Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t quite attach it to a time or a place.

“Czarina Catharina,” she introduced herself. “I did a mentalist act.”

He nodded. He had seen the posters in Jeff Mangel’s on-campus art gallery at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and she wasn’t among them, but a mentalist wasn’t quite a magician. The professor had died surrounded by the posters he had preserved, but now Max was surrounded by many of the famous faces immortalized in those very posters, a Who’s Who of … forgotten magicians, bypassed headliners, outmoded prestidigitators.

The potent brandy seared his lips, making him jerk like a false reading on a lie detector test graph.

“Strong stuff,” Carmen noted with a contralto laugh.

“No,” Max muttered. “It’s strong stuff meeting a roster of a World Magicians’ Hall of Fame.” Oddly, he meant it.

His hand shook slightly as he lifted his brandy snifter and inhaled the high-proof perfume of Hennessy XO Special. He had liked to think he had retired, forcibly, from his profession, pushed by an inexplicable murder into flight. He didn’t like to think he had also reached a dead end.

“World Magicians’ Hall of Fame! There’s no such organization.” Sparks barked like a discontented seal. “It’s all commercial tie-ins nowadays. Make a Lear jet disappear on live TV. Make the Seagram Building crumble on cable TV. We might as well be terrorists as illusionists.”

“You were always too subtle,” Czarina noted sadly, “to survive.”

Her words struck a chill like a dagger to Max’s heart. He had consoled himself that he had retired because his primary career, counterterrorism, had finally made his cover profession useless. But the fact was he had been a magician first and foremost, from his preteen years, and now he was among his own kind, who faced his own kind of extinction, and they were his enemies. They were the Synth.

Max couldn’t help it. He took a deep, sighing breath.

Carmen rose and stalked toward him. “You are one of us, aren’t you? However, or why ever you ‘blundered’ in here, it was no accident. You have come home.”

An undercover operative could not have asked for an easier “in.”

A fellow magician could not have imagined a harder task.

He was in like Flynn. Like Errol Flynn, Mr. Swashbuckler, he would have to play many parts, and some of them, he saw now, might break his heart.

Chapter 22

… Playback

Hand it to Leticia, Matt thought. She never fully relinquished the Earth-mother persona of Ambrosia.

She walked Matt out to the parking lot. The 2:00 A.M. sick-green parking-lot lights turned the black asphalt gray and made a knot of female fans waiting for Matt look jaundiced.

“Safety in numbers,” Leticia declared. “Don’t you linger after all the sweet young things get your John Hancock and leave.”

Matt eyed his white Probe, looking pea-green in the lights, and nodded. He could edge over to the car while signing the station photographs and they could all skedaddle without risking a close encounter with Kitty the Cutter.

The slam of Leticia’s car door assured him that she was sealed away from any motorcycle raids. He thanked his gushing fans and signed, moving toward the car.

Sweet young things they were not. More like sweet middle-aged things, women whose faces wore the worry lines of hard work and hard times. People with higher educations and high-paying jobs took their insecurities to psychoanalysts and trendier alternative practitioners. Radio listeners let it all hang out, Matt had discovered, the same phenomenon that drove the tabloid TV show phenomenon and kept Jerry and Ricki and company in clover.

He was just a local phenomenon in a second-tier media. He liked it that way, and hoped that Kathleen’s unfond farewell broadcast on his show meant she was really out of his hair.

He was signing on the Probe’s fender now, straining to keep some light on the photograph so his penmanship was at least recognizable.

There was one last customer, an immensely overweight woman with the optimistic beaming eyes of a child. Seeing such doomed outcasts always made Matt hurt for them. Everybody faces rejection, but not everybody is a walking advertisement for it. She did everything wrong: carried too much weight, wore circus-size polyester, had her brown hair crimped into some shapeless frizz, a bad complexion, thick-lensed glasses in bad frames, and bit her fingernails down to the bloody quick. Did the Almighty have no mercy sometimes? Couldn’t He have given this female equivalent of Red Skelton’s Poor Soul some natural advantage? Just one.

Her smile. She brought the signed photo close to the crooked-framed glasses, read what he’d written, and smiled. Her teeth were perfect: small, even, white as snow.

“Gee, thanks! That’s one thing I’m good at. Devotion. Your ‘devoted listener.’ I just love radio. It lets you imagine anything.”

And off she toddled, happy.

Matt leaned against the car door. There ought to be an Individuals Anonymous group for people who weren’t thin, confident, good-looking, and socially smooth.

They should spend their time reinforcing their self-esteem, instead of pursuing autographs from people like him who looked like they had it all together and certainly didn’t.

He breathed deeply. The air was the exact temperature of his body. Breathing seemed to be swimming in a puddle of warm, unscented night.

Was she really gone, out of his life, Kathleen O’Connor? But before he could breath free, something fell from somewhere, out of the corner of his eye, a piece of air-lifted paper, whatever. It looked like a falling woman, Vassar slipping downward in the hollow core of the Goliath Hotel at an hour when everybody else was wafted upward in the glass cages of hotel elevators.

A pale figure stepped out of the radio station building’s one-story shadow.

Matt straightened, tightening his fingers on the car keys in his pocket.

He’d been dreaming when he should have been following Leticia’s orders and getting himself out of the deserted parking lot.

The figure was slight, light-colored, and coming toward him.

For a moment he fantasized the ghost of Vassar. Then he feared it was Kitty.

Before he could act on any instinct: stand or run, the figure had come too close to avoid.

“Matt? You are Matt Devine?”

He hesitated, unwilling to give anything of himself away again.

The figure stepped closer, into the wedge of green light that shed a lime pall over Matt and his white car. He was relieved to see it was a man.

Most people would fear male muggers. Matt feared a female one.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

This invitation to inspection had Matt trying to pin a label on a cipher. The guy was maybe five-five, pale-skinned, no Las Vegasite. Balding hard, but only in his … mid-thirties, maybe? Mild-looking. No mugger. So what was he, then?“It’s Jerome,” he said.

Jerome. Okay. Didn’t ring a bell. Or did it?

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

“St. Vincent’s. And I guess I’ve changed. Used to have a mop of hair. That’s the way it always is with us bald guys; heavy on top at the beginning, cue balls by the time we hit the late twenties. Your hair seems to be hanging on.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Matt didn’t think much about his hair, except when it needed cutting. It had never occurred to him that cutting was a privilege. “St. Vincent Seminary?”

“In Indiana. We were there. Together.”

“Jerome. Jerome! Uh, Johnson, wasn’t it?”

“Still is.”

“Sorry. Las Vegas is so far away from all that.”

“Is it ever.”