Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

He smiled as he booted the kickstand aside and revved the engine simultaneously.

A Hesketh Vampire's corporate symbol was a chicken, royally crowned and prominently displayed. Only the British could get away with that kind of underplaying. Still, Matt didn't think a "Chicken" emblazoned helmet would do his health any good.

With the one thousand cc engine growling out fair warning to any small-cylinder vehicles foolish enough to be out there, Matt revved and roared his incongruous way onto the side street.

He still caught the lurid comet tail of the Strip's evening rush hour when he headed to ConTact at six-thirty. Tonight the wind was chilly, and his nylon windbreaker offered as much protection against it as waxed paper.

Potential speed demon or not, he got caught, along with about three hundred cars, by the long red light at Sahara Avenue.

While their conjoined engines idled, growling like sleeping tigers, a stream of pedestrians filled the crosswalks. Matt shivered as he kept the big bike balanced. It was colder sitting still than pushing into the wind, oddly enough. The lined leather gloves he wore on rare visits home to Chicago were welcome. He saw why leather had become a hallmark of the biker crowd: practicality. The menace had come afterward.

Maybe it was because his mind was on idle, and growling with impatience like the surrounding cars. Or because his thoughts had hopscotched to Chicago, knee-deep snows and bitter, biting wind. Bitter, biting memories.

Or because the day was in that twilight zone, when traffic lights are just beginning to brighten in contrast to the waning natural light, when shadows seem to stretch over Las Vegas all the way from the western mountains. As if a giant hand were reaching out to squeeze the light out of life like wringing lemon juice from a rind.

Or maybe it was Temple's talk of seances and death and ghosts.

But Matt recognized a certain shamble as it moved past his day, dreaming vision. A man in the crowd: aviator sunglasses, though the daylight had given up the ghost for today; cowboy hat; jeans jacket; hunched shoulders. Sideburns.

Matt blinked.

The man was already three quarters of the way through the lengthy crosswalk, swallowed to all but the high-crowned, dingy Western hat by the people who had followed and passed him.

Still. Matt studied his position. Far right lane. Guy heading away from him to the left.

Couldn't be worse, couldn't be more impossible. About as impossible as that walk, that hesitating lope that never seemed in a hurry to get anywhere, but always got there faster than you thought. The icy wind Matt felt was not external. Cold was not a consideration anymore.

How could he ... ?

The semaphore light changed to green. Surrounding cars sprang forward, fog lights straining into the creeping shadow of night. Matt found himself making a split-second decision. Maybe the Hesketh Vampire was making it: leaning left, slipping into a slot between a dawdling Volvo and a sprinting Camaro, nipping across the path of a lumbering limo as long as the buffet line at the Goliath. Dodging front and rear fenders, coasting between the massive metal walls of Chevrolet Suburbans, only inches to spare. He felt like Charlton Heston in the chariot-race scene from The Ten Commandments . Only Matt's rival was not Messala with a whip wanting to win at any cost, but the invisible whip of memory, which al-ways drove to lose....

By the next traffic light, Charleston Boulevard, Matt was first in line in the left turn lane, waiting, waiting for time to make the red light green. Don't it make, don't it make, don't it make your red eyes green? When the light finally blinked, the Hesketh Vampire whipped around the concrete island in a U-turn so tight that Matt felt momentarily horizontal to the street.

Now he was veering across lanes to the right. God, if he so much as scraped Electra's--

Kinsella's--precious scooter! That Geo wasn't moving, so... in and out. The machine was a born accomplice to recklessness, Matt was discovering. It seemed to exult in his insane stampede across lines of traffic. Where would the walker be now? Turning left or right along the Strip?

Heading straight on Sahara? Anywhere in the crowd. Matt's only edge was that battered hat.

Back at the same intersection as before, only facing south, with the light having withdrawn another three shades pale and the whole flat valley looking drenched in dusk, with darkness soon to clench its angry, hidden fist until the evening sky was squeezed of everything but stars....

Which way?

No choice.

The light ahead had gone green. A pulsing, pausing metal wall leaped forward, the Vampire first again. Matt scanned the groups of people dribbling into Circus-Circus, the ones walking down the sidewalk to the Stardust or the Frontier, the Treasure Island and Mirage, or even the Luxor's far faint obelisk and pyramid.

No cowboy hats, no hats at all.

A driveway. Had to turn around, go back.

No driveway, not for a long time. The Strip was like that, long segments of hotel frontage uninterrupted by anything but panhandlers.

Where? Vanishing where, even now? Back there.

Matt was sweating despite the chill wind. Rivulets ran down the sides of his face behind the Plexiglas visor. Had to turn back.

The Vampire jumped the curb like a steeplechase steed, cruised across the sidewalk and bumped down into the next driveway, not even noticing what it led to, intersecting the long semicircle almost at the halfway point.

Matt followed it around until it hit a parking-lot road heading west. He streaked along the straightaway, swerving when a car poked its headlights out of an aisle between parked vehicles.

A horn screamed annoyance, but he and the Vampire were ducking into another aisle, hunting for an exit.

They paused together at the deserted entrance to Sahara, hearts beating in concert. The engine's rumble was louder. A few people ambled along the sidewalk on either side, but the cold was too off-putting to encourage much foot traffic on this dead side of the hotel.

Matt looked right and left. Saw no cowboy hat. He lifted the amber-smoke visor to study the street again, Nothing. No one worth anything.

Finally he checked his watch, its pale green face night time bright now in the deepening dusk.

Ten to seven. Time to get to ConTact.

Matt waited anyway. Maybe the man had stopped to buy a newspaper from the corner machines. Maybe he would come by, if he hadn't ducked into Circus Circus or Slots-A-Fun.

Maybe he was still walking east on Sahara.

Maybe he was, but Matt had to get to work on time. He was needed there. Here, he was chasing his imagination. The wind dried the liquid on his skin into pinpricks of sleet. He gave the Vampire its head, like a horse. And it took it. It rolled out onto the asphalt of the street, purring.

At the light he watched the steady red while scanning the intersection crowds for the right cowboy hat, for any cowboy hat.

There was none. Green blossomed in the dark as he and the Vampire started forward like automatons. A LVMPD police car passed in the opposite direction. Matt held the 'cycle to a decorous speed and pattern now: stayed in place, kept to the right lane. He looked right and left, but saw nothing.

Still, he was certain of something. The man who had crossed the Strip while he waited stalled at a red light had walked like only one man he had ever known. Cliff Effinger. The stepfather from Hell who was supposed to be dead.

Matt knew that rolling walk, as surely as he had been uncertain of the corpse lying still and chill in the coroner's viewing booth. Matt looked down again from a distance on the earthly remains of the reputed Cliff Effinger. He couldn't identify him for sure, as Lieutenant Molina had wanted. Yet the man-in-a-crosswalk's name had screamed out with every step he took.