Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

know that, Lieutenant?”
    “I checked your record. I routinely do that on any members of the force I have dealings with for the first time.”
    “Ditto. Except I checked you out after that deal went down at the Dahlia. You shouldn’t have tried to rip off my file on Nadir. It got me interested again.”
    “Why?”
    “I think you’ve got more secrets than going Blue Velvet every now and again at a local club. I find homicide lieutenants with secrets irresistible.”
    “Dangerous too, I bet.”
    “Hope so.”
    “And this is how you ask for a date?”
    “Hope so.”
    Molina eyed the PG-model of Dirty Larry. He still had the sloppy posture of a guy guy, but his hair was almost buzz cut and his angular, currently genial features went down smooth with a cocky charm that probably stood him well in undercover work. He looked like an ex-pilot, civilized but a little bit warped in some wild-blue-yonder way. Not her type at all. But then it’d been so long, she didn’t know what her type was anymore.
    “You want to drag me out to some trendy hot spot again?” she asked.
    “You’re a dynamite singer but you’re an even tougher audience. Not drag. Accompany. And not so trendy. Dinner.”
    She opened the unlocked driver’s door and nodded for him to go around to the passenger side. A concession, but a small one.
    “We don’t have a thing in common,” she warned him as he got in the aging car over the grumble of its engine.
    “Except police work.”
    “A negative.”
    “We both have to play roles every day to survive.”
    She didn’t comment on that because she was too busy backing out without being crushed by one of the many Hummers scattered through the lot. Or because she was too uneasy about answering that assumption.
    “West side of the lot. Black Wrangler.” He push-buttoned down the window and braced an elbow on it, showing none of the unease most men did when they weren’t driving, and a woman was.
    One positive point to Dirty Larry.
    “I’ve got two kids,” he told the open air. “Shared custody with the ex-wife in—of all places, divorce central— Reno.”
    “Divorced ex-cop. Just the worst.”
    “You are too.”
    “I never married, but you know that.”
    He didn’t deny it. “Smart.” Nodding, looking out the window. “Saved yourself a lot of grief. Was it a cop?”
    She declined to comment, instead slowing the car. “Here we are.”
    “All right.” He got out, then leaned his angular yet boyish face through the window. “Thursday night dinner, say seven. Civvies. My treat. No ghosts. I’ll pick you up at home.”
    “You’re nosy as well as nervy, you know that?”
    “Yeah. My best qualities. What can you lose?”
    She didn’t answer that but pulled away as he hit the remote open for his car.
    Molina did a quick postmortem. Nancy Reagan had been right. She should have just said no.
    Why hadn’t she? Because she needed to figure his angle, and because he did indeed know too much about her. And because some of damned Max Kinsella’s taunts when they were tussling in the strip club parking lot had gotten under her skin and were still festering there, like a splinter you can only get out through some deep digging with a sharp needle.
    Finding out Dirty Larry’s game might refute the magician’s nasty insinuations that night. Like how she was too uptight for a real life, for a real man. A sense of shame still lingered from that flat-out physical encounter, a confrontation she’d lost for winning. Even though she’d finally won, had him down and cuffed, she had to wonder if he’d let her. Never arm wrestle a snake.
    And he’d escaped the cuffs later in her car, anyway, when events announced over the police radio made his arrest clearly unnecessary. Thanks to his slippery magician tricks, he’d left her cuffed to her own steering wheel. Molina’s mind winced away from recalling her struggle to reach the handcuff key he had left by the passenger door. Good thing she had long arms. She was still hoping the long arm of the law would reel in Kinsella one day. Hers, God willing.
    But she enjoyed impudence if it was genial, like Larry’s. He was refreshingly upfront, unlike most of the people—men—she’d dealt with lately. So far.



Swinging for It

    Max stared down through the glass window into the lightning lit pit eighty feet below. It resembled a medieval vision of hell but it was just the mosh-pit madness at the nightclub.
    In the name of a good night’s work,