Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

His shadow was a low-rider, a sidecar running alongside the Vampire’s high-profile bulk. The motor throbbed like hard-rock music, guttural and insistent, announcing itself to the night.

There was no way to be subtle on a motorcycle. It was an instrument of the self-advertised, married to a machine. I am inhuman. Hear me roar.

Overweight people, outcast people, overcontrolled people all found freedom on a motorcycle.

Matt wondered if that was why he had hated the Hesketh Vampire at first: too flashy, too noisy, too look-at-me.

Now he thought that he had been the too-too one. Too modest, too quiet, too self-effacing. Was that what had drawn Kitty O’Connor to him? Bullies always needed a victim, and a bully was what she was. Motorpsycho nightmare.

He watched his side mirrors. The helmet muted sound; it was like cruising inside a noisy silent movie, the familiar cityscape sliding by, sometimes at a pinball-machine tilt.

And then it was there: the black ball of a gadfly in his right mirror, moving up fast.

He tilted, swept left down an unknown street. Then right, swerving. Skating the dry warm streets, bike and man moving to a Strauss waltz, like the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey .

It was past 2001 now. It was past odyssey and into obsession.

He rode for the sake of it, for the oneness of it, only visiting the mirror now and then, finding the black spot clinging to him like a burr, but still a block or two behind.

What did she really want? What could she really do? Try to crowd him off the street into an accident? She didn’t want any accidents to happen to him. She wanted to happen to him. So…if he wouldn’t rattle, would she rock and roll? Quit? Give up? Just enjoy the chase and drop out?

He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to lead her. She knew where he worked and lived. She didn’t know a thing about his internal landscape, except what she guessed or hoped to produce.

There was a strange freedom in deciding she could do him no harm, that she was trapped by wanting to harm him in certain limited ways.

She was gaining on him. He didn’t particularly care. Maybe he’d spin around in a 180-degree stop. Wait for her. See what she’d do.

At least it was just him and her. No innocents in the way. Did she understand that trapping him alone with her was not the threat; it was trapping him with someone else?

Yes, or she’d never have brought that poor girl along to the Blue Dahlia.

He had to make her think that the game was more interesting when she came solo.

So he did it, swept the Vampire in a tight, tilted circle and dragged his toe along the ground to balance it to a swaggering stop.

And waited for her.

Like a fly you’re about to swat, she played coy. Throttled down to a dull grumble, hovered three hundred feet away, the Kawasaki snorting and smoking like a stalled dragon.

It reminded him of a bull, so he revved up and raced at her, a toreador on ice.

His aggression caught her off guard. She swept away left down a dark, unlit street.

He followed, on the attack for once, liking it far too much. The worst thing an enemy can do is to make you like him. Like Cliff Effinger, mean, violent, hair-trigger. Still…he had seen, learned from a master. Maybe he needed a little of Cliff Effinger to deal with Kitty O’Connor.

He was an amateur.

She had roared out of sight, then silenced.

When he moved past an intersection, she shot out across it like a cannonball.

He almost spun out sideways in order not to hit her.

And the point was made.

He still wanted to avoid conflict. Crashing. Charging.

He turned the Vampire in a large circle and roared away, the chased rather than the pursuer now.

And now she retaliated. Buzzed up close like a wasp, agitated his jet stream, wobbled close to his wheels. It was like the chariot race in Ben Hur , nerve and dirty tricks and only the power of one Christian God to pull his fat from the fire.

He recognized his earlier hubris, the misplaced faith in the machine, in his new devil-may-care attitude. All the devil cared about was pride going before a fall, and Matt was pushing, was being pushed into taking the Vampire into a hasty, bruising scrape along asphalt and concrete.

He felt a pain, as if the machine’s metal skin were flesh and blood and he would be responsible for its grazing.

He jumped a curb without thinking about it, the jolt bone-jarring. He was barreling along sidewalk on a thankfully deserted street, ducking unclipped shrubbery.

Innocent greenery snapped away from his helmet, his handlebars.

His side mirrors reflected slashes of the rare streetlight. He sensed his pursuer rather than saw or heard her.

All he heard was his own breakneck progress and the thought that this had to end with a mistake, badly, in a crash.

Ahead loomed the deserted industrial park he had used to dodge a pursuing motorcycle before, long before he knew that Kitty O’Connor was after him.

It was odd, the motif of the pursuing motorcycle, like a nightmare, like a cop, like the Hound of Hell or Heaven, like fate.

Matt twisted the hand throttle, poured on the power, turned a 45-degree angle around a building whose glass eyes had all been shot out.

The buzz was right behind him. He was going to cut the next corner too close or too far and he and the Vampire would go sliding horizontal into the dark night and hard ground for a long, long screech of yards.

Something came slicing behind him, crossways, like a buzz saw.

Another cycle. Big. Gaudy. Older than the Vampire. Bigger than the Vampire. All bristling chrome and wire wheels, a red vintage Harley-Davidson.

It swept a huge circle and came up behind him. The motor throbbed like Wagner’s Pilgrims’ Chorus, like the Valkyrie on the warpath.

The rider wore no helmet, just a pair of wraparound sunglasses as pitch-black as tar.

His hair was windswept tar. His knuckles on the handles were white in the night, ungloved.

He wove behind Matt, left and then right, and every swerve put itself between the Vampire and the Kawasaki that followed.

Then the huge machine moved up on Matt, slowly but certainly.

He rode in Matt’s left blind spot, like a cowboy herding a steer.

Matt couldn’t engage with the other motorcycle. This interloper had interposed itself between them. He found himself resenting the intrusion.

It had been him and Kitty O’Connor and now they were three.

He was being herded out of the empty shopping center back toward the freeway and civilization and speed limits and population.

It occurred to him that he ought to be grateful, but he wasn’t.

Maybe this would have ended it, once and for all.

He was being herded too damn fast.

His speedometer in the lurid dashboard lights read ninety miles per hour and he’d hardly noticed it.

His escort pulled abreast without revving up a decibel.

He glanced over, saw the lacquered hair, the thick sideburns.

Elvis saluted and pushed inward to force Matt onto the entrance lane of Highway 95.

In his right mirror Matt saw the overbuilt motorcycle turn like Leviathan to face the oncoming black blot of the Kawasaki.

Damn, but he wanted to see the outcome of that collision!

The night swallowed the images of the two motorcycles. He was awash in headlights and taillights and seventy-mile-an-hour lane changers and overhead lights as bright as the morning star.

This was Las Vegas, and his money was on Elvis. There was no percentage in messing with a living legend, especially after he was dead.

Matt felt a new swell of appreciation for the time-honored religious tradition of patron saints.

Elvis made a troubling spiritual figure, despite his clumsy aspirations to the role while living, but as a ghost he was pretty damn impressive.