Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Osiris’s front nails were clipped, and he was probably shot with a tranquilizer gun.”

Temple looked at Louie and winced. “Please, no gory details in front of the c-a-t. Louie’s ears are flat back; it’s like he knows you’re discussing an attack on a cat.”

“He knows he’s not going to get any leftovers,” Max said. “That’s his problem.”

“But he’s scowling. Can’t you see the little vertical wrinkles in his forehead fur?”

“Yes, and they’re always there. With all the bad actors I have on my tail, I refuse to get worried about being eavesdropped on by a cat.”

Temple exchanged a glance with Louie. He blinked in what she could choose to regard as complicity, or as the usual feline boredom with messy human affairs.

“So you need me to pose as a woman desperately seeking a leopard for…oh, I get it! For the new Crystal Phoenix animal attraction. But we have a consultant doing that. I have nothing to do with it.”

“You don’t have to tell anyone that.”

“Of course not. When do you want to do this?”

“Starting today? Osiris is a pampered performing animal. I’d like to get him back home with as little trauma as possible.”

“Then you think the snatchers, and the sellers, are around here?”

“No sense transporting an animal when there are plenty of buyers in Las Vegas. This town attracts people who like to live big and break rules.”

“You don’t think they’d hurt the leopard?”

“Not intentionally, I hope, but for all the animal compounds around Vegas, the biggest being Siegfried and Roy’s, there are also some sleazy, questionable operations.”

Temple, who longed to visit Siegfried and Roy’s white stucco wonderland especially designed for their rare white tigers and other big cats, recalled the sleek black panther that Max had borrowed for his unsettling Houdini “haunting” illusion at the Halloween haunted house attraction the previous fall.

“I’d hate to think of Kahlúa in bad hands,” she said.

“A lot of love and training go into a performing animal,” Max agreed. “They’re a special breed. Every animal is a partner in the act. Stealing one is more than nipping an investment.”

“You never worked with big cats.”

Max glanced to the countertop. “Maybe that’s why Louie and I have never gotten along.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say you two don’t get along. It’s just that you’re both too overprotective of the same person.”

“Yeah, you can take care of yourself,” he mocked. “Seriously, you’ve got the gumption of a pit bull when someone is trying to keep you from knowing what you think you should. Where did that come from? Besides the news biz.”

“I suppose that didn’t hurt.” Temple hadn’t thought about it much. “Maybe mostly from being the youngest and littlest and femalest in the family. Everybody was always beating me up by sheltering me from something. It got tiresome. The more they whispered or concealed, wouldn’t show me or tell me, or wouldn’t let me tag along, the more I wanted and needed to know, to hear, to go there. That’s all.”

“Picked on with love,” Max said, almost nostalgically.

“Picked on is picked on, whatever the motive.” She pulled her own coffee mug near, nursed it between her slightly cool fingertips. “So what did your birth order do for you? You’ve mentioned your cousin, but even I don’t know about your immediate family. I never thought to ask, because you always seemed so…solo.”

“That was my act. The Mystifying Max. I deliberately avoided using the usual assistants. No nubile girls. Just me.”

“Even Zorro had a henchman.”

“Only on TV. But in the family, I was the oldest, with younger sisters and one very little brother. That’s why my cousin Sean and I bonded. Brothers more than buddies. A guy your own age to do everything with, with none of the little everyday family tensions to drive us apart, or make us fight over stupid things. Until Ireland.”

Temple nodded, not mentioning the disastrous fight over a woman in the end. “A soulmate. I grew up alone in a large family.”

“So did I,” Max said.

“We’re absolutely unique, and two of a kind.”

“Yup. Now, will you be my shill?”

It wasn’t a proposal of marriage, but when he put it that way, how could she refuse?

Max was still driving the Maxima dropped off for him a couple weeks before by some anonymous contact. Such edgy manipulations were the only proof Temple had that Max led an undercover life for a shadowy international antiterrorism organization.

He seemed to relish the black car’s nondescript profile, and its play upon his name. It was as if his life always had to be so anonymous that brand names became extensions of his personality.

Today he drove the Maxima out Highway 95 into the desert that surrounded Las Vegas like a white paper doily surrounds a glazed fruit tart, Las Vegas being the tart, of course, and a gaudy little number she was, too.

Temple adored going places with Max and doing things together again, even if they were clandestine. Their “honeymoon” period was symbolic; intimations of marriage had been scuttled by the realities of Max’s antiterrorist past when it rose up like a deep-sea monster.

Today, there were no monsters, and there never would be any sea here, just desert. The blue sky was cloudless, yet grew misty at the horizon where the distant mountains shimmered like the mauve and lavender glints in an opal.

Much as Temple loved to drive herself, a bit faster than the law allowed, she loved letting Max drive her somewhere, somewhere surprising. He was a magician by profession, after all, even if he was now forcibly retired.

When the car finally turned onto a rutted sandy road, it drove into the encroaching desert for a quarter mile. Then she saw a big wooden sign with white-painted lettering carved into its wind-weathered surface.

“‘Animal Oasis,’” she declaimed and asked at the same time.

“No shills needed here,” Max reassured. “This is where we’ll research your upcoming role. Ever wonder where I got that cloud of cockatoos for the finale of my act?”

“You kept them in that wonderful mesh aviary at the Goliath theater. They looked so gorgeous flitting around that tropical greenery. I’d never seen plants backstage before, unless it was for a production of Little Shop of Horrors .”

“Audrey Junior was hardly a plant,” Max objected, referring to the domineering carnivorous growth that had starred in the cult film and the later musical play and film. He was as much a theater and film buff as Temple was, another reason they had clicked like the opening tumblers of a bank safe.

“I’m just in a gruesome mood,” Temple admitted. “Did you know your cockatoo retreat inspired my idea for an elegant petting zoo at the Crystal Phoenix?”

“That Goliath setup was only for the length of my contract. The birds came from here. And they came back here when I went.”

“Do you miss them? I mean, did you like working with animals?”

“Sometimes better than with people. Well-trained birds are easy to work with. Except for the occasional dropping. A real drawback when wearing black is your trademark.”

“Kind of like really large, gooey dandruff.”

Max grimaced at her comparison. “Luckily, the distance between stage and audience hides a multitude of flaws.”

Temple didn’t mention that sometimes the distance between magician and mate could also hide a multitude of flaws.

She thrust aside past issues, leaning forward to see their destination, intrigued to encounter a place that housed performing animals. Animal Oasis. It sounded like a shelter, but was there really any true shelter for creatures that could be bought and sold like household plants?