Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 24

Fall of Another Card

Molina wanted to see them downtown. Now. Then she hung up.

Temple and Matt hung onto the phone in her kitchen, ears jammed against the shared earpiece, cheek to cheek, with a bundling board of molded plastic between them.

Temple had done all the talking. Not that there had been much to say. And now the line was dead.

"You're sure we have to do this?" Matt asked Temple.

"You're the arbiter of right and wrong. I thought you'd be cheerleading me to sell myself down the river."

"I'm in worse shape. I might have heard the last person to see Darren Cooke alive arrive at his suite."

"At least you're not the one his wife invited over for pasta only to confront you with evidence that you were the last person to sleep with her husband."

Matt's light tan turned ashen. "Molina's going to ask us why we didn't volunteer this information before."

"We were cowards, plain and simple. You couldn't be sure that your information was relevant to the case, and I was all too sure that mine was, except that it made me look like an idiot."

"You could call it a case of Prejudice and Pride."

"That version of the title does not have a ring to it, and our excuses won't soothe Molina's wrath. In her place I'd be pretty put out with us too."

"You know, that's the first empathetic thing you've said about her."

Temple hung up the dead phone, tired of the guilt-inducing drone of the dial tone, although it perfectly suited her mood.

"There's one thing I'm not going to tell her, even now."

"What's that?"

"It's pure supposition. I'm convinced that Darren's daughter has been stalking him. I bet she's in Las Vegas, and I'm going to find her."

"Temple, that's worse than a needle in a haystack, that's one young woman among one million."

"She wouldn't be far away; she'd want to watch him sweat. I keep thinking that Domingo the flamingo artist being in town just when Darren Cooke was working up his show was perfect timing for someone. Domingo's legion of volunteer flamingo-planters, all with undocumented backgrounds, would provide a perfect cover for a twenty-something Jill the Ripper. I'd really like to nail Domingo's ex-mistress Verina with the role, but she's past forty."

"Why do you have it in for this Verina?"

"She took my hat."

"Remind me not to sit on your cat. I can't imagine what revenge you'd think up then."

Matt ambled into the living room to sit beside Midnight Louie on the ivory sofa. He was wearing khaki and almond; with his blond hair and brown eyes, that made him look both cool and warm at the same time. Temple was starting to regret she'd insisted they confess to Molina.

There were much more personal matters to discuss this evening.

Temple joined him on Louie's other side.

Matt rested an elbow on the sofa arm, his face on his fist. "You know, this demented daughter writing ugly letters to her father, calling it stalking, makes me wonder if that's what I'm doing to my stepfather. Whatever he's up to is none of my business. Why I am dogging his trail?

Am I a stalker?"

Temple perched on the sofa arm behind him.

"Sure," she said cheerfully. "I don't think you've even figured out yet what you'd do if you actually found him. You might even be a violent stalker."

"That's the scary part." Matt looked up.

"You wouldn't send him hate letters, though."

"Hadn't thought of that. But, no. I'd want to see him face-to-face . . . and then I might strangle the bastard."

Temple tsked. "Not fit language for Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, I imagine."

Matt looked amused. "You can imagine all you want. Priests use strong language in private to express anger, just like anybody else."

"Not all priests."

"No. Some are perfect practitioners of every commandment. When it came to language, I was more often among the lambs than the sheep."

"I don't doubt it," Temple answered, patting his head.

Matt looked up at her again, visibly trying to decide if the gesture was motherly, comradely or something else.

She stood with a grimace. "No time to wallow in comfort and examine our consciences.

We've got an appointment at the police department. Hey, I'm wearing leggings. Why don't we take your motorcycle."

"It's Kinsella's motorcycle."

"That's no reason not to take it; besides, Max gave it to Electra."

"Some things you can't give away."

Temple stopped by her front door. "Somethings, or some people?"

"It's a rather intimidating machine."

"That's why I want to ride it, silly. Conquer my fears."

"That knit jacket won't cut it; I finally had to find something to replace my windbreaker. The street gets cold these November evenings."

"I've got a great little leather jacket that should be just the thing."

"You don't have a helmet."

Temple paused, then lit up. "Electra's not using her 'Speed Queen' number."

"I've never had a passenger before. The new weight might throw things off. I might dump you in the street."

"I'm little, as I often lament. I won't add much weight. Mister, please, I ain't heavy."

"You aren't my brother," he answered sardonically, "but you're sure acting like a whiny kid sister."

"You never had one of those, although I admit I was everybody's kid sister in my family.

Consider this a making-up-for-lost-time experience on your part."

"Bratty, demanding kid sister is more like it. I'll run up and get my jacket while you get yours.

And sturdier footwear is advised."

Temple pranced into her bedroom. What, did he think these dainty heels were all she owned? She had some kicky ankle-high boots for horseback-riding-if-it-ever-came-up hidden somewhere. She hadn't ridden a horse in years, so it was only in the farthest, lowest, darkest part of her closet that she found the tumbled boots and the cream-colored leather jacket.

What had replaced Matt's unexciting navy nylon windbreaker, Temple wondered as she kicked off shoes and struggled into boots. Was she going to be visited with Electra's vision of Matt-black leather? Temple shrugged into the elderly jacket, which was a teensy bit snug. Eek!

Just touch thirty and your weight was creeping up already.

She hurried back to her door as Matt arrived from upstairs. Her prediction had been right, no macho black leather for golden boy. He wore a sheepskin jacket, and looked a little sheepish.

"It's synthetic," he explained. "The real stuff is pricey, and I don't like to know a sheep died for my sins."

"Radical, and politically correct!" Temple took his arm as they walked to the elevator. "Looks good on you too. Molina will swoon and Electra will be rabid that I got to see it before she did."

He shrugged her arm off, embarrassed as usual by the thought that what he wore might attract attention. Or women. "I needed something warmer and inexpensive."

"So practical," Temple cooed, unable to resist teasing.

Yet Matt's sternly practical instincts had steered him right to the most flattering item. As far as Temple was concerned, black-leather, Marlon Brando motorcycle chic had just been dethroned.

"Molina's working late," Temple noted as they stepped out into a Maxfield Parrish twilight, the sky a warm indigo-blue bowl in the distance.

"Do you think she ever stops?"

"Only to sing for her supper."

Mutual memories of encountering Molina as the house thrush for the Blue Dahlia made them smile.

Matt unlocked Electra's shed and tossed Temple the racy silver helmet labeled speed queen.

"I love it! I feel so kicky, right out of Blackboard Jungle."

"You weren't even born when that movie came out. I'll start the cycle and ease it out of the shed. You relock the shed and hop aboard," Matt suggested.

Temple skittered outside, just happy to be there. The motorcycle was so huge close up. It dominated the small shed like a rodeo bull temporarily trapped in a chute before breaking free to kick loose in the arena.

And the noise! She quickly pulled on the bulbous helmet and fastened the chin strap. She knew when she lowered the sinister, tinted visor that she'd see night all around her and that nobody could see her face. Cool.

"These helmets don't have transceivers built in," Matt shouted, visor up, from amid the sound and fury of the revving Hesketh Vampire.

Temple nodded broadly. They'd be unable to communicate. Verbally.

The Vampire came rhur-rhuring out, then paused to gargle disgruntledly. Temple ran to padlock the double shed doors, then turned to face her moment of truth.

The motorcycle seat was longer and broader than she had thought. But she had ridden horses, great huge beasts, so this would be a piece of coconut cake. Maybe. The lift-over was as thigh-stretching as a horseback for her short legs, and she settled onto the hard leather seat with an unintentionally punishing slap. Next, she couldn't find the footrests, not until she stretched her legs way out and pointed her toes. Of course there was nothing convenient to hang onto but Matt, and her passenger position wouldn't really work unless she scooted up right behind him, which she did, snaking her bare hands into the faux-sheepskin side pockets of his jacket.

"Ready?" he shouted.

She just tightened her grip and then the Vampire leaped into the street like a runaway horse.

Galloping gallons of gas! She had never noticed that motorcycles tilted this way and that so much. As they turned into the street, Temple felt almost parallel to the pavement and clutched onto the flannel pocket linings until she thought they would rip out. The wind, absorbed by Matt ahead of her, still had plenty of pummel left in it for her.

And the traffic loomed all around them like an encroaching herd, pale circles of headlights and highly polished rumps... er, rear fenders ... of neighboring vehicles.

Temple curled her fingers into the lining of Matt's pockets for dear life.

Luckily, nowhere was far from anywhere else in Las Vegas, which still adhered to its simple desert-town layout.

"Oh, look!" Temple couldn't help shouting to the wind. "Domingo's flamingos are lit up at night!"

She actually unclutched and removed a hand to point, but a Ford Taurus sped by so fast she was almost about to be known as "Knuckles" for the rest of her life.

She replaced her hand in a hurry, remembering that Matt couldn't hear her no matter how well she projected. A motorcycle was no bicycle built for two; it was the eye of its own howlingly cold hurricane. No matter how cozy motorcycle couples look, pasted to each other as they are, she was finding it to be a solitary ride.

Soon, though, the Vampire turned into the deeper dark of the parking ramp behind the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department--again almost scraping Temple off on the concrete floor--and purred into an empty third-level space.

Temple sighed her relief as the engine rumbled to a muffled roar, then quieted entirely when Matt turned it off and kicked the stand into place. Temple wasn't sure her legs would ever desert their wishbone position; she would be doomed to bowleg around like a broncobuster forever. Her lovely shoe collection would look laughable at the ends of her pathetic, hooped legs. She would be drafted for croquet games the rest of her life!

Unbending, she tried to hop off; Matt caught her before she could fall over.

"Took me two weeks," he said, "to get comfortable on this silly thing."

"Will it be safe here?" Temple wondered, eyeing the impressive machine as they walked away.

"I locked it; that's the best you can do. If I ever have to tell Electra it's been stolen, I'd hate that."

"You'd most hate having lost something that was once Max's," she added astutely.

Matt stopped to stuff his buff leather gloves in his jacket pockets. "Yeah. I should have told you to wear gloves."

"That's okay. I had to hang onto your pockets anyway. We better forget about our mode of transportation and start thinking about how to handle Molina."

"She'll handle us, as always," Matt said dryly. "I never saw anyo ne so seriously devoted to her calling, except maybe me. Who wants to go first?"

"I should. I have the guiltier secret. She'll be mad, and rightly so."

"Temple. Don't look like an abandoned basset hound!"

"Oh, thanks! But I ain't gonna like this."

"I'll be there." He put his arm around her shoulder.

A sudden warmth and confidence spread through her chilled frame. This was better than a motorcycle ride any day.

Inside the garage stairway, signs directed them down to the ent ry level, where they had to check in with the desk sergeant. One just didn't waltz into the back door of a police station; that would mean too many could simply waltz out.

The large entry area was brightly lit, a shock after the darkening night and the parking ramp's blackness. Its wall of windows faced onto the concrete area between this building and the Hoover Dam-sheer face of the opposite building.

The sergeant gave them no guff, being a disappointingly pleasant, helpful type. He called up , and they were duly instructed that someone would be down for them.

They had been here a couple of times before, and knew there was nothing glamorous about a police headquarters, except its lack of glamour. That's what gave it flavor, the sense of overworked people coping as best they could, with littered desktops and crowded offices and squad rooms, with busy bathrooms and eternally plugged in coffeepots.

Matt and Temple followed their uniformed guide into the elevators in silence, and were finally shown into a long, narrow office cramped for space but crammed with file cabinets and folders.

Molina sat at the room's far end, behind a desk covered with neat paperwork piles.

"This feels like going in to see the principal," Temple gritted through her teeth to Matt.

"Wouldn't know," he gritted back.

"Goody Two-shoes," she gibed.

Molina put her fingertips to both sides of her eyes, as if acknowledging a headache, or the sight of two such approaching.

"Sit."

The chairs she indicated were plain and wooden, a lot less comfortable than the Vampire's hard leather seat.

"From your call, apparently you both failed to tell me relevant information about the Darren Cooke death. It's not really my case, but when your"--she nodded at Matt--"hot-line card was found in the deceased's possession, someone had to check it out and I had the overriding interest."

Her vivid blue eyes floated in pale maroon circles of fatigue. Her abstract tone of weary disappointment was even more marked.

"I won't do it again, Mother!" Temple was tempted to shout. She glanced at Matt. He was giving Molina his rapt, polite attention, like a perfect student.

"I'm surprised you would hold back relevant information," she told him. He winced ever so slightly.

"Matt felt he couldn't violate the confidentiality of a client," Temple said.

"Unfortunate, but understandable. And what is your excuse for keeping my daughter at the sitter's long past suppertime?"

Now Temple winced. "I thought you--the police--would find it. I didn't realize until recently that you hadn't."

"And what didn't we find?"

"For one thing, my card, which Darren Cooke had possession of at the time of his death, apparently." Temple was falling right into the police patois. Had possession of indeed.

"You think this card is a witness, or what? And how did you learn that he did have it?"

"From his wife. She found the card, and incorrectly assumed that I ... was an inamorata of his."

"Again, please. In English."

"Oh, you know what inamorata means, all right! A musical person like you, Lieutenant. You just want me to squirm. I was attending his regular Sunday brunch, at his personal invitation."

"Why should he invite you?"

"We were working on the same set at Gangster's. Theater people make quick acquaintances and slow friends."

"And this happy crossing of paths made you bosom buddies with the late Mr. Cooke."

"No, but he had heard Savanna h Ashleigh, who once was very bosom buddy with Mr. Cooke, refer to me as 'Nancy Drew.' So --"

Molina pushed back her seat and almost laid her cheek on the desk. She laughed. Finally, her head lifted and she examined the objects hung on her wall as if inviting them to participate in her merriment. She even glanced at Matt with tear-filled eyes, expecting him to join her hyena act.

But of course he didn't. He was too anxious about his own confession to enjoy another's discomfort.

"Nancy Drew!" Molina was still laughing. "Perfect, and here I thought Savannah Ashleigh's brains were all in her purebred cat."

"They are," Temple snapped. "And she had a very hot fling with Darren Cooke a couple years back, if you're interested."

Molina the Poker-faced could sober up instantly once she had fallen victim to humor. She composed her expression to the usual deadpan. "Yes, Nancy?"

"I'm not gonna call you Bess. But I will tell you what I should have told you three days ago.

His wife thought I was ... the other woman. A other woman," she corrected. "An other woman?"

"And why would anyone think Darren Cooke would proposition you?"

"Because he did! But, don't worry, I left in a huff of injured virtue."

"Is that why his wife thought you and he had--?"

"The fact that I was there, that I went into his bedroom for a few minutes ... it was perfectly innocent, but I knew people would smirk and rush to the wrong conclusion, which was why I kept quiet about the other thing. It's enough to have a widow ringing you up because she thinks you were her dead husband's last lay and she wants to know his state of mind--"

Molina was her old, stoic self again. "Why was she so sure?"

"He always kept a trophy of his... inamoratas, on which he wrote the date of their one-night stand, as a kind of keepsake, or scorecard. For some reason, he'd written Sunday's date on my business card, so naturally his wife assumed--"

"Where did he hide that card? We searched that suite from whirlpool to coffeemaker."

"You'll have to ask Michelle."

"Michelle?"

"Yes, we became quite good friends once she realized that I wasn't his last stand, so to speak. She's French, you know. Michelle Bonard, a world-famous French model, but she's a wonderful mother and she even advised me on my love life."

Oh! She had been rattling on and then... Temple didn't dare look at Matt. Or Molina. She studied the framed document on the wall over Molina's shoulder. Some kind of degree, or award, with thick, tortured calligraphy.

"She's at the Crystal Phoenix," she finished.

Molina leaned forward to prop her elbows on what free space remained on the glass-topped desk. "Miss Barr's love life. Now that I'd like to hear. Wouldn't you, Mr. Devine?"

"No, I don't care for idle speculation."

"Then you're not cut out to be an investigator."

"I know I'm not. I was trained to hold other people's confidences as sacred, no matter what."

"And this is where your part of the confession comes in."

"No, not yet." Temple drew the harsh spotlight of Molina's attention back to herself. "You see, Darren Cooke really did need a Nancy Drew. That's what he told me in the bedroom. He showed me a manila envelope, an ordinary nine-by-twelve-inch envelope, but inside was an extraordinary collection of letters dating back, oh, a couple of years."

"Love letters?"

Temple shook her head.

"Blackmail letters."

"No, hate letters, pure and simple. From a young woman who claimed she was his daughter.

She was bitterly angry, blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her mother's life and her own. I was sure the police would find something as big as a manila envelope. But Michelle told me that you hadn't, as far as she knew, and that even she hadn't known about the letters.

Michelle said that you didn't even find my card because her late husband was exceptionally clever at hiding things. That was his whole life: hiding things, especially from himself."

"And yet he told you, a virtual stranger, all about the letters."

"He was feeling the pressure. That's why I think he was calling Matt. He really wanted to change, but his obsession with seduction was too strong. His wife knew about it, and thinks he was no longer able to attract the foxy young things he'd been used to. He was really anguished about those letters. And sorry that this 'daughter's' mother had kept her existence hidden from him. A couple of years ago, he and Michelle had a first child, a baby daughter he adored; maybe he would have adored this adult daughter if he'd had a chance. He wasn't as afraid of her as I thought he should be. I told him he had to contact the police--"

"Thank you for that." Molina inclined her head as slowly as Queen Victoria. Tall, dark-haired women with morning-glory eyes can get away with those sorts of gestures, Temple had found.

She couldn't.

"I told him that if he wouldn't contact the police, he should try some pricey, discreet Beverly Hills private-investigation agency."

"Astute, if not forthcoming."

"He wouldn't have done it. I could tell. And, then, when I was leaving, he made a veiled suggestion."

"Aha. The wolf pounces on the helpful little lamb."

"I was so angry. He was ignoring my advice, but apparently he could find me horizontally useful. I told him a no-shilly-shallying no and got out of there. I wanted to forget about the encounter. I both felt sorry for him, and despised him. So pathetic and so true-to-form. So when I heard he'd killed himself that very night, I figured that you'd find the letters."

Molina remained quiet, doodling on her legal-pad desk mat for a moment. "So you think he could have been murdered--?"

"Maybe. Though, the mood he was in, having struck out in his halfhearted seduction and worried sick about this disenchanted daughter, suicide could be likely."

"And what do you think?"

Molina had spun to drill her memorably blue eyes into Matt's.

He refused to bolt, speaking in a flat, reportorial tone. "You know I've been receiving calls at ConTact for several weeks from a sexual addict. A man with an impressive speaking voice. He's also an impressive manipulator, which comes with the addict's territory."

"You've concluded this was Darren Cooke?"

"This could have been Darren Cooke. I don't know for sure yet. If he never calls again--"

Matt shrugged, and then shrugged the sheepskin jacket, which was much too hot for a small office, onto his chair back.

Molina, Temple noticed, was riveted on his every move.

"The incident that Temple wants me to tell you," Matt went on, "was one I was reluctant to report to anybody. I'm simply not sure who I've been talking to all these weeks. This call came Sunday at about midnight."

Molina was no longer riveted on Matt, but on his testimony. And she didn't interrupt him as much as she did Temple. Sexist!

Matt toyed with a leather button on his new jacket. That way he could look down and talk more to himself.

"I tried not to judge him, but he would never take positive steps to work on his addiction. I found out last week that he was calling me not only from out of town--I was supposed to think I was vital to him--but that he'd been calling other phone counselors." Matt smiled sadly. "He had to know more than whomever he was dealing with. A tragic personality."

Molina could wait no longer for the tale to tell itself. "So. Sunday night. At midnight."

"I got another call. He alternated between dependency riffs and angry rejection."

"Of you?"

"Of course of me. In these situations, the counselor is the punching bag. He is everybody the caller thinks failed him in life. And then, his tone suddenly changed. I could hear him moving around with his portable phone, answering the door. Apparently what he craved was standing right there. 'Hello, baby,' I heard him say. 'Just what the doctor ordered. Come on in!' He hung up before I heard his visitor speak. That's all."

"That's all? You could have heard the arrival of the last person to see Darren Cooke alive."

"Yes, but what good does that do? I don't know who came to visit, or why or what happened next. Temple's main concern is that you find the missing letters. Perhaps his widow wo uld know where to hunt for them. She found Temple's card quickly enough."

"Temple's card. Marked with the ritual seal of successful seduction." Molina smiled conspiratorially at Matt. "Is our little Miss Temple as innocent as she would have us think? She has a nasty habit of withholding information from the police. See the Mystifying Max."

Temple jumped in. "I never knew where Max was or why he might have been gone."

"But now that he's returned . . . don't you know more?"

Temple hesitated. "Not enough," she muttered.

Molina hit the flat of her hands on the desk in dismissal.

"I've made what notes are relevant. Miss Barr, if we find that missing manila envelope, I'll have to ask you to identify the contents. Mr. Devine, I presume your hot line doesn't have caller ID?"

He shook his head.

"Why didn't you simply refuse this tiresome sexual addict's calls?"

"I didn't have the heart to cut him loose. He was genuinely troubled, and trying to find a way to help himself, albeit falteringly."

"Albeit. An old-fashioned term. Bet you learned that in seminary." Molina nodded. "Okay, youse two disreputables can go. Frankly, I don't think either one of you concealed anything worth spit, but don't do it again."

"Yes, ma'am," Temple said.

"Thanks," Matt added with a slow smile

They left, both feeling quite virtuous.

"Confession is good for the soul," Temple said en route to the parking garage.

"That's what I was brought up to believe."

"I'm glad she took it so well."

"That's because she doesn't think that what you saw and what I heard are important, thank God. I hope that this doesn't turn out to be one of your murders."

"What do you mean, 'my murders.' "

"Only that you are a verifiable murder magnet. Suicide would be a nice change of pace; though, speaking from a religious point of view, it's the far more tragic death."

"Can't go to heaven, and all that? That's the Holy Roman Catholic Church for you; kick even the dead when they're down."

Matt stopped under the low, dark concrete beams. "The sin of suicide is in the enormity of denying God's will in your life by taking your own life. A great sin. Granted, the suicide himself is a pathetic soul, often under the influence of severe depression."

"Then why punish him after death? In absentia. Seems cowardly to a mealy-mouthed Unitarian like me."

"We'd have to go into about two years of theology to examine all the issues."

"That's it. Why can't religion be more accessible than that? Why can't mercy be the operating system, instead of right and wrong as written down somewhere by self-proclaimed holy men who are afraid to let women and children and suicides speak?"

Matt shook his head as he buttoned his jacket. "I'm not going to argue theology with you; it's too darn cold. Better bundle up for the trip back."

Temple suddenly produced a wicked grin. "I will."

The Vampire coughed before the engine released its full power and took the motorcycle by the throat.

Temple donned Electra's helmet and hopped aboard, only wincing slightly at the stretch.

This time she wrapped her arms all the way around Matt until they met in front.

If he found their riding arrangement more claustrophobic than before, he couldn't say a thing over the warming engine's roar. They swooped down the corkscrew exit ramp, Temple wanting to scream as if she were on a roller coaster. She caught her breath while he paused to pay the ticket. Matt got the financially short end of the deal. Temple, clinging like a leech for the chilly ride home, couldn't get to the money she had jammed in her jacket pocket when leaving her trademark tote bag behind.

Outside, stars gleamed high in the sky. Except for a red lashmark along the horizon, the sun had vanished, letting the lights of Las Vegas perform their nocturnal magic.

Temple did feel she was on a roller coaster as streetlights streaked by. Passing cars became greased lightning as the wind pulled and pushed the Vampire to top speed.

Matt didn't go straight home, but headed into the dark desert, where the highway eventually became a road that swelled up and down, that curved right and left. Temple's bare fingers stiffened in the brunt of the wind, but that only locked them tighter into position, and pressed her closer to Matt, thigh to thigh, chest to back, warm cheek to chill faux sheepskin.

Not being able to talk over the wind rush and the Vampire's lonely howl in the wilderness underlined the ride's strange intimacy. After only a few minutes, the Vampire etched a semicircle in the empty, sand-dusted highway. In front of them, the lights of Las Vegas now beckoned on the horizon like an electrified bonfire.

The Vampire sped straight for that tropical, topical warmth. Temple no longer considered the motorcycle a machine under human control, but an animate, metaphorical beast, a steed ...

a warhorse or a dragon or something so old that nobody alive knew its name anymore.

She knew that Matt had not known where they were going when he had headed into the darkness, that neither he nor she could say where they had been and that even the Vampire didn't need to know how to get back home. Click your heels, close your eyes and follow t he Strip's bright afterimage searing through your lids. The road became arrow-straight as they neared the city. Cars came crowding around again, like moths hungry for the Vampire's pale, gleaming silver skin and hypnotic howl.

Watch out, she thought. Vampires bite!

A more mundane mob of cars, vans, trucks and taxis finally slowed the Vampire to a docile speed. When they arrived at the Circle Ritz, Temple felt as if she had been trapped in an icy, crystal-clear bell jar amid a maelstrom of sound and speed, unnaturally alone in a vast natural world and yet not alone. Maybe this was how the Biblical prophets had felt when they saw God in mountain peaks and fiery bushes.

She dismounted, disoriented, to rejoin still, solid ground, and let Matt put the Vampire to bed alone. When he came out and locked the doors, she turned with a smile.

"That was scary, but it scared away all the anxiety too. Have you ever driven out into the desert like that, Matt? Just for fun?"

"I've never done anything just for fun," he said. "But I might be up for trying it."

"I'm sorry I criticized your religion's positions. They just seem so set in cold, hard stone."

"Don't be sorry. Maybe that's what religious positions are for: to be questioned, ridiculed and sometimes thrown out."

"Goodness! I think that's exactly what happened to us in Molina's office tonight."

After a pause of agreement, he laughed.