Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 28

The Maxima would not attract attention. It would purr back to town and move quietly into its preordained stall, like a docile horse. It would move to its imminent destruction, unnoticed, and shrink to a cube of crushed metal and gla.s.s and bits of cat-cut leather. It would have no history, leave no trace.

It was not interesting anymore.

When the lights of the Strip made a luminous dome on the black horizon, Max hit the number programmed into his cell phone and designated the drop point, the parking ramp of a major Strip hotel, in the slot marked for hotel executives only. It was always empty and no one questioned that.

Max walked out through the ramp, pa.s.sing the occasional couple heading for their cars, too self-involved to notice him.

Sometimes it seemed too easy.

He walked the endless way to the Strip, amounting to maybe four city blocks in a town that didn't sport billion-dollar hotels as big as airports. He caught a cab to within two miles of his house, then walked home like a sneak thief casing the neighborhood, avoiding lights, 'jumping privacy walls, cutting through unlit backyards, until the last unlit backyard was his own. He entered the house with a key through a hidden door.

Safe at home. Just like a baseball player who's. .h.i.t the ball out of the park.

He moved through the large utility room, past the unoccupied maid's room and bath, into the black-as-pitch kitchen.

Someone turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, a dimmer switch that made no sound and spun up to maximum brightness in one smooth flash.

Max spun around to maximum alertness, never taking a visitor for granted. Who knows. It could have been a ghost. He got one.

"I know I should have waited for you to arrive," Gandolph said. "I shouldn't have let myself in either. You might have changed the security measures."

"I thought I had."

Gandolph smiled, waggishly. "I managed not to trip any of them. I haven't lost all my marbles during my ... exile. You look terrible, Max. Is this a bad moment for a reunion? What took you so long? Where have you been?"

"Back in Ireland." Max opened the huge Zero-king stainless steel refrigerator and pulled out a beer. A Harp beer. "Want one?"

"Beer is not my druthers, dear boy. Why do you think I bought Orson Welles's former house? Like him, I am a gourmand. Wine, brandy, perhaps the not-too-trendy liqueur when I'm in a mellow mood. No beer, ale, or stout of any sort."

Max twisted off the cap, drank deep. "All that is still here. Help yourself."

The older man disappeared into the adjacent wine cellar and came out reverently bearing a bottle.

Max took and uncorked it for him.

"My arthritis thanks you." Gandolph lifted the ruddy winegla.s.s to the light to savor it visually before he tasted it.

Max reflected on arthritis, the unspoken reason why Gandolph had given up the practice of magic to concentrate on unmasking false mediums. When had it hit Gandolph, the stiffening of fingers once so nimble? Somewhere in his early fifties. Max might be heading in the same direction. Who knew? He'd been out of contact with his family for so long, for their own protection, he didn't even know what maladies ran in their genes, what he might expect. He was as good as an orphan.

"Max, lad," came Gandolph's cajoling voice, warmed by his first savored sip of the Chardonnay. "You're brooding. That's a genetic predisposition of the Irish more ingrained than a love of liquor and even more dangerous. Don't think. Talk. What's happened?"

"There's bad news and worse news. Which do you want first?"

"Bad before worse."

"Actually, I think my bad is your worse, and my worse is your bad. Did you know Gloria Fuentes was dead?"

"Gloria! No." Gandolph sat on a kitchen stool. "I haven't seen her in years, of course. Odd how you can work together so closely with someone, and once the act is retired, lose touch. And I was dashing about the country looking for mediums. When was it?"

"A few months ago."

"Only a few months?" Gandolph shook his head. "And me back in town just in time to miss seeing her alive. Poor Gloria. She wasn't that old. I hope it wasn't cancer."

"It was faster. Gandolph, somebody strangled her in a church parking lot. Do you know what she'd be doing there?"

"Oh my G.o.d, what a tragedy! Why was she there? Going to church, I a.s.sume. Just because she worked onstage in fishnet tights didn't make her a showgirl. She loved her work, but when it was over, she was out of the spotlight. Had a gaggle of nieces and nephews she doted on. She'd been retired for years. They did catch the killer?"

"No. Do you think her death could be related to the attempt on your life?"

"I don't see why. Once I retired, we lost touch. I was like you, pursuing the trail of ghosts that were hard to find, and I was darn hard to find myself. If this is the bad news, what is worse?"

"Worse for me than for you, I think." Max sat on a kitchen stool and told him about Kathleen O'Connor's terrible accident and probable death, as if he were at the village pub chatting up the friendly barman.

"The emergency crew was working on her, of course," Max finished up. "But it looked like frantic revival efforts in the face of inevitability. I'm convinced she's gone."

Gandolph's round face grew long and he shook his balding head several times.

Baldness. That was another thing Max didn't know would come to him soon or later or never. He was beginning to feel age hovering behind him like Elvis's ghost, closing down his future.

"Terrible," Gandolph was muttering. "A terrible . . . accident? I can't quite call it that. She was still pursuing you, after all these years?"

"Me. And others in my place. Innocents, as usual. She liked to torment innocents."

"I remember her. Prettiest la.s.s in Londonderry. It couldn't last as I remember it, of course, that beauty."

"It did," Max said shortly. It had been too dark in the desert to see Kathleen's face as other than a light-andshadow-kissed mystery, and now he would never see it again. "Others saw her more recently. A sketch had been done from memory. Her beauty had matured, that's all. Grown, not faded."

"Hearsay, though."

"I believe the source, an impeccably honest source." Max smiled to recall just how hopelessly honest Matt Devine still was. Momentarily, he envied him. "I'm glad I never saw her again, Garry. I can't think of that lovely young girl without seeing a death's head superimposed on those treacherous features. Sean's skull, sans crossbones."

"You didn't see her at the accident scene."

"Too dark."

"But you're sure it was her, sure she's dead."

"What other woman would pursue me on a motorcycle? Someone else had seen her riding one earlier."

"She rode a bicycle in Londonderry, like a country la.s.s."

"She was a country la.s.s then. She had moved up in the world. You don't know. . . . You remember Sean and me trying to trip each other up while we both played court to Kathleen. You know what happened."

"A sad, sad thing, Max. You can't blame yourself for winning the la.s.s over your cousin, or for him being alone that night in a Protestant pub that was bombed by the IRA."

"No, but I can blame Kathleen O'Connor. I've since met someone she was plaguing, stalking really, here. And when he heard of how I knew her, and where, and what happened, he had an interesting diagnosis for it all. He thinks she knew the pub would be hit and that Sean would be there. He thinks she enjoyed dallying with me while my cousin was being murdered, that she relished the guilt I would bear for the rest of my life."

"That would be unthinkably evil, to plan that sort of thing, and she was just a young girl. Who is this 'someone' who thinks such terrible things?"

"My impeccably honest man, an ex-priest that she targeted as a victim when she couldn't find me."

"An ex-priest? No wonder. I couldn't believe you'd tell just anyone your sad history, especially the undercover implications."

Max laughed, not happily. He drank some more beer. "Oh, Gandolph. Oh, Garry. You and I exited Ireland together all those years ago, and mostly worked together until you retired a few years ago. You were a stepfather to me, in magic and in espionage, but you can't know what's happened in Las Vegas in just the past year. This man, this ex-priest, is my new Sean, my cousin and my rival, and my fellow victim of a fatal woman. If he weren't so honest I'd feel free to hate him, but I can't."

"He rivaled you for Kathleen?"

"In terms of competing for her deepest hatred, yes. It was shocking to see her find another to bedevil, to be almost unfaithful in her hatred. But ... there's another woman too. I had to leave Las Vegas for almost a year to keep some hounds on my trail away from her. She met him in the meantime."

"Ah. So they are now a pair."

"No. She took me back, but it's different, isn't it? If I hadn't been able to come back-"

"They would have been a new couple?"

"Maybe. I can't be certain. I don't think they can be either."

"Just as none of us can be certain why Kathleen played the game she did, right up to the end. It went way beyond aiding the cause of Irish freedom. That was only a pretext for her."

"Agreed. But since her reappearance-and she left me alone for all those years-I've had to wonder what triggered her return. And return she had."

"She Who Must Be Reckoned With," Garry mused. "Ghosts are like that. Supposed ghosts, I should say. They have unfinished business and cannot rest, so say the mediums. There's a certain psychological attraction to the notion that the dead wait around for justice to be served."

"Kathleen served up injustice."

"Perhaps not in her own mind. What a puzzle and homicidal round we began in Northern Ireland."

"I began."

"No. You were in the middle, that's all. As all innocents are, caught in the middle. You were just a boy."

"Are any of us 'just' anything? I was ... programmed to hate the 'other,' the 'wrong' side, as in all sectarian wars. I found my soul mate in Kathleen O'Connor. We were made for each other, drawn to our most opposite extremes. Now she's dead, and I don't know what to make of myself anymore."

"Dead? Kathleen? No, lad. Such ideas never die. They infect. For a time she revitalized the movement, single-handedly, with her hatred and her ... well, whatever she had in full measure."

"But you are alive. I never expected that."

"To my discredit. I would rather be dead in my own place than alive in another's."

Max thought. "I can't say that of myself. Yet."

"Then you have a future."

He studied Gandolph. Once he had believed the older man could never be wrong.

Now he knew that anyone could be.

Even, for a split second of inattention or blind fury, Kitty the Cutter.

Chapter 39.

The Morning After: Foxy Proxy Temple stood stock-still in the middle of the crowded convention aisle, people brushing against her every five seconds, their excited hubbub echoing to the top of the cavernous s.p.a.ce.

This hubbub had a definite soprano tinge. One might even call it shrill. If one were s.e.xist. Luckily, there weren't any of those sort around here. It wouldn't pay.

Temple inhaled the very mixed bag that scented the air-conditioned environment. There was a smorgasbord of odors from the food booths and latte bars, from exotic or even erotic ma.s.sage oils and hair spray. She hadn't done PR for a major civic-center event in a few months. Her feet, once hardened to miles of concrete underfoot, now throbbed beneath her despite the concession of thick-soled and cushy clogs.

She had finally found time to venture out from the press room. The media had come, saw, and conquered, shooting miles of film that would show up on local and regional TV, and as far away as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Chicago.

Temple's resume was rosy with new praise from the organizers, but she wasn't one to blush at getting quote-worthy recommendations. A freelancer lived or died by word of mouth.

And the subject of her reentry into major convention business was so up her alley. It was the annual Nevada women's show, a combination sales exhibition and pajama party, crammed with booths on time-saving gadgets, amazing beautification products, clothes, jewelry, and legerdemain: false nails, false hair, false push-up b.o.o.bs, false teeth . . . ah, no, not that quite yet, but falsely whitened teeth.

This was an unabashedly girly event and Temple was an unabashedly girly girl. If it was good enough for a buff but disarmingly pet.i.te little number like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was good enough for her. So she'd had no trouble revving up the media on all that was new and exciting in a Woman's World.

Working this convention was the equivalent of a Mental Health Day off from work, times seven.

Now, on Sunday, the last day, she ambled among the exhibits, even paused to decide if a lifetime of never being able to tie a decent-looking knot could indeed be redeemed by a handy-dandy gadget called "Scarf-It-Up!" Exclamation free of charge.

For her, even exclamation marks couldn't redeem b.u.t.terfingers.

She moved on, fascinated by a display of glittering minerals in small plastic towers, fairy dust for female faces. The women who manned the booths (paradox intentional) spotted her staff badge and immediately offered elaborate demonstrations and yummy freebies, which she took. For journalists that was a no-no, but PR people needed to know how the items they promoted worked. It was on-the-job research. Right, she thought, tucking a clever zebra-fabric mini-tote with miniature samples of lip gloss, eye cream, and nail enamel into her usual Goliath-size tote bag. She loved being back in business.

But this was the exhibition's last hours on the last day. When the Sunday sun went down, the magic booth-city of ideas and products would vanish like the dropped flyers littering the aisles.

Tempting words blared from the papers ground underfoot along with the rainbow wink of glitter: Renew. Glamourous. Recharge. Easy. Cheap. Miraculous. Magic.

Temple found her wandering eye snagged by a glittering tray of rings. Inexpensive costume rings, but, hey, a girl could always use a c.o.c.ktail ring. So she often thought in department store aisles, but she had never ever bought one.

These were cubic zirconia, she guessed, set in gilded sterling silver. "Vermeil" was the formal name for literally gilding the costume jewelry lily. A girly girl could always scope out rings, just because.

One. This one. It reminded her-sharply--of the ring Max had given her last Christmas, which already seemed half a lifetime ago.

She paused to stare at it. Amid gaudy "diamond" solitaires too big to be real, this was the only cla.s.sy design, the setting angular and intriguing. One large stone, a moonstone maybe-it couldn't be a real opal-was offset and set off by twinkling diamonds. Cubic zirconia, or name-brand subst.i.tute.

Temple felt a compulsion to buy the thing. Was it merely because it looked like the ring she had lost so soon, surrendered to an onstage magician who had vanished with it never to reappear . . . until the ring had turned up weeks later at a murder scene. Apparently it had gone from Temple's hand, to the mandarin-nailed claw of Shangri-La the magician, to the plastic evidence baggie of Lieutenant C. R. (Cruella de Rottweiler) Molina.

Temple's fingers hovered over the ring.

"Don't be shy. Try it on," a hyper-happy (harpy?) female voice urged.

Temple, bewitched by the ring, didn't even answer, but did as suggested.