Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“He’s not too short to impinge on my pants legs.” Max frowned at the horizontal bar of black hairs.

“Louie impinges on everything,” Matt said, not sounding regretful about Max’s impaired wardrobe.

“Including Temple’s scarf drawer.” Max was trying to brush off the hair, which stuck like barbed fishhooks to the textured linen weave.

“You need tape loops for that,” Temple told him, glad they had skirted the issue of Louie once upon a time impinging on their California-king-size bed. “No. There’s nothing in my scarf drawer that Louie would find worth the effort of opening it. It’s a lost and found for things I don’t feel I can throw out but don’t know what to do with.”

“Kinda like me.”

Matt groaned at Max’s quip. “It’s not all about you anymore.”

“It’s a stupid scarf drawer!” Temple said. “Can you guys keep on point? Which is … that Ouroboros ring turned up in it, I don’t know how.”

“Exactly when was that?” Matt asked her.

“It was after we think Kitty assaulted you with an aspergillum on the crowded down escalator during TitaniCon at the Hilton.”

Max shifted to restretch his legs. “I know my misfiring memory may be a bore, but can we speak about the same planet at least?”

“Yeah.” Matt frowned, trying to rerun his own memory track. “Mini-Molina was there. She was really kiddish then. They grow up fast.”

Temple nodded at Matt. “Mariah was chubby and half bummed out about being ‘watched’ by us … and half totally crushing on you. Now look at her, all teenybopper. No wonder Mama Bear has been getting unraveled lately.”

“Look.” Max said. “This cozy trip down memory lane isn’t helping my recall or my nauseous feeling. What was TitaniCon? What is an aspergillum, which sounds vaguely familiar, like a medication name … or some kind of flower? Why would Kathleen try to assault you on an escalator?” he asked Matt. “And why were you two wandering around the Hilton with a bratty kid in tow like The Simpsons?” he asked Temple.

Temple took on the task of answering. “TitaniCon was a huge science-fiction convention. Murder was afoot, but Matt got suckered into taking Molina’s kid, who wasn’t there when Matt was going down an escalator and felt something hard, like a gun barrel, pressed into his back.

“When he got to ground level, he heard a metallic roll and found this funky object on the hotel floor. The thing looked to me like a baby rattle with a wooden handle and a silver ball, the kind of fancy, nonfunctional nonsense people without kids give as baby gifts. Matt explained it was an aspergillum.”

“You’ve seen one,” Matt told Max. “Whether you remember or not. It’s a ceremonial holy-water dispenser, and the officiating priest does indeed shake it like a baby rattle at the most solemn rites.”

“I do remember that.” Max waved a hand in front of his eyes. “Just a vision. A pale cloud of incense and chanting and crowds … and me being short.” He made a hasty sign of the cross. “You’re saying Kathleen has collected these mystical or religious artifacts, an Ouroboros ring, an aspergillum? And used them to taunt you? That is really sick.”

“It may be sicker than you think,” Matt said. “She was after any woman I associated with, like the call girl I was counseling, whose death was never solved.”

“Interesting.” Max’s eyes narrowed. “Looks like Molina’s kid wasn’t the only one who had a crush on you.”

Matt was not taking on that role.

“I think, from what you just said,” he pointed out, “she just wanted to hound people the way she and her Magdalen-asylum mother had been hounded. Kathleen’s ‘haunting’ presence in my life did stop shortly after that aspergillum incident. She was able to get in and out of my unit. One day the ring was gone. What’s sick is that she somehow got it into Temple’s possession later. I never thought I’d say this about a human being, but it’s a pity she wasn’t dead, as you thought. As you said you saw.”

“Few people really want someone dead,” Temple said. “You may not be sorry they’re gone, though, like Kitty the Cutter.” She eyed Max. “How could you have made a mistake about something as definite as a dead body with all your counterterrorism experience abroad?”

“I swore she was dead, too, don’t forget,” Matt said. “I ID’d the body through a morgue window.”

“Everybody thought Gandolph the Great was dead when he wasn’t.” Max turned to Temple. “How could that have happened?”

“That wasn’t so hard to pull off,” Temple said. “He was disguised as this ditzy, turbaned, overripe female medium.”

“Looking dead isn’t the problem,” Max said. “It’s being carted away by the coroner’s office. In my case at the Neon Nightmare, I had the services of a fake ambulance and hired EMTs to whisk ‘the body’ away.”

“And a past-master at faking death in Gandolph, now that we know about that,” Temple said. “Besides, after impact, your condition was severe enough to fool Rafi Nadir, Molina’s ex-boyfriend, who was working security at the Neon Nightmare when you fell. He’d been a cop.”

Max hesitated before saying more. Temple supposed he might be reliving the last moments before he hit the wall.

“The crash was authentic,” he said, “and pretty spectacular to witness, I imagine. I was unconscious, in a coma for weeks. At the Swiss clinic they suspected me of being a drunk driver, because the impact ordinarily would have killed me,” he explained to Matt. “What saved me then was what saved me when I braked that car in Belfast so hard to avoid bullets. I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but I’ve trained myself to go limp at any oncoming impact. It minimizes the damage if you don’t tense up. And you said I’d used bungee cords before in my official act.”

Max reported all this to the limo carpeting and Midnight Louie’s unblinking, upcast eyes. Temple caught Matt’s somber glance. Time to move Max past dwelling on his latest case of survivor’s guilt.

“Gandolph must have stage-managed some sort of exchange, then,” she said, “after he got you off in the hired ambulance.”

“From what I saw of his impressive contacts in Ireland and Northern Ireland,” Max said, “he’d have plenty of Vegas help to call on. He was the wizard who helped me develop the Neon Nightmare act as the Phantom Mage, and he whisked my unconscious body out of the Neon Nightmare and Las Vegas all the way to a Swiss clinic.”

“Without any on-scene treatment?” Matt sounded incredulous. “That would be barbaric.”

“Not if Max had really fallen on a mountain,” Temple pointed out. “It can take hours, even days, to get to and carry out a victim. Gandolph didn’t dare leave any kind of trail here in the U.S. In fact, officially, the Neon Nightmare ‘accident’ was written off as unreliable reporting from the scene. It’s not like the onlookers were sober.”

“Except for Nadir,” Max put in wryly. “Little did he know his ex would have killed to get her hands on me for once.”

“Poor Rafi,” Temple mused. “So close to making points with Molina and getting access to his kid.”

“Poor Max!” Max put in. “I guess you and I really were exes by then or you’d be a teeny bit more solicitous about the almost-murder victim.”

“Oh! I’m sorry to be so insensitive. I was just caught up in the dramatic irony, and you don’t look like that much of a victim now, and…”

Temple caught the first momentary glimpse of a twinkle in Max’s eyes. He was just teasing her. And, ironically, you tended to forget about his gigantic memory loss, he was so good at looking like he was in complete control, of himself most of all. Poor Max indeed.