Cat In A Topaz Tango

“I can handle this other guy,” she finally said. “He’s my problem. What I’m having trouble with is how close this incident was to the attack on you several months ago. Both cuttings. You a razor, me a butcher knife. A possible, even probable connection to Max Kinsella, alive or dead. I’m wondering if the attacker is the same party.”

“My slasher’s dead.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. It was this former IRA agent from Max’s early years. I mean his teen years.”

“He was an antiterrorist as a teenager? Antichrist, maybe, I’d believe. Come on!”

Matt nodded, several times. “True. His first cousin was blown up in a pub bombing in Londonderry. The boys had been given a high school graduation trip to their family’s native Ireland. Road trip. The damn fools drove up to northern Ireland to eyeball the Troubles.”

Molina sat silent.

He figured she was stunned.

“The cousin died?” she asked.

“Presumably, based on the pieces.”

“And Kinsella?”

“He was already an amateur magician. Having an Irish temper, teen-boy fury, and survivor’s guilt didn’t help. He found the bombers and . . . I don’t know, ratted on them? Ireland was too hot to hold him; anywhere was. The IRA put a price on his head. That’s when he was recruited by this unofficial counterterrorism group, as I understand. They did it to save his life, and I suppose they admired his nerve. As do we all.”

“Speak for yourself, Matt,” she said with irony, no longer silent with shock. “So the Interpol record was a decoy, full of disinformation for stupid domestic cops like me.”

“It meant his life if he was tied to his real past. I’m wondering what this did to the family.”

“His cousin’s?”

“And his. One lost a son, one didn’t. That doesn’t go down well even in close families. Maybe especially not in close families.”

“That’s why he’s so fanatical about protecting Temple.”

“Probably.”

Her palm slammed the rough tabletop. “So Max Kinsella is a misjudged hero and I’m the villainous pursuer of an innocent lamb.”

“I’d never call Max ‘innocent,’ ” Matt said dryly.

Molina let herself relax back into her seat, her features wincing. Matt knew that wince. Knife wounds became inflamed and, he imagined, even healing stitches pulled.

“Kitty the Cutter gave me a four-inch slash, but I saw a shady doctor who managed to tape it shut,” he mentioned. “And you?’

“Eighty-six stitches.”

“Whew. The number sounds oddly appropriate.”

To be “eighty-sixed” meant you’d been sunk.

She glared at him, thought about laughing, and then winced instead. “Don’t humanize me, Devine. I can’t take that right now.”

“So what’s the deal?”

“Are you right? Kinsella is basically a good guy with a bad boy façade? I’ve been overreacting and wasting my time?”

He considered it. He was used to weighing right and wrong, good and bad, and giving people a lot of leeway on those black-and-white extremes.

“Yeah. Temple’s no victim or dupe. I won’t say Kinsella didn’t have a big load of guilt to bear, and like all loners he has an arrogant way of thinking he knows what’s right for other people.”

“Like you and Temple?”

Matt grinned. “Maybe. Still, the fact is he can’t offer any woman a stable domestic life, not that he didn’t have hopes.”

“Funny.” She turned her beer mug around to study the condensation droplets. “I never gave him credit for being human enough to have hopes. Maybe I was judging him by my own yardstick.”

“It’s a rigorously straight one.”

“How the tightly wound have fallen. Okay, Mr. Midnight. Mr. Radio advice man. What do I do now? I may have blown my career chasing a devil who could be a saint in disguise. Three people too many know about my misadventure at the House of Max.”

“You including me in that?”

“Yeah. You’re young, you’re lovely, you’re engaged. You’ll tell your squeeze. No secrets, right, for love’s young dream?”

“No. I won’t tell her. I think you should. Someday not too far off”

Molina opened her mouth. Shut it. “You do extract a mighty stiff penance, Padre.”

“All in proper measure to the sinner and the sin.”

“Pride is the worst of the Seven Deadly, right?”

“Yeah, but the easiest to fix.”

She stood up. Threw a couple of twenties on the table. “Dinner’s on me. I’ll meet you at the rambling wreck in the parking lot. I’m going to the ladies’ room to eat crow for dessert.”

This time she really needed it. Matt watched her leave, her gait a slightly halting swing, not due to the little beer they’d had, but the hidden stitches.

Would she tell Temple the truth? Give away that Max’s place was not really in other hands?

Naw, he thought as he wove through the beery crowds to wait for her by the door. Now that Max was out of the picture, Molina had no reason to hassle Temple about him anymore.

Matt had to wonder on the drive home from Molina’s house how he’d been forcibly cast into the role of Hamlet: to tell or not to tell Temple.

Torn between two women, and feeling like a fool. That was a line from an old hit song Ambrosia often played on her radio show. He knew he was on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and they were usually demonic.