

“He actually was kind of okay to me…or Tess the Thong Girl, even before the parking lot incident.”

Max just shook his head. Which hurt. So he stopped. “Crime and punishment make for strange bedfellows.”

“Speaking of which, I can’t believe you and Molina duked it out. I mean, she’s a cop, but she’s a woman.”

“Barely. She is a pretty good sparring partner, though.”

“It must have killed you to let her handcuff you.”

“Being handcuffed is second nature to me. Letting her do it…yeah, that stung. But I couldn’t have put her away without getting pretty rough, and I knew you were in trouble and it’d be easier to get out of the handcuffs and custody than a felonious assault charge on a cop, so….”

“Poor Max! Sacrificing your pride for nothing, when you heard over the radio that ‘Pepper Tess’ had bagged the baddie. I’d give anything to see Molina’s face when she heard that the stripper killer had been stopped by yours truly.”

“The incoming news bulletin certainly made my rapid exit from the handcuffs and the car easy.”

“That must have fried her fajitas! I not only get the killer, but you get away. She was left with nothing. Nada!”

“It’s not becoming to gloat, Temple.”

“Since when?”

“You’re right. It’s most becoming. I’m glad one of the three of us is in a position to gloat, and that it’s you, and that you’re all right. And when I’m feeling better — ow! That stings!”

“It’s hydrogen peroxide. It’s supposed to sting. Things that heal you are supposed to sting.”

Max didn’t say anything more about what he’d do when he felt better, lecture her or love her. He just took her hand and kissed it.

“Truer words were never spoken.”

Lieutenant C. R. Molina tossed and turned in her old double bed at home. Three o’clock in the morning and she couldn’t sleep.

She had worked late enough to know that the gathering reports on Tyler Dain did not give her the sense of closure she had hoped for in finding the Stripper Killer. A kid had done it? He was old enough to try as an adult, but that never quieted the unease a young perpetrator brought to the surface in society, all the way through the police and courts structure, like an ugly undertow in the ocean showing its hidden power. He had confessed to the strip club attacks, including the Cher Smith murder. He was cocky, proud of it.

That still left Gloria Fuentes’s parking-lot killing unsolved, and a lot of other questions unanswered, most of them pertaining to magic. Fuentes had been a magician’s assistant years ago. Magic also clung to the apparent ritual murder of Jefferson Mangel, the university professor killed among his collection of great magician posters. Missing from the collection? Any trace of the Mystifying Max’s admittedly spectacular career. Max Kinsella was the missing link, all right, behind a lot of unsolved crimes in Las Vegas over the past year, and who knew where else, when?

Magic was a boyhood hobby that offered the illusion of power and secret knowledge. Some boys never grew up. Kinsella was one, always hinting that his mysterious past had some clandestine purpose.

Boys could be so dangerous when they reached that cusp between adolescence and adulthood cherishing a secret sense of power. Like Tyler Dain in his sound-proof Peeping Tom booth, who played the music the strippers danced to and came to consider them puppets who should dance to the needs of his immature lust. Girls that age also were walking time bombs, but usually because they often harbored a secret sense of helplessness.