Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

"Tomorrow morning? Temple could suffo--"

"So I told them we have an expert searcher. Better than a drug-sniffing superdog. A human nose when in comes to magical paraphernalia. Think he'll come running if you ask him nicely?"

"I think he'll come running if I tell him that no one cares about looking for Temple until they feel like it."

"I don't care what bait you use. I only care that the fish goes for it."

"Fine." Matt trotted back to the Taurus, angry with both faces of the law.

He leaned over the open driver's side window.

"The drug enforcement unit has priority, but it can't find a thing. The truck will wait in a lot until morning unless you search the magic-show gear for hidden narcotics. If you find Temple, the drug guys won't object."

"Politics."

Max got out and slammed the car door shut. "I suppose my services are Molina's idea?"

"She's along for the ride, just like us."

"She's along for the kill, don't you doubt it."

Kinsella strode forward with seven-league steps, forcing Matt to lengthen his stride. He felt like Chester Goode limping after Mr. Dillon.

Molina greeted Kinsella's arrival with a weary tilt of her head toward the open maw of the trailer. "It's all yours."

Kinsella slicked his hair back from habit, but without an anchor for the pony tail it did no good.

A bulky man in what looked like a flack vest blocked Kinsella's way. "This is what you're looking for." In the light of a flashlight, Matt glimpsed purple-and-white capsules on a palm.

"Pills, or plain powder, like crack. We've done a cursory search, but that truck bed's loaded with mumbo-jumbo stuff. Can't make head or tail of it. The lieutenant said you could."

Kinsella threw a glance over his shoulder. "I guess I'm enough of a politician to be good at mumbo jumbo. Got a light?"

The man handed Kinsella latex gloves and a flashlight as he walked into the squad car spotlight trained on the gaping rear doors. The big rig sat marooned like an island of hollow steel.

Kinsella entered the truck with one superhero leap.

Beside Matt, Molina started, as if afraid he had vanished.

"Always a showman," she commented.

"Maybe he has to con the narcs into letting him have a fair shot at it. Do you think Temple's in there?"

"If she isn't we don't want to speculate where she might be."

"Lieutenant--"

She put a hand on his shoulder. "Do you think I like using Kinsella as a hunt-dog? He's got the best chance. The drug group doesn't believe in magic, that it's possible to hide someone in a hollow box."

"She just. . . disappeared."

"I know. What's worse, she was always meant to."

"Why would drug smugglers care about Temple?"

"Why would Effinger?"

"You like bringing it back to me?"

"No. But that's where it goes back to. So tell me why she was there with him. "

They both knew they were no longer talking about Effinger. They walked away from the truck doors, away from the Crown Vic into the deep velvet dark of the desert. Where they walked, skitter and chitter and grind halted. They carried their own desert with them, empty and dry and silent.

"They're together again," Matt said. Strange how honest that sounded.

"Not at the moment," Molina noted dryly. "I suspect it's more his fault than yours."

"The kidnapping?"

Molina might have nodded. She sighed. "Right. One thing I like about Las Vegas."

"Yes?" He felt like a straight man.

"No mosquitoes."

"No mosquitoes," he agreed. But there were sand fleas and chiggers and a thousand other annoying insects of the high desert. "I'm sorry I didn't spot the woman you were looking for."

"I was looking for an untoward event. We got that."

"You weren't looking for Kinsella."

"No. Sometimes I do love this life."

"Not always."

"No. My instincts tell me she's in that truck."

"Then why doesn't anybody see, hear anything?"

"These are instruments of illusion, packed to the gills and probably transporting narcotics.

They'd be clever about concealment."

"Powder and pills, maybe, but Temple's a human being."

"Small, though. Give me that. Small. A regular Thumbelina."

"You think that has something to do with why they can't find her?"

"I hope so. I hope so."

They turned without further conversation and made their heavy-footed way back through sand and scrub.

The lights were still trained on the inside of the truck.

When the lieutenant stopped to consult with the drug team commander, Matt moved to the very lip of the stalled semi's storage area.

A forest of strange boxes and pedestals resembled a struck stage set for some Mount Olympus drama from the 1930s. Matt listened, and heard the faint mewling of a seagull.

In the desert?

There was Lake Mead, but how many seagulls were trucked in?

"Do you hear--?" Matt intended to ask Molina, who stood only fifteen feet behind him, but a voice much closer answered.

"Shh! I'm following the sound." Kinsella appeared from around a Gothic grandfather clock with a sword for a pendulum.

"That's the only sound you hear?"

"The way these props are built, sound doesn't much escape the perimeters. Magicians are smooth and silent, like the dead, didn't you know?"

Kinsella grinned into the garish light, then vanished behind a gypsy caravan.

Beyond Matt, impatient combat boots ground sand to silica.

"I heard a mewling sound," Matt said hopefully when Molina came up.

"Please. No more cats. This case was heralded by cats. I don't want to see another one."

"What do you mean?"

"Mister Midnight Louie and Miss Midnight Louise were present when Effinger's soggy body was dredged up from the Oasis barge-pool."

"Louie was there? And that cat from the Crystal Phoenix?"

"Yes. I hope you set as little store by the presence of cats on the scene of the crime as I do."

"I'm not superstitious. Still--"

" And everywhere that Temple went, her cat was sure to go?' "

"No, that would be too ridiculous. In fact, lately, Midnight Louie has been showing a marked dislike for his old haunts."

"Has he indeed? Could this be a cat with taste? With deep and eerie instincts? What do you think?"

Before Matt could answer Molina's sarcasm, Max Kinsella appeared from behind a mummy case.

"Might these be what the chaps in the moon-invasion outfits want?" His palm flowered open to reveal a cluster of capsules, half-clear, half-purple.

The drug team gathered around like hash-sniffing hounds.

"Where'd you find those?"

"Baggies of them. Under the celestial robes of the automated Fortune-telling Mama from Yokohama."

"All right!"

Combat boots beat a tattoo on the trailer's metal floor as the men raided the premises.

Max leaned against the trailer's side. "Now that the smuggled drugs are confiscated, I suppose I'm to be allowed a little peace and quiet to search the rest of the props?"

"Hyacinth!" a muffled masculine voice called from inside the truck. "Bingo."

"That's the name of the narcotic?" Matt asked, incredulous. "Hyacinth? That's what the note in Effinger's pocket referred to?"

Molina smiled and braced a hand on the truck level. In an instant she had pulled herself up to the trailer floor level. Kinsella applauded her feat, not easy in a skirt. Then Matt jumped up.

"Hyasynth," Molina repeated. "S-y-n-t-h. A designer drug fresh from Hong Kong. They needed to get it out before the Communists took over and quashed all sorts of dubious private-enterprise factories. One component is a digitalis replica taken from hyacinths as a base to produce the usual high."

"I don't get it." Matt was honestly confused. "Why Las Vegas?"

"Because it wasn't Hong Kong." Max pushed his long frame off the trailer opening. "Perfect cover. A magician's props. Are these clodhoppers going to get out of my way soon, Lieutenant?