Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Leaving Las Vegas

Carmen stopped dead in her tracks.

They hadn’t been very purposeful tracks, just the usual domestic homecoming shuffle at the end of a Friday while she totaled all the minor annoying weekend cleaning chores she had been neglecting.

She’d been thinking about something as mundane as washing down her kitchen cupboard doors—Mariah should help—when she realized that Max Kinsella had appeared in her living room not six feet away.

He was all in black—shoes, slacks, trench coat—more like encountering a life-size cutout of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix than a real person. No. Larger than life size. Certainly larger than Keanu Reeves. But he looked gaunt, maybe even worn, desperate.

It was enough to stop her heart. Did. For a beat or two.

She’d made a few collars in her day who’d been threatening and creepy. They were always loud and uncontrolled, flailing against their incarceration.

Kinsella was still free, quiet, and way too calm.

He watched her pull the Glock from the paddle holster at her rear right hip and aim it. The muzzle wavered between head and heart.

“I’m not armed, as usual,” he said, shrugging, “but don’t let that stop you. Maybe your ankle gun is a throwaway. You wipe it clean, paste it in my cold dead hand, and internal affairs goes far, far away.”

He was, what was the word? Disarming. Literally. Silver Irish tongue.

She wanted to check to see if her ankle holster showed or he had just guessed. She’d taken a wide, shooting stance the instant she saw him. Her pant leg could have outlined the gun’s shape.

That didn’t matter. She shrugged in turn, the only gesture she could make without losing the total control she had of the semiautomatic, and of the situation.

“Thanks for laying out the options. This is my home. I’m a police officer. You’re a suspect. A stalking suspect. You shouldn’t be here. I don’t need to salt a gun on your corpse. You’re dead either way.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Me? You blame me for the hole you’re in?”

“Blame is too big a word. You’re a tool.”

It took a split second for her to hear the word as “tool” instead of “fool.”

“Oh, everybody’s after you.”

“Probably.” He smiled so faintly she wasn’t sure she’d seen it.

“Aren’t you special? Aren’t you important?”

“Apparently, you think so.”

“So. Why walk into the muzzle of a Glock?”

“I’m leaving Las Vegas. One way or the other. On your floor, or on a jet plane.”

“You leave? Give up the game? I don’t believe you. Why?”

“The only thing keeping me here has been lying in an evidence baggie in your desk drawer.”

The ring he’d given Temple Barr, later found at a murder scene. He was right. She regarded it as a personal trophy. And a clue.

He said, “Thought I’d give a word of warning before I go.”

“Shoot first?”

“Maybe. Matt told me about what has been happening to you. I just wanted to say . . .” He let the words hang in the air. “I didn’t do . . . this.” His arms lifted slightly to indicate her violated house.

Her trigger finger tautened at the motion. “Tell it to a jury.”

“Sorry. Can’t wait around. Unless it’s a grand jury, investigating my own shooting.”

“Open and shut. Trust me. I hate to play the gender card, but a male suspect stalking a female cop looks especially bad.”

“Fine. I didn’t do this.”

“Who the hell else? Who the hell else knew we’d run into each other in the strip club parking lot and had it out? Who besides you had to get touchy-feely in between the body kicks?”

Again, he denied the charge with a shrug and a faint smile.

“I don’t know. I just know that all’s fair in love and war, but home invasion isn’t my style. You’re the detective. Just asking. If it wasn’t me—say someone was speculating on the far fringe edge of an open mind—who else could it have been?”

“No one! No one was there. No one saw. No one heard.”

“And if you investigated every case, every dead body lying there in a parking lot, from that supposition, how far would you and your detectives ever get? Lieutenant?”

There must be someone. That was the investigative motto. Canvas the neighborhood, roust the winos, savage the Dumpsters, check the surveillance cameras within a five-mile circumference. Dumpster dive. Find someone who had seen, heard.

“Not at Secrets’s,” she said. She’d been there. The lot had been deserted. As empty as emotion.

He shrugged, that irritating I-don’t-care gesture that jerked her chain.

“Mamacita!” The front door banged open. Mariah. Home straight from school for once.

Max Kinsella shrugged again, genuinely apologetic for the first time.

The bastard had probably seen her car in the driveway, left and watched for Mariah to leave school, made sure the kid was heading for home, then just beat her here.

Molina resisted glancing over her shoulder. She heard herself shouting at her own child, “Freeze!”

The schoolgirl scuffles came on. Molina had to risk a direct look, a direct order. “Stop. Drop. Stay back!”

And in that split second, the magician . . . split.

Leaving her hands trembling on the brink of firing. They lowered the gun.

He hadn’t needed a weapon.

Molina swarmed her prone daughter, who hadn’t even had time to notice that anyone else was on the premises. “Good girl. It’s okay. I thought someone was in the house. You did right, chica. We’re okay.”

Unless Kinsella hadn’t been her stalker.

Impossible! It was him. She couldn’t shoot a man in front of her daughter, but she could sure wish that she had. Maybe a kneecap, then he’d be the one cowering on the floor, not Mariah.

Someone else was stalking her? Ridiculous! No one had been in that parking lot but rows of empty cars and pickups and vans. Not a human moving among them. Not even a drifting palm frond blown by the wind.

No one.

So why had Max, aka the “Invisible Man” Kinsella, risked coming here to suggest otherwise?

A huckster unwilling to give up a last con?

A player leaving the stage with everyone hoodwinked?

A deceptive magician taking one last bow?

An innocent man?

Come on!