Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

He followed her suggestion with irritating slowness. "Don't mind me. I'm here to answer any questions, that's all. Pretend I'm a piece of furniture."

Temple stared at the cursor and typed ''wp'' for WordPerfect. The familiar program flashed up in amber characters. Imagining what piece of furniture Crawford Buchanan could be was distracting, but she settled on a Victorian model of water closet named after its inventor, a certain infamous Mr. Crapper, and smiled.

For a while she was only aware of the sharp clack of her long fingernails on plastic and the speedy chuckle of the computer keyboard under her fingertips. And the occasional turn of a tabloid page beyond the computer screen.

By the time Temple had a screenful of idea fragments to consider, half an hour had passed surprisingly painlessly. Why was Crawford being so good? She eyed him over the computer screen. Of course he wasn't doing anything, except skimming the rag he worked for and watching her work; it was probably all he did all day anyway.

"How about,'' she asked at last, **a production number on all the big new hotels and theme parks."

"We did skits on those projects as they came up in past years."

"Yeah, but this would be the Mother of all Modem Redevelopment skits: a Theme Park from Hell bigger than anything that has hit the Strip yet."

''It's hard to top reality in Las Vegas, T.B."

''That's why you brought me in on this, C.B."

"Try whatever you think. I'm final arbiter, though."

"Oh, great. You beg me to contribute something, then you're going to play judge and jury, plus impresario?"

"That's the show chairman's job. Life is full of uncertainty. I'm sure you'll rise to the occasion."

He leaned around her computer to leer in the direction of her legs again.

"You are disgusting, or hasn't anyone told you?"

Crawford smiled. "They tell me all the time, but flattery doesn't cut any ice with me."

"Nor does good taste," Temple said with a snarl, returning to the job that brought her here: creating a clever, fresh, workable script out of thin air while being ogled by the city's worst black sheep in Tom Wolfe clothing.

Chapter 10

Present Tense

Three o'clock in the morning wasn't really a bad time--if it was the end of your working day, so to speak. The Las Vegas air was cool, maybe sixty-five degrees. Street lights and stars sprinkled the black desert sky.

Matt liked the middle of the night. That was one of the things he had discovered while working for ConTact. Maybe he was a monastic throwback to a time and a tempo of life when monks heeded the canonical hours devoted to prayer around the clock.

Now would be lauds.

Las Vegas marked fleeting moments of meditation in its own inimitable way.

Hearing a hoarse roar in the distance. Matt let his fancy roam farther afield. Had the MGM

lion lived up to its own TV commercial and opened its gilded maw? Or maybe the Luxor's Sphinx had broken centuries of smug silence to unhinge its stony jaws for a good, noisy yawn. Or was it just Midnight Louie, taking a lauds stroll through the nearby shrubbery with his sizable stomach growling?

Matt knew what force really hurled the faint, howling challenge to the night: theme-hotel indigestion. The Mirage's volcano was preparing to belch its clockwork stream of ready-made fire.

Still, anything could happen in Las Vegas. Including crimes against a person who walked alone at night.

Matt always studied his surroundings on these long walks home. He wasn't particularly afraid, just cautious. Everyone knew the usual tourist pitfalls of the Strip--private dancers who performed the ever-popular routine called the Customer Shakedown, and that's all . . .

prostitutes who rolled high-rollers for high-dollar Rolex watches . . . creeps who sold dangerous designer drugs. The biggest danger in the city's neighborhoods was the same phenomenon that dogged all other large cities. Gangs. If you were unlucky enough to get caught in the sudden lethal spray of a gang shoot-out, it wouldn't matter whether you were walking or riding, or whether it was day or night.

So Matt felt a warning tingle at the back of his neck. A car was following him. A lone walker, a driver who perhaps was not alone. Businesses that opened at ten a.m. and closed at six--or ten p.m., tops--lined the street. ConTact kept the latest hours in this area. Its women employees were always escorted to their cars, a duty Matt often performed.

All the employees had cars, except Matt, though nobody at ConTact had noticed. He arrived on time, left on time, and always came back the next night. A man wasn't stalker-bait as women were. Nobody worried about him, including Matt. He knew he was always armed by the-formidable depth of his unhealed rage.

Still, a car was following him, creeping down the street about a hundred feet behind at an idling speed unnatural to anything made in Detroit.

Matt managed to kick a discarded Dr Pepper can, stumble, then turn as he regained his balance. He glimpsed a barge as broad as a boat, a late seventies Monte Carlo. Gang-bangers liked all that macho metal from Old Detroit, liked to keep their rust buckets in surprisingly good running order.

Yet this car did not broadcast the low, throaty growl of a souped-up street bomb. It crawled along with a discreet cough, fatigued tires hissing as the elderly rubber peeled over the asphalt.

Matt wasn't surprised that somebody was following him. He'd been tossing out so many lines of inquiry that one could have snagged anyone: a concerned but truculent supporter of Father Hernandez; Molina or one of her minions, annoyed that he had imitated Temple by playing amateur investigator; an aggravated associate who had heard Matt was looking for a man who wanted to stay missing.

Or it could be that man himself.

That thought stopped Matt's breath for a moment. Rage surged so strong that it felt, for a moment, like fear. Neither emotion was useful now. Matt calmed himself, tried to think.

If he had stirred up this kind of interest, he was on to something, in either area he was investigating. He could learn from his stalker. He could teach his stalker that a man walking alone at night is not always a target. Sometimes he is a mobile trap.

Ahead of Matt and the car a semaphore was blinking its timed changes: red, amber, and then green. Matt paced himself to arrive at the intersection when the light was red. He would be forced to stop. So would the car.

This bare, deserted corner offered no place to hide. Matt scanned ranks of locked shops with eerily ill lit display windows. There stood a cheap furniture store, its window infested with scabrous lamp shades. Here was a mailing center flaunting empty cardboard boxes. Next door a low-rent liquor store's windows were papered with hand-written specials on unrecognizable brands.

Matt buried his hands in his pockets and pretended to watch only the red light, waiting for it to change.

What changed was the discreet trailing behavior of the car and its unknown driver. With a squeal of protesting tires, the vehicle made a huge sloppy circle-turn in the empty intersection.

The big old car zipped up to the curb by Matt, its showroom sheen as much of a memory as its original olive-green color faded now to pale chartreuse.

The windows were tinted up-to-no-good, double-dark charcoal, but the driver leaned across the wide seat to roll one down.

Matt waited, ready to bolt, drop to the street, or dive in, whichever was called for.

''Need a ride, counselor?"

The light across the street turned green. Matt grasped the pitted chrome handle and yanked the massive door open. A sodium iodide streetlamp bled soft pink light onto an expanse of cracked vinyl upholstery. It also cast shadows into the lines that seamed the driver's face.