Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Read Online Free

thinking on autopilot. Too little on his mind, or, more likely, too much.
    Whichever it was, he was not about to share his deepest inner concerns with her.
    Max mysterious was one thing: this was a given with a man who had made his living as a magician for so long. Max unable, or unwilling, to be forthcoming with her was something else. Someone else.
    “Anything more I should know?” she asked suddenly.
    He started slightly. That was also so unlike Max, showing surprise. “Know?” He was confused, playing for time while the cobwebs cleared.
    “Any more suspects I haven’t listed here, like this Nadir guy?”
    “Oh. No. Except for the amorphous Synth.”
    “Rafi doesn’t sound too sinister,” she said, lettering it in.
    “He goes by Raf.”
    “As in raffish?”
    “As in you wouldn’t want to win this bozo in a raffle. If you cross his path, stay away from him, Temple. He’s major breaking news in the local disaster department, especially for women.”
    “Yet you let him get away from the scene of the last crime before the police got there.”
    Max’s face froze as if she had said something astounding.
    “Scene of the crime? How did you —?”
    “I was there, remember? At Rancho Exotica.”
    “Oh, right, at Rancho Exotica.”
    That’s when Temple realized that there had to have been another scene of the crime where both Max and Rafi were present, but she hadn’t been.
    “Apparently he’s as eager to dodge Molina as you are,” she said, probing now.
    Again Max tensed, right on the name, which Temple had dropped the same way some people would toss a grenade into a garden party: casually, but with oh-so-lethal intent. The bombshell was the name Molina. Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina, lady cop, lady blood-hound when it came to Max and his vague past and all-too-often suspect present.
    “Let’s face it,” Max said, deciding to hide behind humor, “what red-blooded man wouldn’t want to dodge Molina? Except maybe Matt Devine.”
    Now Max was dropping his own grenades. Temple tried not to feel the spray of psychic shrapnel. When had their consultation become a chess game?
    When the name Rafi Nadir had come up.
    The one man Temple had ever seen who frightened Max. Excepting Matt, and that was a very different kind of fear.
    Why? Who was Rafi Nadir, really?
    And why wouldn’t Max tell her a damn thing about him?

 

Feral Foul
     
    As everybody knows, the world-weary private eye must sometimes tread on the dark side of danger.
    Mean Streets R Us.
    By us I mean the old-time guys: Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee. We are a breed apart. We are not afraid to get our digits dirty, our eyes blackened, our whiskers wet, or our ears wiped.
    You can knock us down, but not out.
    Okay, sometimes you can knock us out.
    But not off.
    Anyway, having observed my Miss Temple struggling to make sense of the string of murderous events that have dogged her teeny-tiny high-heeled footsteps since we met, I decide to take action.
    It was nice of her to share her deductive reasoning with me. I truly enjoyed our consultation over Sunday morning coffee. We make a good team. She is the cream in my coffee, and I am the caffeine in her cream. She is sugar. I am spice. But she can be feisty, and I can be nice when it suits me.
    However, when it comes to ferreting out information from the lower elements, there is no way that I will allow my Miss Temple to dirty her tootsies with a walk on the wild side. I will go this part of the case alone.
    I am not even taking my usual “muscle,” the spitting-mad Miss Midnight Louise, who is my would-be daughter. I say that there are a lot of black cats in this hip old world (despite wholesale attempts to eliminate our kind since the Dark Ages, no doubt why they call it that), and we cannot all be related. Though even a macho dude like myself must admit that there are times when you cannot beat a seriously enraged dame for effective backup.
    The successful operative will stick at nothing to