Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Nadir!” Max slapped his forehead. “What irony! Molina’s hated ex-squeeze saved you from the Stripper Killer and cut out, leaving you sole credit.” His chuckle escalated into a laugh as he pulled Temple against him. “I love it.”

“You hate Molina almost as much as she hates you, don’t you?”

“I’m getting there,” he said, grim again. He kept his arm around her, holding on tight. “That wasn’t my greatest hour, either, that night. She backed me into this corner I didn’t want to be in. She caught up with me in the other strip club parking lot, the wrong one, where the Stripper Killer wasn’t planning to strike again. That’s when I put it all together, where he’d really be, and that you were there, alone.”

“Heck, no, Max. I had Rafi Nadir, remember. And even Midnight Louie showed up with a yowling Greek chorus of feral cats, no less.”

“Where is Louie, by the way?”

“Out. Like my aunt Kit. She’s dating a Fontana, can you believe it?”

“Knowing your aunt Kit, yes. Knowing the Fontanas, no.”

Temple smiled, the tension between them dissipating with their separate visions of a Fontana brother-Aunt Kit tryst.

Max sighed and reached for his glass again, but he didn’t let go of her.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I knew I had to get to you and Baby Doll’s. Molina knew she had me in her sights and she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. I’d been in the same spot with her before and got away, but not this time.”

“Sights? She’d pulled a gun on you?”

“Right. I convinced her I wasn’t carrying and that I’d go anyway and she could justify the shooting however she liked.”

“Max! You shouldn’t bluff an angry, prejudiced person with a gun.”

“Wasn’t bluffing.”

“Max!”

He shrugged. “She’s not a killer, just a damn determined woman. I knew she wouldn’t shoot, and she knew I knew that. So . . . that woman has balls, I’ll give her that. She slams her semiautomatic on the hood of the nearest Ford 350 and decides to keep me from leaving using hand-to-hand combat.”

“She’s really crazy. You’re strong from all that stage work.”

“Used to be. Molina’s no lightweight, plus she’s trained. And, I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“You’re a gentleman.”

“Maybe. Mostly because an assaulting-an-officer charge is hard to defend against if she did manage to haul me in. The point, Temple, is she was costing me time. She was keeping me from getting to where I knew you were exposed to the real Stripper Killer. I tried to overpower her, but she wasn’t having any of it. We were too evenly matched, given my overriding concern to get away and get to you. I couldn’t clobber her outright. And I couldn’t gain enough advantage to get away fast enough and far enough. It was a stalemate. I had her pinned to a van, but the instant I let go, my advantage was gone. I had to get her off-guard, really shock the shield off of her.”

By now, Temple was listening like a kid at a campfire ghost-story telling. What would Max do? What clever magician’s trick?

“You remember my face after that night?”

“It was scraped.” Temple was jolted by the change of topic in the story.

“That’s because I let her take me down and cuff me. That finally became the only way I could get out of that damn parking lot and into her car where I could pick the handcuffs and unite her and her steering wheel with them until death did them part, then get out and get to Baby Doll’s to, I thought, save you. Except you and Rafi Nadir had already turned the trick.”

“And Midnight Louie. He alerted me to someone stalking me.”

Max put his head in his hands. “Don’t mention stalkers. I never want to hear that word again. Temple, when I had that woman up against that van, all I could think of was how to throw her off-guard. What would distract her the most so I could get away without hurting her or myself. What would shock her. So . . . you had to have been there . . . I sort of came onto her. Loathing me as she does, it was the only trick I had left up my sleeve. And it did freeze her into next week. I almost got away before she recovered and I had to play ‘possom. That’s really why she ground my face in the asphalt and why she might think I’m her stalker.”

“Oh, wow.” Temple put her own head in her hands. “Like what did you do, say?”

“It was the heat of the moment. I don’t even remember.”

“She sure does.”

Max cleared his throat. “I might have implied she was . . . frigid. That she was putting all that energy into chasing me because—”

“—she really wanted you.”

He shrugged.

“That is so sexist, Max Kinsella! And so is thinking that I always need to be rescued.”

“There’s the one common denominator in my sins: thinking of you, caring about you, wanting to protect you.”

“You have to leave me with no word for a year to protect me? You have to hit on another woman to protect me? I think I’d rather not be protected.”

“That’s what Devine said. That I had to come clean with you now, before Molina embarrasses you later.”