Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

Max held out his glass. The word predestination crossed Matt’s mind before he chimed rims with his second-worst nightmare. Kinsella was right. Handicapped but right.

It would have to be a battle to the death with the banshee from Max’s past and Matt and Temple’s future. Matt had been uneasily relieved to hear his attacker had at one time been declared dead, by Max, at the end of an attempt to hound the object of her twenty-year vendetta into a deadly auto accident. The deadly auto accident had just happened months later and five thousand miles away … to another man.

None of this was what it appeared to be, and not so simple. They needed to collaborate, again, Matt and Temple and Max, to find out what had really happened, what hadn’t, and what was in store for them.

Matt had evidently ID’d the wrong body with a very wrong feeling of relief. Old sins come back to haunt you. And, for him, hard.

Kathleen O’Connor rides again.

Chapter 31

Every Silver Cloud …

Temple sat at home alone on a Friday night, her only companion a cat, and racked her brain to pick some neutral territory where she and the M&M boys—Matt and Max—could meet to discuss their precarious physical and mental situation.

She’d heard about last evening’s raw and recent M&M rendezvous at the Blue Dahlia from Matt. She didn’t want to risk Carmen showing up for the 10:00 P.M. show, if the trio met there. Matt and Temple and Max and Molina would not make a “fantastic foursome.”

Temple was too well known at the Crystal Phoenix.

And Planet Hollywood was suddenly “too Max.”

Anyone’s place of residence? The Circle Ritz condo address that all three had shared at one time was also the only place she had slept with both men … at different times, Temple reminded herself.

She couldn’t help being a serial monogamist—life threw love at you as unpredictably as a twenty-one dealer threw players aces—but she certainly wasn’t a two-timer, and her fiancé and ex would probably gang up together on anyone who implied that.

Wait! What about that commodious old house Orson Welles had once lived in? It looked bland but was supersecure. No. Max was living in it again, out of perversity or penance, and its forever-link to his slain mentor Gandolph was too memory-laden.

So, Barr, you’re a PR whiz kid. Come up with the perfect location.

No more restaurants. They were impersonal and noisy, especially in Vegas, fine for breaking bad news to the men in your life so they couldn’t go too postal in public, but not for serious strategy sessions complicated by deep-seated male competition.

Another good controllable environment skidded to a premature stop in her mind. No. They could hardly reserve Electra’s in-house wedding chapel.… True, the only ears in the place were on Electra’s imaginative soft-sculpture “congregation,” including Elvis. But the connotations of wedded bliss hit way too close to home.

Temple was totally flummoxed.

This was unheard of.

She prided herself on being the Go-To Guru for whatever or whomever you needed to know in or about Sin City. She was the PR concierge for the whole damn city. The Vegas Magus. The Sage of the Strip. The Info Icon. The utterly In-the-Know Nabob. She of all people would intuit where to take your ex and your current fiancé to solve mutual mysteries without devolving into past issues and public spectacles.

Not a clue.

So she called her aunt Kit.

“Don’t whimper,” Kit said, when she’d heard Temple’s complaints of failure to be innovative, or even sensible. “You’re simply too emotionally involved.”

“Not news,” Temple said.

“A cooler head would list the necessities.”

“A sword for my own hara-kiri?”

“Nonsense. Suicide is gainless. You need to control the horizontal. You need to control the vertical.”

“I don’t believe in attempting to ‘control’ men,” Temple said loftily.

“Not the men, silly. The circumstances. What do you need for this ‘meet’?”

“‘Meet’? Kit, you’ve been hanging with the Fontana family too long already.”

“Answer my question.”

“Uh, privacy,” Temple said. “So a restaurant won’t do. It’s a busy Friday night anyway.”

“And—what else?”

“Liquor should be available as social lubrication, but in moderate amounts. Matt doesn’t drink much—yet, but Max is a melancholy Celt in mourning and fresh from the Ould Sod. So a bar is too tempting as well as too public.”

“What about a pub? Ale is less intoxicating.”

“Auntie! Pub? Max lost his best friend, twice, two decades apart, in Irish pubs. Or near them.”

“Oh.” Kit sounded stymied. “No, beer would not be good. Champagne is all right, though?”

“I doubt anybody will be celebrating this reunion.”

“Privacy, limited liquor…” Kit repeated.

“And nobody can see us.”

“I was an actress and I am a writer, so I can assure you that cloaks of invisibility are not only fictional but a very difficult stage effect. Maybe Max could—”

“Max is not the mastermind here. I am.”

“And your mind is out to lunch. Hush. No protests. You’re so emotionally unstrung. Two wonderfully eligible bachelors on your hands. It would make a terrific reality-TV show.”

“Been there, done that. Bloody murder resulted. Two of them. It may be awkward to have present and past guys in my life, but I can’t afford to risk both of them being killed.”

“And so you shan’t. Lovely verb, isn’t that? Shan’t. So British. Thank you for allowing me to feel very Emma Thompson. I’ll handle it all.”

“You’re not coming along, Kit.”

“Certainly not! And make it a foursome? I’m a married woman now, Temple, to a hot-tempered Italian who brooks no rivals and springs for no free drinks for other guys. I just happen to have thought of the ideal solution. I’ll get back to you in a lickety-split moment.”

Temple shut off her cell phone.

Midnight Louie jumped up beside her, rubbing his nose against her arm.

He was a very nosy cat.

“You remember Aunt Kit?” she asked him. “From our magical, mystery Christmas trip to Manhattan a while back?” Her fingers circled his ears, the way he liked it. “You were on the brink of stardom as a spokescat, and I—”

Temple suddenly clapped her palms to her ears. She just remembered that their jaunt to the Big Apple had ended with her being suddenly whisked away by Max for a night of sex in the city.

What woman on earth wanted to be “caught between the moon and New York City,” between an old lover and a new one? Oooh. That sounded so tacky. Like she was a Material Girl who couldn’t make up her mind.

Stop whining.

Kit was right.

Max was now a memory-impaired mess, and Matt was too earnest for his own good.

Both of them had been targets of Kitty the Cutter’s most homicidal rages. Someone had to make up for male gallantry and take the bad “grrrrl” down.

Temple didn’t believe in calling women “bitches.” She did believe in fighting evil of any gender tooth and nail. Well, with her tenacious teeth and—she eyed Louie—his ferocious claws now and again.

*

A half hour later she was leaving cryptic messages on both men’s cell phones.

“The Kitty the Cutter Club meets at eight P.M. In the Circle Ritz parking lot.” She left that message for Matt and hung up.

“The Kitty the Cutter Club meets at eight-twenty P.M.,” she purred into the unanswered ether of Max’s cell phone. “On the corner of Mojave and Juniper.”

Temple left the message, as instructed, and hung up.

This mission was like those animal riddles about how prey and predator cross a river. Kit decreed that the men shouldn’t be left alone with each other.