Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir by Carole Nelson Douglas

table. The music hummed like a buzz saw, a hive of venomous hornets. The music threatened, abused, and everybody ate it up like it was normal. No, just common. Not normal.
    “That’s why you can really help me,” Matt said. “What can I do? You saw how she threatened you for just walking out of the radio station with me.”
    “Was that it? The bitch was jealous of me?” Letitia started laughing. “If she only knew —” Tears replaced the sweat beads on her cheeks. “Oh, Matt. You are my project, boy. I am not going to let anybody take away from you what they took from me when I was just a kid. Just a kid. I guess you’re just a kid, too, in some ways.”
    “If I give in, everybody around me’s safe. I know she’ll keep her word, because she knows that their safety will sear me as much as their danger if the price is right. Or wrong.”
    “She’s mean. She’s bad. She might do anything, right?”
    He nodded.
    “Then you have to be ready to give in.”
    He drew away, sheer repugnance pushing him back like a fist.
    “No. But on your terms. Your innocence is her price, right?”
    He nodded.
    “Then you have to lose your innocence. Even if she holds a gun to your mother’s head, then you can give in and she hasn’t won what she really wanted. She’s not the first one! That’s what they want, to get to you before you can say yes or no, to make you a fool forever, hopeless, weak, stupid!”
    “But it would be a sin.”
    “So sin! That’s better than being a victim. A martyr. Sin and get what — confessed, and it’s all gone. Don’t you believe that? Isn’t that what Catholics believe?”
    “Yes, but —”
    “Yes, but. I didn’t have any ‘yes, but’ when I was seven years old. I just did the best I could and it wasn’t good enough. You’re older. You’re smarter. You outsmart that wicked woman. You put yourself in a condition that whatever she gets from you, it isn’t what she wants. And don’t you dare get so damned nice that you fail to protect yourself. You owe it to every kid who never had a chance to do better than that. You take away what she wants before she has a chance to get it. Get it?”
    Matt nodded numbly. Letitia was right. If someone holds a weapon at your head, disarm the weapon. Especially when the weapon is yourself, your better instincts, your conscience, your integrity.
    “I get it, Letitia. Thanks.”
    “Okay.” She sat back, gathered the externals that were Letitia and Ambrosia and his producer together. “You want my extra celery stick?”
    “Thanks.”
    “I’d help you out myself, you understand, but it’s better for our professional relationship —”
    “You’re absolutely right.”
    “You have any…candidates?”
    “A few. Maybe.”
    “Honey, just look at the nightly groupies.”
    He frowned.
    “I know the Elvis shtick isn’t for you. But there must be a nice girl somewhere —”
    “It’d have to be absolutely secret. To protect…her.”
    “That’s done all the time, particularly in Las Vegas. This ho ain’t God. She ain’t everywhere all the time.”
    “No.” But sometimes it felt like that. The obsessed could be pretty pervasive.
    “You can lose her and lose your virginity at the same time. I know you can.”
    Matt eyed her soberly. One Bloody Mary-soaked celery stick wasn’t going to undo the condition. “Am I some sort of surrogate for you here?”
    “You bet your sweet ass you are. Just let me know when the deed is done. Ambrosia’ll play something real special for you on the rah-di-o.”

 

DAD: Desiccated and Dead
     
    I am happy to hotfoot it out of the feral territory. I am even happier to hop onto the back bumper of a bus downtown and get a ride almost all the way to my destination.
    In another city, buses and traffic would be scarce as hens’ hangnails in the middle of the night. Here in Vegas, things are always jumping, from dice to bailees.
    I have to catch a cross-town bus and there it gets tough. Beyond the Strip