“Okay. Spill,” I tell her.
An elegant mitt-sweep sends an anthill of army-green pellets tumbling around my toes.
“Consider it spilled,” she says. “And here’s my last nugget of information. A weasely dude with ungroomed long hair and a soul patch came slinking along as soon as the ladies of the night left. He knocks and is admitted after Jay Edgar says something about getting out a bottle. I figure they will jabber until dawn, which is already paling the night sky, so I ankle out of there.”
“How did you get back to civilization?”
“I hopped a ride in a seventies Cadillac Eldorado with a custom pearlized white and metallic magenta paint job, padded gold vinyl top, gold hubcaps on Gangsta whitewalls and interior black shag so long the three lady and two guy riders did not even notice me.”
“Louise,” I say, “you hitchhiked in a pimpmobile. Not classy. How close to home did that ride get you? You must have had to hoof it from the Strip.”
“Not to worry. The Eldo stopped in our own backyard and I slipped out with the occupants.”
“Our backyard? Where?”
“Right by that big old deserted building that has your favorite Circle Ritz ladies in such a tizzy.”
15
Cat Track Fever
“It’s a good thing,” Max mused from under the face-shading brim of a tweed hat tilted low over his eyes, presumably to aid sleep, “that airlines banned the use of metal knives after 9/11.”
His six-foot-four frame was stretched almost full-length as his torso leaned back on maximum recline in the plane seat, but his knees were folded so his feet were braced on the bulkhead wall dead ahead.
Thinking of “dead”, he opened one eye to take in his seat partner by the window. “Otherwise,” he added, “I might have a miniature table knife between my ribs by now.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she answered without turning to look at him. “I would never use a weapon on you that had touched airline food.”
She pointedly gazed out and down through the small window, which Max knew showed only darkness lit by the tiny, lonely lights of big ships now and then. Max had made this flight many times and found the drone of a trans-Atlantic plane’s engines a lullaby. Not that he would sleep a wink on this flight, no matter how lazy and laid-back he appeared to be.
Unlike Max, who’d shed his trademark black designer turtlenecks and slacks for blue jeans, a disgustingly casual plaid flannel shirt, and the narrow-brimmed Trilby hat that was often seen on elderly male Brit pub-goers, Kathleen O’Connor had only semi-reclined her seat for the sixteen-hour flight from Las Vegas to JFK to Dublin, Ireland.
She wore a microfiber emerald pantsuit. A purple velvet beret tilted to the right haloed the panther-black hair that made her delicate pale profile into an exquisite cameo The flagrant hat somewhat distracted from the still-enflamed scratches flaring on her left cheek. Her schoolgirl-stiff posture made the dramatic outfit seem a costume, Max thought, and the injury a piece of stage makeup. Max had always told Temple that naked was the best disguise, and Kathleen, a.k.a. Kitty the Cutter, was the perfect example of that.
As for Max, he was perfectly content to let Kathleen’s boldness distract from him. Besides her, there were plenty of people in Ireland, north and south, who wanted to kill him.
“I’m disappointed,” she commented, almost as lazily as he’d been speaking.
He waited.
“No private jet? No shadowy international counterterrorism sponsor? Not even First Class?”
“Bulkhead seats, though,” he said, proudly.
“A perk for you. I don’t need that.” She was five-three, tops, and her feet in kitten-heeled black patent leather shoes were propped on a huge black tote bag.
Max smiled again. Kathleen dressed as innovatively as his ex-fiancée, Temple Barr, except Temple was shorter and would have worn three-inch heels. Temple had also come up with the “Kitty the Cutter” nickname, and Max had to school himself to use the formal version now.
“Killing you,” Kathleen said, “was never my intention.”
“Yes, that would have interfered with my ability to suffer for loving you and leaving you right after, but seventeen-year-old guys are fickle.”
“Did you?” she asked sharply.
“What?” Love me would always go unspoken with her.
Her jaw muscles tightened. “He said you said you had.”
“Matt Devine the radio shrink, you mean?”
Your fiancée’s new fiancé.”
“He’s a pretty good shrink,” Max admitted.
Kathleen licked her bright fuchsia color lipstick, a rare nervous gesture. “He said because I’d lacked ‘all positive social connections’ growing up I couldn’t understand close bonds. Or the guilt and responsibility you owed your cousin when he was blown up in the pub bombing while we were…in Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park.”
“You know, Kathleen, my memory is still really screwed up. Belfast was almost twenty years ago. The answer you want may never come to me. What about my answers? Were you behind sabotaging my bungee cord act at the Neon Nightmare club?”
“No.”
“Did you ever don a Darth Vader mask and cloak to join your longtime IRA ally, Santiago, then threaten those disgruntled unemployed magicians who owned Neon Nightmare?”
“Is it truly serious you’re being?” She sounded indignant. “Santiago liked over-the-top stunts, and those Synth freakos were meddling with old IRA business in North America, but me, indulge in any such fakery? If I threaten, I act.”
“There were two Vaders. Both were attacked and marked by a pack of cats. You know the ones I mean. Santiago’s body bore the track marks down his back and legs when he was autopsied.” Max’s forefinger drew a soft line under Kathleen cheek scars. “Are you marked someplace other than this?”
“Is it possible you’d like to find out for yourself?” Her words were part taunt, part seduction.
“It’s more than possible you’d like to find that out for yourself. No one human scarred you, in that instance.”
“Those feral cats! They pack and attack like dogs. I’ve seen them hunting that way in the barrios of the major South American cities, more so than in the U.S. You saw it. Your girlfriend’s housecat can don the ‘mask’ of a carnivore and the cloak of darkness and be as feral as a black panther. And if you want to see my scars, you’ll pay dearly for the privilege.”
Strong emotion had pinked her marked cheek, her small, strong body had tensed even more, and Max felt it, the adjacency, the intimacy, the mind’s-eye photographic still of them lying almost side-by-side and, more than a memory, a feral desire to embrace heat and danger and sin and maybe even death.
“Your three a.m. shrink,” Max said to change the subject, the emotional rush, ASAP. “He said you were cat-track free.”
She frowned, distracted. “So that’s what he was up to that night? Trying to see my backside without committing a mortal sin?” Her small cascade of laughter startled Max as much as a machine gun spray of bullets, but he kept still. “Father Straight-and-Narrow broke a sweat going undercover, all right. My God, he’d almost got me to admitting there had been some good priests, but he had to ruin it by going off and leaving. All men are alike.”
Max found himself smiling along with her, mentally clinging to the fact she was a psychopath made not born, but still a psychopath. Going off and leaving her was a cardinal sin in her mind.
Kathleen shifted her seat to the recline position so abruptly that Max jerked upright by reflex, every muscle tensed.