Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

Matt whirled to face the dark car with its windows black-tinted like a limousine’s. It was a boxy, anonymous vehicle. He couldn’t even name the model and maker.

It looked like a cut-rate hearse to him.

Someone was stepping out of it.

Stepping out with my baby…

A woman.

…a face in the misty light…

No, not Laura from forties film noir…just Kathleen. Kitty. Any haunting songs written for such a common name or nickname? Only raucous Irish ditties and a soulful Celtic ballad or two.

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…

She wore something long, dark, and glittering. It hung from rhinestone straps on her shoulders. She was done up like a disco prom queen. Her high heels clicked on the pavement as she approached. Scarlet rhinestones dripped like blood from her earlobes. Not rhinestones maybe, rubies…

She clutched not a gun but a small, bejeweled purse shaped like a kumquat. The innocuous bag was more suggestive, more chilling. What was in it? A folded razor? A tiny automatic pistol? A lipstick case? A vial of poison? Or of holy water?

“Don’t be in such a hurry,” she said. “The Midnight Hour is still a lifetime away.”

He was alone this time. He didn’t have to worry about her hurting anybody else. He moved toward the motorcycle again. It could outrun any car.

“You’ve come here before,” she called after him, softly as a song. Her voice still held the faintest musical lilt of Ireland, a siren’s lure. “I was wondering why.”

He didn’t pause.

“Actually, I was wondering who .”

He turned, stopped, spoke. “What a small world you occupy, Kathleen O’Connor. There is not always a why, or a who. Sometimes there’s a what. Not for you, though. You’re hooked on whys and whos. That’s what makes you so ignorant.”

“ Me! Ignorant? I’ve lived all over the world, visited casinos that make Las Vegas look like Disneyland for the double-wide set. I’ve drunk the finest wines, worn designer jeans that cost more than that whole damn motorcycle —”

“Impressive,” Matt said without stopping or turning.

“If you really want to be impressed, maybe you should peek in the backseat of my car.”

Her voice wasn’t musical anymore, but raw, as metallic as a zipper slowly opening, grating. Kitty was sure that what she was about to reveal was raunchy but irresistible.

Matt knew it was a mistake not to resist, but her voice had become so smugly threatening…

He turned. Kitty O’Connor cut a sophisticated figure in the blue-green parking lot glow. The car behind her was a shiny black box. He remembered sensing it as a hearse. Whose hearse?

He started toward it, she spinning and clicking on those high heels to reach it first, as if now they were in a race. Her staccato steps reminded him of Temple, but he didn’t want even her name crossing his mind in the presence of Kitty O’Connor.

The woman had paused by the back door on the driver’s side of the four-door sedan to unlatch the hard little jeweled bag. She brought out something black and oblong. A remote control. The car’s rear window opened with a can-opener whirr.

It sliced open on a band of red hair. Matt’s heart stopped, but the window kept descending until a third of the way down. He saw frightened eyes and a duct-taped mouth, like a robot’s featureless silver orifice pasted onto a human face.

Matt’s heart throbbed like a jungle drum as he recognized not the fractured face but the mane of red hair: the teenaged fan from last night at the radio station parking lot.

The window was rising again like a dry dark tide, obscuring the terrified eyes and obscenely cheerful red hair. Had Kitty chosen the girl because she had been there, or because her hair was red?

“She’s just an —” he began.

“Innocent bystander?” Kitty tucked the remote control back into her purse as casually as if it was a cigarette case. “My favorite kind. Besides, I don’t buy your assumption that anyone is innocent. Even you.”

“I never claimed I was.”

“You claimed you were a good priest.”

“A good priest isn’t innocent. A priest needs knowledge of evil.”

“You must be an even better priest now,” she said, slithering forward like vamp on a nighttime soap opera.

“A priest needs knowledge of evil,” he repeated, “like a seductress needs a touch of innocence to be believable. Seducing me won’t work.”

“Just remember the girl in the backseat. Next time she might be somebody you really know.”

He choked back his anger at her constant threats, her theatricality. Did she need to be the star of her own show this much? Apparently. And what did that tell him about her?

“Relax,” she was saying. “I’ve planned a quiet evening for just the two of us. And” — her dark head jerked over her shoulder toward the closed window — “she can’t see us. No one inside the car can see out except the driver. Aren’t you wondering who the driver is?”

He hadn’t considered that. If Kitty was not alone tonight, if she had a hostage, she might also have an accomplice. An accomplice was needed for what? Chauffeuring? Ferrying captives…carrying bodies?

“A quiet evening —?” he repeated to gain time.

“Sure.” She walked around to the car’s front passenger side.

He heard the heavy metal door open, then Kitty began unloading objects onto the car’s long black hood. Two champagne flutes. A silver ice bucket. A green bulbous bottle of Perrier-Jouët twined by painted art nouveau flowers.

“Come here,” she said.

He didn’t, of course.

“Come here or I’ll have to get my petite straight razor from my purse and attempt to cut that poor child’s duct tape off.”

She poured one tall flute too full of champagne, and waited.

He moved in her direction, around the front of the car, wondering if her anonymous driver had orders to run him down.

But the engine stayed dormant and only the bubbles in the long tall glass moved.

They spun frantically for the lip of the glass, pearly strings and ropes twirling up like deep sea divers trying to outrun the bends. Bubbles, tiny bubbles of frantic, tiny final breaths.

A tearful bound girl trapped in a stranger’s car with her mouth taped, breathing anxiously through her nose, fighting for each breath as congestion clogged her sinuses and nostrils.

“Let her go.”

“No.”

“Let her go, or I go.”

“You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”

He shrugged, walked away, turned his back on the bubbles.

“You don’t dare risk it,” her hoarse whisper called after him.

He heard furious heel clicks, rapid, angry.

The whirr of a car window opening. The driver showing himself? Pointing a gun?

He kept walking.

Heard a muffled cry.

Turned.

Kitty stood beside the rear car door, now gaping open, the young woman tumbled to the asphalt in a fetal position, still bound, still gagged. Eyes still wide open.

“There. She’s out. On her own. I’ll leave her here. Now, come back.”

Kitty strode around to the car’s long front hood gleaming like a black steel coffin and lifted the heavy champagne bottle, a hostess as impervious as patent leather.

“It’s rude to walk away when you’re the guest of honor.”

At least now the car couldn’t take off with the girl captive.

Matt obeyed, or, rather, did what he thought was best at the moment, which was to seem to obey.

She poured another shaft of champagne trembling with manic bubbles as he approached and handed him the glass, her hand rock steady.

She sipped. He followed suit, wondering what playing her game would get him or cost him.

Her payoff was instantly obvious. Satisfaction. She fairly purred with it, arched her dark eyebrows, licked the smoothly rolled glass rim of the flute as if it were jagged and she had a taste for blood, even, perhaps, her own. Or perhaps mostly her own.