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

Molina, but she carries a lot of weight. It’s not fair for me to ask this, but you might have to do it again.”
    “Stand up to Molina?”
    “Always. I mean, stand by me.”
    “What’s happening?”
    “I can’t quite tell. Can’t quite say. I don’t know what to think. I know.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s not like me. This is getting too much like Northern Ireland. Foes and friends mixed together in one bloody stew. You start to question friends, you start to sympathize with foes, and the upshot is almost always betrayal and death.”
    “Max! You’ve never talked this way before.”
    “I’ve never been here, in this precise position before.” His hands touched her shoulders, then his thumbs reached up to caress her cheeks. “You’re sharp. You’re nobody’s fool. You might hear some things about me. Don’t believe them. No matter who they come from. I know. You’ve done it before, but it’ll be worse now. What I’ve found is worse.”
    “The Synth?”
    “No, nothing that exotic! Something down-home and downtown. Just remember, if I’m suspect, it might be because other people are more suspect.”
    “People? Or person? Is it this Nadir guy?”
    Temple watched her stab in the dark ricochet off the wary expression in Max’s blue eyes, like a stone skipping across one of her native state’s vaunted ten thousand lakes, never quite connecting with anything, defying gravity, just defying. Everything.
    She was close, but still too far away.
    “Does it have something to do with Molina?”
    “It always has something to do with Molina,” he answered, laughing bitterly. “Try to keep it between us, Temple. Can you?”
    “I always have,” she said, no longer certain she could.

 

DOD: Domesticated or Dead
     
    No sooner I have applied myself to sniffing around the silver mesh than I sense a change in the air.
    I do not hear a thing, mind you. Yet the empty space surrounding me has suddenly become not so empty. It cannot be rats. Rats cannot retract their shivs, so they always announce themselves, like Miss Temple in her high heels. Also, rats cannot refrain from chittering when excited, and the gang I expect knows how to keep its lips zipped tighter than a leather bustier on Pamela Anderson.
    I flick a nail at the pungent glop of fish before me, then say right out loud, “Sucker bait. One bite and boom! You are in stir.”
    I turn to regard my audience. Gack. Imagine a ragtag road show of CATS! with the entire cast recruited from a feline West Side Story .
    These dudes are lean, edgy, and ravenous. Their shivs nervously scrape the cracked asphalt. Their whiskers are broken and twitching. I spot one poor sod who was in a rumble with a car. His untended broken leg sticks out at such a bizarre angle he can only walk on his knee. I notice a duke’s mixture of ragged ears — some neatly notched — and crooked tails, not to mention fresh and festering wounds. As for coats, this crowd looks like it has just come from the Ragpickers’ Ball. Exiting through a shredder.
    There must be a dozen of them. Three or four start circling me so somebody is always at my back no matter which way I turn.
    This is when prior planning pays off. I retreat until I am pressing the nap of my coat flat against one wall of the wire grille. After this gig I will look like I am wearing monotone plaid from the back, but sartorial concerns are the last thing on my mind.
    These are not just tough and desperate dudes; this is the original Wild Bunch.
    A big tiger-stripe pushes forward until his fangs are in my face. “You got a lot of nerve coming onto our turf, a downtown dude like you.”
    This I already know, so I say nothing.
    A marmalade tom with a broken front fang pushes so close I can inhale the Whiskas-lickings on his breath. “Fee, fie, foe, fumbug! I smell human on your lapels. You are a housebroken cat.”
    “Not true,” I hiss back. “I do happen to occupy a co-op off the Strip, but I come and go as I please