Read Online Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir by Carole Nelson Douglas - Free Book Online Page B

like lonesome train rails. Her mind was back in the Valley Hospital room, watching a girl who called herself Gayla lying pale and lost in some monotone film nightmare produced by that low-budget pair of mind-numbers: pain and pain killers.
    The injuries from the attack Molina had almost witnessed in the Kitty City strip club parking lot were minor, but Gayla’s voice rasped from a near-throttling. Her knees had been skinned, her wrist sprained. All minor injuries in a major-trauma world.
    “Did you see or hear anything? Anyone?” Molina had asked.
    Gayla’s red-blond frizz of a hairdo had thrashed back and forth on the pillow.
    “No, ma’am,” she said, either reared in a household that taught children respect for their elders and authority figures…or that beat the hell out of them until everyone they met was a force to be reckoned with and kowtowed to.
    “No, ma’am. If I’da seen something I’da screamed. You know? I just sort of slipped and my throat was all tight, and my elbows and knees burned and someone was leaning over me.”
    “Someone. Tall, dark?”
    Gayla frowned. Every night she saw faces on the other side of the spotlights, all blurred and all Someones. “Dark. The hair. Maybe.”
    Maybe. Maybe Kinsella. Maybe…Nadir.
    “Were the eyes dark, or light?”
    “It was night.” Gayla finally sounded indignant enough to speak up for herself, for everything she missed really seeing as it was because life was nicer that way. “I couldn’t see eyes. I didn’t see face. Just something…dark coming at me and knocking everything out from under me. And breath. It was hot on my cheek.”
    “Breath. Did you smell anything on it?”
    “Wow. You know, when I was feeling sick there on the ground, it did seem my sense of smell kicked up. Like when you —”
    “When you what?”
    “You know .”
    “No, I don’t. When?”
    “During…it.”
    “Oh. That.” Molina sighed. “So what was the smell in the parking lot?”
    “What? I wasn’t doing…it.”
    “The attacker’s breath. What did it smell like?”
    Gayla’s faced screwed into such exaggerated concentration that she winced when her muscles hurt from it. “Gum, I guess.”
    “Gum?”
    “Gum.”
    Molina chewed on that. Neither suspect was what she’d call a gum-chewing man. Unless he’d drunk something that often flavored gum.
    “The scent. Was it cinnamon? Spearmint? Fruity?”
    “I don’t know. For just a second I thought…maybe spicy, I don’t know.”
    Spicy. Did they put cinnamon sticks in anything besides hot Christmas punch? Or maybe it was breath mints! Any scents similar? Check it out. Check out every damn breath mint on the market.
    “But you didn’t see anything?” Molina pressed.
    “I told you, no!”
    “Did you sense how tall the man might be? He was behind you. He choked you, forced you down. Did he feel like a shadow of yourself? Not much taller, but stronger? Or did he come from above, like a tree, bearing down?”
    “Gee. I don’t know.” Her vacant, pale eyes, no color to speak of, like her opinions, her testimony, blinked rapidly. “I can’t say. It was like a…spike, driving me down. I just gave, without thinking about it. It was so sudden, I didn’t know anything else to do.”
    Molina looked at this frail young woman. She was a willow, this girl. She would bend to any will stronger than hers, and every will was stronger than hers. That was why the attacker had picked her. He knew a beaten-down soul when he saw it. It was so unfair! Those whom life had already battered gave like reeds and took more battering.
    Molina reached to cover Gayla’s hand on the thin hospital blanket. “I’m sorry. We’re going to find the man who did this. Stop him.”
    Gayla nodded, looked like she believed her. Smiled a little. Sadly.
    “There’s always another, though,” she said. For the first time during the interview, she sounded very, very certain about something.
    Molina’s flashback faded, leaving her back in