Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Well, there was a fifty-fifty possibility."

"I told Electra that I didn't like the idea."

"That wouldn't change Electra's mind."

"And she said the last thing Max would want now was to be seen on anything as high-profile as this."

"True."

He turned one handle, revving the powerful motor to a faint whine protesting its inaction.

"If the parishioners at Saint Rose of Lima could see me now--they always gave the parish priest a slightly used Volvo."

Temple's unease teetered on a fit of giggles. "Very practical. This isn't."

"I really feel silly."

"So would I."

"Maybe I'll get into it." He shrugged. "I could use a way of getting around, and beggars can't be choosy."

"Just lock it up good if you park it anywhere. It's a collector's item."

Matt shook his head again. "I'm not used to having things that anybody else wants."

This time the pause allowed the larger implications of that remark to cruise above their heads like buzzards. Max was there, the unseen dead body the buzzards circled, gone but not unnoticed all the same. Where was he really, anyway?

Electra's pink Probe turned into the parking area. She stuck an arm out the driver's window as she passed them, thumb up.

"All right!" she shouted.

"Solo flight," Matt explained to Temple modestly before putt-putting slowly to the shed behind the oleanders.

Adorable! Temple shook her head. Women would be taking him under their wings and giving him motorcycle lessons and... and dancing lessons and anything his little towheaded heart might desire from now until doomsday. So why did she resent the fact?

Electra caught up to her inside by the elevators.

"What do you think?

Temple eyed her landlady's ever-changing hair, but found nothing radically different. "About what?"

Electra shrugged and looked over her shoulder. "Letting Matt use the Vampire."

"Does he have a license?"

"He will. Quick pupil. Besides, I hate to think of the poor man making that long walk back from ConTact at three every morning now that the nights are taking a plunge."

Temple laughed.

"What? What's so funny? I'm never amusing unless I mean to be. M

"Yes you are. You are! Electra, it's gotta be a heck of a lot colder racing home on that windjamming machine than simply walking."

"Not with the proper gear, like black leather."

"You may get Matt Devine on a motorcycle, but if you get him into black leather, I'll take you to dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe."

"Done!" Electra blinked as the elevator doors opened and they stepped in. "What makes you think he'll be so resistant to black leather?"

Temple shrugged. "Black looks harsh on blond men."

"Rules are made to be broken."

"But not by Matt. Besides, I think he's had enough black in his life."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That I don't have any concrete reason for thinking your Hell's Angel fantasies about Matt are doomed. Just an instinct," Temple finished with an exaggerated simper.

"You don't have instincts; you have ideas and inside information. FU find out, you know."

"Great, let me know if you do."

Temple whisked out of the opening elevator doors on her floor.

Chapter 4

Haunted House

Haunted-house attractions had never scared Temple. They looked too much like carnival midway sideshows. There was the usual luridly painted, cutout flat up front, with a dingy, boxy building cringing behind it.

No matter what terrifying effects were unleashed inside, Temple could never overlook the hokey outside. She felt the same way about Tunnels of Love. All those painted pastel hearts couldn't camouflage what was basically a trench of fetid water snaking through a darkened warehouse.

And this particular site, on an overgrown lot marked to spawn some massive theme hotel in the next year, looked discouragingly true to form. Old Las Vegas had been too rough and ready, and New Las Vegas too trendy, to grow a genuine haunted house naturally.

The city had no established streets now falling into disuse and lined with creepy, crumbling Victorian mansions that rambled for room after room. Temple had never heard of a ghost in Vegas except for Jersey Joe Jackson, and even his haunted hotel suite was barely fifty years old.

How much evil could accrue in a mere half century? Not enough to raise goosebumps on a public used to slasher movies and horror novels that left no stage of death and decay to the imagination.

She finally dropped her key ring inside her tote bag and minced over the urban litter that drifted down the Las Vegas Strip like the autumn leaves the city so seldom saw, given the climate's year-round vegetation.

A crude wooden sign near the sidewalk announced a schedule of "hauntings" beginning ten days before Halloween. By now the "helliday" itself was only forty-eight hours away, but the busted-flat lot looked as if no one had trespassed on it in weeks.

That was the setup's spookiest part, Temple thought: seeing an essentially empty Strip lot at a time when the Good Ship Las Vegas tossed on a feverish ocean of construction, expansion and upgrade. Temple looked back through the cyclone fencing that surrounded the open space. Cabs cruised the Strip like barges plying some latter-day asphalt Nile. The monorail between Bally's and the MGM Grand whooshed by above street level like a silver bullet, or a French supertrain.

But here, inside the diamond-patterned steel wire, all was quieter than the eye of a storm.

Not that it would be quiet, Temple reminded herself, when folks lined up for a tour, as they would tonight, on the hour from six P.M. until the stroke of midnight.

A dry, scraping sound at her feet made Temple jump. Looking down, she watched a dirty page of the Las Vegas Scoop skitter by. Crawford Buchanan's column happened to land facing up, and his face in the accompanying photo had been nicely wrinkled. Temple added to its troubles by clamping a foot down on the trash in mid-tumble. Her high heel put Buchanan's nose out of joint: a little higher and to the right. She bent to grab the page for disposal, but the gust wrenched it away. She watched it drift toward the lurid haunted-house facade, where a pile of orphaned papers huddled against the painted stone foundation.

Temple moved on, hearing her soles scrape on sandy, rock-strewn soil. If the Midnight Louie shoes were already in her possession, she certainly wouldn't wear them over this blasted sand that could buff the sheen off industrial steel.

Close up, the attraction facade looked like a mismating between the house-on-the-hill from Psycho and a funeral parlor with pretensions of Poe.

The real horror was the architectural styles blended willy-nilly. Grinning gargoyles rubbed stone shoulders with wooden Victorian gingerbread shaped into spiderwebs. Bats flew out of a silhouetted belfry covered in gray shingles, while the entrance was flanked by classical pillars, Southern-style, draped in shrouds of Spanish moss.

At this distance the quick rough strokes of the painting looked singularly unbelievable, but Temple detected a glimmer of some light-reflecting surface. A circle of ground-level spotlights were aimed at the cheesy artwork like howitzers.

No doubt by night the whole thing would light up in a lurid swirl of glow-in-the-dark colors.

Everything in Las Vegas was built to shine at night.

The sound of a demented hinge squealing open made Temple gawk at the front door.

Though painted to resemble ancient wood and wide enough to admit an elephant, the airy ease of its opening belied the whole effect. Within the broadening frame lurked a figure more likely to amaze than afright.

Certainly Temple's jaw dropped.

It dropped even further when a big black cat threaded through the elderly man's slightly bowed legs.