Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Another magic trick. I was told about Matt Devine, yeah.”

“You remember him?”

“Only from the radio station Web site I saw in Europe. I saw yours, too, so you really didn’t need to don the jelly-bean colors.”

“How? Where?”

“It’s called the World Wide Web for a reason.”

He paused while the martini glasses and their white contents with a setting sun of red in the bottom’s V were set before them. Temple raised a right forefinger for the bill. They had a dinner reservation to get to.

“We’d better sip some booze before I go on,” Max suggested. “It’ll get a little heavy from here on.”

She lifted the glass. “I’m sorry, but ‘Cheers’ anyway.”

“Cheers,” he replied in the hasty, absent, British way.

Their glass rims tinged together. After a couple sips, Max asked, “What’s in these things?”

“Vodka and white Crème de Cacao, besides the other liqueurs.”

“All booze,” he said. “Great. Are we there yet? Because I’m afraid I need to report a resurrection and death.”

Temple was struck by the phrase’s reversal of the religious “death and resurrection.” She was wishing Matt was here; this was starting to sound like a confession.

“Did you know,” Max asked, “a man named Garry Randolph?”

“I’ll do like you and say the name sounds vaguely familiar for some reason, but I can’t attach any memories to it.”

“Maybe because you never knew him, except in disguise.”

She shook her head and sipped her drink. She could feel the tension draining down her neck and arms.

“And shortly after, dead, at that,” Max added.

“Are you talking about the recently dead Synth magician from the Neon Nightmare? I thought his name was known.”

“No. That place is really knocking off magicians, isn’t it?”

“Apparently. Back to Garry Randolph. It’s not an exactly memorable name,” she said.

“Gandolph make it easier?”

“Gandolph!” Temple sat up and put her drink down. “The Great. The magician and your mentor and partner in counterterrorism. He died last Halloween at the crazy Haunted House attraction, where a bunch of psychics were trying to bring back Harry Houdini. He was disguised, and was rather scarily convincing, as a flaky, overripe female psychic.”

Max’s lips quirked on the glass rim as he drank more Albino Vampire.

“Oh, Garry could carry off anything. No, Temple, if I may call you that, he didn’t die. Like a lot of magicians, he was accustomed to using doubles in his act, and did so there, which was a subtle tribute to Houdini, because Harry’d done that too.”

“How did … Garry get away with it?” Temple asked. “He must have put his ID on the dead double and allowed him to be buried in his place.” She glanced hard at Max. “Like you, it was convenient to vanish completely from the hounds of your earlier counterterrorism work on the Continent and in the British Isles.”

“Brava,” Max toasted her, shutting his eyes as he swallowed.

Temple had to continue speculating aloud. “You said … ‘resurrection and death.’ You don’t mean … Gandolph?”

The man who was my only family for half my life is dead, as good as assassinated, and I suppose I’m next on the list.

Temple wanted to be sure she understood. “Garry … Gandolph, your old mentor and former partner in magic and espionage. He’s really dead now?”

“Really dead. Not a double in sight, would God there had been. Irony incarnate. I’d made him fasten his seat belt as we were fleeing both illegal surviving wings of the IRA. Never had time to fasten mine. I was driving.”

“Despite your mending legs and mussed-up mind? Oh, Max! You hit your head on the windshield, didn’t you? And your legs and body must have been brutally jolted.”

“Yeah. Absolutely accurate deductions. You are good. Can you deduce what happened when our car got caught in the crossfire?”

She shook her head.

“I had to brake fast then spurt away to get our pursuers shooting at each other instead of us. Braking so hard thrust me forward just as the bullet meant for my head passed behind me and—”

“—and into Gandolph held upright by his seat belt. Max. That’s beyond awful. I’m … so sorry.”

“Got this gash”—he touched it—“from the windshield, not the bullet. Garry died instantly, but I couldn’t leave him.”

“You had to.”

Max nodded. “That’s what he said.”

Temple didn’t have a reaction to that solemn belief. She didn’t doubt Max had “heard” his mentor’s voice between the daze of his head blow and realizing the older man was dead.

Max set down an empty martini glass with a few watery drops of red at the bottom. Her glass was still half full. Or half empty, like Max’s eyes.

“I couldn’t even make arrangements for the body. I had to drop him and the car off near some of the Irish contacts he’d made. He had colleagues over there from years ago. I trust they had the decency to bury him with some ceremony. He had no … other family.”

The man who was my only family for half my life is dead.…

“Speaking of family,” Temple said, “you must not remember, even know, how to contact your own here in the U.S. now.”

“Apparently we’ve been estranged for almost twenty years, since my cousin Sean died in that IRA bombing in Ulster. I would imagine the Kellys and the Kinsellas had trouble dealing with one son lost, one son saved.”

“That’s true,” Temple said. “You told me that pulling away from both families was your choice. Survivor’s guilt infected your immediate family as well as you.”

Max rubbed the back of his neck as if reliving the fatal impact. “I have a double dose of that now, for sure.”

“So maybe you should just concentrate on the surviving part for a while.”

He looked up at Temple. Her tone had been matter-of-fact.

“I can’t argue.” He sounded surprised.

“And we need to move downstairs for dinner.”

“Garry was right about you.”

“In what way?”

“You’re easy to underestimate, but hard to beat.”

I’ve been told by the only man I ever trusted you’re a pretty smart and gutsy girl … .

Temple handed him her glass. “Finish my Vampire. It was fifteen bucks. Then we’ll go downstairs to get you a decent dinner and you can continue your traveler’s tale.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, draining the glass.

He sat back, then heaved himself up from the low couch without needing Temple’s support, although she’d come around to stand by him.

“If I leaned on you,” he commented, “you’d snap like a toothpick.”

“Try me.”

But he didn’t have to. He moved slowly but certainly out of the Living Room to the escalators. Temple let him lead, watching his steps. Gandolph still alive all those months … Max must have known that. He had been living in “dead” Gandolph’s house, had “inherited” it. Which now was absolute truth.

She would have given them both hell for the secrecy, and Max for leaving her in the dark so long, but who could lay recriminations on an injured, mourning man?

Not Temple.

Not until Max was well and himself and then … she might not be Irish but she had the temperamental fire to match her natural hair color.

Chapter 5

House Warming

Six P.M. was an unfashionably early dining hour in Las Vegas. The mostly empty Strip House restaurant produced the promised red leather banquette and dim lighting, but the crimson walls were lined with black-and-white pinup photos of Hollywood starlets.

Temple had never eaten here before—who could cover every restaurant in Las Vegas?—and had taken the “Strip” in the name as a tribute to its easy access from Las Vegas Boulevard and for, uh, strip steak.