Cat in a Red Hot Rage

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Thanks, Morrie.” Her voice had faded at the end there.

  He raised an eyebrow. They didn’t call her the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD for nothing. Her voice never faded.

  “Kids,” he said. “You kill ’em with kindness and they kill you with worry.”

  She didn’t try to answer this time, just nodded briskly. That was the Molina they all knew and tolerated while leaving her personal life alone.

  She breathed a big sigh of relief when Morrie left . . . and nearly shrieked at the pulsing, splitting feeling all along her side. Knife wounds hurt like hell until they fought off the infection and started closing. She’d have to move like a real iron maiden around here until the stitches took hold.

  The phone rang.

  “Yes,” she barked. The pain helped her stay in character better than anything.

  It was the desk sergeant. A tipster named Hyde was asking for her, and her alone.

  “Freak or geek?” she asked.

  “Looks like a fairly solid cit.”

  “Send him up.”

  Molina wanted to sigh, but she swallowed the gesture. Anything from coughing to hiccuping would be agonizing for a few days, maybe a couple weeks. So much for Dirty Larry’s bedroom fantasies.

  Minutes later a shadow loomed in the half-open maple-blond door to her narrow office.

  Dark.

  And then in walked Rafi Nadir. Just the last person in the whole wide world she’d want to see on her office threshold right now.

  “Impersonating a snitch?” she asked. “You used to impersonate an officer.”

  They were fighting words, and they shot out of her current pain and wariness, and from some old unhealed wounds as well.

  She pulled her forces together: observation, and that old police authoritative attitude that controlled anyone who might resist or bribe or cry wolf at the drop of a shield.

  Despite her own problems, she saw that Rafi had a new resoluteness. That’s what had conned the desk sergeant. How? Maybe the black denim jacket paired with black denim jeans and a burgundy T-shirt that read SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. He was thinner, harder, more pulled together. Maybe even confident. For a so-called police confidant. Confidential snitch.

  Every muscle in her body tightened at her own assessment. Danger, Wilhelmina Robinson! Rafi was looking in control while she was running on anemia, adrenaline, and nerves.

  “Can I sit?” he asked.

  “May.”

  “Can. I speak real life, not off some blackboard. You always wanted me to pass as something you weren’t.”

  She shrugged. Ouch!

  “I know why you look like you swallowed a peach pit,” he said, sitting before her desk.

  “Why?”

  “You know why I’m here, admit it, Carmen.”

  She had no idea. Her side and head ached abominably and Dirty Larry was enough encroaching male to deal with in one week.

  “Why?” she asked.

  His face puckered in disbelief, maybe disgust. “The kid, of course. Like you didn’t expect this. I can count, Carmen. I know when you left L.A. I know how old the kid is.”

  “I didn’t leave L.A. I left you. And she isn’t ‘the kid.’ ”

  “No. She’s my kid too.”

  Odd, how a chair she’d sat in for years could just melt and vanish. How the distance between her desk and the door could suddenly telescope in and out, as if she were being jerked forward and backward in time like a yo-yo.

  How her fingers could curl into the papers on her desk and still not find anything solid to dig into.

  How her side felt the swift, long score of a sharp knife blade, and also pulled at stitches like a seam splitting, morphing into a splitting headache. A head wound.

  “That came after,” she heard her voice say from a long distance away.

  “Naw. I don’t think so. I can see myself in her.”

  “No.”

  “My eyes.”

  “No. My mother’s eyes.”

  “You got your father’s eyes. Anglo. Northern European blue. Why shouldn’t Mariah have gotten my eyes, Middle Eastern brown? Don’t that fact make your blue eyes bluer?” he paraphrased the old hit song. Bitterly.

  “You didn’t want her, Rafi. A daughter. You wanted me tied to her, tied down, off the force.”

  “Wait. We talking L.A. here? I didn’t even know you were pregnant. And I didn’t want her?”

  “You made sure I was pregnant. Daughters aren’t valued in Muslim society. Remember that suicide? The Anglo girl who got involved with an Arab foreign student and jumped off a bridge because her baby was a girl, and he completely rejected it, and her, completely?”

  Rafi was leaning nearer, his almost-black eyes intent, shocked.

  “That was a shitty case, but I’m not that foreign student. You wouldn’t even have known what gender the baby was in those days, so can that excuse. I’m a half-breed, sure. Like you. Did I resent it, being Arab-American? Yeah. Every day. It wasn’t a fashionable mix, nobody was fighting to get my kind represented on the force, not like Latinas and black chicks, and that was years before 9/11. Then it really got fun. The looks. The stops. I used to stop people when I was a cop. Now I’m a stopee.”

  Molina started to put a hand to her forehead, to block the overhead fluorescent glare that felt like the lights of a third-degree interrogation room in the bad old days, but the hand started up, then stopped. A weak, hesitant gesture. Not a good message in a situation like this.

  “I won’t discuss this on the job,” she managed through the throbbing in her head and side.

  “Then where? And when?”

  “I . . . don’t know. This is not a good time.”

  “It wasn’t a good time fourteen years ago when you walked out on me without a trace. Without a reason.”

  “You were a bastard!” Was it her shouting? “That’s all the reason I needed.” Was that her lurching over the desktop and collapsing?

  Even Rafi Nadir looked shocked. Concerned. Right.

  “Hey.” Morrie Alch was in the doorway. “You’re outta here, fellah.”

  Nadir rose, spinning, ready to fight. “I can call for reinforcements,” Alch said, standing his ground, “but I’d rather beat the crap out of you myself.”

  Nadir was ten years younger and a lot taller, but Alch was all infuriated street cop at the moment. Both Nadir and Molina knew better than to tangle with him just then.

  “I’m gone,” Rafi said, spreading his empty hands. “Just like she was all those years ago.”

  Alch shut the door behind Nadir and came to the desk.

  “Carmen? What the hell’s wrong? Oh, Jesus.”

  She looked down at her desk, where he was staring.

  Her side was bleeding all over the crumpled paperwork.

  Chapter 49

  Getaway

  Molina was under the glaring fluorescent lights again, feeling a lot weaker and with a lot fewer places to hide this time.

  This time she sat on a bathroom toilet.

  And yet another man was trying to get into her clothes.

  Dirty Larry, the Dirty Doctor, now Morrie Alch of all people. At least it wasn’t Rafi Nadir.

  “Stop fighting me, Carmen,” he said firmly. “I’ve done more scraped knees than are on an octopus. Jeez, who sewed this up, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Igor?”

  “Barrio doc. Dirty Larry was”—she didn’t want to say “with me,” because it wasn’t precisely accurate and she didn’t want Morrie ragging on her like an overprotective dad about hanging out with a narc. They were known to be wild cards.

  “Dirty Larry came along afterward. He realized I couldn’t go to a regular facility without answering questions neither of us wanted to answer.”

  “Where’d he take you from?”

  Actually, Alch had looked more like the trustworthy family doctor than a cop as he’d gingerly pulled the blood-sopped bandage off the wound. She hoped he’d follow through on that impression.

  “From the s
cene of a B and E.”

  “You the breaker and enterer?”

  “Yeah. Ouch! You don’t have to pour half a bottle of rubbing alcohol on it.” She hissed in pain again.

  “Yeah, I do. Those stitches aren’t pretty. You’re gonna have a really ragged scar, Carmen.”

  “Like I care?”

  “Wouldn’t want my daughter treated like that. Do a doting father a favor. Before you return from your flu absence, see a plastic surgeon. They don’t have to report anything to the police, and in your case, they’ll just think you got this in the line of duty. Looks like bad ER work.”

  “What flu? I’ve never missed work for a cold or flu.”

  “Flamingo flu! Bird flu. You know how to pull a con. You’re gonna need at least three days off.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  She glared at him as the alcohol sting ebbed.

  “Easy.” Alch was looking as hard as Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry movie. Also like the Man Who Knew Too Much.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she conceded unhappily.

  He resumed cutting lengths of white adhesive tape and attaching them to the edge of the bathroom sink.

  “You need to be taped all around for a long knife wound like that. That doc was a total quack. Is Mariah able to take care of you if you’re in bed for a couple of days?”

  “Don’t know. She’s not exactly at the ‘taking care of’ stage.”

  “I’ll stop in when I can. Change your dressings. You order in. Watch TV. Keep down and as still as you can.”

  “I’ll die of boredom.”

  Morrie pulled a huge roll of gauze out of the medicine cabinet.

  “You’ll kill your career if you don’t lay low for a while.”

  “Oh . . . shoot.”

  “Believe it or not, that would have been worse.”

  “You don’t know what, why—”

  He gave her a grave smile. “You’ll tell me, though. Eventually.”

  “Aiii!” The gauze was hitting the raw wound.

  “Maybe now, huh?” he asked.

  Morrie knelt to roll the gauze around and around her bared midriff. She wanted to sigh and protest. But any movement was like red hot lava rolling over her bare skin.

  Morrie was, damn him, right. She needed to stay away from work and heal enough to function. She needed help. Someone between Mariah and her and Rafi Nadir. And maybe between her and Dirty Larry. Someone she could trust. Utterly.

  “Stay there,” he said when her middle was wrapped like a mummy and starting to feel supported and better.

  She buttoned her blouse when he left, feeling unexposed despite everything. The single father of a teenage daughter knew where not to look. She smiled. Morrie was a true sweetie of a guy. Wait! She must be sick. She didn’t think of any men that way.

  He returned, bearing gifts. Two lowball glasses, a little smudgy, and a nice tall bottle of Johnnie Walker black.

  “Now we use the good alcohol,” he said, sitting on the tub edge and pouring.

  “Don’t make me laugh, Morrie. Don’t even make me chuckle. Please.”

  “You got it.” He handed her the glass.

  “I need to call in.”

  “Nope. I called in on the way over here and said you had a real bad case of flu and I was taking you to the doctor.”

  “You did! I didn’t hear—”

  “You were way out of it, Carmen.”

  “Oh. My papers—”

  “I stashed ’em in your desk drawer. I’ll get new forms and refill them out on your computer when I get back.”

  She sipped a mouthwash-large bolt of scotch. Ran it over her teeth and gums, then swallowed that bracing fire.

  “So.” Morrie sighed and relaxed for her. “Where, when, and why?”

  “You don’t often have a chance to get your collars drunk before you interrogate them.”

  “Nope.”

  “This really isn’t fair, Morrie.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m your superior officer.”

  “Yup. But us privates sometimes have to look out for the looies for their own good.”

  “We’re not in the army, Morrie. Just law enforcement.”

  “It’s a war anyway.” He clicked glasses with her. “To iron maidens and good sense.”

  “If I’d had good sense I wouldn’t be in this condition.”

  “So tell me about it.”

  She sipped the drink again, feeling the fire of the wound retreating before the inner fire of the straight scotch. That’s the way the firemen did it: set a fire to stop a fire.

  “First, I have to say you have a really cute bathroom, Morrie. I never dreamed.”

  He looked around at the seashell-patterned wallpaper, the sage-green and pink guest towels. “My daughter redid it when she was in college. Domestic phase. Then she went and got married and left me with this sea foam dream.”

  “Don’t make me laugh, Morrie.”

  “Tell me about it, and you won’t laugh.”

  “No. I won’t laugh.”

  So she told him about her stalker, which made him angry. He’d had a daughter to look after too. She told him about her suspicions about Max Kinsella being her nemesis. And he looked skeptical, as Matt did. Damn! That magician conned everyone around him, even grown men who should know better. Even when it looked like for all intents and purposes that he was dead and gone.

  She described the last home invasion the stalker engineered, the trail of rose petals to Mariah’s bedroom, then hers.

  Morrie stood up, tried to pace in the tidy little bathroom. “That should have been reported. You can’t do this all on your own.”

  “I had no proof . . . until I got a print from Temple Barr’s place that matched the one print left on all that sick stuff the stalker planted at my place.”

  “A print. Just one?”

  “One is enough.”

  “So Temple Barr’s your stalker?”

  “Don’t. Make Me. Laugh.” Confession and scotch were making her edgy, confrontational.

  “It wasn’t her fingerprint,” she admitted, “but you know whose prints would be all over her place, especially on those theatrical, egocentric Vangelis CDs in the bedroom.”

  “Vangelis, huh?” Morrie chuckled. Was it admiringly? “Guy must have had some stamina.”

  Molina felt her face burning almost as much as her side at the implication.

  “So,” he said, “you have a set to match your one print with?”

  “No. But when I catch him—”

  The threat rang hollow even in her own ears. That house had been abandoned, ownerless. Certainly it had held only a shadow of the dark charisma of its likely resident. It was a ruin the snakes had come to take possession of. One particular resident snake with a fang that was eleven inches long.

  So she told Morrie of her unauthorized entry. The invader she’d accidentally interrupted. Larry showing up. That part was touchy.

  “What was Larry doing there?”

  “He was following me.”

  “Your stalker, maybe?”

  “He’s one of us.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s an undercover guy. They’re loners. They get freaky. Sometimes they turn.”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t it.”

  She eyed Alch. He was looking kinda blurry now, through a glass, smearily. She wasn’t used to anything stronger than a beer and an occasional social cocktail. She wasn’t used to a secret, pulsing pain that never backed off. Never had been plagued with menstrual cramps. Always had been strong. Hardy.

  She wasn’t used to a fatherly gaze. Her real father had vanished before she could remember him, a piece of history that labeled her mother’s shame. Pregnant by a blue-eyed Anglo. So she made up for it by marrying José Quintera and bore him seven black-olive-eyed niños and niñas. Carmen babysat her stepbrothers and sisters all through her school years, and then she shocked everyone by getting a junior college law enforcement degree and turning cop.


  And by keeping her mother’s surname. After all that kid sitting, she never intended to have any of her own, church ban on birth control or not. Then Rafi Nadir had pierced that life plan with a pin though her diaphragm. Or not. Maybe he wasn’t lying. Either way: exit Carmen and, later, enter Mariah. Even her family didn’t know about Mariah. She’d thought it was safer that way. Had she been fleeing a ghost, in L.A., and chasing a ghost here in Vegas?

  Her mother had never talked to her about her father. A shame and failure better forgotten. Like Rafi Nadir. Like mother, like daughter.

  She’d made sure to spare Mariah the humiliation of a wayward father, or an indifferent stepfather. Matt had suffered from one of those stepfathers, unfortunately not indifferent, just mean and violent.

  Molina shuddered and took another slug of scotch. She may have been wrong about Rafi’s motives, but he still wasn’t a candidate for Father of the Year.

  The pain inside was getting more insistent than the pain outside.

  Morrie put a hand on her shoulder.

  “You just rest, kid.” He was only ten or eleven years older than she was. How’d she end up outranking him? He was a good cop, a better detective, and a great human being. Burned past him with ambition, that was how. Had a reverse edge, like Rafi claimed. Women barred for so many years, then suddenly becoming a politically correct carnation in the PD’s buttonhole.

  Pain and—Dios!—helplessness made you think and rethink things. People. Events. Your life.

  “I’ll handle the Crystal Phoenix case,” Morrie was saying. “I think we’ve got a couple leads to look at if Su doesn’t get too eager and tip our hand.”

  Molina nodded.

  “I’ll take you home now and get you settled. I’ll be looking in on you, so lay off those unauthorized B and Es and keep Dirty Larry out of your laundry for a while.”

  She was nodding, agreeing, nodding off.

  Morrie took the glass from her hand because it was weighing her arm down to the floor and dribbling yellow liquid like a two-year-old on the clean white tile bathroom floor. At least she wasn’t dribbling blood anymore.

  And thank God Mariah was on a three-day school trip to the Grand Canyon. There was a Grand Canyon in her gut. She’d lied to Morrie. Shouldn’t have. Lying got to be a habit.