She wasn't trembling any more.
The two figures down the road were coming back, slowly, still talking.
"Thanks," Temple said. "I'll pick up Louie and that'll keep me warm the rest of the way."
Matt bent to lift the hefty cat into her arms.
The tomcat actually honored Temple with a lick on the cheek and a burst of purring.
"You'd better get in the car," Molina instructed Temple. "Yes, with the cat."
The trio walked away toward Kinsella's Taurus like a mockery of the Holy Family: man, woman and cat.
Matt watched them go.
Molina still stood facing him, as if she had something to say.
When he finally gave her his attention, she was staring past his shoulder. Her voice was the muted drone of an officer reading the suspect's Miranda rights.
"Infatuation," she said in her best official monotone, "is a predictable chemical process. It floods the brain with feel-good serotonin. Gives a sense of overpowering optimism and shattering insecurity. It lasts about eighteen months at the outside. In primitive times this was long enough to beget a child and let it grow big enough to stay with its mother while both parties repeated the infatuation process elsewhere. Another heat wave, another inheritor of the race. The notion that love has anything to do with it is a medieval artificiality that has been elevated into an obsession in modern times."
She glanced at him once. Eye to eye. "Get over it."
Chapter 49
It's Not Over Until It's Over
They drove back to Las Vegas in silence.
Matt was beginning to think that being in the passenger seat was his new lot in life. Molina actually driving the Crown Vic felt odd. He supposed her driver hadn't hung around for what was obviously a very private quest.
"Did you learn anything?" Matt finally asked.
"A little. Not where they're going now."
"What do you mean?"
"Kinsella obviously has some place to go to ground besides the Circle Ritz."
"Obviously." Matt tried hard not to imagine where Temple would be tonight. He wasn't much better off than when she had been utterly missing, except he knew she was safe. He needed more than that now.
Molina pushed the window buttons until they lowered four inches. Chill night air played pinball through the car.
Although the pursuit into the desert in Kinsella's car had seemed endless, the Crown Vic swept into town so soon it made Matt blink. His watch said it was not quite midnight, and he was utterly alert.
Molina drove into the police headquarters' rear garage and parked. Then she led Matt down to another level, where the venerable Toyota station wagon he had seen at the Blue Dahlia was waiting.
"I promised to drop you home, didn't I?" she asked.
He nodded.
"How about dinner first?"
He was too startled to answer quickly.
"Come on! You don't want to go home alone to that empty red couch."
He still hesitated. He may have been used to being up nights, but he was emotionally exhausted. Being a third wheel could do that. He didn't want to stay up and think about it.
"My treat." Molina jingled her car keys like spurs meant to startle a reluctant horse into action.
He was getting curious. "All right. I don't know that I'm hungry."
"You'll be hungry when you get there."
He got into the passenger seat of her Toyota, thinking about buying his own car. Suddenly it seemed important. He had never owned a car. Always it had belonged to the parish. Even the Hesketh Vampire was on loan from Electra.
Molina drove in an edgy, distracted way that made him nervous. He wouldn't have expected it of her . . . such loose, laid-back driving five miles over the speed limit.
Cars still swarmed outside the Mexican restaurant she pulled up to. She regarded it through the dusty windshield like an old friend seen too infrequently.
" Mi Cocina." My kitchen. "Good fajitas. Great margaritas."
Matt was getting nervous. She had really rolled the second V in "margarrrritas."
Matt stared at her as she entered, and eyes snapped to attention all over the dining room.
She was known here. The host led them through two cavernous rooms paved in quarry tiles and past a chittering fountain to a quieter back room. People nodded and smiled all the way.
The back dining room, with its one rock wall, felt like a grotto. A statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe spread her ever-open arms inside a blue-tiled wall niche. Pierced tin mirrors winked from the terra cotta walls like warning lights.
Tables for twelve in the outer rooms were still occupied despite the hour. Here there was only a scattered couple or two, and the murmur of water trickling down the rock wall.
Molina didn't even glance at the menus they were handed. Matt studied the small print, cruising unfamiliar Mexican words, reading past the occasional spatter of salsa.
"Won't they close soon?" he wondered.
"Don't worry. They stay open as long as the guests stay up. No Anglo obsession with when they close, or when they open."
Matt nodded. The waiter came bearing three bowls of salsa of varying heat and a huge hot heap of freshly made nacho chips. Molina had been right; he might become hungry soon.
He ordered the chicken fajitas, as she suggested. She ordered a drum roll of Spanish phrases and finished up with a pitcher of "margarrritas" on the rocks.
His objection must have been as plain as one on a defense lawyer's face in court.
"It's cheaper this way," she assured him. "The pitchers aren't that big, the margaritas aren't that strong. Besides, the night is young."
"Not for me."
"That's right. If you were at work, you'd be starting to think about getting off. Off and into the arms of the Razor Lady."
"You didn't find her."
"We didn't find her." Molina shrugged, and unbuttoned her boxy jacket. She leaned back in her chair.
Matt wondered if the gun at the small of her back scraped against the chair rails.
"Not a bad night," she said, sipping the first margarita. "You got the girl. Sort of. I got the interrogation. Sort of."
"I trust we are equally satisfied."
"Now that was halfway sardonic, Devine. You're getting better. Not happier, but better."
"Is that what we're celebrating: your getting to buttonhole Max Kinsella against a semitrailer truck?"
"Hmm. You're making it sound a whole lot more interesting than it was."
"Then he didn't reveal anything cataclysmic."
"Cleared up some suspicions of mine."
"Anything you'd care to pass on?"
Molina actually managed to look coy, an odd effect on a woman of her size and authority.
"Not at the moment. But humor me. I've been after that guy for, oh, eight months. I'm sorry that Miss Barr had to get roughed up to bring him out of hid-tag."
She began dipping nacho chips into the hottest of the three sal-sas. Matt had tried a small broken chip on it and backed off, happy to still have an intestinal track.
Matt suddenly understood why they were there, why he was there. He had wondered if Molina had some misguided purpose in distracting him tonight, but it was far simpler and more straightforward than that: he suddenly realized that he was here to distract her.
Molina had realized a very unlikely and difficult goal, and she needed to celebrate. Who else could possibly understand what it meant to her to finally corner Max Kinsella for a few precious seconds. Other than Matt, who knew both the obsession of tracking a man down and the bedeviling presence (and absence) of the once-missing magician?
"How did you meet him?" Molina twirled the short plastic straw in her wide-mouthed glass around and around, until the opaque lime drink spun like a whirlpool.