Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

She pictured Mariah, asleep with the tiger-striped cats in her bedroom and surrounded by Technicolor stuffed animals, visions of boy bands dancing in her head. Almost twelve and already hormones were erupting like invisible pimples. A sudden yen for pierced ears. Belly button next? Sass and backtalk becoming common household static. Sending her to Catholic school retarded the inevitable, but didn’t stop it.

What would it do to Mariah if she discovered the father her mother had always said was dead was alive and was a loser like Rafi Nadir? What would it do to Mariah’s mother, she thought wryly, if she had to ’fess up herself for a change? To admit to lying to her daughter. No. Why couldn’t Rafi have crashed and burned completely? Died or stayed in L.A.? She had never pegged him as a killer, just as a controller. She would never have tried to keep him out of the stripper cases otherwise. So she wasn’t surprised that Tyler Dain and not Rafi Nadir had killed Cher Smith. No, Rafi was only a danger to her. And Mariah. And he didn’t have to raise a fist or lift a little finger to be a threat. Just existing did the job nicely.

Molina pictured having to face him again after all these years. The thought made her insides writhe, her hands into fists. Just thinking about him brought back a younger, dumber, weaker version of herself. She didn’t fear facing Rafi so much as reverting to a state of vulnerability she’d struggled to escape for many years.

And if they ever met face-to-face, she would indeed be weak: a police officer who’d cut all the corners off procedure to bury a link to a personal issue. Rafi Nadir could ruin her, as he’d tried to do thirteen years ago, and failed. Now, after what she’d done to ensure he stayed out of her and Mariah’s lives, he could ruin her utterly.

She spent a few minutes savoring the bitter fact that she’d have been better off confronting the problem directly.

She turned over in bed again, her mind moving with her body into yet another uncomfortable position.

Her encounter with Max Kinsella had been a complete failure too, a humiliating downer.

Everything the man said and did was calculated, like that attempt to eroticize their conflict. What an amoral human chameleon! He had to be guilty of something, and she would find out what and then she would nail him for good.

Meanwhile, she had a souvenir of the evening: the memory of how he’d ducked those handcuffs and left her chained to her own steering wheel. Of course she’d whomped him good first, but she had an ugly feeling he’d let her because it would be easier to escape her in a moving car than in a parking lot. He’d been right in insisting that Temple Barr needed help, but he wasn’t the one who should have been giving it.

She mused for an another really ugly moment on where they’d both be now if Temple Barr had not fought free of Tyler Dain to use her pepper spray but had been found dead the next morning.

Hell. In hell. And hating each other even more, if that was possible. It reminded her of the infernal, eternal triangle in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hell-set play, No Exit.

Things, Molina decided, could not possibly get any worse.

At least that was one ray of hope in a dirty world getting grimier every day.

She hoped to hell that Kinsella had as hard a time getting some shut-eye tonight as she did.

Max left Temple at 3:20 A.M., sleeping like the dead, which she almost had been.

Magicians can do that, slip away and not be noticed. He intended only to be gone for a couple of Temple’s deepest sleep-drenched hours.

Midnight Louie apparently never slept. The black cat watched Max go through slitted green eyes. He wasn’t about to squeal on a fellow creature of the night, but he just might judge him.

The early-morning air kissed Max a cool fifty-five degree hello as opened the French door to the patio and then worked his way down the Circle Ritz’s conveniently stepped exterior. Art Deco had a lot to recommend it. To a second-story man, its step pyramid tendencies were the most pleasing.

The Maxima purred like a panther as he started it. He idled silently past Temple’s new red Miata and the silver blob of Electra’s Elvis-edition VW bug, glided beyond the white Probe Matt Devine used now. They were all in transition, he realized, changing emotional models and personal identities like cars.

The Hesketh Vampire, chained in the shed like a lone wolf, called to him with a howl higher than human sound as he exited the parking lot.

In mere minutes he was parked outside the bone-white walls of Los Muertos.

The presumed dead remained still beneath their ersatz tomb-stones. This was Disneyland Macabre, this phony cemetery designed to hide the residence of a magician whose career was built on mocking other magicians. Max would defend the Cloaked Conjuror’s life to the death, but he didn’t have to like the way he made his living, on the harvest of an honorable land of dead magicians and their once-spectacular illusions.

Magicians were like spiders: you had to keep spinning or the web would fracture and fall. And you with it.

He climbed and leaped down from the wall, thankful for a cushion of expensive sod. He noted the absence of the guardian Rottweilers he’d been prepared to deal with.

Odd, but now he could cross the grounds like a shadow, on foot.

Soon the plink of water on carefully arranged stones told him he was where he wanted to be.

With the big cats.

Mr. Lucky came forward first, rubbing and purring like a housecat, his muscular black-panther side hard enough to knock over an unprepared man. Max was never unprepared among the big cats.

Osiris the leopard kept a wary distance at first, then he too swaggered closer, making a soundless snarl that Max understood was not a threat but a greeting.

Max crouched like the big cats and they rubbed closer, leaving their scents on his shoulders and face. The dogs, if they were loose, would stay away from him now.

The big cats were show-biz veterans and magicians’ familiars, used to the spotlights and the long, deep well of darkness before and after. They understood Max as he understood them. Domesticated and wild. Social and asocial. Caged and free. Life was a compromise. So was death.

They permitted him to stroke their furred sides as they paced back and forth, wrapping him in acceptance as if he were a domestic cat, welcoming him to the litter, the cage, the spotlight.

He stood, caressing their wide-cheeked faces, lulled by their high-volume purring, more a rumble. He had come only to see that they were well housed, happy, living as they wanted to live after their various captivities, both benign and malign. That they were themselves, that he had been right to choose the Cloaked Conjuror as their best hope for long, content lives.

Their rhythmic greeting dance paused.

They lifted throats and eyes to the edge of the rock garden that was their home.

A small cat stood there, under the glare of a security light.

Max stared, expecting it to be Midnight Louie, though how he would have gotten here…

But this cat’s coat was pale, as were the eyes that shone sky-blue in the spill of sodium iodide rays from above.

The darkness beyond the shower of light, behind the cat, turned into a figure as Max’s vision adjusted. The form was curlicued like a silhouette portrait cut with manicure scissors from stiff black construction paper. This thing was more solid, more like paper-thin wrought-iron, a creature of razor-sharp extremities…gown, nails, the curled ends of hip-length tresses as dark as night would be without security lights.

Shangri-La.

Max templed his fingers, drew himself into one long line of watching black, an impassive vertical of stasis and potential.

Behind him, leopard and panther pushed against his legs, their massive throats growling gently.