Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

She’d left her guns on top of the eating bar. Mariah wasn’t here. Cats don’t have opposable thumbs to handle firearms. She’d stow them in the bedroom gun safe after she’d cooled off with half a beer.

Condensation dimpled the brown bottle. Dew for the drinking woman. The beer tasted effervescent and stinging.

So. Mariah was off social butterflying. Maybe Larry was off. Carmen felt like some adult company. Tabitha ratcheted up the side of the couch to one arm, then blinked solemn yellow eyes at her. Me? Snag upholstery?

Cats were born hostile witnesses. Mum to the max.

Max.

Carmen made a face. Her deal with Temple Barr was going south before the ink was barely dry. That swing-style death at the New Millennium had Max Kinsella’s imprint all over it. The only oddity was that it wasn’t Kinsella himself throttled and hung out to dry.

Maybe someone else felt the same way as she did, and had missed his or her mark. Carmen stretched her bare toes into the only sand available to her . . . the sandy beige nubbles of cheap wall-to-wall carpeting.

Maybe the place could use some updating, but with Mariah’s college tuition looming . . .

Carmen sipped beer, then stowed the bottle on a terra cotta coaster on her coffee table. Now that she’d wound down a little, she was aware of a tiny distant sound.

Outside? Some neighborhood low-rider twenty blocks over?

And there was a smell.

She eyed the cats, the usual source of unlikely smells. They had moved away from their half-demolished dishes to tongue-scrape their whiskers, faces, and feet clean.

Good children with bright shining faces.

The distant insectlike buzz of semi-music was putting her to sleep. Like she didn’t lose a lot of it in the night. And the scent. Heavy, come to think of it. Sweet. The way death was sometimes, in the earliest stages, before the sour . . .

Molina shot to her feet, bare toes digging in so she could charge in any direction. She eyed the black, dead bug–like silhouettes of her guns on the pale kitchen countertop.

She ran to grab them, secured one in each pocket of the hot polyester-blend blazer she’d still kept on. In this climate, linen and cotton wrinkled like your grandfather’s forehead from sitting at desks and in cars.

The cats leaped onto the abandoned sofa, claiming her vacant spot. They always wanted to be where you were, where you had been.

Maybe somebody else did too.

Her cell phone was on the coffee table. It wasn’t like her to strew her belongings around, but the day had been hot and Mariah was gone again, and maybe she’d felt a false sense of solitude and security in her own home.

A homicide lieutenant should know better.

She snatched up the phone, pressed it on, hit . . . Larry’s number. Didn’t hit TALK.

She was carrying a 9-millimeter Glock and the Colt Pocket Lite. If she couldn’t handle vague buzz and sniff without backup, she might as well use her shield for a beer coaster.

The house was older than she was. Laid out like a thick-waisted hourglass. Kitchen, dining, and living areas off the attached garage; long narrow hall with bedrooms and bath leading off that.

Modest house. Modest neighborhood. Fairly safe unless the Hispanic gangs were at it on your front doorstep, which they usually knew better to avoid in her case.

And so she walked into her own hall with the 9 millimeter cupped in a two-handed grip, elbows braced, body sideways.

Mariah could have left her bedroom stereo on. The sound was still soft, but louder here. A Latino station celebrating la vida loca in ways Ricky Martin had never thought of.

The odor hit her as sharply as vomit the minute she crossed into the hall’s eternal shadow. Houses in Las Vegas demanded interior darkness. Cool. Shelter from the sun.

She looked down, took a moment to focus.

She stepped in the smell, and made it sharper. Sweet.

Carmen bent to touch the dark red ovals that dotted the bland hall carpet.

Velvety. Thick. Saturated with scent.

Rose petals. Crushed to release scent. Each a separate blot on the carpet, like gouts of blood.

Sweet. Sick.

She followed the trail, knowing this was intended, her stomach twisted with anxiety. Mariah’s room on the right. Was that where the muffled music was coming from?

Call in? Call backup? Call Morrie? Call Larry?

Someone had been playing games with her for weeks. Leaving things in the house, announcing a bold come-and-go presence. At first, she’d doubted her own senses.

Not anymore.

Oh, God! And if Mariah wasn’t out as announced? Wasn’t doing teenage overtime on the social circuit? If she was still here, in that room where the rose petals led and the music was just a shadow of itself . . .

She came almost abreast of the door. Ajar. And the radio sound. Louder. And the rose petals, crossing the threshold.

The door banged against the wall, askew on its hinges. Her semiautomatic’s sleek, sweeping muzzle had the whole room covered.