Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Maybe she’d been reading herself into the wrong book.

These new divided loyalties were tearing her in two. Why was she still putting her heart and soul into a relationship that had been perfect at first but had become more and more tenuous? Even Matt, Mr. Patient, thought Max had deserted her. He wouldn’t be tempting her with romantic gestures and the sweet, crazy idea of an opt-out trial civil marriage if he thought her relationship with Max was the done deal it once was.

Temple took guilty refuge from her quandary over Max by mentally replaying her most recent intimate moments with Matt. He had sure found his inner Casanova. That combined intensity of tenderness and sheer engulfing sexual hunger loose for the first time was pretty overwhelming. So. Overwhelm her. That would surely erase this miserable sense of loss and increasing distance every time she saw or talked to Max now.

She shook herself out of her sad, sexy reveries and examined her familiar homescape.

Midnight Louie was lounging on her living room sofa, one long foreleg sticking out over the edge as stiff as a shotgun barrel, yet oddly graceful.

It was the pose of a bored, indolent cat, but Temple didn’t believe it for a second. Any more than she’d believed Max’s offhand, indolent reassurances.

“A Chechen rebel,” she told the cat, only because Max had signed off and wasn’t there to hear, and regard, her. “That’s crazy. What would they gain from disrupting a pretentious Las Vegas circus-act-cum-art-exhibition?”

Would Louie shrug her off, like Max? No. Cats didn’t shrug. They just yawned, and blinked, and fanned their toes.

As Louie was doing right now.

Men! They were all alike.

Even when they were wearing fur.

Playing Chechen

Max came out of the back patio’s scorching sunlight into the house’s cool dark shadows.

Garry, aka Gandolph, was in the kitchen, literally whipping up lunch. Max sat on a stool to watch his mentor in magic and counterterrorism whisk egg whites into a bowl-topping foam. The process was tricky, so he nibbled on some red grapes and kept quiet.

Gandolph finally looked up from under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows, now shaggy and quizzical when in his youth they had been devilishly peaked and cynical.

“Working two nighttime undercover jobs is putting maroon circles under those baby blues of yours, my lad.”

“Working two nighttime jobs up in the rigging, period, is putting circles under my eyes. One blink too many and it’s splat.”

“You are fanatically precise about the care and feeding of your equipment.”

Max grunted. “There’s been an ugly turn in the New Millennium situation.”

“The dangling dead man wasn’t enough?”

Gandolph turned to put the dish into the preheated oven. Cooking was his form of meditation, and he was damn good at it.

“Now they’re speculating the victim could be a Chechen rebel, or at least someone tied to them.”

Gandolph’s pudgy form (with time and retirement from the stage, the gourmet cooking had won the battle for Gandolph’s physique) whirled around to face Max.

“And you know this from—”

“A little bird.”

“Ah, your little bird, the redheaded PR chick.”

“Blond, temporarily, as you recall. She couldn’t know that I knew she was working on this PR assignment so I had to act, surprised. Damn! Why did she have to get hired on a project that I’m being forced to muck up? She is very proud of this New Millennium exhibition, thinks this could be the plum PR assignment of her career, and is afraid that things might turn really ugly and political.”

“And she went right to you for advice. Good thing for us!”

“Possibly.”

“What’s not to like about a tip-off?”

“One ugly fact. Not only has the murder drawn higher hotel security and the LVMPD’s attention to our little heist site, it implies that we’ve got a lot more to worry about than some greedy low-end would-be jewel thief. This might mean that if some terrorists plan to use this exhibition for a political statement, we’ll have the FBI all over the place as well. I’m supposed to nip a large and valuable cultural artifact from under the noses of hotel security, the Vegas cops, hidden anarchists, the FBI, and God knows who else?”

Gandolph set the oven timer and hopped up on another stool like a chubby adolescent bellying up to a soda fountain. He grinned.

“We always did our best work against impossible odds. You love ’em.”

Max grinned and ate another grape.

The grin faded fast as he considered how much this last, demanding, double-edged masquerade to infiltrate and topple the Synth was imperiling his long-held and deep love for Temple.

Maybe, he thought, it was high time to love impossible odds less and to spend his energy loving Temple more. Only a month more, surely. Once he was an inside man. Which he wouldn’t be without stealing the scepter. Which would damage Temple’s job performance.

Damn, sometimes there wasn’t any which way to go, including loose.

Better Bred Than Red

Hot news is hot news even when it is hot mews.

I allow my Miss Temple to mistake me for a stuffed pillow (a role I had more than enough of during one of our previous adventures), but the moment she leaves the condo, I bestir myself. I also desert the Circle Ritz, my home away from homicide, for the New Millennium, my homicide away from home.

I cannot tell you how all my hunting instincts sit up and take note when I hear that the dead man in the exhibition area may be from Chechnya (or could be connected to some rebel cause there?). I have relatives in Chechnya. (In fact, I have relatives all over the globe. Those of us who do not cling to limited pedigrees are truly universal. Some call us “mongrel” but it might as well be “Mongol” as not.)

Global politics is not normally my bailiwick. (Bailiwick is a good old-fashioned word for “arena of operation.”) My arena of operation for the nonce (another good old-fashioned word) is the New Millennium and the White Russian exhibition. By now, I have found a handy ground-floor entrance: the back area where they download the Big Cats every day for rehearsal.

I merely hop through the bars of their cages—all right, I have to shimmy-shimmy my midlife male middle through the iron uprights—then I can hunker down between their extended forelegs and pass as a shadow. We are all big black dudes, after all.

Kalúha is cool, but I have to watch Lucky, as he is new to the act and at times does not realize his own strength. Sometimes when he yawns, his lower jaw knocks my skull sideways. But a few blows to the cerebellum does not stop the streetwise shamus, as all the noir detective novels point out ad nauseam.

By the time the boys are transferred to their holding cages up top I am freewheeling and hard on the trail of crime and punishment. First, I need to know if the Big Cats have any insight on Russian politics.

Zip. Nil. Nada. These guys are huge and brawny and cooperative, but not much in the little gray cell department.

So I slink about the upper area, blending into the matte black paint job as long as I keep my eyes slitted almost closed, looking for some high witness I have missed interviewing. See, the guy was found dangling just above the apex of the exhibition area. That was sixty feet below the magic show staging zone. I figure somebody up there was not only watching, but pulling the strings.

CC and Miss Shangri-La are not on the scene yet, so I edge to the rim of a ledge to gaze down at the busy work below. It is way higher than an elephant’s eye up here and is in no way a beautiful morning, so I am not surprised when a cold bolt of fur and claws bowls me over and has me hanging by my flimsiest nail sheaths from the wooden platform.