Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (5 page)

For a moment, the vision was face-to-face with Max. Or mask-to-face, rather.

Breaths released audibly behind him.

“The bastard!" Max exploded, tense now, so tense that Serena released him and reflexively jumped back. His
muscles were knots of indignation. "He's ripped off my
old act's finale. No wonder you wanted me to see this so-
called act. The bloody bastard. Punchinello on a stick!
This is a travesty."

“Exactly so, lad," Sparks said. "This is why the Synth exists. The true artists remain, uncorrupted. This is why we have to make a statement."

“Damn right." He turned to regard them with burning
eyes. "Consider the Czar's scepter your joystick."
They stood as one, and applauded.

“
But I expect fifty percent of the proceeds for setting
up my comeback act.”

The applause never died.

Max bowed and melted into the black and featureless passage.

He
wiped the infinitesimal mustache of sweat from his upper lip and headed up into the pyramid's apex, by ways even the Synth hadn't found yet.

Gandolph awaited him up top, sweating as he retracted the flexible dummy in Phantom Mage guise.

“Did we reel in our fish?" he asked.

“The entire school.”

Gandolph collapsed against the wall, so close in these close quarters. "I'm too old for such shenanigans. This thing weighs a ton.”

Max pulled the dummy onto the narrow catwalk and peeled off the costume.

“They were suspicious. It was crucial to give this fellow a chance to swing."

“I've been called a 'puppet master' in my counterterrorism years, but never so literally, my boy. So you're in like Flynn."

“
No, I'm in like Max Kinsella, cat burglar."

“Cat burglary is always an elegant sideline for a magician. I'm pleased to see you expanding your repertoire.”

Max quickly donned the dummy's costume: the half-mask, the tool belt, the swirling cape.

“Can you do what they want?" Gandolph asked, stuffing the dummy into a large dark garbage bag like a dead body.

“Without getting caught?" Max, accoutered as the Phantom Mage, poised on the brink of plunging into the darkness below on a bungee cord. "Not easily. Why else set up the challenge? I'll have to do it, though, if we want to embed me deeper in the real heart of the Synth.”

He swung out over the abyss, half Batman, half Spider-
Man, all magician.

Gandolph would leave by the secret tunnels honey
combing the building, which he'd found even before Max
had first come here, sniffing around.

For Max, there was no way out of the Synth's chal
lenge but to mount a one-man raid on a major casino museum. Get caught and he'd satisfy Molina's deepest wet dreams, for sure.

Get caught and he'd betray and wound Temple past any
patience and passion she still held for him. No matter
what he did to lay his undercover past to rest for good, he
only augered in deeper. And Temple paid as much in the present as he had. He was neglecting her, dangerously, risking their relationship in the hope of breaking free to enjoy it forever. Again.

If he didn't get caught he'd be an actual thief on a
global scale, but he'd have won the trust of the darkest
levels of the Synth. He'd be well on the way to finding out
who really backed this cadre of disgruntled magicians,
and what they hoped to achieve.

He'd worry about the difficulties of the museum job later. Right now he had more important worries: how to
"disappear" for the time required to set up the job without
seeming to abandon Temple. Playing relationship Russ
ian roulette with the woman he loved. Again. How many times could he risk that, and not lose?

His booted feet hit the opposite wall and he caromed off it like a cue ball cleaning up the table. He was flying, like Peter Pan, and it was fun. Thrilling actually. A Never-NeverLand of adrenaline and adventure.

But he sure didn't want to leave Wendy behind, alone in the family bedroom.

Chapter 4

Male Call

Temple
stood on her tiny triangular balcony, one of the
 
perks of living in a round building and having what
passed for a "corner" unit.

She was marking a sure sign of spring: her upstairs neighbor, Matt Devine, doing laps in the pool.

She watched him cut a swath through the becalmed aquamarine water. She was also regarding a crime scene through the foggy lenses of time. Electra, their landlady, had only recently told Temple of witnessing Matt's first
encounter with their joint Me-noir-to-be, Kathleen
O'Connor, at that very poolside months ago.

Temple
could picture that scene right now. Kathleen
O'Connor made a very vivid, deceptively attractive
ghost: maybe five-foot-five, in pumps, wearing an Irish-green silk pantsuit, and looking like a girl from a ballad. The fall sunlight would have glistened off her black, black hair, her ruby lips, her skin as white as snow. Snow Black.

As Temple retro-daydreamed, Matt finished whatever number of laps he'd set himself, and pulled himself onto the wooden decking that surrounded the pool.

Now only Matt remained of the word picture Electra
had recently painted, and he was the same: lightly tanned,
muscled enough to be fit without making a fetish of it, white swim trunks and teeth, blond hair glinting pure platinum in the sunlight.

Okay . . . yum. Good enough to eat alive. Kitty O'Connor had thought so too. Only literally. Luckily, she'd left. Permanently.

Temple
watched him snatch a towel from a lounge
chair. White. Both the towel and the vinyl straps of the lounge chair. Temple, single, female, and thirty, ducked out of sight.

This lurking was pathetic! You'd think she didn't have
a perfectly good beau of her own, also out of sight, unfortunately.

A long
merow
drew her back to the living room sofa
and was interrupted by an even longer yawn. Midnight Louie was stretching until his toes reached the armrest,
where he riffed off a few earnest rips with his front claws.

“
Louie, no!”

He looked up with a lazy blink of green eyes but his
toes stopped doing the Watusi across her upholstery,
which was tough but not impervious. That might describe
Louie himself, or even Temple as she liked to think of
herself. Small but sturdy. Petite but persistent. Spoken for
but not blind.

Meanwhile, Louie was yowling from the couch for more
personal attention. She went over and attended to him, re
warded by a hoarse meow of contentment and a purr loud
enough to mimic a light plane engine passing overhead.

“
That's a good boy," she told him, scratching his
tummy while he twisted and flipped from side to con
tented side. "You should stay at home for a while and get
some first-class petting instead of roaming all over the
city and getting into trouble.”

Only belatedly did Temple realize she could have been advising her often-AWOL significant other, the Mystifying Max Kinsella.

Like Louie, Max always managed to be there when
she really needed him, but the times in between were
stretching longer and longer . . . like Louie on the sofa
right now.

Her doorbell rang. Actually, being a fifties' vintage doorbell, it didn't just ring. It chimed. It yodeled. It caroled a multinote phrase.

She opened the door before it had rung through its sonorous sequence.

“
Oh. Hi.”

Matt was on her doorstep, towel like a flyboy's white scarf hung around his neck, no longer dripping as far as she was able to discreetly see, but still all tan and bare. Bare. Oh, my.

“
Electra corralled me for errand duty in the lobby.
Seems you forgot to get your mail yesterday."

“Wonder why?" Temple murmured, taking the four or five envelopes he held out. "Something bad in the neighborhood? Like a meltdown at Maylords Fine Furniture? Glad that's a done deal. Come in."

“
I might drip."

“It's okay. Area rug. Right by the door. See?"

“
I never noticed that before." He was smiling at her,
the implication being why would he look down any farther than her face.

Well . . .

Temple
decided to flip casually through her mail, such as it was. "Speak of the devil. Oriental rug cleaning service advertiser. Political flyer. The usual suspects for shredding to keep my address safe and secret.”

He quirked a smile at her tepid witticisms. "I have to
go out of town next week."

“Speaking engagement?"

“
Amanda Show,
in Chicago."

“What day? I can record it for you.”

He shook his head. "Not necessary. I long ago over
dosed on my own image on TV. Just wanted you to know
I'd be away. And—"

“Yes?"

“
I'd like for us to have dinner when I get back.”

“Dinner?"

“
Someplace nice. Maybe the Bellagio."

“
Someplace expensive!
Every
restaurant at the Bella
gio is."

“Money's no object." He was smiling now. "The company is."

“Oh. Any special . . . reason?"

“Only that we don't get a chance to just sit down and talk."

“About what?"

“Just . . . anything."

“
Un-huh. Well, sounds fine. Just let me know when.”

“
I'll be back in several days. Any special time you're free?"

“Pretty much all the time now," she heard herself saying, wanting to retract the brittle tone as soon as it passed her lips.

“Fine," he said after a pause. "I'll let you know as soon
as I get back. I might even stay over a few days more.”

“
This trip is more than a quick TV gig, isn't it?”

“
Yeah. I'm finally doing what my mother wanted. I
don't know if unlocking the past is a good idea, but I've got an appointment in Chicago that might lead to my father. My real father."

“
So you could have news when you get back?”

“Maybe. But that's not why I want to have dinner." She was not going to ask the obvious question. "So,
good luck."

“I'm hoping for that." His unexpectedly brown eyes,
unusual in a natural blond, crinkled a bit. At her.
"Thanks.”

She was swinging the door shut even while wishing it was going the other way. From the living room, Louie let loose a long, abandoned howl.

She started toward him, still flipping through en
velopes over and over. Dinner? Bellagio? Just to "talk"? Were they talking "date"? Oh, my.

Temple
stopped dead, between her entry hall and liv
ing room. Louie yowled unanswered. A bold return address had caught her attention completely.

This was it. A response on the "LV PR Job of the Year."
She ripped open the envelope to scan its contents. And
rescan them. Again. Stamped her size five feet in their Via
Spiga slides to wake the dead, i.e., the unfortunate tenants
in the room below her, who were probably off at work anyway.

Temple
stared at the form letter in her hand.