“You want him out and about?”
“I want him paying for what he’s done, not what you might wish he had done. I admit it looks bad that he was at Secrets before that stripper was killed, but I bet Temple can clear him of having anything to do with the earlier deaths. We know who killed the ex-nun and dumped her at the Blue Dahlia.”
“But ‘we’ don’t know who killed the woman in the church parking lot soon after. You remember, the former magician’s assistant?” Molina kept her eyebrows raised in challenge.
“I understand what you’re saying. An ex-magician’s assistant could have been killed by an ex-magician like Kinsella. But he had no connection to her.”
“That we know of. And he had a connection to the dead stripper, Matt, because I sent him into that club.”
“You did? Why?”
She shook her head, ate a mouthful of bun and burger so she couldn’t answer until she had come up with a good one.
“He seemed to fancy himself an undercover operator,” she finally said. “I wanted him to tail somebody, and he ran into Mandy, actually born as Cher Smith, instead.”
“Poor Max.”
“Poor Max! Are we talking rival here or blood brother?”
“He’s not my rival. You know that Temple and Max are…reunited. There are no rivals where there’s no contest.”
“Poor Matt.”
But this time he had bitten off more than he could chew and was too busy to answer. Her comment lay as heavy as a cold French fry in a pool of congealed ketchup between them.
“Poor Carmen,” he finally said when he had finished chewing, looking amused.
“I guess the only one of us who isn’t ‘poor’ something is that blamed PR whiz.”
“Temple’s doing okay,” Matt said. Serenely.
She tried not to grit her teeth. There wasn’t a thing she could do with serene people.
“So.” She started all over again. “It doesn’t bother you that Kinsella was on the scene of the crime-to-be?”
“The scene where the victim of the crime-to-be had last been seen before dying. A lot of people must have been there that night.”
Molina nodded. She had come here to disarm any suspicions Matt might have had. Instead, he was developing some of his own.
“I just wanted to warn you,” she said.
“About what?”
“If it should turn out that Kinsella is as dirty as I think he is—”
“He’s no murderer. Quite the contrary.”
“If he were, he’d be out of your hair, Devine. Don’t you care?”
“I do care. That’s why I don’t need to rise if someone else falls. You have chili on your chin.”
“What!”
“Here’s a napkin.”
“I don’t want a damn napkin, I want an understanding.”
“You’ve said before that your nailing Kinsella would force Temple to turn to me, but you’re wrong.”
“About Kinsella being nailable?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you can charge him with something serious. But that wouldn’t force or free Temple to do or be anything other than she is. And she’s committed to Max Kinsella. I’ve come to terms with that. Isn’t it time that you did? You can’t use her, and you can’t use me.
“Poor Carmen.”
He handed her a paper napkin.
Chapter 20
Feast
He lay sated.
Relieved.
The cub had come, playful, pushing its tiny paws between the bars of his lair.
All black, the same midnight color he had seen in some adults and fellow performers of his kind.
It was tiny, the cub, and for a moment his hunger was so sharp he had considered…
But it danced away before he could think any more about his hunger, his huge, black hole of hunger, gnawing at every thought and every instant like nothing he had felt before.
Where were the kind ones? Who brought food and water and reward?
Where were the two-legs he relied upon for everything?
Two-legs there were here. He had seen them shoveling food into the other cages, the aroma massaging his huge nostrils like his mother’s tongue, creating a sense of want and fulfillment at the same time that he had not felt since his cub days.
Mother. She would feed him. Where was she, the constant presence, warm and purring as loud as a two-leg’s machine?
But now he was not hungry. He heard an echo of his mother’s purr within himself.
The cub he had spared, that he had been too hunger-dulled to threaten, had come back. Dragging meat! Food. Fresh.
It had struggled to push the trophy between the metal poles of his container with its tiny forefeet. Then it had sat and watched him eat. Asking nothing for itself. A very well-behaved cub! No pulling and fighting with it, small as it was.
He had eaten and eaten, and then gnawed bare bone. Eaten a great deal for a single sitting, as he had heard the Forepaws had done in the Far Place before meeting the two-legs. Feasting. You did not understand a feast until you had known want. Until you had known hunger gnawing at your innards like a predator, like a tiger or a lion at its meal.
But he didn’t need to think of more meals yet. Now he was full. Sated. Lazy.
He dozed, his eyes shut, his purr an echo of his mother’s crooning.
When the sharp bite nipped his shoulder again, his muscle twitched, that’s all.
A fly. An irritating fly when life was so good.
Odd that the cub had come into his territory after he had eaten and was feeling drowsy. A brave cub. To enter his lair and wrest the naked bone away, through the tall shafts of iron grass.
A brave, strong cub. Where had it come from? He had heard no mewling of young here, just the snarls and cries of the old and forsaken….
He felt himself slump over on his side. On the side where he had been bitten. Again. Perhaps he would wake up with the two-legs he knew and trusted. Perhaps the food would come often from now on, as before, and this last vision was just the uneasy milk-dream of a besotted cub. A small spotted cub. No. Black. Solid black. Of the kind they call panther. White teeth, red tongue like fresh meat, heart of lion.
If he saw the cub again, he would share some of his meat with it. His head felt as big as an elephant’s. He tried to prick his ears, but they lay limp, dulled by the buzzing of a thousand tsetse flies.
* * *
The smell is odd. There is none.
No. There are traces of odor, but faint, like the scent the two-legs leave.
His head lifts. He now lies on grass.
No.
He lies on the short grass the two-legs line their lairs with.
It smells like the water in the pool in his home lair, pungent, sharp, not of blood and bone, but of nothingness. That smell had been all around his home lair, and his slowed heart begins to pound faster in the happy excitement of recognizing the familiar.
He is in his home lair again! Inside the two-legs’ lair, as he had been allowed now and again. For flashes from their machines, when they praised him like purrs. Good boy. Handsome boy. Osiris. Yes.