Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

“Besides yours?” Max asked back, sardonically.

  “Tut-tut.” Czarina intervened. “No need to get testy. You’re an untried factor. We must be sure you’re reliable.”

  “So.” Sparks was looking excited and a bit nasty. “Have you seen the Phantom Mage perform here?”

  “No, and with that impossibly hokey name, I don’t want to. I’ll be going.”

  “I hope not.” Serena uncoiled herself to rise and take his arm, a seductive gesture that was also custodial. “Why in such a rush to leave us?” she purred. And her voice did indeed rumble deep in her … ah, chest.

  “You want me to steal the most prized object in Las Vegas or not?”

  “Stay just a while,” she coaxed. “You might find this new fellow interesting.”

  “I find little that is common interesting. I must be off.”

  “No.” The tone and the glance was commanding.

  Max removed Serena’s arm from its entwined position on his.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s imperative you stay.” Sparks stood as well.

  “Come to the window,” Serena cajoled, entwining him again, like a velvet boa constrictor. Max was very glad he’d decided to drop the nickname Carmen for her. She was acting completely out of character for the Carmen he knew.

  He made her work to draw him toward the tinted rectangle on one-way glass that framed the dark upper pyramid of Neon Nightmare.

  “I really have better things to do … .” But he let the sentence trail off.

  Everyone was watching him, like rats at a cheese tray.

  He stared out over the empty darkness, glancing at his watch without seeming to. The Phantom Mage was scheduled to start a set just about now … .

  Everyone behind him had tensed, as had Serena, so close and yet so far.

  Max kept his own tension bottled, his limbs as loose as linguini. He could see Serena frown as she detected this.

  Don’t worry, lady, he thought, I can produce the requisite tension when needed … . Which was not now, when everyone expected one and only one outcome for this charade: Max would fail because the Phantom Mage would fail to appear.

  He knew they suspected that Max and the Phantom might be one and the same person. The Phantom’s performing gear, mask, and cloak certainly made his identity doubtful.

  Beyond the glass, music was ratcheting up to introduce the night’s featured act: the Phantom Mage, aka Max.

  Inside the glass, someone smiled pleasantly at the Czarina.

  Max.

  Breaths were held. Not his.

  The space beyond the window remained mere space.

  Then! A caped form swooped past the window, caroming off the dark sides of the narrowing apex of the pyramid-shaped building, strewing light wands and iridescent glitter.

  He came plunging directly toward the one-way glass window. He saw it as only another of the Lucite mirrors positioned to reflect the neon fireworks. He touched toe to the surface and rappelled off like a mountaineer in Batman guise.

  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 honeycombing 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 challenge 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 Russian 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-Never Land 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 bête-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 Irishgreen 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 h
e’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, rewarded 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 contented 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 overdosed 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 Bellagio 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 envelopes over and over. Dinner? Bellagio? Just to “talk”? Were they talking “date”? Oh, my.

  Temple stopped dead, between her entry hall and living 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.

  She couldn’t believe it.

  “We thank you for your interest but—”

  She’d lost the hottest PR account in town to … Crawford Buchanan, fellow freelance flack and part-time gossip guru for KREP-AM radio! Pronounced KREEP in her book, as anything relating to Buchanan was.

  Nattering Nabobs of Negativity! This was so unfair. She had the background—former TV news reporter, former PR director for the prestigious Guthrie Repertory Theater in Minneapolis, current PR rep for the classiest hotel in Vegas, the Crystal Phoenix. What was there not to prefer over Awful Crawford? Plus she was a girl, and you’d think that would be an advantage on an account like this for once!

  Temple stared at the hot pink headline over the bad black-and-white news.

  CALLING ALL TEEN QUEENS! The letters were an inch high and as curly as her natural red hair. TV’S HOTTEST NEW REALITY SHOW HITS VEGAS! FROM ’TWEEN IDOL TO LEGALLY LIVE BAIT! THEY COMPETE FOR THE GUY, THE GOLD, AND THE GOOD LOOKS!

  And the sleaziest PR hack in Vegas, not to mention the biggest lecher on Las Vegas Boulevard, would be handling all the publicity, not to mention the contestants if he could.

  Temple shook her head. She hadn’t been entirely at ease with being head flack for a reality TV show anyway. Especially one that would turn the twenty-four-hour spy cameras on vulnerable young women of tender years. If you could find any of that breed around these days.

  She deposited the letter in the wicker wastebasket near her living room sofa.

  The position paid spectacularly well, and she certainly could have done a better job with it than Crawford, even with one manicured hand tied behind her back, but que sera, sera. She was probably better off out of it. The potential PR headaches were as big as the payoff.

  The possibilities unscrolled in her mind.

  Number one, permissions. You don’t put underage kids on TV without parental permissions up the wazoo. Then, too, how do you run a peep show involving minors without getting hit with child endangerment or abuse charges? More parental permissions.

  Then there was the financial tangle of who would b
enefit from any resulting prizes or payments. Kids, or parents?

  Not to mention the ugly matter of stage parents who push their kids into this kind of media exposure for their own needs, otherwise known as JonBenet syndrome. One thing that ugly unresolved investigation had never made clear was where that offbeat name came from. That answer might explain a lot.

  Kids tote a heavy load of parental expectations, Temple mused. Cats too. Maybe Louie hadn’t really wanted to be a TV commercial spokescat.

  Nah. Louie had been born to attract attention, unless he was sneaking around, up to feline mischief, and then he was Mr. Invisible.

  Chapter 5

  Mail Call

  Lieutenant C. R. Molina was doing a surprise inspection of her clothes closet and not liking what she saw. Not that any of her wearable troops were out of uniform and disorderly. Quite the contrary.

  A row of black, navy, and brown pantsuits in serviceable twill for winter alternated with a row of taupe, navy, and charcoal gray pantsuits in sturdy cotton for summer.

  They weren’t cheap, but they all came from conservative career clothing for women catalogs, where she could find styles long enough for her five-foot-eleven-inch frame.

  At the other end of the closet hung the limp folds of a few choice silk-velvet evening gowns culled from vintage stores in Los Angeles and Las Vegas over the past fifteen years.

  She looked from one end of the closet to the other. “Lieutenant Jekyll and Ms. Hyde,” she muttered. She moved down to flip through the vintage gowns representing her years as Carmen the chanteuse. The rich velvets seemed to echo the tones of her bluesy contralto voice: dark mossy forest green; shimmering black, ruby-burgundy, deep magenta, blue velvet.

  Her hand paused in pulling out that last gown. Couldn’t even remember buying it. Usually she knew the where and when of every costume … even, or especially, those found during her L.A./Rafi Nadir period. Her mind danced away from summoning those dread days beyond recall but her hand clung to the blue velvet. Was she losing it? She let the fabric fall away. No, just too much on her mind that was much more important nowadays, including Her Hormonal Highness, the periadolescent Mariah. Oh, for the pigtails and skinned knees and kiddish enthusiasms of yesterday!