Cat In A Leopard Spot

She sighed, pushed her hair off her face, which she didn’t need to do because she wore it in a functional blunt out.

Mariah had even fetched in the mail. Amazing!

A small padded manila envelop lay on the cluttered coffee table facing the sofa.

A surprise. She hated surprises. Not healthy. Okay, we are all kids at heart. I love a parade….

Carmen froze to hear a kitchen appliance whirring. It’s okay. Give the kid space. You can fix anything that can go wrong except chopped-off fingers…She’d been in homicide too long.

She looked at her name on the typed—computer-generated, these days—label. C. R. Molina. Odd. These promo packages usually came addressed to “Resident.”

Still, maybe the day, and the nights before it, had been too wearing, but she felt the slightly giddy curiosity of a child with a surprise present. She didn’t get many of those nowadays. Certainly not at home.

She ripped open the adhesive flap at one end. Who had the energy to stagger into the kitchen—Mariah’s domain of the evening now—to look up a steak knife?

A small boxy item was inside. She practically had to squeeze it out, like a newborn.

Then she stared at what lay in the palm of her hand. A pair of white minibinoculars, something alien with two round sides. It didn’t look like an America Online CD, much too small, but who knew what innovation lurks in the heart of today’s technology?…

She groped in the empty package and pulled out a plum: a piece of memo paper folded in half.

“Not for correction,” the typed capital letters read, “except in color.”

Weirder and weirder. Carmen twisted one plastic screwtop. Too small to be plastic explosive…would she quit thinking like a cop for one single minute—? No.

Floating in a viscous fluid was a bit of colored Saran Wrap. Huh?

“Mom, I need some advice,” a voice piped over her shoulder. It dropped a register. “Mom! What are you doing with a contact lens?”

So that’s what this was. A set of contact lenses. Not for correction, except in color.

The abrupt, one-word signature below the cryptic phrase suddenly registered.

Chameleon.

“Oh, my God…”

“I haven’t even made anything yet,” Mariah complained defensively.

“Oh, not you!” Carmen turned and smiled encouragingly, like all mothers everywhere. “Go to it, niña. If you make it, I’ll eat it.” She would regret this promise.

The manila envelope was still pregnant with possibility, another lump. She midwifed out another sibling: some solution in a bottle.

A whole kit and kabottle. Soft contact lenses. A change of eye color. Boring brown, she noted.

Somewhere, sometime in her nightly undercover rambles she had crossed paths with him. He was sending her a message: if you play at undercover work, dress the part. Do as I do, do as I did, and hide your lying eyes.

She pushed the hair she didn’t need to brush aside back from her face anyway, remembering her image in the mirror, the mirror she so seldom consulted. Vanity was not a vice.

She had worried that a haggard face might betray her to a friend.

She had been on the right side of the law for too long to think like a perp. Moving onto dangerous ground, she had counted on her altered getup and her cop’s instincts to see her enemies first, before her vivid eyes gave her away like a blue-light special at Kmart. Gave her away…

To Max Kinsella.

And to Rafi Nadir, should she be caught off guard and meet him face-to-face. According to this packet of joy and admonition from Kinsella, she had come too damn close to meeting Rafi for any of their goods.

Would she heed the warning?

Of course.

Did she appreciate it?

Hell, no.

“Dinner’s ready,” Mariah caroled from the kitchen.

It was much too soon for anything edible.

Carmen put on a happy face, if not contact lenses, and went into the kitchen.

She smelled burning cardboard.

Chapter 33

Track of the Cat

The desert sky looks like one of those Strip hotel dioramas: big bowl of dark sky, twinkling lights for stars, a nice crescent moon tilted artistically low on a horizon tinted a smoky indigo color from the distant aurora borealis of Las Vegas.

Except that this sky is real, and dark, and deep.

The dark in the building behind us is even more impenetrable.

“I smell something bad, Mr. Midnight,” Groucho pipes up.

And I do mean “pipes.” The pipsqueak sounds like a soprano cricket.

“So do I,” is my response. “And do you know what it is? I smell a rat.”

“We are not afraid of rats,” Golda puts in.

“I mean the human kind,” I start to respond, just working up a really withering retort, when someone else decides to do it for me. A roar rends the night like it is a silk curtain.

All of our ears flatten in joint pain and consternation. A lion’s roar in the wilderness is a primal thing. It sounds fiercer than the volcano in front of the Mirage at eruption time. Worse than a jetliner taking off from McCarran. Probably worse than a tornado coming to take you away to Oz.