Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “No suspicious characters?” Nadir asked.

  “Just you.” Jay snickered. “You’re not hired heat anymore, why worry?”

  “This used to be my beat.” Nadir’s eyes, so dark the black pupils melted into the surrounding iris, scanned the entire club.

  Temple wondered if his pupils were dilated from being high on something, or if he just came with creepy jet black eyes, like a larger-than-life cartoon villain.

  She remembered Thomas Harris’s one chilling fantasy touch in his description of Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter. He had “maroon” eyes.

  How could Molina suspect Max’s true-blue eyes (sometimes disguised by contact lenses as alley-cat green) when here stood a suspect with eyes as black as his presumed heart?

  Supposedly Molina had at one time fallen for this man, this hired muscle, this jaded strip club junkie.

  Just as her description of Nadir was yearning toward truly extreme heights of distaste the man himself turned to her. “You’re new.”

  “Not according to my mother.”

  He was speechless for a second, then laughed. “So you sell overpriced elastic bands. How’s business?”

  “Good. And they’re not overpriced. It takes tremendous skill to make the ‘gather’ setting on a sewing machine pay off. These costumes have to survive a lot of…stress.”

  This time he exploded with laughter, his dark eyes almost disappearing inside the fleshy eyelids.

  “You got that right, kid. So, is your sister a stripper? How’d you get into this scene?”

  “You got the sister part right. She does this.” Temple shook her hoop like a Salvation Army girl her tambourine. There was no noise, though, which wouldn’t have been heard over the sound system anyway. She and Nadir were shouting at each other, although only two feet apart.

  Yikes. She was sitting only two feet away from Molina’s ex–sleaze-a-squeeze and the only man in Las Vegas, or anywhere, that Max Kinsella had shown any fear of. Wow.

  “Say, you’re kind of cute,” he said, as if just noticing that. Having a strip club epiphany of sorts.

  Anyone else called her cute, she’d raise a ruckus.

  This was the fearsome Rafi Nadir, so she’d accept it. “Thanks. I won’t say you’re kind of cute yourself.”

  Again he laughed. She got the impression he didn’t do a lot of that and he enjoyed the novelty. He was…gasp…enjoying her.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tess.”

  “That all there is?”

  “That’s all there is around here.”

  “Smart. You never know who you’re talking to.”

  “Well?”

  He shrugged, let a smile touch his lips, smugly. “My name’s Raf.”

  “Smart.”

  He aimed his forefinger like a pistol. “Bang. You’re faster on the uptake than most of the broads around here.”

  “Maybe it’s because I’m not a broad.”

  He digested that along with some sodium-rich snack sticks salted with about three peanuts from a bowl on the bar that Temple had rejected forever after one try. Salty snacks encouraged drink orders, and bloating in the female of the species. Better dead than bloated.

  “You want to go someplace where we can talk?”

  Temple couldn’t believe her luck: Rafi Nadir, feeling talkative, all to herself.

  Too bad she didn’t dare risk going as far as the jukebox with him, not that there was one here.

  He read her hesitation so fast she thought he was Max. Predators were like that. Funny, she’d never thought of Max as a predator before.

  “How about a quiet table?” he suggested.

  “There is one in this place?”

  He jerked his head toward a far corner. “There is one in every place. You just gotta know the terrain.”

  She shrugged her acquiescence and slid off the barstool.

  “Leave that,” he said, stopping her hand from reaching for the drink. “Send over a real one for the lady,” he growled at Jay.

  Temple was glad she had ditched the high heels, the better to disguise her daily habits, the better to run for her life.

  His hands were always on her: between her shoulder blades to guide her toward the right table, at her elbow to thread between the tables, on her shoulder to follow her down onto the chair he pulled out for her.

  With a man you were attracted to, it was a barrier-breaking, seductive exercise.

  With a shady character, it was stomach-knotting. Temple wanted to use her fabric ring like a barrier to fend off his attentions, but undercover junior G-girls didn’t get any good leads that way.

  “Amazing,” she said after Jay had come and gone, leaving a margarita with a high lime color behind. “It really is quieter here.”

  Nadir pointed to the ceiling. “In Vegas you always gotta check the ceilings. They’re not only where the spy cameras lurk, but the loudspeakers. This is a loudspeaker-free zone.”

  “How’d you know all that?” Temple asked, sipping her margarita through its short, obligatory straw like a teenager at a soda fountain. She figured the more naive and impressionable she acted, the more information she’d get.

  “It’s my business.”

  She waited, sucking on her straw. Whew. This margarita had a tequila kick.

  “I’m in security. Right now I’m working for a major Strip celebrity, but before that some of the strip clubs asked me to check out their systems.”

  “Wow. How do you get into that kind of work?”

  He hesitated. The urge to impress won out over discretion. “I’ve got a history in law enforcement.”

  She bet he did! What was the expression Max had used? Rogue cop.

  “So you went from the LVPD to private eye work.”

  “Private security,” he corrected her. “Private eyes are rip-offs. Their rep is all from books and the movies.”

  Temple was still congratulating herself on leaving out the M in LVMPD. Unlike many cities, Las Vegas’s police force was called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, because there was also a North Las Vegas Police Department. If she had used the official set of alphabet soup to refer to the force, Nadir would realize she knew a bit more than she should. Which wasn’t much, but at least it was a fine point or two, thanks to her brushes with Molina.

  Molina! Was married to this guy! Or shacked up with him! Imagine that. No, don’t imagine that, she told herself on redirect. She didn’t want to gag on the only real drink she had ever gotten in a strip club.

  She had to admit that Rafi Nadir knew how to operate around here. That meant he would also know how to operate unseen and unsuspected around here. And certain murderers, especially sex murderers, loved to revisit the scenes of the crimes.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Huh? Oh, goose bumps. Just nervous.”

  “This is all new to you, right?”

  “Yeah. My sister does this stuff. Does all right with it too. But she’s —”

  “She’s what?”

  “Scared. There was a stripper killed not too long ago at one of the clubs. Outside one of the clubs. And another girl was just attacked. She had all these, ah, suits made up and decided she didn’t have the nerve to hang around and sell them, so I said I would.”

  “What makes you such a brave little girl?”

  Grrrrr. Temple hated condescension, even coming from potential serial sex killers. “I lost my job, so I guess I was just desperate. Anyway, I’m glad to see that the clubs have security experts like you working to keep us all safe.”

  She apparently had hit the litany of buttons that made Rafi Nadir resonate like a choir boy singing soprano, or ring like a slot machine that had just coughed up three cherries in a row.

  “Don’t you worry. This creep’ll get caught.”

  “You sound pretty certain. Any reason?”

  He leaned close. Even with this “quiet” table, the grinding rock music was always pounding the edges of your attention, flattening them like t
in.

  “I was there.”

  “There?”

  “In the parking lot of this one club. Secrets. Some guy was with Cher Smith. I stopped them to make sure it was on the up-and-up.”

  “And —?”

  “He cold-cocked me. Moved faster than a whipsnake. I don’t often take a hit. Cher drove off. I think he followed her.”

  Temple frowned. She’d heard this story the other way around. Oddly, Nadir’s version jibed with Max’s, except….

  “That was the killer. She was dead in another strip joint parking lot the next night. I saw the killer. That’s why I come back and hang around, even though I’ve got a better job elsewhere. I saw the guy. I’ll see him again. Guys like that don’t stop.”

  Temple was speechless, probably the best thing she could have done.

  Nadir was setting up Max to be the killer. If Molina could ever overcome her extreme prejudice against crossing paths with Nadir, that’s the story she would get out of him and it would give her everything she’d ever wanted.

  How ironic.

  “Now don’t be afraid.” Nadir reached out to pat her hand. He didn’t. His own closed over it, trapping it against the slick tabletop. “That’s why I’m here. I saw the guy. He wears disguises, but I’ll know him again.”

  “How do you know you will?”

  “Because I did see him again. That girl who was attacked outside Kitty City? I was there too. He got away. Some dumb-ass undercover narc bitch was there and blew my one chance to nail the guy. I had him in my reach, but she held a gun on us both. She arrived just after I came on him with the girl down. She couldn’t tell which one of us was the real killer so the stupid…broad let him get away, and forced me to go after him.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “No. He had too big a start on me. He can disappear like Lance Burton, this guy. But don’t worry, unless you see some guy over six feet tall. That he can’t quite hide. Tall guy. You look out then.”

  Temple nodded, sober despite the kick-lime margarita. She could swear that Nadir believed his own story. But then, pathological killers always had some self-justifying notion.

  She pulled her hand from under his to pick up the big glass bubble of the margarita glass in both palms and drink from the rock salt-slathered rim.

  Her lips curled at the caustic taste, even as her skin crawled.

  She had either just heard the twisted spiel of a stone-cold killer, or there was more to these murders than Max, Lieutenant Molina, and even Rafi Nadir knew or was telling her.

  “So where’ll I find you tomorrow night?” he was asking, as if she’d want to be found by him.

  Maybe she did.

  She leaned in to whisper one word to him.

  Shadows

  Matt couldn’t help thinking about computer hackers as he stepped out of the small WCOO office into the empty parking lot.

  You never saw them, hackers, but they came knocking on your cyber-door, and huffed and puffed until they blew your house down. Their only motive was spite, pure and simple. They didn’t have to know you to hate you. They struck and ran, leaving your entire system slowly eating itself. They were thugs, vandals, cyber-stalkers.

  Kitty was like that. Maybe, like hackers, she took pride in mindless destruction. It was more fun to ruin a stranger than an acquaintance. Some poor Job who stood there naked and bleeding, asking the universe, “Why me?” Evil without motive, logic, gain, was more unsettling than all the seven deadly sins combined.

  Letitia had left a few moments before him, at his insistence. He said he had to be a “big boy.” Basically, he had to make sure she wasn’t with him in case Kitty showed up.

  He’d ridden the Hesketh Vampire tonight and every night since she had accosted him and Letitia in this very lot.

  The Vampire was one sleek, shining, silver gauntlet thrown down on the empty black asphalt. She wanted to play motorcycle nightmare on her Kawasaki, he was ready to play back.

  He figured they were pretty well matched. He had the anger and she had the nerve. Anger could betray you, of course, but it also was a fearless motivator.

  He unlocked the cycle, took the helmet off the handlebar, put it on, donned the leather gloves, mounted, kicked the stand up, balanced all the bike’s awesome weight on his boot-toes for a moment before throttling up and cruising down the smooth asphalt.

  He was alone except for the shadow he cast in the pink-grapefruit-color parking lot lights high on their standards, like artificial moons stuck on fence posts. Pumpkin heads on scarecrow stalks.

  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.