Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Bigger.”

Temple was too busy chewing to speak with more than her raised eyebrows.

“That new attraction at the Crystal Phoenix is on the verge of opening, isn’t it?” Max asked, switching from syrup to coffee. “I’ve been hearing and reading nothing in the local media lately but squibs about the new Action Jackson subterranean virtual-reality mine ride and the Domingo flamingo farango—whatever performance-art installation and the children’s petting zoo.”

“Mmphhank ouuu!” Temple got out before she could finish mashing waffle.

Nothing paid tribute to a public relations person’s expertise more than a host of well-planted news items. You had to nibble the public to death to make an impression: repeated, needling mentions, rather like piranha love bites.

“So you’re perfect for the job,” Max went on.

“Of buying a big cat.”

“I don’t expect you to tote one home in your U-Haul. Just to…go shopping.”

“You can shop for lions, and tigers, and bears?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Of course it’s highly illegal.”

“Illegal.” Temple polished off the last swipe of waffle and reached for her morning multivitamin pill, which was almost bigger than she was. “I love to do illegal.”

Max grinned. “Yes, you do. I had no idea when I ran into you in Minnesota—”

“You ran into a ficus tree while looking at me.”

“You ran into a drinking fountain while looking at me.”

“At least we didn’t damage the greenery and the water supply.”

“No, they damaged us.”

“Then did we damage us?”

He sobered instantly. “No, fate and the past damaged us. Not too badly, I hope.” She shrugged it off good-naturedly, but he went on. “I often wonder if you would have been better off, safer and saner anyway, if I’d just stayed lost.”

“You would have never come back? Why did you?”

“I told myself that it was safe, for me, but especially for you. Sometimes magicians get so good at deceiving audiences they even fool themselves.” He pushed the plate of waffles and syrup away as if sickened by sweetness when his thoughts had turned so sour. “If I hadn’t come back, you’d probably be married to Devine by now.”

“No! There wasn’t anything that serious between us.”

“He sure hates me enough for there to have been.”

“Matt doesn’t hate you, he just thinks—”

“That I had no business coming back and getting you into trouble. He’s right.”

“Max. Those thugs were going to waylay me whether you came back or not. Molina was going to hassle me whether you came back or not. Better you’re here. Now when I’m hounded, I’ve got a secret weapon.”

“Too secret. This isn’t the way I wanted us to live. I don’t think you’re happy with it either.”

“No,” Temple admitted, “but I don’t see how we can change things.”

“I keep telling myself that it wasn’t ego, my coming back and winning you back. That seeing you’d met Devine didn’t make me territorial. But I’m so used to everything going my way, by hook or by crook. And now look—the ring I gave you in New York, missing. Stolen, onstage, yet, in front of Devine and Molina and everybody. The future I promised you in New York—no bogeymen or women, me free of my undercover past and us living like a normal couple, married with…cat. Enter Kathleen O’Connor, stage left-wing. Or is she right-wing? Either way, she’s no angel. Domesticity is history.”

“That’s not your fault, Max.”

“You’ve changed. And that is my fault.” He frowned down at the countertop tile, his long fingers moving over it like it was a chessboard mysteriously vacant of kings, queens, bishops, knights, and pawns that he could move.

Max did not do angst, but he was perilously close now.

“Maybe it’s for the better,” Temple said.

He glanced up, startled.

“Maybe I’ve changed for the better. Gotten stronger. And what shape would I have been in if you’d never come back? Do you know how everybody pities and despises a woman whose guy has walked out on her? It’s nasty. Everybody thought I was crazy for believing in you, but you did come back. You proved me right.”

“Even if they think you’re still crazy for sticking with an invisible man.”

“You manage to show up when it matters. So. Have you figured out why you really came back?”

“I always knew, Temple. I love you.”

“That simple?”

“That complicated.”

She put her hands around his, smiled. “I always knew that you love me and I love you. And at least we’re together again, in a way. Barr and Kinsella, undercover detectives. I think we make a good team, even if it’s not onstage.”

He finally smiled back. “I admit I underestimated your capacity for the lurid and the offbeat during our Minneapolis honeymoon.”

“See. That’s what was wrong. Most people honeymoon in Las Vegas. We came to Las Vegas, and suddenly the honeymoon was over.”

“Not completely over.”

“No,” she admitted, looking down at their empty plates. “I wish you still lived here with me.”

“I can’t, Temple. It would blow my cover and make you a target.”

She looked up. “At least you ask me to help out now and then.”

“Like I said, I underestimated you. Doing PR for a regional repertory theater looked like such a respectable position. Maybe it was your previous life as a TV news reporter, but you really have a heck of a need to know. Tell you that you can’t go somewhere, and you’ll scratch, kick, and burrow—or con—your way in. And look as innocent as Shirley Temple all the while. No wonder you drive Molina nuts.”

Temple basked in Max’s regard. She had developed her serious snooping instincts during the long year he’d been missing in action, and was glad to hear the professional spook admit that the amateur sleuth was effective, even useful. In limited ways, at least. It was more than Molina would ever do.

“So what’s the story on the big cat?” she asked, using a caffeine chaser to wash down starches and sugars.

“I don’t know yet. The Cloaked Conjuror’s leopard has been kidnapped. It could be by a ring of illegal animal dealers. It could be by some disgruntled local magicians who don’t like him squealing on how stage illusions are done. It could be—”

“The Synth.”

Max nodded, staring into the dark depths of his coffee as if expecting an image to appear there. “CC has heard from them. It. Supposedly. The note could have been a misleading hoax.”

“Cee-cee?”

“I can’t keep repeating that corny title. The Cloaked Conjuror. Ye gods, what the public will buy.”

Temple squinted at her kitchen wall clock, a rhinestoned Felix the Cat model with twitching tail for a pendulum that Electra had given her after her most recent brush with death.

“The CC seemed nervous at the TitaniCon judges’ table even before all hell broke loose. Once the action started, he and his bodyguards got out of there fast.”

“He’s a nervous man. The media aren’t kidding about death threats. He makes enough money to live behind the security measures of a drug lord, but I don’t think that would help him against a cabal of rogue magicians.”

“They make bad enemies?”

“The worst.” Max was dead serious. Then he lightened up. “But I don’t know that this leopard snatching has anything to do with the Synth, if there is such an entity. No ransom demand has turned up yet, which is a little disturbing. So I’m going on the first premise: the cat was taken by someone who wanted a ‘tame’ wild animal to peddle for big dough to a drug lord or a vanity collector.”

“Isn’t it dangerous to abduct a leopard?”