Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Riding Shotgun

“Hide-ho, honey!” Ambrosia greeted Matt as he stepped out of the glass booth at two A.M. She was lofting his cell phone like Perry Mason revealing Exhibit A. “This mockin’ bird don’t sing. Not one little ringy-dingy outa this cell phone. Daddy is not gonna get either one of us a diamond ring. No, sir. Is that bad?”

Matt reclaimed his cell phone with a sigh. “I’m probably taking this way too seriously.”

“You do have that tendency, sweet cheeks. Hey. Ambrosia’ll buy you a drink to wind down with.”

“Thanks. Another time. I’m sorry I kept you up so late. I need to, ah, gather my notes. I’ll leave in a bit.”

“You vant to be alone,” she accused in a dead-on Garbo voice. “Sure thing. Curtis here is putting ole WCOO on digital autopilot until morning. Don’t linger too long brooding, my man. It’s bad for the face. Trust me.”

Matt stood dreaming on the other side of the door to the waiting room long after Ambrosia had sailed out like Cleopatra’s Barge heading over to anchorage as a famous restaurant at Caesar’s Palace.

Talking to the people out there in Radioland had given him a sense of perspective. They were all trying so hard. Trying to stay afloat in this down-sizing economy. Trying to keep love in their lives. Trying to make sure their children didn’t feel the losses they had, although that was always impossible. No matter how much a parent tried to “make up,” there was always some new psycho-social stress to make kids’ lives hard. Tragically, it was often caused by the parents’ own anxiety.

Matt breathed deeply, and allowed as he didn’t control a single thing in his life and the larger world beyond it. Just let go of trying to insist that God—or the Fates if you were a secular person—would ensure that things would go your way.

By the time he stepped out into the tepid Las Vegas night air, he was at semi-peace with himself.

His fancy new silver car shone like a slick magazine ad under one of the parking lot lamps. All alone. It had the same sleek mechanical beauty of the Hesketh Vampire motorcycle that had originally belonged to Max Kinsella, but Matt would have pushed his new car off a cliff if he thought it would make Temple feel one sixteenth of a scintilla better about the ugliness Carmen Molina was about to drop on her.

Turned out he didn’t have to sacrifice his car.

A low, throaty growl drew his attention to something glinting outside the wash of parking lot lights. A motorcycle. Not the Vampire. Flashier but oh-so-familiar.

Matt edged over warily, like a kid to a high-end bike on Christmas morning. He knew that bike, that figure in glitzy leathers, that shining black helmet as round as a pumpkin on Halloween.

The rider revved the engine as his leather-gloved hands wrung the bike’s handlebars. Matt approached. The rider tossed him a helmet that had been tethered to the back.

“Rock or roll?” he asked with something of a Southern accent.

Matt shook his head, not sure if he needed to clear it or to derail a rueful laugh. This was the motorcycle that had shadowed him during those dark nights when someone sinister had seemed to be on his tail light, his motorcycle’s tail lights. When he’d ridden the Vampire he’d gotten from Electra after Max Kinsella had let her have it.

He’d had a shadow rider then. Two. One lethal, another riding ghost shotgun for him. That guy had looked and acted a lot like Elvis, who’d apparently called in to the Mr. Midnight show for a while there. An Elvis so real you thought you’d had breakfast with him one time that you couldn’t quite remember: a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs. Elvis had been Atkins before Atkins was Atkins.

One mystery was solved. A persistent mystery of streets and night and pursuit. The voice over the air waves was a different matter entirely. Much harder to impersonate.

Matt donned the safety helmet and gazed at the night and its lights through the veil of its smoke-Plexiglas visor, darkly. He mounted the elongated seat behind the rider, curled his hands around the chrome rods beneath the seat, pushed his heels onto the chrome rods over the rear wheels.

The cycle charged into the night, leaning, roaring, shooting like a star.

Being a passenger on a meteor’s tail took guts. Matt realized for the first time that he really, really wanted to be in control, not eddied along by his history, his inheritance, his losses.

The biker took the bike to a high point overlooking Vegas before his boot-heels dropped to asphalt and he let the machine tilt to a stop. All that massive weight, held up by a bike stand.

Matt hopped off, doffed the damn helmet. Waited.

The motorcycle man dismounted like a cowboy who loved his mount, fluid and easy. He took off the helmet.

“You were my guardian biker,” Matt said. Accused. Thanked. “My ersatz Elvis.”

“Maybe.” Max Kinsella hung his helmet from the handlebar. The full moon reflected in its dark side, kind embracing kind. “Sometimes. Maybe sometimes it was Elvis. Dude had an aura, you know. You don’t kill that.”

“I know. Still, masquerading as a motorcycle cop that time—”

“Me? Impersonate a cop? Don’t have that costume on tap. ‘Fraid not.”

Matt felt a chill trickle down his spine. That had been the guy who’d advised him to let the bike fly. If not Max, then who? Elvis for real?

“What did you need to talk to me about?” Max asked.

“You took me seriously.”

“I take Temple seriously.”

The words hung in the air, in their multiplicity of meanings. “Me too,” Matt said. “What about Molina?”

“What about . . . her?”

“She’s bound to get you for something.”

Max shrugged. “Let her try.”

“Fine for you, Mr. Invisible. Tough on Temple.”

“Temple’s tough. So, what’s Molina up to now?”

“It’s who’s up to what against Molina.”

Max walked to the overlook, trying to untangle that sentence. Las Vegas lay like a tea tray of white-silver glitz on the vast dark desert floor.

They were halfway up the Spring Mountains. Matt would have a long, exhausting walk back to civilization if he had to make it on foot power. How competitive was Max Kinsella, anyway? Very.

“You don’t like me. You really, really don’t like me.” Max surveyed the distant glitter of the city where he had once been an A-list star, a magician to reckon with. “You particularly don’t like me in Temple’s life. Or bed. Still. You want to warn me. Why?”

“Because I don’t like you in Temple’s life.” Matt made himself ignore the bed part. He felt guilty about being the other man. Given recent events, he was now supersensitive about beds and what did, or did not happen in them.

“That’s why when you call, I listen. But I don’t have a lot of time.”

“You don’t know how true that is.”

“Tell me.”

Max Kinsella never waffled around. Never shillied nor shallied. Matt admired that. He’d been reared to question everything, most of all himself and his motives. His motives here were pure, even selfless. Mostly.

“Carmen Molina’s had a stalker for several weeks.”

“Stalkers must be hard up.”

“Not funny. I had one, one handed down from you.”

“Stalkers must be hard up,” Max repeated with sardonic humor. He turned back to face Matt. “Molina’s a cop. Stalkers come with the territory. With her, I wouldn’t doubt that it would come more often.”

“She’s got a right to be angry. The stalker has been breaking into her house. She has a young child there.”

Max chuckled. “From what I heard went down at the Teen Idol reality TV show, that kid is hitting puberty big time. Maybe it’ll keep Mama off my tail.”

“I don’t think so. This latest visit, the stalker left a trail of rose petals to Mariah’s bedroom as well as hers.”

“That’s really sick! No wonder she’s unhinged.”

“And she’s convinced you’re the stalker.”

For once, Matt had rendered Max Kinsella speechless.

“Me?” Kinsella said. Then frowned. “That’s crazy.”

“That’s what I thought. At first.”

“I don’t care what you think. What has this got to do with Temple? That’s all I care about.”

Matt kept himself from saying “Me too.”

Max was still on a tear. “Let Molina rant and roar and chase a phantom. She can’t touch me.”

“Maybe not. Maybe this time . . . yeah, maybe. But she’s already touched Temple.”

Kinsella’s motorcycle boots crunched desert shale as he stalked back over to Matt, looming at six four with two added inches of boot heel.

Matt felt enough bottled fury, and a nasty edge of guilt, to take him on and take him out if he said anything dismissive about the threat to Temple.

But Kinsella never satisfied in that way. He cared about her as much, maybe, as Matt did. That knowledge was as bitter as an arsenic pill in his throat, but it was also why Kinsella was the first, and last, person he’d gone to about this.

“What did Molina do?” Max asked.

“Barged into Temple’s place at the Circle Ritz”—Max didn’t correct him on that. A magician was, above all, a realist, but it had once been theirs, that place, his and Temple’s. “Took something likely to have your fingerprints still on it.”

“Took? Without a warrant? Why didn’t Temple—? Never mind. It was a lightning raid, wasn’t it? What did Molina take?”

“A CD.”

“Damn. Temple never did share my tastes, or like to run the VCR or even the multiple-CD player. So. Molina is now the only cop in the Western World with possible fingerprints on me. So what? She has nothing to compare them too.”

“That makes anything she finds on that CD all the more likely to be yours. She already printed Temple way back when.”

“I’m going to swear, Devine. You can put your fingers in your ears if you want.”

“Go right ahead. On that I’m with you.”

Max sighed, not a weak sigh, more like the hissing sound a weight lifter makes during ultra-heavy reps. “That damn . . . woman . . . will not leave well enough alone. If she had a decent sex life, she wouldn’t have to mess with mine so much.”

Matt shut his eyes. He didn’t want to hear about this. Think about this. “That’s what she said you told her in the parking lot of Secret’s. That’s why she thinks you’re obsessed with her.”

“Me. Her? Obsessed? Get a life! That’s what I told her in that damn parking lot, while she was trying with all her might to keep me from going where Temple was in fatal danger. How has she explained her stupidity in fixating on hogtying me when a major capture of the Stripper Killer was going down with Temple playing the next victim?”

Max had grabbed his sleeves, was shaking Matt in agitation.

“Hey!” Matt slapped Kinsella on the leather lapels, forcing him to back off. “That wasn’t me standing in your way then, pal. Molina did give you a chance to fight her for your freedom from what she said.”

“Couldn’t shoot me cold. I wasn’t carrying. Yeah, she had the guts to go hand-to-hand with me, risky considering how frantic I was about Temple. Guts were never her problem. She’s not a lightweight. She’s been trained. I finally had to play possum; live to fight another day, and get her in a situation where I could win without wasting time: handcuffed in her car. You know about magicians and handcuffs. Anyway, I let her grind my face into the asphalt, cuff me, and lead me away like Mary’s little lamb. What more does the woman want?”

“That’s all it was? Her not daring to shoot you dead? You two mixing it up? You letting her ‘win’ so you could escape faster to race to Temple’s defense? Her hung up on catching you and losing you?”

“That was it. She’d got me cuffed and in her Crown Vic. I was already working on the handcuff’s release mechanism when the call came over the radio that the cops had nailed the Stripper Killer while he was attacking a certain Miss Barr masquerading as a club costume seller. The minute I heard Temple was safe, Molina was wearing her own cuffs attached to the steering wheel and I was outa there.”

“Interesting,” Matt said.

“This stuff we’re talking about is way more important than ‘interesting’.”

“I’m just replaying it. You’re Molina’s prisoner, then she’s a police professional handcuffed to her own steering wheel, and not only that, wrong about you being the Stripper Killer.”

“It might freak her out,” Max said, a smile in his voice.

“It might freak her so far out that she’d violate Temple’s space and her trust to take you to the cleaners.”

“You know what I think?” Max’s voice had lowered. It sounded dangerous in the dark. “You and Molina are a pair. You’ve got that blind Catholic standard that makes everyone else substandard.”

“You were reared Catholic.”

“I got over it.”

“She said—”

“He said. It’s a draw.”

“Molina said you came on to her. She said you said all she needed was a—I guess you might be kinda conceited—’good screwing.’ ”

Kinsella laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Not that it might not be true. I don’t know what I said, did. I was fighting for my freedom to go and protect Temple. You might know what that feels like, someone you love in mortal danger. You might know what that felt like for me.”

It was Matt’s turn to keep silent. He did, way more now that he and Temple had become . . . closer.

“Carmen distrusts you,” Matt said at last. “I guess she hates you. She might take whatever you said or did to get free of her as the God’s truth. That you would have screwed her to make her let you go. That you thought she would have liked it.”

It was Max’s turn to be silent. “Maybe that’s true,” he said. “Maybe I found her weakness and it was me. Hate is fear, and sexual fear hides unadmitted desire. If that’s what it would have taken. As it happened, I preferred to let her grind my face into the ground and feel she’d beaten me physically. Pride isn’t worth a penny if someone you love is at risk.”

“Nope,” Matt agreed. That’s why he was here, warning Temple’s lover, instead of letting Max go down so he could have Temple all to himself.

“So,” Max said. “Now your face is asphalt dust. Maybe you’ll have to screw Molina to get her off Temple’s case. No sacrifice too harsh.”

“You can laugh. I guess it’s a kind of defiance. But if Temple thinks you’d ever thought of betraying her with Molina—”

“Oh, shit,” Max said. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”

“Did you?” Matt asked, because he had to and because he actually enjoyed asking it way too much.

Matt couldn’t believe how much he relished the idea of Max being unfaithful, how down and dirty he could get, for the right wrong reason.

But he had to know.

“Because, if so, I’m going to have to warn Temple, to tell her something. I’d like to include your self-defense.”

“Sanity? Look. Why would I? I don’t need this right now. I have no idea where this nonsense came from. And I don’t need some do-gooder John Alden playing go-between for me and Temple. Even you should know by now you want her.”

Matt felt a flush. Why? It was the truth.

Max threw up his long, bony hands, always clever, always strong. “That was a low blow. Sorry. I suppose you are a professional mediator of sorts. Mediate this.”

“I won’t use this against you with Temple. Or for me.”

“Use it. I won’t surrender Temple to anyone without the balls to take her.”

Matt felt the old blinding rage he thought he’d buried with his stepfather surging into all his muscles. He stepped forward, balanced for martial arts moves. Max was more expert, he knew, but Matt had the fire in the belly in this case. It would be a long, bloody draw probably.

Max stepped back. “Pax, priest. Us tearing at each other will only hurt Temple more. That’s one thing we’re agreed on; the less damage to Temple the better.”

“Is there anything you can say to defend yourself, to counter Molina’s charges?”

Max had nothing printable to answer.