Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Temple sat sweating in her air-conditioning after the homicide lieutenant left.

She was dazed. Molina had only recently promised to leave Max and her alone. Now she was muscling into their intimate lives, sneering at the implicit details of their love life. Making it criminal to care. To defend and protect.

Or, was she just too tired to be Max’s personal pit bull anymore? Was she weakening because she was distracted by Matt and his needs, his attractions? Was it getting easy to give up the ghost? Max, her maybe lover?

Temple knew she should have done more to resist Molina, but she also knew that this humiliating breaking and entering wouldn’t have been necessary if Max had done less. If he’d been here rather than anywhere else. And the fact that he needed to do what he did didn’t make it one damned bit easier. For him.

Or for her.

High Anxiety

Max’s stint as the Phantom Mage at Neon Nightmare was the ideal training ground for this job at the New Millennium.

“Job”in the sense of pulling a heist.

In the deepest dark of night, against the ceiling of the black-painted area above the exhibition, he’d installed his own web of deception.

He and Gandolph had spent many wee morning hours after Max’s Neon Nightmare shows tunneling a secret entrance above the suspended platforms and electronically operated mirrors and the web of bungee cords the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La had rigged for themselves, the two black panthers, and her acrobatic Siamese cat.

The tangled nest of electric cords and circus gadgetry had evolved into two levels of treachery. The machinery of illusion could always be dangerous. Two hidden hands, two different purposes made it doubly treacherous. As was Shangri-La herself.

Max had erected a secret shadow rigging above the original installation.

He planned to tangle CC in a falling net of cables, then swing down in his stead, wearing a duplicate costume. In front of a transfixed audience (the way he always liked ‘em), he would use the heavy boots to kick away the Lexan pyramid-cum-onion dome protecting the scepter, which he and Gandolph had rigged to give. Then he’d swing up into the black nowhere, prize attached to utility belt.

No matter that the alarm system screeched its worst.

The guards would believe their eyes and waste time lumbering upward to corral a sputtering and stunned Cloaked Conjuror.

Max by then would be shimmying through eighty feet of narrow aluminum tubing installed like a long, long, skylight tunnel. CC’s mask and heavy shoes and cloak would remain behind, as deflated as the hat and robe of the melting Wicked Witch of the West.

What a world, what a world!

The Synth would have proof of his loyalty and daring and would at last admit him to their inner sanctum of secrets. Gandolph, presumed dead and therefore not suspect, would keep the scepter for producing later, when the Synth and all its murky works would be known to Max and the world and be broken.

Max would gladly retire his growing poker hand of identities. Maybe he could break the Synth in a couple of months, then come back as his original performing persona, the Mystifying Max. He was in superb physical condition again. Maybe the Crystal Phoenix would renew its offer, particularly with Temple as his . . . agent. They could stop playing hide and seek. Get married. Buy a house of their own.

But all that was later. This was now. The biggest problem for his successful escape was Shangri-La. He carried a lariat of steel cord. If he could encoil her on the way down, her long tatters of costume would become her prison.

Now, he hung under the ceiling like a big black spider, feet and hands in the holds he and Gandolph had screwed into the unseen joists. He breathed deeply, trying to relax in the trying position.

The music was revving up to introduce the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La. Across the chasm below, he could see into the staging area hidden from the audience. The low-level spotlights that dotted the black ceiling gleamed on the steel bars caging in the big cats across from him. Their eyes gleamed in the dark as they growled softly with anticipation. They saw him and spotted prey, but no one would heed them. That would be invisible to the audience looking up from the pool of brightly lit white exhibition cubicles and pedestals far below.

They sat in a semicircle of sleek white stands on the museum’s far walls, chattering with opening night excitement. Buzz. Temple would be happy. Even though the press wouldn’t be allowed into the exhibit until the following week, he knew that she would be down there, making sure all the VIPs were at ease and ready for the big preview night. But he didn’t dare shake his concentration to look for her.

He hated to ruin an event she had worked on, but she was endlessly clever at turning bad publicity into good.

Max eyed the equipment installed for the true performers. They had tested it many times for stability and strength, as he had his own gear. This mock-robbery stunt was nothing more, or less, than Cirque du Soleil had so elegantly reinvented for Vegas, a spectacular, arty circus act.

Max inhaled long and slow. Launch time was only a few minutes. He would swoop down, looking like part of the act. He would leave the real CC and Shangri-La hanging uneasily, shocked.

He would take the prize and retract his presence as swiftly as a spider reeling in web silk. And he, like Robert the Bruce, had studied their swift and efficient ways on the back patio of Gandolph’s house, now his. Not his and Temple’s. Someplace new for them. Fresh. Free.

No. Think the job. Only the job. Not the rewards.

The music swelled into the introduction segment, forcing the upward-staring faces below to turn down as they settled into their seats.

Like a bird of prey, he swiftly eyed all the platforms: CC’s, Shangri-La’s, the big cats’, even the tiny one reserved for the Siamese cat named Hyacinth.

She was really too small for an aerial show. She wouldn’t be very visible. But Max understood Shangri-La’s loyalty to an animal partner. He’d worked with some himself and knew that they came to love and crave the spotlight. Praise and adulation and applause could seduce any species, a sad commentary on how often it was missing in young human and animal lives.

Max blinked. He wasn’t wearing his colored contact lenses tonight: not the Mystifying Max’s feline-green ones, not the Phantom Mage’s brown ones. His eyes were their natural hue, blue, rather like the Siamese cat’s.

But he wasn’t seeing a Siamese cat on the small, half-hidden perch reserved for it.

He was seeing a small glimmer of ultra-feline green, as vivid as his own false lenses. He didn’t see much else there, just disembodied eyes, like the isolated toothy smile of the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland, implying a total cat, but winking out.

This was a kink in the perfect plan. Hyacinth hadn’t suddenly made her blue eyes green. With a shudder of premonition, Max looked harder. A dark feline form was moving onto the platform poised like a diver’s board on the edge of nothing.

It was, of course, Temple’s eternally meddling tomcat, Midnight Louie. While he posed there, invisible to everyone near and far but Max, he glanced up. Directly. At Max.

Great. Outed by an alley cat.

Then Louie pounced farther out onto his podium, as if chasing phantom prey.

Max’s mouth opened to shout a warning no cat would heed. Stop!

But Midnight Louie had already leapt back into the shadow of what passed for wings up here, besides bungee cords.

And the entire platform buckled and fell vertical to its support members. It dangled there as if held by an invisible thread of remaining support.

Sometimes seconds can take minutes. It required enormous muscular strength for Max to cling to the ceiling. His body craved the release of a bungee freefall, of stretching long to fly and then liberate the prize, seize it, rebound upward toward ungiving ceiling, then cling and skitter out the escape route.