Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

12

Guardian Angle

Matt was jostled awake by a vehicle speeding over pockmarked roads.

His head ached, his side stitches from the bullet-wound burned, and his jaw felt dislocated. He kept his eyes closed to take inventory. All right. Semi-upright in a car seat, but not buckled in.

Yeah, mobsters dumping a body-to-be would worry about traffic rules.

The rough ride felt like an SUV, not Woodrow Wetherly’s old sedan. Matt guessed he could have been out cold for three minutes, or a quarter of an hour. Would he make his showtime like Woody had promised? Not his worst problem. His closed eyelids sensed the regular rhythm of passing streetlights, intermixed with some vagrant neon, he’d bet.

The driver was exceeding the speed limit for this old, bumpy part of town. In Chicago, winter snow and distributed salt made for spring potholes. In the desert southwest, the summer sun did the same job on the asphalt in its own searing way.

It didn’t sound like the vehicle was on its paved-highway path to a sandy grave in the litter box of the Mojave desert, where all the mobsters hits lay undiscovered.

“You can stop playing dead to the world,” the driver said.

The man’s voice was deep, but he wasn’t Kinsella or Frank Bucek, Matt’s mentor from the seminary. Matt must have hopefully hallucinated someone from his past coming to his rescue.

Yet this voice was so vaguely familiar… It could have belonged to the last guy at a gas station pay booth or an actor on a recent TV commercial.

It rumbled on. “Sorry for the ‘light’s out’ tactic, but a fistful of bad actors were about to clean your clock, so I’m taking the inner workings home for patching up and some necessary adjustments.”

Matt blinked his eyes open and struggled to focus on the driver’s profile. The dark hair was thick and wavy, the nose beaked. He recognized the least likely person he’d expected to hear or see, but the guy talked like a cop.

Matt’s voice came out a dry croak. “Mariah’s new singing coach knocked me out? Why was an ex-cop like you at a dive like that?”

“That’s my line, choir boy.”

“But you will answer it.” Matt made the sentence a demand. “What’s your angle?”

“Lucky for you, I’m up for the head security job at the Goliath Hotel. I was doing some extra-curricular tailing of a guy I thought was sizing up the hotel for a hit. The Lucky Stars bar is a cesspool of what passes for organized crime in this city, which now finds street gangs the biggest policing problem. And who do I see raising a ruckus with six guys but Mariah’s fave candidate for her freshman Dad-Daughter dance escort. Can’t allow the kid’s crush to get a broken nose.”

“A broken jaw is better?”

“That shot hurts you more than it will your looks. We’re heading for your Circle Ritz digs. I always wanted to see the inside of that infamous building.”

“No! I need to pick up my car.” Matt checked the street signs. “It’s not far. I’ll direct you. I guess I should say thanks, Rafi…Nadir, isn’t it? Yeah. I got in over my head.”

“So what’d you do to rile the Lucky Stars’ Silver Senior crook crowd?”

“Those guys really go back on the Vegas crimeline, don’t they?”

“And they are so out-of-date, but not out of cold criminal intent.”

“I’m trying to figure out why my stepfather from Chicago came to Vegas and got himself offed in a dramatic way Bugsy Siegel would envy.”

“Oh, yeah. That Effinger goof.”

“You know about his murder? More gory than goofy.”

“There are some extreme Las Vegas mob-style hits, but, dude, that drowning in the dark of night on a major Vegas attraction is infamous.”

“Really? You say ‘dude’? Man, you must be forty years old.”

“A well-worn thirty-eight, like the caliber of my favorite gun. The ‘dude’ is from hanging out with the kid.”

Matt wondered what else in Rafi Nadir’s life might “be from hanging out” with Mariah’s mother hen, all-pro homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina. A guy with major hotel security responsibility playing singing coach? Was this a way to edge Mariah’s secret father into her life? Because Molina was well qualified to tutor her daughter herself, given her own fantastic vocal talents.

“If you have any influence, I wish you could persuade her mother to get back to performing,” Matt said, hardly realizing he’d spoken aloud.

Rafi refused to share his status with the lieutenant or her family, just saying, “Carmen’s torch singing was a classy act. And nobody persuades Molina to do anything,” Rafi added, probably unaware of the naked bitterness Matt detected in his tone.

He went on. “The kid gig is because I used to be a…what you’d call an amateur ‘talent developer’. Don’t judge her mother. She has a huge job responsibility as a woman on the rise in law enforcement. Puttin’ on the ritz now and then at the Blue Dahlia can’t be on her agenda these days.”

“She has a great voice, though. I’d want her to sing at my wedding any day.”

“Wedding. That in the cards soon?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you don’t want to be offed in a free-for-all fight at the Lucky Stars nudie bar, do you? Might annoy the bride-to-be.”

“No. But I don’t want to make that big a step without knowing what my rotten stepfather was up to in Chicago and then here that was so bad it, thankfully, widowed my mother. That has got to be linked to something big.”

“Stubborn, aren’t you?” Nadir swung the steering wheel ninety degrees. Matt looked around to see Woody’s house. “I guess if you’re going to live long enough to get married, you should creep into the home place unnoticed tonight.”

“I’m not staying. I’ve got to clean up and get to work for the night shift at the radio station. What have you done to me? I’m leaving early tomorrow morning with my fiancée for Minneapolis. My jaw will be a dead giveaway.”

“Sleep on an ice pack and you’ll be normal by morning. Say, I’d still sure love to see a condo or apartment at the Circle Ritz. Let me know if you and the lucky little woman are going to leave a vacancy.”

Matt sighed and opened the SUV door, trying not to land hard on the asphalt. Every little move he made right now was not magic. Ouch.

Rafi leaned over the passenger seat to pull the door closed after Matt. “Remember. ‘You’ve got a friend.’ Carole King. ‘I’ll Be Watching You.’ The Police.”

“Babysitting not appreciated,” Matt said. “I don’t know if you’re my guardian angel or worst nightmare.”

“Sometimes, dude, they are the same thing.” Rafi Nadir winked and pulled the door shut with a nerve-shattering bang, at least for Matt’s nerves at the moment.

Being hauled away from his first serious investigative move like a delinquent teenager could be considered humiliating.

He didn’t humiliate, though; he persevered. For Matt, the evening’s debacle was proof that Clifford Effinger was gone, but not forgotten, and was still of deep interest to both the crime and punishment sides of Las Vegas. How could Matt marry Temple with that kind of threat from his past hovering over them?

He couldn’t.

So the only way forward was to ID and eliminate the threat.

Matt groaned. He was beginning to sympathize with Max Kinsella.

First, he had to get the Jag out of Wetherly’s garage before the old guy came back. The ramshackle door didn’t have a lock. Woody must consider himself theft-proof for some reason and would know who had taken it.

Then Matt had to get home to ice his jaw for a while, drive to his radio talk-show gig, and rise and shine early tomorrow to look fine and accompany Temple to Minneapolis to meet his future in-laws.

Right now, he might prefer to be Max Kinsella on the run from Kitty the Cutter.