Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 2

Let the Mind Games Begin

A man without a memory’s greatest enemy wasn’t vulnerability. It was boredom.

That’s what Max Kinsella was discovering. Here he sat in a parked car in Las Vegas, unemployed magician and ex-counterterrorist, staking out the Circle Ritz condo and apartment building.

After spending several days driving on the left side of the road, he had more memories of doing it in Ireland and Northern Ireland than in the U.S. So a car with the driver seated on the left side felt “wrong.”

His recent visual memories still featured his slain mentor sitting in the place Max occupied now, as if Max were occupying the lap of a ghost.

Pathetic. Almost as pathetic was spying on a couple he didn’t remember and hadn’t “known” in his current state of amnesia until last week. He watched them walk out the Circle Ritz’s rear door, luggaged up for a trip out of town. And he wondered like crazy where and why.

Blond Matt Devine wore his usual impeccable yet casual beiges. Temple Barr was dressed to impress in a shiny red pencil-skirted suit that looked like leather. Her dark strawberry blond hair glowed redder in the naked sunlight. A leopard-pattern tote bag and matching high heels spiced up the look.

A white-haired older woman in a hot pink muumuu and orange flip-flops shepherded them into boarding order as a Yellow Cab pulled up.

Used to the soothing grey greens of the Irish countryside, Max’s eyes almost winced shut at all the bright colors glaring in the sunlight. Despite his ultra-dark sunglasses, it was like watching a Technicolor silent film. Matt Devine gestured to instruct the cabdriver on the proper order in loading the three bags. Temple hefted her bulky tote to the floor of the SUV’s second passenger row behind the driver, and then hugged the landlady, Electra Lark.

How odd to observe people he had known and who knew him as if they were pantomiming strangers.

Temple turned to see how the luggage-stowing was going, waiting for an assist up the SUV’s first big step. At her height in those heels and that tight skirt, she needed it. At around a hundred pounds, she would get it.

Not a casual girl, in any respect. Max could give her a lift in a second, even with his recovering broken legs, and spin her around. For an instant, his mind flashed inside the building to an earlier time. He saw himself doing just that, and Temple laughing.

His hands tightened on the Volkswagen’s steering wheel. When Matt Devine came to the vehicle’s side to do the escort honors, Max looked away, up the lone palm tree trunk toward the Circle Ritz’s triangular corner balconies. One of those had been his—theirs—once.

A suspicious stirring among the tall oleander bushes edging the parking lot caught his eye. The cause of the suspect motion was a pair of stray cats, one black, one striped.

Neither was Temple’s oddly inseparable guard cat, Midnight Louie. Ah. The oversize carrier was for one oversize black cat.

Max shook his head as the rear of the yellow taxi disappeared from view.

He badly needed to find a hobby.

He’d started the car, when something hurtled atop the hood and pressed against the windshield, making him duck below the dashboard.

A cautious peek revealed no Molotov cocktail, but … Louie? What the—? The resident black cat hadn’t gone a-traveling with the happy couple?

Then he saw that the feline eyes glaring into his, utterly unafraid, weren’t green, but intensely gold.

This cat was smaller and fluffier than Midnight Louie, but Temple had proved that size and delicacy were no issue, not even when recently tangling with a serial killer.

The cat’s gaze was so hypnotically “trying to tell him something,” Max settled back behind the steering wheel and began to open the driver’s door to shoo it away.

And started again at a figure bending down to the window. Opening it admitted a wave of Las Vegas heat.

“Max Kinsella,” Electra Lark said. “Stop lurking out here in the bushes and come in for a glass of iced tea, or stronger. I haven’t seen you in far too long and I’m betting a quick tour of the premises might do your meandering memory some good.”

“I was just—”

“Watching over us, like that colony of stray cats that moved on but still visits. It’s always good to remember where you came from. Isn’t she a beauty?” Electra straightened to eye his new hood ornament. “I believe that’s Miss Midnight Louise, the ‘house’ cat at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel. Not a stray. She’ll find where she wants to go.”

Electra turned and headed toward the building’s rear glass door, her flip-flops slapping the hot asphalt like clapping hands. Max eased his frame out of the Beetle’s surprisingly roomy driver’s compartment. He eyed the black-marble-clad round building not unlike a bunker, except for the architectural frills.

Electra’s hot pink–clad form—and there was plenty of it—was in perfect 1950s sync with the age of her building. Rock ’n’ roll, Cadillacs, and skinny black ties.

She was right. It was good to remember where you’d come from. And he’d just now recalled the place had an attached Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel where Electra officiated as justice of the peace.

Despite the view of the departing couple heading for places unknown, Max was not in a mood to dwell on forthcoming weddings.