Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

The hall was dimly lit and the tiny reception room seemed larger without people in it. Beyond the glass door, the almost empty parking lot looked like a staging ground for a UFO movie.

It was one-thirty in the morning, but in Las Vegas the bars were open twenty-four/seven.

Matt opened the door for Letitia, then followed her into the lukewarm night.

They’d dawdled inside long enough that the small gaggle of fans who usually waited for Matt after his show had given up and gone home.

“No groupies,” Letitia commented.

“No groupies.” Matt sounded relieved even to himself.

“You don’t worry that your ratings might be slipping?”

“No, because if they were, I’d do what I did before I had ratings to slip.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. Whatever I have to do to pay the rent.”

A form came barreling toward them from Matt’s left side, from the shadow the building cast along its sides.

Matt barely had time to put his hands up before something as big as a German shepherd lunged at him. Hairy, too. Red hair.

While he was thinking Irish setter, the apparition’s weight pushed him slightly backward and swiped his mouth off-center with a sloppy kiss.

It was five-feet-something of overenthusiastic girl and only the red hair kept him from pushing her away like an encroaching poodle.

“I love your show! I can’t believe I did this! ’Bye.”

And she dashed off around the building, giggling.

Letitia nodded. “Kiss-and-run groupie. Not bad.”

Matt backhanded his mouth. “Where are their parents, anyway?”

“At home, wondering where their kids are, as usual.” She chuckled, a sound as rich as water in a mountain stream plunking notes from a scale of river rocks. “Lighten, man. You’ve got fans and they’re in the desired demographic. I don’t know why you gotta see life in shades of gray when it can be a Technicolor paradise like the merry old land of Oz.”

“You forget the wicked witch.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not playing no ugly old thing with striped socks unless I get to keep the jazzy red shoes, bro. That’s what it’s all about. Life does not have to be a black-and-white film these days.”

Letitia stopped to stare at a vehicle under the greenish glare of a security light. “There. See what I mean? Where’s that kick-ass motorcycle of yours? Or that sweet shiny silver Volkswagen Bug that Elvis left for you? That just makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time, Elvis givin’ people VW Bugs, even if they have been redesigned. Poor Elvis never got a chance for a redesign. I know what you’re gonna say: ‘it wasn’t Elvis.’” She sing-songed along with Matt, nodding at his programed response. “But why you driving that white chocolate old Probe now? It isn’t even white chocolate. It’s just plain white, honey, and that ain’t you. Trust me.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be me.”

“Yeah, that’s soooo tough. Easy job, good money. Raking it in on the traveling chitchat circuit. I don’t get those gilt-edged national speaking invitations. Not yet. And I was here first. So what is it? Girl trouble?”

That question was so wildly off and so right on that Matt felt like Letitia did about Elvis’s postmortem taste in giveaway cars: he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

“Boy trouble?” she asked when he remained silent.

He saw that he’d at least have to commit to declaring a sexual preference. Before he could, his feet felt a faint, almost spectral thrum. They knew that subliminal vibration but his mind couldn’t name it.

“Damn it, Matt, my car’s in the garage, so we’re going to get in that Vanilla Ice car of yours and go someplace for a Bloody Mary and then you’re gonna drop me home —”

He was frowning into the distance, black and empty. “Yeah. Let’s get to the car.” He took her elbow, or what he figured to be her elbow, and tried to hurry her across the black asphalt sea of the parking lot.

That was like a fishing boat trying to tug the Queen Elizabeth into port in double time.

“What burr got up your nose?”

Not only his feet felt it. Now his knees were humming with it, all his joints, and he could finally hear that distant waspish drone, sweet and scary.

“Come on, Letitia!”

They didn’t make the car, of course.

Some things just overtake you, like hurricanes and tornados and very fast motorcycles.

It came spurting and bucking into the lot, as black and anonymous as the leather jumpsuited and helmeted figure that rode it. Zorro on wheels.

It came roaring toward them on a curving scythe like Death’s particular sheep’s crook, the dark side of the Good Shepherd. Matt cast a quick prayer at the nearest streetlight, a vigil light for the whole firmament and what might lie behind it.

He stopped moving and Letitia mirrored him.

“What’s going on? Who’s that speed demon?” she demanded. For the first time her deep, dark voice trembled like her flesh.

“That’s my problem.”

“Drugs? Somebody’s after you?”

“No drugs. Just after me.”

The black motorcycle, a Kawasaki model aptly called the Ninja, swung in a circle and tilted closer and closer until it ringed Matt and Letitia into an invisible circle of containment.

“It sure does stir up a lot of hot air,” Letitia complained as her tangerine outfit expanded to blowfish proportions.

The Ninja revved and came whooshing by, forcing them to back step.

Matt circled Letitia, keeping between the motorcycle and her.

“Hey, man,” she objected, “don’t play the hero. I can take that thing. Who’d you think’d be left standing after a head-to-headlight?”

Matt laughed, his tension easing. “You’re addicted to counseling, you know that?”

“It’s cheaper than a lot of things. Oh, that machine is snortin’ now. Here comes El Toro.”

The dark motorcycle charged, cutting it even closer than before.

Matt tensed to pounce as it passed. Motorcycles were powerful, fast, and maneuverable, but they rode a very fine line of balance. If he could tip that balance he might be dragged over the asphalt, but the bike might skid, tip.

He lunged as the heat and sound roared at them like a dragon’s breath. Grabbing at the handlebar jerked him off his feet, sent him rolling on the asphalt without the protection of biker leathers.

Khakis and a linen blazer kept the asphalt from breaking through and he was up as fast as he was down, but fifteen feet away from Letitia.

The Ninja cut a close, wobbly circle; its rider was forced to throttle down and drag a booted foot on the ground to stabilize the bike.

Then it revved again and drove straight ahead, between Matt and Letitia.

He tried to lunge and grab once more, but only ended up smacking the red taillight good-bye. Letitia huffed out a protest.

He glanced at her. Still upright. Still all right.

The vanishing bike’s driver lifted a right hand off the handlebars and flourished something long and dangling like a trophy, or a scalp.

Matt ran toward Letitia.

“My beads!” she was bellowing. “That bastard ripped off my tribal beads.”

“Are you all right? Your neck?”

“The world’s worst Indian burn.” Letitia removed her palm from her nape and examined it in the glare of the streetlight. No blood. “Now I really need that bleeding Bloody Mary. And you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

The place was called Buff Daddy’s and the clientele was all black.

Rap and hip-hop twitched off the sound system, the rapid-fire rhythms and lyrics as relentless as musical machine-gun fire.

Matt made his Polish-blond way in Letitia’s wake to the corner table she commandeered like a petty dictator. The speakers were far enough away that you could hear someone talk if the language was English.