Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

The doors remain ajar, but we can hear the screech as Red puts the bus into gear.

With a mutual look, we race toward the huge silver bus. I tell myself that timing is everything, even as I urge Caviar to greater speed. Together we sink our claws in sand to keep from shooting under the bus. I smell hot rubber and diesel fuel, and--somewhere near--

something dead.

"Get on!" I yowl, unsheathing my claws to give her a spur in the flank.

She shoots up the stairs so fast that Red will think she is me.

Even as I watch, the accordion doors snap shut, grinding their rubber buffer strips like toothless gums.

I hear Red on the microphone, announcing the rest of the itinerary.

"Now that you have had a tasty lunch at Temple Bar, we will head back up north, folks, for a leisurely tour of the Valley of Fire, with dinner at Echo Bay. Hope you enjoy."

I back up as he turns the behemoth and it starts lumbering for the access road.

An old lady in a baseball cap at a nearby window jumps, then I see Caviar pasted to the tinted glass, her green eyes focused on me with furious disbelief.

"It is better this way, kid," I tell her, though she cannot hear me. Maybe she can read lips.

She is too young and inexperienced to lay her life on the line in case of such dire necessity.

And she is blood kin, after all. Plus, this is no job for a dainty little lady who is as green as a twenty-dollar bill.

Besides, I work best alone.

I dash around the back of the restaurant and breathe a sigh of relief.

A big white truck is idling there, its back doors as wide open as heaven's gate.

HARRY THE MEATMAN the sido lettering reads, LAS VEGAS.

Here is my ticket to ride. I leap up into the dark cool interior. Ah, at least the ride back will be air-conditioned and considerably more direct than the tour bus. I chuckle to think of Caviar seething amid a busload of tourists all calling her "Kitty, Kitty." I just hope that she does not bite the hand that feeds her. Red might bear me a grudge.

I hunker down behind a carton of wieners and curl into as tight a ball as I can manage. Not only could I be accused of attempted assault on a side of beef if I am found, but if my calculations are wrong and we do not speed back to Las Vegas post haste, I could end up on ice, permanently.

I shiver as I contemplate the long odds facing me. At least if I die it will be in a meat locker.

Chapter 34

Girded for the Gridiron

Matt jerked down the sleeves of his black dinner jacket for the third time. He wasn't used to white cuffs showing.

He winced to glimpse himself in the makeshift mirror of Temple's French doors. Twilight's soft sable fog was pushing against them, so his rented suit vanished into the oncoming night. He looked like a dark-cloaked magician standing against the illusion of concealing black curtains, only his pale head, shirtfront and disembodied hands visible.

The black satin bow tie perched at his throat looked frivolous, even oddly sinister. It was such a different symbol from the plain notch of white linen he had been used to wearing.

Black tie was the last vestige of the peacock in modern male dress, and, ironically, also the closest thing to clerical garb.

He could hear Temple moving in the other room, the click of her heels telegraphing unread messages onto the hard tiled bathroom floor and then the bedroom's quieter walnut parquet.

She was late; she wasn't quite ready; she was as nervous as a barefoot cat on a batter-ready waffle iron.

In two hours the curtains would sweep back on the Las Vegas Gridiron show. Temple's sole, show-closing skit would be on the line, not to mention the others she had doctored at Danny Dove's invitation.

Matt had never glimpsed that opening-night edge in Temple before. It must date back to her amateur theater days, he mused, even to her time before the cameras when she had worked as a television news reporter.

Tonight she broadcast an air of energy and suppressed excitement that made him edgy. He remembered that Max Kinsella must have shared that singular exhilaration; that they had understood and suited each other very well; that he was a stranger, an uneasy intruder in an arena he hardly knew.

"Where on earth is Louie?"

Temple came trotting out from the bedroom, trying to screw a rhinestone dangle into her left ear.

"Not here. Nor is Caviar at home upstairs. Trouble?"

"Ouch! Oh, I'm all . . . thumbtacks . . . tonight! I seldom wear these blasted glitzy things. I can't find the hole."

"I didn't even know--notice--that you had pierced ears."

"It's this rusty mop. Distracts everyone."

"I'd help if I could." The Matt in the French doors lifted uncertain hands.

"Just look and tell me when I get the prong through."

Temple came over to present her earlobe, all the while jabbing at it like a mad jackhammer.

Matt squinted at the operation, then lifted his hands. "There Looks like a picture nail went through."

"Good." Temple slapped a tiny clip over the prong and smiled. She pulled a small chrome purse paved with rhinestones from under her elbow. "Hope I've got everything. I'm not used to Lilliputian evening bags . . . say, you look fabulous."

"You think so?" Matt pulled his sleeves down again. The shirt cuffs seemed wrong.

"Perfect." Temple pulled his cuffs up a half-inch. ''What about me? Anything off?"

He supposed married couples performed this mutual inspection ritual on evenings out, a thought that made him even more nervous.

"Perfect," he repeated for lack of originality, not so sure. Temple's gown was a slim, short beaded length of glittering silver--shapeless yet slinky, as liquid as a mercury fountain.

''How do you like my latest Stuart Weitzmans?" She turned to present him with a cocked, pale-hosed calf. "My first dressy high heels since I did a double axle down the Crystal Phoenix stairs."

Matt studied the mysteries of a black suede high-heeled pump with an ankle strap. Its gravity-defying, curved Brancusi sculpture of a steel heel was sheathed in white rhinestones.

"A masterpiece," he pronounced with confidence.

Temple sighed with edgy content. "Shall we go?"

Matt checked his watch, an inexpensive Timex that looked shoddy against the rented finery he had been advised to wear. "We're only twenty minutes late."

"I know!" Temple rushed to her door, then hesitated; she wasn't waiting for him to open it.

Her subtly made-up face fell. "Louie's been gone so much lately. Where can he be? It's not like him to desert me in my hour of need."

"You think the show is going to be that bad?"

"I don't know! I'm too close to it. You tell me after you've seen it. I don't think I can bear to watch."

Matt laughed and opened the door for her anyway.

*******************

Temple certainly knew how to prolong her misery.

Despite the delay, they had arrived at the Crystal Phoenix early enough for her to conduct an antsy tour of the stage's underbelly. She led Matt to a frill-free freight elevator that whisked them down a floor in silent, motionless magic. He couldn't help thinking of a magician's vanishing cabinet, which people entered to disappear and emerge from again on cue. Despite the elevator's impression that it had gone nowhere, the stainless steel doors slid open on vast warehouselike space, the antithesis of the meticulously decorated atmosphere above.

Matt was treated to more clicking heels on a hard surface-- concrete in this case--more pre-performance jitters and the sight of amateur chorines in exceedingly careless states of undress, which made his ears overheat. He had been an ordinary citizen for eight months now; when would he become blase about the simplest signals in a world that emphasized, rather than ignored, boy-girl interaction?