Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 24

What attracts me is the luminous color that fills her cla.s.sic martini gla.s.s. Ah! I cannot rhapsodize enough. It is the liquid, lurid green of the Queen of Cat's eyes, Bastet herself. It is the Green Fairy of absinthe gone nouveau noir. It is as modern as the blinkers on a well-bred Chartreuse cat.

The lady in question, and in a place like this, the "lady" is always in question, attracts my attention next.

Other than Miss Temple, a feisty ginger-bit of a Tortie to me, I am not much impressed by human pulchritude.

But this lady is well-matched to her sour green-apple martini. Her hair is as black as the sheen in my coat at its most well-licked. Her eyes are the blue-green of the Divine Yvette, my absent ladylove, at her most imperious Persian princesshood. Her lips on the short straw stuck in the opaque drink like a tap into a poisoned apple skin, are, well, to coin a phrase, grapefruit ruby-red. Her skin is the dead-white of an albino and hairless Sphinx cat.

All in all, she is a Technicolor treat.

I boldly stop before her and yawn, so she can observe my glossy black coat, so like her hair . . . my blood-red tongue, so like her lips . . . my lettuce-green eyes, so like her poison of choice . . . my shark-white teeth so like her pale, satin skin.

I am eye-to-eye . . . indeed, eyetooth to eyetooth with, of course . . . the living inspiration for the sketch of Kathleen O'Connor, aka Kitty the Cutter. (My thankfully absent roommate does have such a way with words!) They say a cat may look at a queen. They also call unfixed female cats queens. They also call jealous and vicious women "cats." I think I have Miss Kitty's number.

I stare into Miss Kathleen O'Connor's aquamarine eyes.

"What have we here?" she asks loudly enough that only I may hear. "A tomcat on the town? Would you like a drink?"

I do not respond, but she raises a pale finger topped by a scarlet nail, and in two shakes of an innocent's lamb's tail, the bartender presents me with a saucer of the same vile green liquid she imbibes.

I deign to run a paw across it, sniff the result, then shake the excess onto the black-gla.s.s bar.

Miss Kitty laughs. She has claimed even my kind's name, as if evil had an inbred feline bent. I owe her for that one too.

"You Las Vegas boys," she says soft and low, "are all alike. Thinking you know something, but too . . . discriminating . . . for the real world."

If I know who she is, does she know who I am? How could she? I am an undercover operative. I am as discreet as a poodle in Paris. What could she know about me?

She leans close, sips from her straw, blows the words at me as if she expects me to understand. And I do.

"Tell your friends-and I know you have some, big boy-Ihave some myself. Tell your friends that I said 'h.e.l.lo.' I don't know quite how you will go about telling them that. Perhaps it is just as well. Anyway, kiss them good-bye for me."

I have a thousand questions, most of them starting with, "Are you really leaving my a.s.sociates alone?"

I do not admit to human "friends." (Miss Temple, of course, is different. She is much more than a friend. She is my tender little filet of solemate.) And I certainly do not "talk" to humans, friend or foe. I stand alone among my kind in knowing more of humanity than I would want to. This particular piece of it I would like to toss into the pool in front of the Mirage's volcano attraction during mid-explosion, but even though she is a pet.i.te little doll she is too big to throw for a loop here or anywhere else.

So I content myself with hissing in her voodoo martini and stalking off without a word.

Sometimes it is better to leave to fight another day.

Chapter 32.

. . . Wizard!

Another whip-crack sound of an unseen door opening. Night air and parking lot lights slapped Max's senses silly.

He felt like a tomb robber slipping out of Cheops' pyramid at Giza. A dark figure urged him forward, and soon both were ensconced in ... an aged Volkswagen Beetle.

Shades of Tomb Raider? Hardly.

Yet, behind them, shadows of the Synth were pouring from the black pyramid of Neon Nightmare while the t.i.tular horse was screaming in neon rainbows above it all.

His guide revved the VW and putt-putted them into a dark corner of the lot, where they parked between the looming screens of a Ford Exasperator and a Lincoln Aggravator.

Great. If he'd wanted a getaway driver in a midget clown car he could have called on Temple and her new Miata.

Or maybe not.

He eyed the driver, a hunched figure in black rather likeSister Wendy, the Episcopal nun-c.u.m-art-expert on public TV.

Max was getting very tired of mysteries inside of enigmas inside of puzzles.

"I don't need a chauffeur," Max said finally. Grumpily. "You need a friend." The simple answer paraphrased the old Carole King song.

"No." Max was certain. "Friends are excess baggage."

"So I taught you," the raspy voice answered. "But I was wrong. Terribly wrong. I'm sorry."

Not many people had ever said "I'm sorry" to Max Kinsella.

There was only one person, maybe two, he needed to say "I'm sorry" to. One was Sean, his dead cousin. The other one was dead too.

Or was he?

Max turned to eye the obscure figure.

Magicians were good at obscuring things, even and especially themselves.

"You saved me back there," Max said.

"You needed saving," was the answer.

"We all do, but I especially needed it half a lifetime ago, in Ireland. Only one person applied for the job."

"He must have been a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t."

"He was a genius."

"Thank you." Said modestly.

Max twisted in the cramped seat to see better, as if a change in position could penetrate the veil of mystery. "Garry?" he asked. "Gandolph? It's you? You're alive?"

"My greatest and most cowardly illusion. I'm sorry. I never meant to deceive you."

"The h.e.l.l you didn't!" Max pushed open the car door, stepped out at full length, and still didn't top the Lincoln SUV at his back. The parking lot was quiet now, pursuers faded back into their bizarre building. "You old fraud! You . faked your own death. What are you, a Houdini for the New Age set? Did you plan on reappearing and snagging a major hotel gig, or what?"

The lumpy form struggled out of the driver's seat to confront his pupil.

"It wasn't planned. At least not my death. You fret over a death in a foreign land long ago. I now know your pain, pardon the cliche. Can't you guess what happened?"

"Wait." Max ground his bicuspids and his brain cells at the same time. If Gandolph was alive, and he definitely was, then . . .

"You were dedicated to unmasking false mediums," he said. "That required a false persona. You were always good at disguises. But you needed to be better. So . . . you did what a lot of magicians have done for stage work. You hired . . . a double."

Gandolph's head nodded in the dark.

"A double," Max repeated. "And your double died at the haunted house seance. You didn't expect that."

"Never. I never would have allowed another person to risk life or even limb on my behalf. I merely wanted to lurk behind the scenes, as you yourself did that night. Quite a brilliant impersonation of Houdini, by the way. You are nothing like him, in physique or in magical style."

"Thank you. But I also have you to thank for thinking you were dead all these months. You didn't warn me."

"How could I? I expected my double to survive the seance. I would never have hired a stand-in for my own murder! I never dreamed the Synth would be so irritated by my existence."

"So it was the Synth!"

"The Synth has a thousand heads, and they are all Magic."

"Magic is an illusion."

"So is death." The figure so short and squat stepped forward to doff its hood.

Max looked down into the grandfatherly face of the late Garry Randolph, now come back to life, wondering if heshould pinch himself, or his mentor. Was Garry really alive and back? Yes!

It had been almost two decades since he'd read The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's epic fantasy. If he remembered correctly, Gandalf the Gray, whose name Garry Randolph had folded into his stage persona almost forty years ago, had been lost in a deep cavern and presumed dead.

Only he had returned.

Now Garry had pulled that same mind-boggling trick and Max was as bedazzled as any wannabe magician.

Not until now, seeing Gandolph alive again, had he understood, or admitted, how much the older magician had meant to him, alive and dead. He had an ally again, a mentor. Someone who talked his language, the bilingual tongue of magic and counterespionage.

Like the company of the Ring, he felt energized again by the notion of a stout companion. Garry was more than that, though, he was all Max had left of family. And he was alive!

There'd be plenty of time now to figure out who had wanted Gandolph dead, to unravel the Synth and all its works, to track down Kathleen O'Connor-Garry had known her, seen her, as a girl. She wouldn't intimidate him, as she had Matt Devine and Temple and even Molina, long-distance.

He realized he had felt the same sense of betrayal at Garry's presumed death and resurrection as Temple had felt at Max's own disappearance and return. You can't condemn a man for avoiding you because he was a walking death trap, not even Matt Devine.

Max smiled broadly and held out his cloaked arms. "Welcome home, maestro."

The old man embraced him with true feeling. "Welcome to the endgame, rather. My home is your home now, I've learned that, and it was what I intended. Yet I dare not appear as myself until all my enemies are unmasked."

"They're my enemies too."

"Then we have even more in common. Come on, let's go chew over our pasts and our futures until our d.a.m.n jaws ache and we know we're alive because it hurts. Let's go . . . home?"

For once Max found himself stunned into silence. He had never dreamed that a live Garry Randolph would return to the house he himself had occupied alone for many months, a recluse and a hermit and a hunted man, brooding on ghosts.

He had never dreamed another human being would urge a retreat to any place they could both call "home." It felt incredibly good.

He was so . . . unusually jubilant that he almost forgot where he was.

Something skittered past his ankles: large, dark, ratlike.

Or was it a shadow that fell between the bolts of flashing neon from the neon mare high atop the building's distant peak?

Whatever it had been, it recalled Max to himself, to here and now, and to danger. He stood there in the guise of the Phantom Mage. Now he should make like his name and vanish.

"We should leave separately, and ensure that no one follows us. Let's meet at the house."

"Delighted to, my boy!" Gandolph hustled back into his low-profile car and started the engine.

Amazing, Max thought.

Garry Randolph alive. Investigating the same shadowy ent.i.ty that he was. Now they'd get somewhere!

Time for him to make the first step. Swirling his theatrical cape around him, Max stalked away like Dracula repelled by the whiff of garlic toast.

He could hardly wait to lose this persona and this place and rejoin forces with Gandolph.

Yes!

Chapter 33.

. . . Torn Between Two Tails Some shamuses have all the luck.

Not Midnight Louie.

Here I am, as undercover as a dude can be at the Neon Nightmare. I have just made contact with the Woman in the Case.

I have previously seen Mr. Max Kinsella slinking around the joint, although he has been as invisible as a flea on a tweed suit for the past hour or so.

I am frantic to keep these two natural enemies apart, though they have not seen hide nor hair of each other in years, and I am mad to trail both of them as they separately (I devoutly hope) leave this place.

There is only one entrance and exit that I know of, the velvet cordoned-off door guarded by the goons up front.

That does not mean there are not other doors, used for service purposes.