Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

I have got to give Mr. Max Kinsella credit for a true magical presence. First you see him; then you do not. Some people could call him irresponsible. Some people could call me just a cat. You can never go by “some people.”

Meanwhile, I am more than somewhat pleased that I instructed the Cat Pack to assemble here at Neon Nightmare after the Oasis adventure, just in case Synth shepherding was needed. I released the tuxedo unit to go back to the police substation for a well-earned fast-food feast at the hands of Las Vegas’s finest.

So Mr. Max is the only formally dressed presence here. I hope he spotted my reduced posse and me, and appreciated our letting him hog the stage. Again.

Meanwhile I set an example for our next moves by sidling over to the almost empty bottle of Blue Curaçao and giving it a gentle swipe.

It crashes onto its side, leaving a macabre tail of blue blood leaking out of its lip.

Miss Czarina Catherina screeches and jumps even farther away from the bar, just as Inkadoo and Blacula jump up on each shoulder of Mr. Hal Herald. His Adam’s apple sets his bow tie jiving as he swallows hard and recalls how the Cat Pack shredded the Darth Vaders’ much heavier cloaks during the showdown in the Synth clubrooms.

With my Miss Temple armed, for the first time in her life, the Pack was there to see to it that no concealed carrying laws were visibly broken. Now we are here to see that certain shady characters scatter posthaste, so Miss Temple can leave safely under our escort.

Mr. Hal’s shuddering session has encouraged Inkadoo and Blacula to jump to barstools to watch the back of his departing heels. Miss Czarina is wailing and calling on Bast to help her, so I merely escort her out the length of the bar and meow a polite good night.

Ramona is a hard case. She is eyeing Miss Temple with an aim to exercise a bit of territorial imperative. I well recognize the signs in any species.

It is then that Miss Midnight Louise chirps from her spot near Miss Ramona’s barstool, stretches with her posterior and big plumy tail up in the air, opens her dainty jaws wide, and extends one elegant black-velvet foreleg to the side of Miss Ramona’s green satin gown and draws one claw down it from shoulder to décolletage.

Miss Ramona gets the message and scrams with an echo of very fast high heels.

My Miss Temple has watched all this with interest but without comment. She looks up into the empty peak of the almost empty nightclub.

I stalk over and rub around her ankles, in and out like the famous Hollywood hamburger joint handles customers, to say that I will wait outside.

A couple head-jerks from me, and the Pack leaves various stations on the bar, stepping carefully around the sticky trickle of Blue Curaçao. I must say Miss Midnight Louise sashays out at her own speed and druthers, pausing like a statue of Bast to look up as intently as Miss Temple.

Chapter 49

Max’s Last Act

Just as mysteriously as Louie could suddenly be there in less than the blink of an eye, Temple’s intent stare caught a bit of white still at the peak of the building.

The zodiac signs still washed over the floor like a ghostly cleaning crew.

And the dove hovering in the artificial night sky slipped closer and closer until it was a white shirtfront and the face above it.

Temple bent to pick up the gloves, the wand, and the top hat.

“How can you do this?” Temple asked Max as he touched ground.

“Do what?”

“Risk an aerial stunt in this place, with this equipment?”

“Magicians have to do the impossible.” He looked up. “The equipment Garry and I installed is sound, and was tampered with only after I’d inspected it and started down.”

“Then the would-be killer was comfortable with heights and that kind of equipment.”

Max nodded. “But you can see from the earlier events tonight how many unemployed aerial workers are available around Vegas now. Speaking of risk and the impossible, I knew you could do it.”

“Do what?” she said in her turn.

“Get that instinctive yet clockwork mind of yours ticking on the real dynamics of the Synth.”

“My theories would never get an arrest warrant or play in court.”

“Maybe not. Maybe not yet.”

“Is the Synth defanged now?” Temple asked Max.

“Pretty much. I can always yank out an extra tooth if they get forgetful.”

She looked up into the vast dark disappearing into a peak, the disco lights now crackling in the night, heat lightning, and bathing their faces and bodies with a dizzying round of zodiac signs. Hers Gemini. His Aries. Theirs … always, Ophiuchus.

“I will never forget—and coming from a recovering amnesiac like me, that’s something,” Max said. “I will never forget you saying ‘Max, come home.’”

Temple knew what she had to say then, but she didn’t know what to say now. So she let Max speak.

“When I did come ‘home,’ and I saw you, your situation, I thought ‘This woman must be crazy.’”

Temple shrugged. That’s what you do when you can’t quite speak.

“I call this stranger that my best friend, my mentor, said I loved and I can’t even remember, and she says, ‘Come home.’”

Still silent, forced to keep silent. He didn’t seem to notice.

“My biggest regret about still being alive—”

Temple tried to cut off that horrible way to put it.…

His hand lifted, the magician hypnotizing an audience into silence.

“—is that I still don’t remember. And I promise, if I ever do, I will never, ever let you or anyone else know that I do.”

Max grasped her shoulders and, slowly, kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll wait outside to follow your car home. Just in case.”

He left.

Chapter 50

A Very Vegas Affair

Temple was having a nice, private nineteenth-century “swoon” on her living room sofa the morning after overseeing the total disintegration of the Synth and proposing a solution to three murders that would likely remain in cold case files for eternity.

What was frying her brain were the unpleasant facts. For every loose end and murder she might have tied up at Neon Nightmare last night, several messy threads remained. Not the least was the murder of the suspected multiple-killer himself, Cosimo Sparks.

If world-class architect Santiago had done it, as seemed possible, why would he risk killing such a deluded and low-level crook? And if the three head Synth members had appropriated the Darth Vader look for their panicked heist schemes, who were the real Vaders, the pair that had raided the club headquarters carrying serious weapons?

And where was the Jersey Joe Jackson loot, which had expanded from rare silver dollars from the Vegas early days to bearer bonds and weapons of mass seriousness?

Not to mention a series of unsolved “falling” deaths all over town.

Too much information for even an action heroine to process. She definitely needed downtime.

In fact, she was lacking only a mint julep and a pool boy (of her acquaintance, of course), when Midnight Louie leaped before looking and made a four-point, twenty-pound landing on her midriff.

“ Oooph, you big oaf! That hurt. Can’t a girl have a time-out to soothe her nerves around this place?”

Apparently not. Louie added insult to actual injury by using her as a springboard to the newspaper-strewn coffee table. Louie proceeded to dig frantically on the papers he’d been peacefully dozing upon barely a minute before.