Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

She glanced at the fence, lit by the security light.

A cat sat on it. A silhouette in the night. Big cat.

Its mouth opened wide to showcase white shark’s teeth in a mouth raw and red against its backlit form.

Maybe it was a black cat.

Temple spotted the Miata’s sassy and sleek rear end, looking black, not red, in the vans’ shadow, and moved toward it, her door key between her first and second knuckle.

And then she realized what was wrong.

The cat had howled.

And she hadn’t heard it.

She was temporarily deaf from the music inside and…she hadn’t taken out the wads of tissue in her ears.

She was temporarily deaf.

A body slammed into her from behind.

Slammed her up against the van.

“You don’t want to leave.” The voice was right at her deaf ear, penetrated the soundlessness like a scraping file.

“I’m not a stripper,” she said. Not me. I don’t fit the profile.

If only she could reach up and rip out the tissues, but his body had crushed her against the lukewarm metal, arms pinned at her sides, the ring of costumes cutting into her ribs and hip.

“You’re pretty,” it said. A hand snagged in the rough fibers of her wig. She could feel the bobby pins that held it on slipping. “Come home with me.”

He was pushing her along the van. She felt the side door give behind her, slide open, even heard the sharp crack as it began to move.

His van. She had become a crime of opportunity.

Once inside…

Temple squirmed, resisted, tried to scrabble along the moving door so something solid remained behind her, so she wasn’t pushed, sucked into that bottomless imprisoning dark within.

The struggle must have knocked some tissue out of her ears. She heard like one cured: an unholy yowling, a whining like the horrible shrieking sound played behind the shower murder scene in Psycho .

Oh, Lord, she was in the shower murder scene in Psycho !

The guy’s elbows and hands and knees were jamming into her, hurting her, but she kept scrambling. She didn’t know anything about him: how tall, how old, how heavy. He was just an impinging part of the dark.

If she went down, she would never know….

She felt herself slipping, sinking into the off-key shrieking sound, her wrist desperately twisting to turn the big metal ring on her wrist.

He had gotten tangled in the jungle of elastic straps, an arm, Temple thought.

In that instant, her fingers found the small cannister danging from a keychain amid the garish fabrics. Max’s so unromantic gift.

She twisted it, twisted her hand half off its joint, and pushed on plastic.

A mist hissed up between them like an invisible serpent’s head, as searing and blinding as a sandstorm in her eyes, her nose, her throat.

Force fell away, but Temple tumbled writhing and gagging to the asphalt. After the hard struggle along the metal van side, it felt as cushioning as a warm gingerbread cookie.

Tears blinded her. Her ears, though, were finally clear of tissue. The horrible shrieking, screaming, howling sound never stopped.

Molina: Face-off

Before Molina could answer, he swung her away from the wall.

She was surprised by his strength, quite amazing, almost equal to an angel-dust addict’s. The move lifted her off her feet for a second.

She had never experienced in adult life that pit-of-the-stomach carnival-ride thrill she felt now, not in martial arts class and not even in sex, not since she had grown into a tall woman and made herself strong and independent, and ultimately celibate. He only had thirty pounds on her, but he was all muscle and bone, as flexible as a rattlesnake tail.

Now he was pressing her so tightly between the van and himself that she could hardly breathe. She had never allowed herself to speculate about any man’s sexuality, not for years, not since she’d become a career woman in a man’s world. He was right about one thing: she was all business, all working mother, all bureaucrat and civic servant. And hunter.

He released her, drawing his left hand down her arm to her hand. His right hand tilted her face to the side. Then his mouth touched her neck over the carotid artery. Every move was music, slow and controlled and perfectly pitched. Not a kiss, a slow-burning brand.

She was back in a crowded high school hallway, a gangly, thick teenager watching the petite bow-head girls as they ransacked their lockers between classes. Giggling and brushing back the careful curls from their necks to show off small lurid bruises. Hickeys. The tattoos of a quarter century ago. Badges of sexual initiation. She knew now that these marks demonstrated the boys’ passion and possession more than the girls’. Good Hispanic girls were too repressed to feel passion, but they were good at pretending to it. And they welcomed visible signs of possession, of their own dangerous desirability. Hickeys were the one pimple an adolescent girl could be proud of.

She had never had one.

A departing headlight raked across their figures like a spotlight. She used the distraction to push him away. “Vampire,” she accused.

“Vlad the Impaler,” he answered.

How could he find sex so amusing, she wondered, especially this explosive kind that defied all previous behavior, all roles, all reason? Maybe he found her amusing.

“You just want to screw me.” The accusation, the situation demanded an ugly word for it.

“Right. I just want to screw you.” He said the words emphatically, separately, with an undertone of surprise.

Somehow the surprise made the vulgarism sexy, not dirty, as he looked at her mouth, then her eyes. “But I won’t. Not until you just want to screw me as much.” He had perfectly imitated her tone but his words were an invitation, and hers hadn’t been.

She caught her breath. Words were just another weapon to her, but they didn’t work for her like this, not in emotional clinches. Only on the street, where they were ugly and effective.

“Don’t try your bedroom games on me,” she said contemptuously again, softly. She meant the contempt for the games, not the bedroom, but she had to wonder if one hadn’t rubbed off on the other for her long ago.

“Bedroom games,” he agreed. “We’re well matched, Lieutenant,” he repeated. “Shall we call it a draw for now?”

The “shall” reminded her of his Continental adventures. Her law enforcement instincts had always told her he could have been, could be, involved in something serious. Something big-time. International. Now she knew it.

She scuttled away along the metal wall, more repelled by herself than by him. He would try anything; she didn’t have to.

“You’re a criminal.”

“Sometimes. To some.”

She shook her head, didn’t look at him. “Get out of here.” Said as shortly as she would dismiss a snitch.

He left, as she said, as he had always wanted to.

And in that momentary turning away, she leaped, kicked a foot out from under him, followed up with a hard knee to the small of the back as he went down, had his right thumb in a painful lock as she forced his arm into an ugly angle behind his back, used her free left hand to slam his head into the asphalt and stun him long enough to grab the handcuffs out of her Excaliber fanny pack, snap the left wrist in, jerk it hard over to…finally…meet the pinned right wrist and…presto.

One magician, hogtied on the rocks.

Molina sat back, both winded and revved. Practice makes perfect, and God knew she had done her share of takedowns in L.A., but that had been years ago.