Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

"The game is distraction. The aim is a moving target. If Temple were back there, she'd be dead."

  "God! Don't say that!"

  "It's the truth. As long as someone is running, there's a chance Temple is worth something to them."

  Matt grew silent. He couldn't drive like a demon, not without a vehicle; he couldn't pull a gun and flash a badge, not without a license. All he could do was pray. And be there. For whatever would be.

  "More taillights at the same speed." Kinsella's chin jerked to-ward the windshield. "It's a caravan. Major bust. Molina and her case is icing."

  "And Temple?"

  "Temple is ... an innocent bystander and the point of the game."

  "Then you know who?"

  "I know who the target is. I don't know why."

  Kinsella's hands left the wheel, then pounded back onto it in a death grip.

  Matt knew dread, and knew for the first time in his life that prayer was not enough.

  ******************

  Temple rocked and rolled in her padded cell.

  Temple despaired. She shouldn't have had that scotch and water. With all this motion, all this stress, all this hallucinogenic high, she might have to go to the bathroom. And if she died, well ... it would be embarrassing. If she lived, it would be even more embarrassing.

  Amazing what really mattered.

  Not being a kid. Not losing it. Not freaking out. Not... choking to death on your own fear because you were locked into this human-size jewel case in the dark, bouncing back and forth like heisted emeralds, only emeralds don't have to go to the bathroom, afraid you might die and afraid you might live and never live it down, this awful claustrophobia, this turning of yourself inside out, this delirious buzz that's supposed to be a kick if you pay for it but is sheer hell if someone does it to you.

  Oh, Lord. Think how disappointed everyone would be if she died? Poor Max. Guilt would move right in and pay rent. Poor Matt. Another guilty party. They could blame themselves for decades. And her poor aunt Kit, who would blame herself for ever letting Temple leave New York City for the Wild West. And her mother and father, who always knew she should never go off on her own, especially with a man. Especially with That Man. And her brothers, who started all her phobias by holding her under the fruit crate when she was four, and threatening to never let her free, and laughing.

  She guessed they didn't really mean it. But it had felt like it at the time, because she was smaller and a girl, both things they didn't seem to like much at their grand ages and sizes of ten, twelve and thirteen . . . she had hated the dark and closed-in places ever since . . . remember how she had grabbed Matt's arm in the haunted house? Not so very long ago. Much more recently than she had encountered her terror in a fruit crate.

  Those creepy ninjas, masked men. Weren't going to get her down. Okay, she was down. She was almost out. But she was conscious. Sort of. And her feet were free. Maybe she could pry the lid open. Wriggle her wrists out of the handcuffs. But she'd tried, and it's like they knew her wrists were small. All she did was wear off her skin. And the upholstery was up, down and all around. Muffling.

  No one would hear her. She tried chewing the silken gag into a narrow strip and shouting around it. But it was spiderVweb strong, the silk and all she managed were a few puny mews, like a sick cat.

  Sometimes she thought the dark and the drug haze and the endless nauseous motion would gag her. Or that she'd stop breathing. Just because. And then her heart raced until her ears pounded. And she thought, no, someone wanted this to happen to her, and the last thing she wanted was to give in to someone who wanted her to give in. Did that make sense? No.

  They would be so sad that she'd had to leave them. She could hardly stand it. She could face leaving, but she couldn't face leaving them alone, with only sadness to remember her by.

  All right. She wasn't dead yet. They could have killed her, but they didn't. She was still alive, and she wasn't quite crazy, although the possibility of that seemed the scariest of all. And her feet were free. And they were wearing very spiffy shoes. If she died, she'd be put in a funeral casket, and then no one would see her spiffy shoes.

  Not to be tolerated.

  She kicked off one of the shoes, put both hands to her mouth and pulled on the tight rope of silk until it seemed her lips would peel off. But finally she managed to work one side over her chin.

  Her handicapped hands tussled the fabric down to her neck, where it hung like a cowboy's kerchief.

  Her face and mouth were sore, worn, but it was great to know she could really holler if she had to.

  And then she curled her toes, flexed her knee and worked the loose shoe up, up the cushy side of the rolling coffin to her hip. She caught its pointed toe with her fingertips.

  She brought it, heel first, to her head.

  Temple took a deep breath. It was harder to strangle without a gag in your mouth. And now she could yell. But should she, right now? Better to wait until she sensed that someone beside ninjas might hear her.

  The shoe lay on her chest, between her handcuffed wrists.

  Now what? It couldn't spring steel. Maybe she could work her-self half upright and pry away at the upholstery. There must be wood underneath, and nails or screws. She fought the flutter in her stomach at the word "screws." Screws were hopeless.

  No, screws were harder, but not hopeless.

  Chapter 44

  The Last Time with Temple

  The night had settled into a game of follow-the-dotted-line.

  The dotted line of the highway center divider.

  Max Kinsella drove it, but Matt Devine rode it in his head, on the Hesketh Vampire. A motorcycle was made for following a line, a thin, endless high-wire road through nowhere.

  Matt had never realized, until confined as a passenger in this car, how much he had converted to the lone, whining whiplash of a two-wheeler.

  He had never understood, until that last time with Temple, how much of himself lay unexpressed, like raw ore in the ground, waiting to be found and valued.

  "Why Temple?" he asked. "It began with her ring, but then they took her. Why?"

  "Why you?" Kinsella rejoined. "Why were you there at all, with Molina of all people?"

  "I was a witness." Matt suddenly saw that role as both horrific and ironic. "I was supposed to identify the woman who cut me. Why she was supposed to be there, I don't know. Ask Molina.

  She seemed so very sure."

  "She's paid to seem certain."

  Kinsella drove like someone who could take it or leave it. Like driving was a means to an end, not an end in itself. It was hard to imagine him caring enough about the Hesketh Vampire to own it.

  "What are we paid to do?" Matt asked.

  Kinsella was silent. Then he hit the door buttons and the win-dows rolled down, letting in chill desert air.

  His unconfined hair blew back like an Art Deco pennant, dramatic, decorative. He looked like the Pontiac Indian: aloof, superior, alien.

  "We're paid to care," Kinsella finally said.

  Matt tasted the idea. That described his job all right. His hours on the headset, connected to strangers. How did it describe Kin-sella's reality? Paid"to care? Matt hoped not. He hoped humanity was not a mere commodity.

  "Temple cares without being paid," Matt noted after a while, into the wail of the wind.

  "Temple is a throwback," Kinsella said shortly.

  Matt was silent. The expression made Temple sound expendable, when Matt realized that was the last thing Kinsella had meant to say. Temple was a hark back to old-fashioned values.

  That was why he was so drawn to her. She looked before she leaped. She weighed right and wrong. She considered other people's feelings. And he had castigated her for trying to spare his.

  Matt leaned his head into the wind, felt the fresh, sundown whip of night in motion.

  Molina seemed to know what she was doing.

  Kinsella always acted as if he did.

  Matt would have to count on them being at lea
st half right, because there was nothing else he could do.

  *****************

  A constellation had fallen to earth.

  Mars, Venus, the Crab Nebula lay across the long, lone strip of highway, blinking wildly.

  Matt took in the convention of red, blue and yellow-white lights.

  "Accident?"

  "Roadblock."

  Coming up fast.

  The Taurus's brakes took, but not before the car did a graceful, screeching half-turn on the empty road.

  Beyond all the ground-bound official lights blinked an alien vehicle. Twinkling like a rectilinear Christmas tree, big as a double-wide house on wheels.

  A semitractor and trailer. West Coast mirrors. Twin trucker CB antennas. Eighteen wheels and chrome Playboy bunny mudflaps. A true UFO brought to earth by a squadron of police vehicles, most of them vans bristling with antennas.

  Above them, a helicopter hung like one mighty mad hornet, buzzing.

  "Wait," Kinsella cautioned, turning off the ignition.

  Wait? When Temple's fate was winking somewhere out there in the chaos.

  Matt opened the Taurus door, got out, began walking toward the commotion.

  Kinsella they probably would have crucified against the nearest empty van as a suspicious character.

  Matt they left oddly alone, as if he were invisible.

  Perhaps fifteen men milled around the truck. Matt spotted the white Crown Vic and headed that way. The red light on top still circled endlessly in the night, washing desert and sky and van in sweeping turn.

  Molina waited on the road, hanging back as the bulky men in commando gear swarmed over the parked tractor-trailer.

  When he came alongside of her, she didn't seem surprised.

  "It's their show. We're just a sideshow." She meant the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police.

  "And Temple?"

  "A featured attraction. I've got to let them do their thing. All we've got is suspicion. They've been working this case for months."

  She glanced over Matt's shoulder into the desert darkness. "Hitch a ride with a friend?"

  "You know better than that."

  "He's still out there." It was a statement.

  "Yeah."

  Molina nodded, satisfied. "We'll get our turn."

  Matt wasn't sure what she meant: that they'd get their turn at Max Kinsella, or at the truck.

  Molina leaned against the car fender. "Kinsella's smart. He's got the best seat in the house.

  We're standing on hot asphalt waiting for a pretty-please chance at the evidence."

  Matt shrugged. Only the rotating lights made the site hot. The air was actually chilly.

  "Are you saying," he asked, "that their drug bust has priority over a kidnapped person?

  Temple could be--"

  "I frigging know it," Molina said. "These guys have frigging priority. Mess with 'em and you get a slow sentence on their time clock."

  But she swaggered forward, finally buttonholing one of the chunky guys in commando gear.

  They talked. Hands gestured. Molina returned.

  "And?"

  "They're not finding anything. I made a deal."

  "What deal?"

  "You bring Kinsella over for a search."

  "Kinsella?"

  "This semitrailer is loaded with magic-show gear. The cast of thousands, including the human and feline stars of the show, has vanished elsewhere. This major drug bust has nabbed two drivers whose underdeveloped muscle has displaced their brains. Errand boys. There's apparently nothing in the trailer but elaborate empty boxes. The narcs want to take the truck back to their secured lot and go over it with a fine-tooth flea comb tomorrow morning."

  "Tomorrow morning? Temple could suffo--"

  "So I told them we have an expert searcher. Better than a drug-sniffing superdog. A human nose when in comes to magical paraphernalia. Think he'll come running if you ask him nicely?"

  "I think he'll come running if I tell him that no one cares about looking for Temple until they feel like it."

  "I don't care what bait you use. I only care that the fish goes for it."

  "Fine." Matt trotted back to the Taurus, angry with both faces of the law.

  He leaned over the open driver's side window.

  "The drug enforcement unit has priority, but it can't find a thing. The truck will wait in a lot until morning unless you search the magic-show gear for hidden narcotics. If you find Temple, the drug guys won't object."

  "Politics."

  Max got out and slammed the car door shut. "I suppose my services are Molina's idea?"

  "She's along for the ride, just like us."

  "She's along for the kill, don't you doubt it."

  Kinsella strode forward with seven-league steps, forcing Matt to lengthen his stride. He felt like Chester Goode limping after Mr. Dillon.

  Molina greeted Kinsella's arrival with a weary tilt of her head toward the open maw of the trailer. "It's all yours."

  Kinsella slicked his hair back from habit, but without an anchor for the pony tail it did no good.

  A bulky man in what looked like a flack vest blocked Kinsella's way. "This is what you're looking for." In the light of a flashlight, Matt glimpsed purple-and-white capsules on a palm.

  "Pills, or plain powder, like crack. We've done a cursory search, but that truck bed's loaded with mumbo-jumbo stuff. Can't make head or tail of it. The lieutenant said you could."

  Kinsella threw a glance over his shoulder. "I guess I'm enough of a politician to be good at mumbo jumbo. Got a light?"

  The man handed Kinsella latex gloves and a flashlight as he walked into the squad car spotlight trained on the gaping rear doors. The big rig sat marooned like an island of hollow steel.

  Kinsella entered the truck with one superhero leap.

  Beside Matt, Molina started, as if afraid he had vanished.

  "Always a showman," she commented.

  "Maybe he has to con the narcs into letting him have a fair shot at it. Do you think Temple's in there?"

  "If she isn't we don't want to speculate where she might be."

  "Lieutenant--"

  She put a hand on his shoulder. "Do you think I like using Kinsella as a hunt-dog? He's got the best chance. The drug group doesn't believe in magic, that it's possible to hide someone in a hollow box."

  "She just. . . disappeared."

  "I know. What's worse, she was always meant to."

  "Why would drug smugglers care about Temple?"

  "Why would Effinger?"

  "You like bringing it back to me?"

  "No. But that's where it goes back to. So tell me why she was there with him. "

  They both knew they were no longer talking about Effinger. They walked away from the truck doors, away from the Crown Vic into the deep velvet dark of the desert. Where they walked, skitter and chitter and grind halted. They carried their own desert with them, empty and dry and silent.

  "They're together again," Matt said. Strange how honest that sounded.

  "Not at the moment," Molina noted dryly. "I suspect it's more his fault than yours."

  "The kidnapping?"

  Molina might have nodded. She sighed. "Right. One thing I like about Las Vegas."

  "Yes?" He felt like a straight man.

  "No mosquitoes."

  "No mosquitoes," he agreed. But there were sand fleas and chiggers and a thousand other annoying insects of the high desert. "I'm sorry I didn't spot the woman you were looking for."

  "I was looking for an untoward event. We got that."

  "You weren't looking for Kinsella."

  "No. Sometimes I do love this life."

  "Not always."

  "No. My instincts tell me she's in that truck."

  "Then why doesn't anybody see, hear anything?"

  "These are instruments of illusion, packed to the gills and probably transporting narcotics.

  They'd be clever about concealment."

  "Powder and pills, maybe, but Templ
e's a human being."

  "Small, though. Give me that. Small. A regular Thumbelina."

  "You think that has something to do with why they can't find her?"

  "I hope so. I hope so."

  They turned without further conversation and made their heavy-footed way back through sand and scrub.

  The lights were still trained on the inside of the truck.

  When the lieutenant stopped to consult with the drug team commander, Matt moved to the very lip of the stalled semi's storage area.

  A forest of strange boxes and pedestals resembled a struck stage set for some Mount Olympus drama from the 1930s. Matt listened, and heard the faint mewling of a seagull.

  In the desert?

  There was Lake Mead, but how many seagulls were trucked in?

  "Do you hear--?" Matt intended to ask Molina, who stood only fifteen feet behind him, but a voice much closer answered.

  "Shh! I'm following the sound." Kinsella appeared from around a Gothic grandfather clock with a sword for a pendulum.

  "That's the only sound you hear?"

  "The way these props are built, sound doesn't much escape the perimeters. Magicians are smooth and silent, like the dead, didn't you know?"

  Kinsella grinned into the garish light, then vanished behind a gypsy caravan.

  Beyond Matt, impatient combat boots ground sand to silica.

  "I heard a mewling sound," Matt said hopefully when Molina came up.

  "Please. No more cats. This case was heralded by cats. I don't want to see another one."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Mister Midnight Louie and Miss Midnight Louise were present when Effinger's soggy body was dredged up from the Oasis barge-pool."

  "Louie was there? And that cat from the Crystal Phoenix?"

  "Yes. I hope you set as little store by the presence of cats on the scene of the crime as I do."

  "I'm not superstitious. Still--"

  " And everywhere that Temple went, her cat was sure to go?' "