Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“Yadda, yadda,” she says. This younger generation has no respect for anything but MN. “Nose to the groundstone, Daddyo. Everybody and his brother and sister and second cousin have been marking territory on this lot. Not much vacant land left in Vegas.”

The chit is correct on both counts: bare desert scrub is a rarity inside the city limits. Where it exists, every life form except alien invaders tries to establish a beachhead. I sniff coyote, all right, and domestic dog. Ugh! And rat and mouse, and several of the lizard variety, even tortoise.

What I am looking for, though, is Man. Not woman. I am not about to cross woman off my suspect list, but high-powered rifle attacks usually indicate the male of the human species. Unless we are talking somebody aberrant, like Miss Kathleen O’Connor, whom I have seen dead with my own eyes, after my associate Miss Louise offed her on a desert road.

Of course, I do not tell Miss Louise that she offed her. I encourage the fiction that it was an accident. I like my little dolls feisty, which means that I do not want them feeling guilty about their lethal tendencies.

“We can clearly see here,” I note, “the shell casings where the dastard crouched to take aim. I am sure that this

once-vacant lot will soon be crawling, quite literally, with crime-scene investigators.”

“We should brush out our tracks.” Louise sits and twitches her long, bushy extremity over a swath of dirt, sand, and

gravel.

Showoff! She is more than somewhat vain about her long hair. She makes it clear that my buzz-cut one is not a very efficient broom. Just as well. I do not do women’s work.

I am forced to stand back from the mini-dust storm her cleanliness fetish is stirring up.

While doing so I detect something interesting: pads other than ours have been all over this lot for a long time. My practiced sniffer gets into the act. After several impassioned sneezes and a long walk around the perimeter I return to Miss Louise and her obsessive-compulsive cleaning motions.

“Forget the yard work,” I tell her.

“Why? You want the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to come calling at the Circle Ritz and the Crystal Phoenix with

plaster casts of our feet?”

“Forensics is not into pad-prints. Besides, this place is loaded with them, not just ours. Nice, fresh ones. I think we have a few dozen witnesses to track down. From the way they scattered in all directions, they must have been on the premises when the first shots were

fired.”

“A colony?” she asks.

“Not exactly,” I answer.

“Then what?”

“A gang.”

“Oh, great. Gangsters will not unbutton their lips for us.” ‘This gang will. I know the top cat. One Ma Barker.”

“Ma Barker! What a name for a self-respecting feline! She must be one lowdown excuse for female empowerment.”

“I cannot say,” I answer mildly. “All I know is that she could be your grandmother.”

Miss Louise’s big gold eyes widen like headlights on high power. “That is the old dame who claimed to be my elder at the cloaked

conjuror’s place?”

I cannot wait to bring her home to mother.

Chapter 15

Hot Car

Temple and her Miata returned Matt to the Maylords parking lot at a time of morning much brighter and earlier than a nightshift man was used to.

When she mentioned this, he smiled ruefully. “Maybe I need to shake up what I’m used to. Having had a stalker decree your every move, your every moment, makes you question yourself on a pretty deep level about what’s important.”

“Like having the world’s most demanding home-room teacher.”

He laughed. “We all kinda freeze in the high school hierarchy somehow, don’t we? Getting it in our heads what we are and what other people think of what we are way too early.”

“It’s the first serious institution we tangle with. But you’re right; a lot of people are still trying to ditch their high school preconceptions in midlife crisis.”

“Maybe I should thank Kitty O’Connor, if I could.”

“Thank her? Why on earth?”

“She really knew how to play me, play my conscience.Made me see I needed to reexamine my … I won’t say that old

clich� ‘priorities,’ but maybe my premises. I’m feeling strangely freer.”

“You are. Free of that harpy! Freer is good.” Temple smiled and looked up to the open sky as the warm breeze riffled their hair. It was like getting a scalp massage by the wind.

This was another cloudless Las Vegas morning, except for the straight chalk marks of jet vapor trails from Nellis Air Base. The day’s heat was still set low on simmer, and the sky was so blue it looked like a cool pool to jump up into.

Ahead of them the facade of Maylords’s one-story beige stucco building glittered like a high-end junkyard, though. Its glassless windows with their jagged-edge frames seemed almost deliberately arty. Helmut Newton territory.

In fact, a photographer was busily shooting away at the shot-out windows, either recording damage or creating a postmodern catalogue for the store.

When a security guy swaggered around the building’s corner, overbuilt legs and arms as stiff as a puppet’s, the whole area looked like a crime-scene wannabe.

Temple was so busy eyeing the damage and estimating the time and cost needed to repair it that she was startled when Matt tapped her on the shoulder.

“Stop over there.”

“Where? This lot is deserted. I don’t see-”

She scanned a line of mature pine trees that bordered the lot on the east.

Something hunkered in the early morning shade, something streamlined and silver. Matt had taken the Hesketh Vampire to the opening? The vintage motorcycle, formerly Max’s and famous for its screaming engine whine at high speeds, was a spectacular ride, but it was hardly a Datemobile.

Temple had gone for a spin on it once, long ago, with Max, but she couldn’t picture tall, dignified Janice Flanders riding

pillion with Matt … maybe she just couldn’t picture Janice Flanders with Matt, or didn’t want to.

No mystery was too small for Temple’s busy brain to ponder.

How had Matt gotten Janice home? Her car? Then how had he gotten back here for the Vampire? And why would he leave such a valuable bike in an unprotected parking lot? Forget hands! Idle questions are the devil’s_ workshop.

Even as Temple’s mind worried the question, one part of her cerebellum spun the Miata’s small steering wheel right. The car glided into the shade.

There Temple’s vision acclimated enough to reveal her mistake.

This was no Hesketh Vampire before her eyes. This was a candy-coated, supercool, streamlined silver, automotive baby the likes of which she had never seen.

“Matt? What is this thing?”

“A Crossfire.”

“Yeah. We did have a lot of that here last night. Bang, you’re toast … or tawny, or beige. Galloping gasoline prices, did

this thing sit on the lot the whole time? During all that destructive snap, crackle, and pop?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. I checked it out last night before I collected you for the ride home. Lucky I parked it in the most protected

and low-profile area of the lot.”

Temple followed him out of the Miata to circle the stranded car. It struck her as low and sleek enough for Las Vegas’s famous Fontana brothers (who favored Dodge Vipers) to lust after in triplicate. The two-seater had that squinty-eyed rear window all the newest speedsters sported.

“I see you have a vestigial backseat too,” Temple noted, trying shamelessly to attach herself and her new Miata to the Crossfire’s chrome dual exhaust pipes.

“It does look kinda impractical.” Matt’s sheepish frown only underlined his good looks. “But I don’t need a big vehicle shuttling back and forth from WCOO.”