Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

It drove right at her, like a bull. Like a bullfighter, Temple jumped to the side.

The ring of politically correct emollient didn’t stop this one. It raced across the oil-darkened asphalt.

Temple jumped as far away as she could. Her eyes squeezed shut at the inevitable and imminent impact.

Splaaat-thud!

The sound was TV-familiar. A bottle thwacking into something?

Through slitted eyes Temple saw the horizontal cycle sliding along the asphalt, leaving a dark trail of black body paint.

She winced, imagining Max’s streamlined Hesketh Vampire cycle coming to a such a scraping end. Except that Matt used it now. Sometimes.

Brakes screeched behind her. Was someone else trying to make her into parking-lot roadkill?

Who and why?

She spun around. A long, long, long limo, black as midnight, glided toward her.

One rear door was open, and out of it peeked the shiny black barrel of a semiautomatic pistol.

She turned back to see that the downed motorcycle had a blown-out front tire. Shot out. Its rideless master vaulted onto a

seat behind the rider of the circling Elvis model.

The whole gang roared into an escaping pack and scattered down the side streets, finally dwindling like their engine roar.

Temple eyed the limo’s protruding gun barrel with suspicion: she was crouching kitten, hidden panther. Her trigger finger

itched to depress the canned heat in her hand. Limos didn’t like oil slicks either.

But the vehicle stopped before one front tire tread crossed the gunk. The back door swung fully open.

Fontana brothers came pouring out like passengers in aclown-car-cum-hearse: one tall, dapper, dark-haired brother after another and another and another.

Nicky Fontana, founder of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, had a surfeit of siblings, all male. Some might even say a mob of mama’s boys. With Ermenegildo Zegna suits and Beretta accessories. Temple had worked with Nicky for a long time. She and the nine other Fontana brothers were more than passing acquaintances, though Temple had never been able to tell the junior Adonises apart. They were buff, they were bachelors, and they were beautiful. What more did a girl need to know?

She had memorized their names, though, if not what faces went with them: Aldo, Emilio, Giuseppe, Rico, Ernesto, Julio, Armando, Eduardo, and Ralph.

“How’d you get here?” she asked. “How’d you … all … get here?”

“Chunk-a-Cheez called the cops, on whom we eavesdrop sometimes,” said one she thought was Aldo. He made a face.

“These fast-food joints nowadays have no guts. They reported a redhead holding off a motorcycle gang with a can of canola oil.”

“It’s extra-virgin olive oil.”

Aldos lifted one skeptical eyebrow a centimeter. “If you say so, Miss Temple. Anyway, we knew right away it was you.

Slick idea.”

“Thanks. And how’d you get a Gangsters limo here so fast that you beat the police?” Temple asked.

“This Gangsters limo happened to be cruising by and we, ah, thumbed … a ride.”

Aldo pantomimed his thumb cocking a gun, although even Temple knew a Beretta was a double-actioned semiautomatic

weapon that didn’t require cocking. Still, point taken.

“In fact,” said Emilio, who she recognized by his discreet ear stud (“Earring is for Emilio,” she remembered drumming into her consciousness once), stepping back to hold the door open, “you’d better accept a ride from us, unless you like explaining yourself to the police. Surely carrying concealed extra-virgin olive oil is illegal somewhere.”

“Not in any Italian restaurant I know.” Temple ducked into the limo’s cool, dark interior. Vivaldi thundered joyously from the stereo system. “My car,” she protested unheard.

“Relax and let us waft you to safety in the manner to which you should become accustomed,” one of them said.

All around her the Fontana boys gathered, an ice-cream-suited flock of hunky young guys wearing Brut aftershave and an air of welltailored … well … muscle. She felt like a mafia prom princess escorted by a carload of gangland Prince Charmings with Crest-Strip white teeth. Until now (maybe the black limo had done it), Temple had never realized just how potent an aura of mob surrounded them.

Oh, the shark, dear, is your dinner date. Barracudas, beware! Whatta way to go, though! Much better than the average squad car with strawberry-scented freshener for aftershave.

“So,” asked … Rico, casually sniffing the scentless white carnation m his lapel, “why’d a weird biker gang target our Miss

Temple for becoming a spot on the asphalt behind such a low-grade eatery?”

“That is for sure,” said Emilio gallantly. “She deserves to be attacked behind the Bellagio at least.”

“And how did she happen to be carrying that lethal can of extra-virgin olive oil?”

“Hush, Julio,” said another she knew as Ralph by the tiny ponytail at his nape. “Perhaps Miss Temple does not wish to make public the contents of her purse.”

Temple quailed to imagine Lt. C. R. Molina probing this intimate area.

Obviously the brothers were musing aloud so she could answer their questions, although they were much too polite to ask

her right out.

“I was reaching for my canister of pepper spray, and that’s what came out of my tote bag,” she said. “I’d been to the store

Friday and a few necessities didn’t fit in my grocery bags.”

“Of course not.” Aldo eyed the lumpy tote bag crouching at their sleek Italian leather toetips like a snarl-ridden Lhasa apso.

“What was the extra-virgin olive oil for?” a possible Ernesto asked. (Or was earring for Ernesto?)“My salads, of course.”

“Perhaps you had better locate your actual pepper spray,” Julio urged. “You might mistake it for something to apply to a pizza later. It is always a good idea to dispense weapons to more accessible locations on your person.”

“Such as where?” Temple asked a bit testily. “I rarely wear slacks, so can’t use my ankle or the center of my back. I don’t wear a blazer, so have no handy pockets.”

“That is true,” Ralph said gravely. “There is not much of you to conceal anything on.”

“And I am not going to run around all the time, like Lieutenant Molina, in a navy pantsuit that an ex-nun wouldn’t be caught dead doing social work in!” “Lieutenant Molina.”

The name, once mentioned, occasioned serious nods among the gathered Fontanas.

“We are sure,” said one, “that she is familiar with all the usual places of concealment, not to mention our … um, personnel folders in the police department.”

“You have personnel folders at headquarters?”

“Our personnel, their folders,” Aldo said.

Next to her, Ralph hissed two ugly words in her ear. “Rap sheets.”

Oh, galloping gangsters! The Fontana brothers weren’t just Nicky’s uniformly colorful brothers. They weren’t just welltailored figureheads who hung out at the Crystal Phoenix, they were the real megillah. The actual remnants of Las Vegas’s good old wise-guy days. They might even be … dangerous.

Temple smiled. “I’ll holster my olive oil, boys, if you’ll break out whatever’s behind that burlwood door. After all I’ve been through, I could use a Mountain Dew.”

Two brothers slapped palms above her head, perhaps the equivalent of a mob welcoming ceremony. “I told you,” one crowed to the other. “Redheads rock!”

Chapter 33

Mumm’s the Word

The Fontana boys didn’t oblige Temple with a Mountain Dew. She probably didn’t need the extra caffeine at the moment any-way.

Instead they uncorked some Mumm’s Champagne that foamed into a host of flutes hidden behind one of the burlwood doors.