Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 37

"Someone . . . I know?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Not just Va.s.sar."

Max shook his head. His hand didn't shake as he lifted the gla.s.s to his lips again, but Temple sensed that it might have if he had allowed such a thing.

"Who? Max, tell me now. I can't stand this waffling around. It's so unlike you."

"She's gone. Kathleen O'Connor. Dead."

"Kitty the Cutter dead? Not possible!"

"Believe it. Devine ID'ed her for Molina this morning, and besides, I was there when it happened. She's in cold storage at the medical examiner's facility, waiting for next of kin to claim her. There won't be any. Only enemies."

"Dead? After making all our lives so miserable? People like that don't just . . . die."

"Effinger did."

"Yes, but you're sure it's her? Both you and Matt? And Molina buys it?"

"The medical examiner buys it. It's undeniable. Even your Midnight Louie witnessed the accident."

"Louie! He was out earlier, but ... when?"

Max shook his head. "Not today. Two nights ago."

"And no one told me?"

"Not our fault, Temple."

"You speaking for Matt now, too? Mr. Zipped Lips?"

"Not our fault," he repeated. "We had a lot to do. I had to call emergency personnel from a phone that couldn't be traced to me, dump the Maxima, and stay low. Devine had to answer Molina' s summons and go stare at the dead body. We haven't much felt like talking to anyone human in forty-eight hours, or like explaining ourselves."

"Or how you feel about this," Temple added shrewdly. "Dead. For you guys it must be like . . . the twin towers falling. No. More like the upside-down world turned right-side up again, like gravity has reversed itself."

"Yeah," Max held the whiskey gla.s.s in both hands before his face, as if it were a fire capable of casting warmth and light. "Her evil pull was like some counterforce I was so used to fighting that I've lost all energy to stand on my own. She was out there somewhere. I'd sensed her hatred for so long, it almost seems unnatural to live without it in the world."

"Kind of how Matt felt about his abusive stepfather."

Max nodded. "Given a nemesis like either one of them, you start to wonder if you don't deserve it somehow." Max looked at Temple for the first time, straight on. "He must have thought about killing her, you know. Before he tried Va.s.sar. He knew he could. He had enough martial arts training to do it. And she . . . was a small woman. Perfectly killable, except you'd become her and then she'd go on anyway, wouldn't she?"

"Matt? It crossed his mind to kill? How can you be so sure?"

"She threatened everyone he knew and cared about. It crossed his mind. Mine too."

Temple took a deep breath. "So that's what you two talked about, your homicidal impulses?"

"We also talked about our mutual guilt."

"For thinking that way, and then getting your wish?"

"For being that desperate. And then, Fate steps in and kills her for us. And now we're feeling guilty because Fate had the guts to do what we didn't."

"Max, start from the beginning. How did she die, and when, and how on earth was Louie present?"

"It began Sunday night, at Neon Nightmare. I have no idea how or why your cat was there, but he ended up in my car."

"Your car?"

"Yeah. The backseat. Must have eeled in when I left the club. Anyway, I was being my usual paranoid self, checking for any car that might be following and ... thinking of other things, I admit, when that wildcat of yours comes clawing over the leather seat back into the front pa.s.senger seat, yowling and generally ripping cowhide."

"Ooh, your car," Temple sympathized as only the ownerof a new vehicle with a costly leather interior could. Of course hers had just a little leather because it was just a little car. Call it a Baby Bear car. "Louie knows not to scratch the furniture. I can't imagine what got into him."

"It didn't take imagination. It took glancing into my rearview mirror, which I'd ignored after a few cursory checks because I was busy thinking about something else. There was a motorcycle on my tail."

"A motorcycle? Wow. A motorcycle? It was Kitty?"

"Apparently. It was dark, the street was She was riding a black Kawasaki Ninja and she wore black leather and a helmet."

"Then it didn't have to be her."

"No, but it made a lot of sense that it was her. I think she made me at Neon Nightmare. I've been going there, hanging out."

"Why? It's a hot new club, but-"

"It's where the Synth meets."

"You're sure."

"Sure? I've joined them. They welcomed a pa.s.se magician like myself into the fold. They a.s.sume I'm not working because I can't, that I despise the likes of the Cloaked Conjuror, who gives away trade secrets. That I'm bitter and washed up by the newest trends in mega-magic, i.e., raise the t.i.tanic on national TV and then make it disappear again, all in an hour minus forty minutes of ads. They may be right."

"So now you're mourning your career as well as the death of an enemy."

He quirked her a smile. "I'm mourning change, Temple, the first sign of dawning middle age."

"What is Matt mourning?"

"A good question. A lot more than I am. His duel with Kathleen was fresh; mine is decades old. He followed Molina's sage but cynical advice right into a death trap . he'd almost feel better if it had been his death rather than Va.s.sar's. I brought that over to cheer him up, but even the whiskey of kings couldn't lift his depression."

"So you dove right in with him."

"Momentarily." Max's smile grew as slender as he was. "There is some good news. Think about how Kathleen died."

"In a motorcycle accident?"

"Doesn't that answer some dangling questions?"

"She had an Easy Rider hang-up? Wait! Way back when . . . when you got back from California looking up Rafi Nadir for Molina, someone on a motorcycle took a shot at you while you were driving in that convertible you had then. It was her?"

"Seems logical. I suspect she'd been looking for me since she hit town. Luckily for me, she only caught that one glimpse of me, and took advantage of the opportunity."

"Luckily for you, she only grazed your scalp."

"Rush hour on the Strip is not the ideal venue for target practice. But it wasn't me she only had eyes and wheels for. In his cups, Devine confessed that he's been ... haunted for weeks by a motorcycle-riding phantom. It was definitely Kathleen, he said, when she attacked his female producer at the radio station, but at other times he swears it was-are you ready? An Elvis impersonator. He doesn't believe in Elvis or his ghost, of course, so he's convinced these manifestations were just darn good imitations."

Max grinned again, so crookedly that Temple suspected he wasn't telling her everything. She returned to the slow process of getting things as straight as she could.

"So Kitty didn't see you again after that sniping incident on the Strip until she spotted you Sunday night at Neon Nightmare. You've been going out in public too much again, and several times with me. It's my fault."

"Don't go all Devine-ish on me, Temple. Taking the blame for other people's actions can get to be a bad habit."

"You feel it too, don't you, Max? That someone died because of you, even if she was out to get you. Lord, Matt has his soiled madonna on his conscience, and you have your Irish Fury. You Catholic boys are a mess."

"I'm not going to weep for Kathleen O'Connor. She had a lot of years to get into something better than using a pa.s.sionate cause as cover for her own twisted hatreds. And I guess I'd rather she crashed and burned chasing me than Devine. I can handle it better. His plate of guilt already runneth over."

"Tough guy," Temple teased, realizing as she said it that he'd always had to be that to survive. Tough enough as a mere teenager to seriously annoy the IRA. Toughness wasn't muscle, or age, or any gender. It was something in your soul.

"So you're sure she's dead?"

"Why even ask?"

"You hadn't been able to lose her in seventeen years. She had grabbed onto Matt like a vampire bat and wasn't about to let go. Who'd expect somebody that . . . tough . to let go of anything, most of all her life?"

"If she knew about Devine's appointment with a call girl, she may have been furious that he had eluded her. Then she had the good luck to spot me at Neon Nightmare. On that lonely desert road, one thing was certain: she wasn't going to let me escape with a grazing this time. She was literally h.e.l.l-bent for leather to catch me from behind. If your nosy cat hadn't been in my car, and hadn't been determined to shred my leather seats, I might not have noticed her until she'd gotten close enough to shoot something ... the tires, the window gla.s.s, me."

"But instead-"

"Instead, thanks to Midnight Louie, I saw, did an immediate one-eighty-turn so my headlights were blaring straight at her. I'd hit the high-beams while the Maxima was skating around. You know how things slow down in a car accident, even one you avoid? How it is absolute slow-motion, with these snapshots of images as sharp and large as if they were on a movie screen?"

Temple nodded, remembering. "I've had the occasional close call. Once I almost hit a squirrel that had decided to run across a street in front of me. I hit the brakes, but I can still see the little critter in every detail, stopping crouched on his delicate hind feet, trying to decide whether to run forward or back."

"What did he do?"

"Ran back."

"That's a squirrel for you, dithering and then retreating. That's why so many get run over."

"Not this one. I slowed the Storm enough to miss him, and the oncoming cars saw me braking and slowed down themselves, so he was sitting safe on the curb by the time I looked again."

"It was like that, except Kathleen didn't retreat. I saw her in my headlights. That 'cycle looked like one shiny big black bug bristling with armor. RoboRoach. Her own single headlamp almost blinded me. She swerved at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision, not because she cared about damaging any car or motorcycle, but because I'd survive it and she wouldn't.

"We were already out of town near the Great Nothing of Darkness. She went careening off into it, then I saw her red taillight bobble like a UFO headed for Venus. It arced upward. The front wheel must have hit a pretty big impediment. The little red light sailed up and then fell down so far it disappeared. That's when I knew that she had landed in a dry wash."

"Was it very deep?"

"Ten, twelve feet probably. Not so deep unless you're diving helmet first into the hard sand at seventy miles an hour."

"You're sure she's dead."

"I'm not, personally. Logically, she had to be. The person pulled out of that gully was sirened away by the EMTs, but they always have to try. Devine saw the body, and swears it was hers."

"How close did he see it? In a viewing room like where he ID'ed his stepfather?"

"Naked on an autopsy table. It doesn't come any more revealing than that. They'd even taken out her contactlenses. Blue-green. That was the wrinkle she developed after Ireland. Her eyes were hazel-green."

"She meant something to you. A lot."

He didn't quite look at her. "Kathleen was sweet, charming. So . . . unspoiled compared to the Material Girls at home. So dedicated to a cause. Sean and I had to pretend it was a contest between us, winning her. But it was first love, for both of us."

Temple kept silent, knowing from her older brothers how early boys learn to disguise softer feelings beneath a kind of brusque, rude energy.

Max went on without prompting, as if her comment had released the floodgates of the past instead of tears. "After Sean's death, when I turned on the IRA to punish his killers, I always thought Kathleen's apparent love had turned to hatred because I'd betrayed her cause. I always felt guilty about that, regretful that my thirst for justice, or vengeance, had come between us, that it was my fault.

"Only when Matt Devine came along recently, the 'innocent' ex-priest, and blithely suggested that Kathleen had set up Sean's death did I understand that he was right, that hatred underlay everything about Kathleen, that she had charmed us into infatuation and goaded us into compet.i.tion. Do you know the story of Maud Gonne?"

Temple shook her head.

"I was into everything Irish then. Maud Gonne was a beautiful nineteenth-century Irish actress, but first and always she was a relentless patriot. William Butler Yeats, the poet, fell madly in love with her, wrote plays and poems for her, said her beauty 'belonged to poetry, to some legendary past.' She refused all his many marriage proposals. He wasn't as fiercely committed to the Irish cause as she required. His last poems memorialized the fruitless beauty of a bitter, angry woman."

"When did you first start calling yourself 'Max,' after your string of given names?" Temple asked carefully.

His glance was tender, grateful, recognizing the intuition that had guided the seemingly irrelevant question.

"Michael Aloysius Xaviar. After ... Kitty and Sean's death and my blowing the whistle on the IRA, I needed a new ident.i.ty. Max it was."

"So you haven't been called 'Michael' since." Temple didn't indicate "since" when.

"Not since then. Her. Until now." He looked at her again, smiling. "It's time to put away the things of a child, including delusions. We have more modern mysteries to solve."

Temple decided it was also high time to let Max escape back into present conundrums. "Like why both you and she had a knack for high-tech disguise."

"Hardly disguise, Temple. Merely effect. I guess she and I liked to stage-manage our own images. Maybe that's what drew her to me."

"What drew her was that you had a conscience. That's the one thing you and Matt have in common."

"Me, the seasoned man of magic, illusion, counterespionage? You think I have a conscience?" He spoke lightly, self-disparagingly.

"Second only to Matt's, which is way overdeveloped. That's why you were both her victims."

He leaned forward to finally pick up the gla.s.s and take a long swallow. "You may be right. We'll never know, will we?"

"Probably not. Who's going to bury her?"

She didn't often startle Max, but this time she had. "h.e.l.l, Devine can bury his wicked stepfather, I can do as much for Kitty the Cutter. I'll do it."

"How? You don't exist."