Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (35 page)

You never saw them, hackers, but they came knocking on your cyber-door, and huffed and puffed until they blew your house down. Their only motive was spite, pure and simple. They didn’t have to know you to hate you. They struck and ran, leaving your entire system slowly eating itself. They were thugs, vandals, cyber-stalkers.

Kitty was like that. Maybe, like hackers, she took pride in mindless destruction. It was more fun to ruin a stranger than an acquaintance. Some poor Job who stood there naked and bleeding, asking the universe, “Why me?” Evil without motive, logic, gain, was more unsettling than all the seven deadly sins combined.

Letitia had left a few moments before him, at his insistence. He said he had to be a “big boy.” Basically, he had to make sure she wasn’t with him in case Kitty showed up.

He’d ridden the Hesketh Vampire tonight and every night since she had accosted him and Letitia in this very lot.

The Vampire was one sleek, shining, silver gauntlet thrown down on the empty black asphalt. She wanted to play motorcycle nightmare on her Kawasaki, he was ready to play back.

He figured they were pretty well matched. He had the anger and she had the nerve. Anger could betray you, of course, but it also was a fearless motivator.

He unlocked the cycle, took the helmet off the handlebar, put it on, donned the leather gloves, mounted, kicked the stand up, balanced all the bike’s awesome weight on his boot-toes for a moment before throttling up and cruising down the smooth asphalt.

He was alone except for the shadow he cast in the pink-grapefruit-color parking lot lights high on their standards, like artificial moons stuck on fence posts. Pumpkin heads on scarecrow stalks.

His shadow was a low-rider, a sidecar running alongside the Vampire’s high-profile bulk. The motor throbbed like hard-rock music, guttural and insistent, announcing itself to the night.

There was no way to be subtle on a motorcycle. It was an instrument of the self-advertised, married to a machine.
I am inhuman. Hear me roar.

Overweight people, outcast people, overcontrolled people all found freedom on a motorcycle.

Matt wondered if that was why he had hated the Hesketh Vampire at first: too flashy, too noisy, too look-at-me.

Now he thought that he had been the too-too one. Too modest, too quiet, too self-effacing. Was that what had drawn Kitty O’Connor to him? Bullies always needed a victim, and a bully was what she was. Motorpsycho nightmare.

He watched his side mirrors. The helmet muted sound; it was like cruising inside a noisy silent movie, the familiar cityscape sliding by, sometimes at a pinball-machine tilt.

And then it was there: the black ball of a gadfly in his right mirror, moving up fast.

He tilted, swept left down an unknown street. Then right, swerving. Skating the dry warm streets, bike and man moving to a Strauss waltz, like the space station in
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

It was past 2001 now. It was past odyssey and into obsession.

He rode for the sake of it, for the oneness of it, only visiting the mirror now and then, finding the black spot clinging to him like a burr, but still a block or two behind.

What did she really want? What could she really do? Try to crowd him off the street into an accident? She didn’t want any accidents to happen to him.
She
wanted to happen to him. So…if he wouldn’t rattle, would she rock and roll? Quit? Give up? Just enjoy the chase and drop out?

He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to lead her. She knew where he worked and lived. She didn’t know a thing about his internal landscape, except what she guessed or hoped to produce.

There was a strange freedom in deciding she could do him no harm, that she was trapped by wanting to harm him in certain limited ways.

She was gaining on him. He didn’t particularly care. Maybe he’d spin around in a 180-degree stop. Wait for her. See what she’d do.

At least it was just him and her. No innocents in the way. Did she understand that trapping him alone with her was not the threat; it was trapping him with someone else?

Yes, or she’d never have brought that poor girl along to the Blue Dahlia.

He had to make her think that the game was more interesting when she came solo.

So he did it, swept the Vampire in a tight, tilted circle and dragged his toe along the ground to balance it to a swaggering stop.

And waited for her.

Like a fly you’re about to swat, she played coy. Throttled down to a dull grumble, hovered three hundred feet away, the Kawasaki snorting and smoking like a stalled dragon.

It reminded him of a bull, so he revved up and raced at her, a toreador on ice.

His aggression caught her off guard. She swept away left down a dark, unlit street.

He followed, on the attack for once, liking it far too much. The worst thing an enemy can do is to make you like him. Like Cliff Effinger, mean, violent, hair-trigger. Still…he had seen, learned from a master. Maybe he needed a little of Cliff Effinger to deal with Kitty O’Connor.

He was an amateur.

She had roared out of sight, then silenced.

When he moved past an intersection, she shot out across it like a cannonball.

He almost spun out sideways in order not to hit her.

And the point was made.

He still wanted to avoid conflict. Crashing. Charging.

He turned the Vampire in a large circle and roared away, the chased rather than the pursuer now.

And now she retaliated. Buzzed up close like a wasp, agitated his jet stream, wobbled close to his wheels. It was like the chariot race in
Ben Hur
, nerve and dirty tricks and only the power of one Christian God to pull his fat from the fire.

He recognized his earlier hubris, the misplaced faith in the machine, in his new devil-may-care attitude. All the devil cared about was pride going before a fall, and Matt was pushing, was being pushed into taking the Vampire into a hasty, bruising scrape along asphalt and concrete.

He felt a pain, as if the machine’s metal skin were flesh and blood and he would be responsible for its grazing.

He jumped a curb without thinking about it, the jolt bone-jarring. He was barreling along sidewalk on a thankfully deserted street, ducking unclipped shrubbery.

Innocent greenery snapped away from his helmet, his handlebars.

His side mirrors reflected slashes of the rare streetlight. He sensed his pursuer rather than saw or heard her.

All he heard was his own breakneck progress and the thought that this had to end with a mistake, badly, in a crash.

Ahead loomed the deserted industrial park he had used to dodge a pursuing motorcycle before, long before he knew that Kitty O’Connor was after him.

It was odd, the motif of the pursuing motorcycle, like a nightmare, like a cop, like the Hound of Hell or Heaven, like fate.

Matt twisted the hand throttle, poured on the power, turned a 45-degree angle around a building whose glass eyes had all been shot out.

The buzz was right behind him. He was going to cut the next corner too close or too far and he and the Vampire would go sliding horizontal into the dark night and hard ground for a long, long screech of yards.

Something came slicing behind him, crossways, like a buzz saw.

Another cycle. Big. Gaudy. Older than the Vampire. Bigger than the Vampire. All bristling chrome and wire wheels, a red vintage Harley-Davidson.

It swept a huge circle and came up behind him. The motor throbbed like Wagner’s Pilgrims’ Chorus, like the Valkyrie on the warpath.

The rider wore no helmet, just a pair of wraparound sunglasses as pitch-black as tar.

His hair was windswept tar. His knuckles on the handles were white in the night, ungloved.

He wove behind Matt, left and then right, and every swerve put itself between the Vampire and the Kawasaki that followed.

Then the huge machine moved up on Matt, slowly but certainly.

He rode in Matt’s left blind spot, like a cowboy herding a steer.

Matt couldn’t engage with the other motorcycle. This interloper had interposed itself between them. He found himself resenting the intrusion.

It had been him and Kitty O’Connor and now they were three.

He was being herded out of the empty shopping center back toward the freeway and civilization and speed limits and population.

It occurred to him that he ought to be grateful, but he wasn’t.

Maybe this would have ended it, once and for all.

He was being herded too damn fast.

His speedometer in the lurid dashboard lights read ninety miles per hour and he’d hardly noticed it.

His escort pulled abreast without revving up a decibel.

He glanced over, saw the lacquered hair, the thick sideburns.

Elvis saluted and pushed inward to force Matt onto the entrance lane of Highway 95.

In his right mirror Matt saw the overbuilt motorcycle turn like Leviathan to face the oncoming black blot of the Kawasaki.

Damn, but he wanted to see the outcome of that collision!

The night swallowed the images of the two motorcycles. He was awash in headlights and taillights and seventy-mile-an-hour lane changers and overhead lights as bright as the morning star.

This was Las Vegas, and his money was on Elvis. There was no percentage in messing with a living legend, especially after he was dead.

Matt felt a new swell of appreciation for the time-honored religious tradition of patron saints.

Elvis made a troubling spiritual figure, despite his clumsy aspirations to the role while living, but as a ghost he was pretty damn impressive.

Heads or Tails?

At least I am able to return at a decent hour.

I manage to beat Miss Temple back to the Circle Ritz and am lounging on the comforter with my rear leg hiked over my shoulder like an Enfield rifle on parade, grooming an intimate part of my anatomy, when she comes waltzing in.

“Still up, Louie?” she asks the obvious…unless it is a question of a personal nature and therefore not so obvious.

Either way, I do not deign to answer, as usual.

I am too miffed by her bizarre appearance to deign to notice her.

When she leans over the bed to give me a midnight smooch, I turn my head away. Has she not looked in a mirror lately? Not that I go for dames who would place looking in a mirror over looking at me, but an occasional peek could spare another individual much distress.

“What is the matter, Louie?” She backs off, puzzled, her adorable little muzzle all wrinkled like a shar pei’s, who are not so adorable.

Then she runs into herself in the dressing table mirror.

“I bet it is the wig! You did not want all this blond Dynel rubbing on your whiskers. Well, this is history. For now.”

She strips off the Lauren Bacall “do” to reveal her own sassy curls all crushed beneath. This girl could use a good grooming, but my tongue is not for hire. I have enough square footage of my own to tend to.

“These are wild,” she says vaguely in my direction.

I hear a click and then the large silver ring on her forearm snicks open.

All is forgiven! An armload of cat toys!

I bound from the bed and leap into action, batting, snagging, toothing.

“Louie! These are borrowed goods. Let go. No! Bad boy! Please!”

That is Miss Temple’s idea of domestic discipline, all right. She wields the Carrot of Cajolery and the Big Stick of Superior Force in such rapid turns that a guy could commit sixteen felonies or hara kiri while she was making up her mind whether to slap or tickle him.

She hangs my playthings on the top of the ajar closet door.

“I agree,” she tells me, “that those skimpy string monokinis would make ideal cat toys, but I need them for my undercover work.”

Perhaps she meant
uncovered
work.

I decide right then that despite my misgivings about Miss Midnight Louise I had better keep an eye on Miss Temple and her midnight ramblings.

So much for taking on a partner. Now I am stuck with a partner missing in action and the previous case of the stripper killer heating up and no one at hand to lend a mitt in either instance.

Perhaps I shall have to hone my delegating skills further, first thing tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Miss Temple has totally thrown off her undercover persona to slip under the covers with yours truly. It is while we are rubbing noses and murmuring sweet little nothings that I resolve to defy logic and physical science and pursue two cases at once.