He lifted his arms from his sides. “You finally believe me about something, that I’m not armed.”
“Oh, you’re armed, and dangerous. I know that. I’m just saying you’ll have to go through me to get out of here.”
Max glanced to the pant-legs that covered her ankles. “And your side piece.”
She nodded. “I’m not going to drop my guard to bend down to take that off. Maybe you can grab it when I kick your head off.”
“That’s the most interesting proposition I’ve had all night, and that’s saying something after one too many hours in a strip club or two or three.”
“So you admit to patronizing the clubs.”
“I admit to doing what you’re doing here: investigating the clubs.”
“Who made you junior G-man?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I would love to be surprised about you, Kinsella. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. Now. Into my car and down to headquarters. Or not?”
She came closer, sideways stance.
It was to be, as the British say, fisticuffs.
That put him off balance. He had to play this out here, in its own time, or he could never get away to go to Temple.
For a nightmarish moment Molina morphed into Kathleen O’Connor, and he was back to the night when a stupid adolescent dalliance became his salvation and his cousin’s Sean’s death warrant.
But Molina was not the porcelain, poisonous Kitty. Her deadliness was direct: she wanted to wage war, not love, or at least not love as a variety of war.
There was no option. Max would have to fight her. And win.
Given Molina’s size, profession, training, and fierce personal stake, he couldn’t consider winning as the usual given.
Max, the semiretired, had once been expert in half a dozen martial arts, but he was two years rusty by now. Molina, he would bet, hadn’t worked out much recently either.
Still, she had the confidence, and the anger, to challenge him. It went against all the rules of police work. It was deeply personal.
Interesting. The only woman he’d had for a mortal enemy up to now would never confront him physically.
Max began calculating, not how to pass Molina to reach the gun but how to draw her into a weaker position. He didn’t feel an ounce of chivalry about the coming struggle. Her slamming the Glock down had released him from all that. If she wouldn’t hide behind the gun she certainly wouldn’t hide behind her gender. She wouldn’t hold back either.
Neither would he.
It was tentative at first, like a knife fight. They danced around, determining each other’s reach, reflexes, speed, strategy.
Eerily, the first inward rush to engagement was simultaneous.
The moves came fast and frantic then.
They grappled silently, all their limbs twisting to find a hold that would last, but each move resulted in an effective countermove.
Breaths became pants and then grunts, but neither resorted to martial arts cries, though both had done the drill. At nearly six feet, Molina was solid and surprisingly strong. Max was a steel eel, tensile and limber. Their fighting styles were as violently different as their personalities and made them serious opponents. Molina’s determination to subdue a suspect she had hunted for months, come hell or high water, met the skilled desperation of Max’s need to end this contest and rush to Temple’s aid.
It ended in Max’s pinning Molina against the van wall, enforcing a temporary truce as they caught their breath, boxers clenched in each other’s arms like dizzy waltzers before breaking away to pound each other to oatmeal.
“We’re well matched, Lieutenant,” Max admitted between discreet pants.
Not good news. He couldn’t count on getting this over quickly and moving on to Temple.
“It’s not over,” she gritted between her teeth.
“No.”
He wasn’t really holding her. His hands had flattened against the metal beside her shoulders, one knee was braced between her legs. Technically, she was pinned, but he could see her mind reviewing a half dozen things she might try for the one right move, when he surprised her by speaking again.
“Don’t spoil the moment. This has been incredibly erotic.”
She broke their eye contact by whipping her head to the side, cheek to the smooth metal. “You’ll try anything,” she said, contemptuous.
“Yes.” He knew he sounded amused, but he meant to startle and irritate her at one and the same time.
She whipped her head to the opposite side. “Get out of my face.”
“That’s not what you really want.”
That brought her eyes forward, blazing. “Right. Next you’ll say that what I really need is a good screw.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Complicated! No. This is simple. Me cop, you crook.”
They both knew the truce was temporary, that either one could lash back into attack, and that both would be ready for it.
“Sure it’s simple. A simple matter of control, Lieutenant. Or over-control. It goes with your job. You’re on the job, all the time. You’re in charge, all the time. After a while, there’s no way not to be in control, in charge, on the job. Except this.”
“I can be out of this any second I want to.”
“But do you really want to?”
The Third Man
Temple nursed her decidedly flat club soda and the sample-perfume-vial-size drop of scotch that went with it.
Your midlevel strip club barware was so tacky: narrow glasses clogged with ice like a backed-up sink. No lowball glasses, no delicate-footed cocktail glasses. Just thick cheap giveaway glass, cloudy ice, squinky drink.
Not that she wanted anything alcoholic. The noise, i.e., music to strip by, had already given her a headache.
So she sat on her barstool, her feet hooked around the top rung, the gaudy selection of monokinis covering her lap, and kept an eye out for her most likely suspect.
It wasn’t a brilliant piece of deduction, but talking to Lindy had spurred some ideas.
For one thing, both Cher Smith and the girl whose attack had been interrupted, Gayla, were both new to the Las Vegas strip scene. It could be a coincidence, but Temple thought the killer might be oneof those asocial guys who are only bold when they’re over-the-top aggressive: no nerve, or all nerve. Someone who explodes. She’d seen so many wimpy guys here, mooning at the strippers like besotted computer nerds in front of a porno-site screen…. What if the worm turned? Maybe he picked new girls because they were fresh enough to still be stupid. Maybe they hesitated and talked to him, just to be nice to someone who seemed to need it. Maybe they needed to feel glamorous and desired. Two people meeting with so much to overcome, their separate expectations igniting instant disappointment of the other’s fantasy, and then…violence.
Temple sucked her ice cubes again. There was so little drink in the glass it stayed puddled on the bottom.
That was her theory that saved the neck of everybody she knew. And wrote a satisfying “The End” to the episode that had begun with Cher Smith’s dead body being found in this very club’s parking lot.
Or, if she wanted to depress herself, there was the Terrible Troika to consider: Max, Rafi Nadir, and Lieutenant C. R. Molina converging seconds apart over the fallen form of Gayla in another strip club parking lot more recently.
Had one of the two men attacked Gayla? The victim couldn’t say who had barreled into her in the dark. Temple thought she could eliminate Molina as the perpetrator. That left Max and Rafi. She knew she could eliminate Max, so that left Rafi.
Unless…a third man had been there just before these two natural enemies.
So who was the third man?
Temple had an idea, and she was looking for him tonight.
The migraine music stopped.
Temple glanced at the stage.
Temporarily vacant.
In the glassed-in sound booth, she saw a man standing and talking to
the kid who ran the sound board. Not the man she was looking for.
Who do you overlook at a strip club?
The man who is looking at you, but from behind a mask.
She was looking for the man in the mask.
The music started up again, so suddenly it nearly snapped her head back. The strips of tissue she had stuffed into her ears barely muted it.
She figured if the guy was a regular, and he probably was, he’d come back to Baby Doll’s. To allay suspicion if nothing else. Or just to relive his big moment.
Temple had read the true crime books, some of them anyway. She knew the profiles, yucky as they were.
She knew something else as she scanned the constantly moving crowd of customers: that head of dark, slightly wavy thick hair.
Darn! Rafi Nadir was here too. Of all the gin joints…
She spun back to the face the bar, hunkered down. When she’d told him this was her next thong gig, he was a suspect worth watching. Who’da thought that Lindy would later tip her off that a new hot suspect would be here tonight?
Unlike Nadir, this was somone too nondescript to describe, although she’d glimpsed him once, more than once when she reviewed all her forays into the clubs.
He was like a mailman, someone made invisible by his function.
Tonight she wanted to spot him, and then really see him.
And she didn’t need Raf Nadir playing Big Man to her Little Girl to get in the way.
An off-duty stripper (were they ever off duty?) who was cruising the house paused to twine her arms around his neck.
He must like that, being greeted like a Big Spender. The male ego could be a slippery slope to being taken, and then expected to take it back in spades.
Oh, the music! It was worse than forty alley cats caterwauling. Temple liked high-octane rock, the best stuff, but this was jacked up so that the bass became a punishment.
She glanced in annoyance at the gangly kid in the glass booth, his head bobbing on his scrawny neck (which she’d like to wring), staring sightlessly at the stage where a girl slithered out of her second skin (courtesy of Tess the Thong Girl, as they’d started calling her already). Temple was struck by how fast and easy it was to establish yourself in a subculture like this. Well, easy for her as long as she wasn’t masquerading as Suzy Stripper.
It would be that easy for the killer too.
And then she spotted him. Suspect Numero Uno.
That nervous little middle-aged man in the yellow polyester shirt and the polyester-linen sport coat. Hair receding about as much as his belly advanced. A bit officious as he lined the offstage girls up, telling them what to do and clearly liking it.
And that mask he carried everywhere, his ticket to entry into this scene, the reason nobody ever really saw him clearly, because every time they looked right at him, really looked at him, they were thinking of themselves and never saw him, couldn’t see him, not through the monocle of glass that made them small in his eyes and him eternally nonexistent in theirs.
Temple nodded to the bartender.
“Another S and S?” he asked.
If she had either scotch or soda in her glass, she couldn’t testify to it in court. “Yeah. And…that guy.”
“Lady, there are sixty guys in here.”
“Him. The photographer. Do you know who he is? I mean, who is he shooting the photos for?”
“His bedroom wall.” The guy left to run some tapwater and sheltie pee over the ice cubes in Temple’s glass.
He plunked the glass beside the ten-dollar bill she’d glued to the water spots on the bar.
“Guys can just come in here and do that?”
“They make copies, give ’em to all the girls. What a racket.”
“Well…” Temple said, jiggling her thong ring.
“Yeah, but you’re selling a product. You don’t get off on it unless you’re a dyke. These losers, they just gotta be around the girls but they don’t want to pay for it. They gotta think they’re special.”
And a guy who thought he was special might ask for special treatment, and if he was refused…
“How long has he been doing this?”
“Since I been here?”
“And —?”
“Longer than you’ve been coming around. Why you want to know?”
“I’m new. Just curious.”
“Just curious don’t pay in this game. Forget it. He’s nobody.”
Nobody just might get tired of that condition.
Temple checked out Nadir through a concealing strand of blond Dynel wig.
The same stripper was still with him. His arm circled her waist. They were talking, smiling, flirting.
Revolting! She’d be glad to wash this scene right out of her hair, her fake hair. She glanced at the officious photographer again.
Well, it was an intriguing idea, but there wasn’t much she could dowith it except pass it along to Molina, who would sneer at her amateur theories.
Still, she had come up with an alternative to Max, at least, and they could check on this guy’s movements, his history. Who knows what would show up?
She kissed the ice cubes a less-than-fond farewell and slid off the stool. Her rear was numb.
“Sold out?” the bartender asked.
She nodded, feeling guilty about the two-hundred-something of stripper-earned money in the tiny wallet-purse she’d learned to carry in the clubs on a shoulder strap she wore across her chest like a bandolier.
They worked hard for the money. Temple hated to take any of it under false pretenses, for vulgar accessories to a lifestyle that still made her cringe.
She could hardly wait to walk out of here — if only Rafi Nadir wouldn’t notice her! No, he and that stripper were still hanging on each other.
She had to push with all her might to open the big front door.
The night air wasn’t really cooler, but it felt cleaner, rinsed of all that smoke that made her ears and nose and throat clog up like ice in a pipestem glass.
She walked across the lot to where she had hidden the Miata between two huge custom vans. That was the problem with a new high-profile car. It was a liability for sleazy undercover work.
She missed the snappy click of her high heels on the asphalt, a percussion that had always lifted her spirits since she’d been allowed her first pair at fourteen, and that made her feel taller. But sneakers were smarter to wear and her ears still rang from the relentless music inside, like an infection she couldn’t shake.
The parking lot had a wooden fence stretched between brick posts to present a more seemly view to the street. Facade was all in Las Vegas.
Temple realized she had mixed emotions: she hoped she’d found a suspect who would take the heat off Max. She was so sick of the strip club scene.
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.
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.
Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Page 30
