Cat In A Leopard Spot

At 2:00 A.M. Matt Devine stepped outside the radio station, glad to find the parking lot deserted for once. What a guilty, if rare, pleasure. Staying an hour after his radio show ended meant that the loyal fans who gathered to greet him at 1:00 A.M. had given up and gone away.

He took a deep, liberating breath. Signing photos for fans in the wee hours was not a favorite part of his radio-shrink job.

Only four vehicles squatted on the otherwise empty parking lot. Each hugged a light pole, parked by staff members who knew they’d be the last to leave and wanted as much light as possible against the dangers of the lonely night.

Wanting as much light as possible against the dangers of the lonely night. Sounded just like what his call-in clients craved.

Matt grimaced. Life was a metaphor, especially when you earned your living as a radio shrink. Still, he glanced carefully around. There was one particular “fan” he hoped never to see again. She made a habit of jumping him after he got off work in the wee hours, both here at WCOO and before that at ConTact, the hot line counseling service where he’d honed his phone advice technique.

Each parked vehicle reminded Matt of its owner: the producer/radio personality known as Ambrosia’s late ’70s red Cadillac convertible; Dwight the technician’s beat-up minivan; Keith’s decidedly downscale aging Toyota hatchback with its spindly tires about as wide as a ’60s necktie and that’s all.

Then there was his transportation.

Locked and tilted toward one of the sentinel parking lot lights the Hesketh Vampire’s convoluted silver silhouette looked like it belonged in a movie. The British custom motorcycle was borrowed wheels, but it could make a faster escape than the Volkswagen Beetle that was recently his, courtesy of Elvis. Or Elvis’s ghost. Or one of Elvis’s whacked-out impersonators. Or fans.

After his most recent unscheduled encounter with the woman Temple had nicknamed—Ouch! “nick” was the name of her game, all right—Kitty the Cutter, Matt felt safer with the ’cycle’s speed and agility, although more exposed on the bike than in a car. He still wasn’t sure that the phantom biker he glimpsed now and again wasn’t Miss Kitty. Then again, it might not be. If not, who was it? How about a ghost?

Matt smiled at his own fears. Monsters and ghosts. He was acting like a kid scaring himself with the dark. Except that it was indeed dark at this hour, and getting darker. Another metaphor.

He stopped thinking, an occupational hazard in both the radio talk-show game and his old vocation of priest, and went over to the streetlight-turned spotlight to unlock the bike, don his helmet and gloves, then spur the metal steed into the dull roar that would soon become a whine as it hit the streets and cruising speed.

Like any performer coming down from a late-night show, Matt was in no hurry to head home to the Circle Ritz.

He found himself pondering the mysteries of human, and more often inhuman, behavior after an hour of hearing everybody’s miseries. Now he had his own lethal mysteries to ponder. The current crop made his recent search for his lost stepfather look like a cake-walk. Poor Effinger, the ultimate loser; outclassed by an uppity hit-woman.

At least he assumed that was what Kitty O’Connor was. An odd, sadistically seductive hit woman, with a modus operandi of introducing herself to her victims. And, in his case, she had an even odder price. Or was it only his case? Was he part of a longtime pattern with her?

She had been Max Kinsella’s Waterloo years ago, when he was still a teenage tourist propelled into the lethal jig that politics, bombs, and the IRA had played for decades in Ireland. Now Kinsella, all grown up, was Matt’s personal bane, ever since he’d come back and taken Temple back, not that Matt had ever had her. It was easy to blame Max for Kitty’s brutal entrance into his own life. And wrong.

Wanting to resent Kinsella for every loss in his life, Matt tended to overlook one key fact: Kathleen O’Connor had first approached him during his hunt for Effinger. To this day, she still didn’t seem to know that Matt had become infatuated with Temple while Kinsella was among the missing. So Kitty was stalking him long before she could suspect any connection between him and Max, via Temple. She still seemed blind to the faint outlines of a former romantic triangle, and Matt would do anything to keep it that way. Temple must be protected at all costs. That was probably the only issue he and Kinsella would agree on.

The howl of the Vampire’s famously loud motor mimicked the chaos of his thoughts. The bike almost took its head like a willful steed. Soon the powerful motor was idling in another parking lot, this one utterly empty, except for the cold puddles of blue-green night lights.

A large, low building huddled like a bunker in the moonlight.