Hmm. Warm, meaty, fishy, not-Maurice-endorsed product. At least two bowls full.
I bump the patio doors open with my sturdy rear quarters and signal the corps. Ma Barker’s rangy, somewhat raccoon-customized form comes scrabbling up the palm tree trunk, everyone but poor three-legged Gimpy after her.
I look at Karma. “I can work the microwave. You think your Divine-ship could transport a little grub down to the three-leg waiting below?”
Those celestial blue eyes blink. In a wink, shy, reclusive Karma has a napkin full of Á La Cat’s best between her sharp white teeth, and is sliding down the palm trunk like it is a magic carpet.
The last I see, she is laying it all out for Gimpy, and pitching tasty nuggets into his tuna-hole. Meanwhile, I am the chef du jour, clambering to the countertop, teeth tearing foil packets open, kicking them into the microwave, then using fifteen-second bursts to release their full, fishy aroma.
Manx! Cooking for a crowd is murder.
Chapter 39
Dangerous Curves
Dirty Larry hunched forward in Molina’s visitor’s chair, his hands loosely clasped.
It was an oddly tense posture for a man with a style cool enough to chill ice. Maybe he sensed that she wanted to know something she didn’t want him to know she wanted.
What a tangled web undercover work involved! If Max Kinsella really was the super-spy Matt claimed he was, he must have been one hell of a multitasker. She knew she was too direct and authoritarian to match wits with a seasoned undercover operative like Larry Paddock. But she needed to do just that.
“My favorite redhead-gone-blond is up to her tiny tush in the murder and attempted murder at the Crystal Phoenix,” she told him. “I dug out the surveillance report you did on her for me a couple weeks back.”
“You want a vintage shop sizer-up, she’s your woman.”
“I know her routines look all girly and innocent, but I don’t buy appearances.” Her hard look implied that might apply to him as well.
Larry shrugged. He had that inborn indifference to authority of any kind that made him such an apt candidate for a drug runner or other specialist in the criminal arts. Molina figured it was a native talent, honed through a prefelonious boyhood in some urban slum. Then military, probably special branch, then undercover in L.A. or Las Vegas where crime was as spectacularly intense as the scenery and social ambiance.
“Anything innocuous could be a cover,” she told him. “You didn’t give me the addresses beyond the general locations.”
“You want addresses of local vintage shops?” He grinned crookedly. “I thought Carmen the chanteuse habituated those places.”
“Not for years. Her thirties and forties era is out of fashion in the vintage shops now.”
“Too bad. Them’s ritzy rags.” He gave her a male once-over that stripped away the khaki pantsuit and attired her in dark liquid velvet.
Darned if she didn’t mind that. There was something feral and sexy about Dirty Larry. What used to be called devil-may-care in the torch song era. He’d aimed that at her when no one else dared. She hadn’t made up her mind about who was using who here, or if either of them cared.
She did care about getting a deeper interrogation of him on the matter of Temple Barr’s movements around Las Vegas, without him catching on, which was tricky.
“Mind this store for the moment,” she admonished him, lightly enough that it sounded as much like a come-on as a rebuke. “This is police business.”
“Sure, Lieutenant, you can pull rank on me anytime.” The tone was insolent.
“Like you’d ever take that.”
He shrugged, his smile tight. Then he shifted in the chair and pulled out a small cheap notebook, half the pages pulling out of the spiral binding.
“I took down the addys, just figured you didn’t plan on stopping by these nothing places.”
He started by spitting out the date, then shop names and addresses. Molina could barely jot them down fast enough.
“That’s the vintage shops, all along or near Charleston, as you know. The residence was 1200 Mohave Way, kinda like High Noon. The hotels I think you know well enough to dispense with street addresses. And the funky round residence—”
“That one I know all too well,” she said, waving a hand as she finished jotting down the vintage store addresses she didn’t want or need as if they were manna from heaven.
“What’s the deal with this old stuff?”
She looked up to see that the notebook had disappeared. She bet Dirty Larry had a lot of stashing places on his person, almost as many as a magician.
She felt her face flush. Guilt maybe. But Larry was good. He’d read every flicker of her expression, her thoughts.
“You want to search me, Lieutenant?” He spread his arms and hands, inviting.
“Not today.”
“Tonight?”
“Maybe.” Damn it. She needed to distract him. Sexual banter might do that.
His head tilted, like a bird who’d heard a worm wiggling underground.
“I was thinking Carmen needed to put in an appearance at the Blue Dahlia,” she said.
“Tonight?”
Now she would have to. “You’ve been a good boy with your math questions. But I hope you weren’t using a crib notebook.”
He laughed, easy and contented, all male satisfaction. It’d be hard to lose him tonight, but she had to. “Admit it. Those velvet gowns make you hot.”
“And they don’t make you hot?”
He rose, leaned forward, tapped the top of her hand with the pen in it. “I’ll be there.”
Some emergency with Mariah. That would be her out.
Dirty Larry paused at the door to her office. Cut her a dirty blond Sting look. Maybe she didn’t want an out.
It was too bad her appearance at the Blue Dahlia was a sham.
The trio was really smoking and her voice had been just unused enough to have a throatier edge that matched them.
Dirty Larry had been lounging at a corner table drinking Madeira on ice like it was cough syrup meant to be taken by teaspoons, sober but undressing her with his eyes.
He was impertinent, unprofessional, arrogant, and oddly attractive. Maybe it would take an outlaw like him to breach her formidable defenses.
But not tonight. She had other business in mind.
She was crooning out the song’s endless last bars when the slimy-looking guy who was as twitchy as a coke addict sidled up to Larry’s table.
Larry frowned, big time. He gestured the lowlife away, brought his eyes back to her so she could breathe the last “you” of “It had to be you” right at him.
His lips pantomimed the word “Shit.” Then he rose and made a royal wave with one hand that meant “and all that stuff we cops do.”
And left.
Thanks to the inside info she had on the drug deal at the Opium Den going down, he was outta here. And so was she.
Molina bowed her head slightly to the enthusiastic applause, winked at the guys in the band, and beat a retreat to her tiny closet of a dressing room.
In front of the big round mirror on the vintage dressing table, she wiped off the dark carmine forties lipstick shade from an online company of vintage cosmetic shades called Besamé. Kiss me. Not tonight. She dusted her face with dark brown face powder in a random camouflage pattern. The velvet gown, peacock-green, went on a hanger. She was wearing black yoga pants underneath. The dark green satin platform forties sandals gave way to black high-top tennis shoes. Black turtleneck. You’d think she was a Max Kinsella fashion clone.
If she was lucky, thanks to that Mojave Way address from Larry, she’d be invading Max Kinsella territory tonight. The Glock was too heavy for this gig. A small black Beretta nine-shot semiautomatic, perhaps in tribute to the Fontana brothers, was in her black nylon ankle holster.
She glimpsed herself in the round mirror before she ducked out of the dressing room and out the Dahlia’s back door. She looked lean, dark, and
dingy.
Maybe this wasn’t Max Kinsella. Maybe this was more Midnight Louie, Allah bless his tribe.
Because she was going to solo as a cat burglar tonight, God willing. Not exactly what Larry’d had in mind, but what she’d planned from the first. Her lips managed a tight feline smile.
Chapter 40
Dead of Night
Molina had to agree with Larry’s reported opinion.
Bland, boring neighborhood. One-story, ranch-style houses. Only the Asian rat-tail sweep up at the roof ’s corners gave the place some flare. Not that it didn’t cost three times what her modest bungalow in the Latino area did.
The house was fifties vintage, dark and shrouded like all the firmly middle-class homes in this aging subdivision.
The traffic swish of the Strip was almost audible here, it was so close in compared to more modern suburban developments in Henderson and environs.
No garage out front, but discreetly tucked at the back, as functional things were then.
The shrubbery was low and trimmed, unlike its neighbors. Someone knew the rules for discouraging lurkers. The lights at the corner eaves were motion-triggered.
She’d be better off to climb the cedar-wood six-foot fence at the side and try entering by the back. It had been a long time since she’d scrambled over a wall in pursuit. Desks didn’t require much scrambling.
But she kept her martial arts up and should still be fairly limber . . . shoot! Literally. She’d almost snagged her ankle holster on one of the pointed boards.
The backyard was lit on the fringes by rows of low lights. Probably solar-powered. She quickly padded out of their glare toward the house and the bulk of a hot tub on a patio.
If this place was what she thought and fervently hoped it was, she could dream up some steamy scenarios for that now-covered aquatic playpen. She had to crouch along the hot tub’s bulk to near the back door without triggering the corner lights.
And then she saw the red gleam near a potted hibiscus plant, matched by one from the opposite pot.
Right. Laser light security. Or guard cats. Given her suspicions, the cats wouldn’t surprise her. But if she wished to surprise anyone still in residence, it was up the fence to the roof, like a cat, and over the tile shingles to the back door, then down. Where she expected to find other barriers.
She did.
Steel shutters. And on the windows too.
She pulled out the small computerized device she’d “borrowed.” Max Kinsella was making her break a lot of rules, not to mention laws.
The device ran through endless codes from the major manufacturers of security barriers. Kinsella might have modified and customized the codes, but this probability device was tireless.
And she knew this was the right place now. The security level screamed that fact. This was the one innocuous residential address at which Temple Barr had stopped the day Molina had asked Larry to tail her.
Her heart was beating with the excitement of a hunter who might suddenly become prey. If Matt was right, Kinsella was an international-level spy. Breaching even a few of his defenses meant only that more awaited her.
This was way out of the range of her normal operations. She’d been a desk jockey for too long. Still, she loved being back in the field, flying on nerve and adrenaline. She loved . . . breaking the law in the law’s cause. One-upping Kinsella. Proving him guilty of something. Proving him the lying bastard she’d always seen him for. Proving Temple Barr a deluded little girl.
Matt an idealist.
Herself right.
Kinsella wrong. Dead wrong.
The device blipped and then the flashing light stayed red. The back door shutter opened slowly, with a low, grinding sound.
She tested the outer glass door, twin to a million others. It swung ajar.
She stepped into the black empty hole the shutter had left in its stead, into the heart of darkness.
Nothing is as haunting as the landscape of an unlit, presumably empty house.
Every breath you take sounds like the wheeze of an iron lung. Every soft, hesitating step crushes minuscule grains of sand underfoot, as if you were smashing shells in a driveway.
She passed through some utility room or pantry onto a hard-surfaced floor, probably the kitchen. She had a small, high-intensity flashlight in the tiny inner pocket of her supple knit pants, but she left it there.
The house seemed to breathe with her. Someone could be here. He could be here.
She hoped he was.
Step by step, she edged around the altarlike bulk of a kitchen island, her eyes adapting to what little light sifted through the back door into the interior dimness.
Ovals of metal pots glimmered above the island and her head. This was a reflective, metallic chef ’s kitchen, so unlike her expectations of Max Kinsella. Crook, yes. Never cook.
Was she wrong? Was this the wrong place? Was it some paranoid citizen’s bunker against imagined assault?
No.
The slim scimitars of light glanced over a butcher block impaled with an expensive array of long, dangerous kitchen knives, something odd about their presence here.
The refrigerator was a matte silver mirror of stainless steel. She glimpsed her own figure as an impossibly narrow fencepost of wrought iron, moving out of range.
From the kitchen she moved into utterly dark inner space, probably a dining room. She edged outward until her hand felt a stucco wall and followed it. A waft of air told her a door or a hall intersected it.
She was moving on primitive instinct now, mostly sightless, her ears straining at every sound she made. It had taken maybe seven minutes to get to this point.
And she sensed a presence. Someone besides her was in this house, in these rooms. Nothing proved it. Nothing could deny it.
She moved even more cautiously. Yes, into a hall. Her long arms could span it, touch each side. The long arms of the law.
You can run, but you can’t hide, Max Kinsella. You are mine!
A floorboard creaked ever so slightly.
To her right and behind.
Molina flattened against one wall, felt down it until a doorknob butted against her hip. Had she been moving faster she would have collided with it and huffed out an audible breath of pain.
As it was, she felt the small round disk, the kind you find on louvered wooden doors on closets, and pulled. A panel opened silently. She slipped behind it into folds of clothing. A closet, yes. She pulled the flimsy door shut. It was too light to creak.
Some light sifted through the louvers, striping the darkness with horizontal bars. A jail cell on its side.
Shelter? Or trap?
She heard sounds, motion. The subtle grind of footsteps not hers on the hard-surface floor of the kitchen. A subtle, scraping sound, faintly shrill, reminded her of something she couldn’t name. A faint bellows of someone else moving and breathing now that she was still.
Her heart was thundering in her veins and chest, at her ears and throat. Bending down to draw the Beretta would be damned awkward. She’d butt her head on the louvered door so close. She should have drawn it when she was in the larger hall, damn it!
She heard a door opening, a solid-core door across the hall.
Then a tiny sound, minute but long, like . . . like something tearing. Again and again. There was a rhythmic, sawing motion to the sound. Across the hall, in another room. Someone breaking into something? A cabinet. A magician’s cabinet?
And breath. Getting louder as the small gnawing sound continued. Heavy. Breathing. Someone else was definitely in here. And not a resident.
Someone secret, like herself.
Who?
The tearing sound stopped. The minuscule grains of outdoor sand crushed again. Breathing, harsh, passed her louvers. She held her own breath until her chest burned and she feared an exhalation would sound like a tsunami.
She clapped her hand to her mouth and used her singer’s strong stomach and chest muscles to expel the air, silent bit by sile
nt bit.
Whoever was in here was dangerous. And it wasn’t Max Kinsella. He wouldn’t move like a thief in his own rooms. No one had sensed her yet. Yet she knew she wasn’t alone.
She felt as if some giant slow-slinking serpent was moving from room to room, about some very vicious business.
And then her mind fixed on the impression of what had been wrong in the kitchen like a grade-school student clinging to a flash card recognized a fraction too late to count.
Metal being honed.
The knife block.
One had been missing in the regular ranks of dark hilts glinting with steel rivets.
A big one.
The biggest one.
The butcher knife.
Holy Saint Ginsu Jesus!
Chapter 41
Transportation
The senior partner of Midnight Inc. Investigations is not the all-knowing oracle he thinks he is.
In fact, there are times when I deeply hope that he is not the dirty dog who sired me and my littermates on my unknown but obviously easily duped mother and took off for other venues.
I admit that I have always had a soft spot for Mr. Matt Devine.
For one thing, he offered me a temporary home for a few days back when I was known as “Caviar,” and had not yet beat all comers to become house detective at the Crystal Phoenix. And I have always felt something in common with the dude, given he was searching for two absent fathers: a mean stepfather and, unknowingly, his birth father. I fear his quests have been as disappointing as mine was.
And Mr. Midnight Louie, dude about Vegas (I would say “dud” about Vegas were he here to hear me), is not the only one wont to drop in on Karma at the Circle Ritz and get up-to-date on the doings of its human occupants.
Anyway, I have a bone to pick with him on what is more important: sheep-dogging his Miss Temple through murder among the feather free-for-all at the Crystal Phoenix, or figuring out what is going on with the Mystifying Max.
That dude is sure living up to his performing moniker lately, or maybe not.
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