Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

3

Midnight Stalkers

“Matt, my man!” Letitia enfolded him in her cocoon of warmth and bright silky color and soft, generous flesh the moment he entered the tiny radio studio.

They were both bumping the desk and equipment, but Letitia would not allow herself to be contained, in any way. In every way, including temperament, they were utter opposites, and he envied her for it.

He immediately checked the clock high on the wall. 11:50.

“I’m closing the show with a medley of most-requested songs, Matt,” she said, catching his gesture. “Relax. We have a few precious minutes to ourselves.”

And the days dwindle down to a precious few.

He could hear the muted lyrics of regret and longing expressed in “September Song”, now massaging the airwaves in the dark Nevada almost-midnight.

“You always read me from ten miles away, I swear, Letitia.”

“I’m psychic, didn’t you know? It takes a worried man to sing a somber song. Now you sit your handsome, worried self down in the soft swivel chair, all its joints oiled and cushy smooth, and unfret that telegenic brow and tell me all about it.”

He couldn’t help laughing as her strong black fingers with the inch-long French manicure false nails shaped themselves around an invisible crystal ball.

“You’re the one who should get her own television talk show,” he said.

As “Ambrosia” she dominated the late-night radio audience, playing just the right song to comfort the lost, the lonely listeners who’d tell their sad stories and be encouraged to move on past their woes.

“No, no. No! No TV.” She waggled those Chinese Empress false fingernails at Matt. “I must be mysterious. I must just be a Voice. I must possibly be assumed to weigh a hundred-and-twenty pounds.”

She was a voice. A seductive, velvet voice, but she weighed maybe three times that imagined weight. Matt worried about that. He worried about diabetes. He worried about cardiac issues. Yet Letitia was the most comfortable-in-her-own-skin person he knew. His boss, the mysterious, the intuitive, the amazing Ambrosia.

He had been brooding driving into the station for his Midnight Hour two-hour counseling stint. Somehow she’d plucked that out of the air with her magician’s fingers and bushwhacked him with ten free minutes of talk therapy, and all before he had to go forth live and do likewise.

“You’re always recreating yourself. That’s better than being packaged and marketed as an attractive product,” he agreed.

“Hey, honey-haired boy! I sure do that. I package and market myself.” She shimmied her ample shoulders. “My Ambrosia self. You’ve done the same, as an ‘understanding’ product too. You just happen to have some looks to go with it. I made me. You made you. God made the both of us first. And we keep it that way.”

“I know I’m a good counselor. I do help people.”

“But do you have fun? You gotta have fun. You gotta laugh at your own mojo, man. We can change lives, but we gotta start with accepting ourselves. Accenting ourselves. Take the bad of the past and BE-spell it into the good, for everyone.”

He had no answer to that. Her unhappy childhood, was (her amazing) hands down worse than his.

“So why are we so pouty tonight?” she asked. “For me, I know it makes my Orange Tango lips look gooood, and I know that they come in contact with nothing but the radio mic, but guys ain’t got no reason to gloat over cosmetics.”

When Letitia got folksy he knew he was being mocked. “You’re right, Letitia. I’m being an ass. An angsty ass. I would counsel myself to solicit a good kick in the pants. The ghost of the Mystifying Max in Temple’s past seems to be banishment-proof. He keeps popping up like a skeleton out of the grave.”

“That man do have some serious mojo, but that kind of thing can wear a woman out. And not in a good way. Keep that in mind.”

Her upfront fashion style, her vibrant optimism, the way she morphed into Ambrosia, both slinky and comforting, kept Matt shaking his head as he settled into his combination chair and magic carpet navigating the entire country.

“Letitia, you’ve got my number. I do fixate on family skeletons and ghosts from the past. It’s crazy to do that with all the great things I’ve got going. Who cares why my nasty stepfather, Cliff Effinger, was killed and who did it? Not anybody, really.”

“Right. And if you keep on gnawing at an unsolved murder, you might dig up someone who doesn’t want that solved going and putting a rattlesnake in your mailbox.”

“So. Trying to keep up the tradition and ‘protect’ Temple as Max Kinsella always did, I might get the opposite outcome?”

Letitia nodded solemnly. “That’s why I very, very reluctantly advise you to leave Las Vegas for the Chicago talk show offer. It’s the only course that makes sense.”

“I’d sure like to cut Temple and me loose from a lot of bad memories. I’d work days too.”

“That’s right. No Magical Max to wonder where he is at. And, hey, follow the money.”

“Maybe I’ve dithered too long. The network people have been silent.”

“After all those lavish efforts to woo you, sweetie? I bet my old seventies Plymouth against your fancy Jaguar gift car they’ll get back to you. I expect to see you on my home TV any month now, where I’ll be toasting you with a McDonald’s chocolate shake. Then I’ll stand right up and do a chocolate shake.”

“Letitia, you always make me laugh.”

“Then my work here is done,” she said, patting him on the cheek and dancing light-footed out the studio door.

That reminded Matt of the crazy TV cat food advertising opportunity that had come in for Temple and her Wonder Cat. Would Midnight Louie have to do the Bunny Hop to earn his lettuce? What a mental picture. Could it be Matt had lost out to his own fiancée?

Did he want to throw away a career to catch the murderer of a man nobody liked?

He had to quit this Hamlet act before somebody really got hurt. Time to slip into the deep space of Radioworld.

The minute Matt put on the headphones, he saw himself as an astronaut or a diver, somebody who floated like an infant tethered to an umbilical cord, a person abnormally high or below ordinary reality. For him, connecting with call-ins, voices in the night with an endless element of surprise, let him utterly forget himself. The first caller could sound distraught, the next hesitant, or ranting, weeping, nervous, self-justifying, shy, egocentric—his two hours on the air had come to feel like emotional Russian roulette crossed with impromptu meditation.

Still, always in the back of his mind, his own doubts and worries murmured nowadays, soaking up his own advice and often critiquing it.

Only tonight what threaded through the routine was a faint filament of panic he couldn’t lose, not even in a laugh with Letitia. Practicing the kind of intense investigative moves that Max Kinsella did could wear a man out all right, and maybe get him taken right off the planet.

The first line lit up. Matt nodded at Dave, the engineer, and sat back without a creak in the chair. They used a brief delay to “dump” a joke caller or cut bad language. Not all the touchy callers, though. Listeners liked Matt’s adept way of derailing the difficult ones.

“Gee, Ambrosia was kinda a downer tonight,” a bored girlish voice said. “What does signing off with all that ‘September Song’ stuff mean? It sounds like it was written in the olden days, girls with twirling curls and all.”

“It was,” Matt answered. “Mid-last century. It’s about lost chances. That must not be what you worry about.”

“‘September Song’ reminded me about having to go back to school soon. That’s a downer too.”

“High school?” he guessed.

“Same mean witchy cliques as junior high, only with bigger allowances. And they have all those jocks to date and wave under everybody else’s noses.”

“What’s your name?”

A long pause, probably for a couple reasons. One was committing to a radio conversation, the other was teenage discontent.

“Jessica.” Said with a wrinkled nose.

“Well, Jessica, that name has a certain gravitas.”

“Huh?”

“Gravitas is when people take you seriously. I’d take a Jessica totally seriously.”

“Really?” There came the edge of hope and vanity, when a young girl thought she might be Someone to Someone on the Radio. Or the Internet.

Dangerous.

Matt felt he was about to commit an Ann Landers. “All that high school stuff is not what’s really bothering you. You were smart enough to know that was coming.”

“Yeah?” She sort of liked being thought “smart”. “So tell me what my issues are.”

“Do your parents know you hate the high school vibe?”

“They say ‘get good grades, forget about all that social media stuff’. And they’re just… Me-dee-evil. Watch my phone and computer like I’m some baby.”

“You are.”

“Whaaat?”

“What classes are you looking forward to, what activities? What do you want to be?”

“Miley Cyrus?” She giggled. “That would send the parents up the fire pole in reverse. ‘Classes, activities’, that is so uncool, Mr. Midnight. So parent-y. I used to think you sounded sexy.”

“Well, now we know what you really want. I can get to the next caller so you can sit there and listen, or you can come up with a reason for me to talk to you.”

“No, wait. I want to work on the school paper, but that’s so nerdy and the nerdy boys own doing all the jobs on that.”

“Drop the labels. Nobody ‘owns’ anything in high school, except finding out what they want to be. And not everyone is going to like that, or like it if you’re good at it. That’s the real world. Now, you want to write for a dying media, print news. There are people old enough to be your grandparents who’ve lost their jobs and livelihoods doing that. What do you think they’d be saying if they were calling in? Would they be worrying about what some kids you’ll never see after four years think of them? Wouldn’t they do just anything to get on a crummy school paper? Maybe not. But maybe they’d wish they could go back to those days. And you can do it. And find out if you like it.”

“Uh, but maybe nobody will let me on. Or let me on only to make me wish I wasn’t.”

“You must have something you really want to write, or you wouldn’t freak out at trying.”

“Well, maybe something on…bullying. Not me. Not big-time bullying, but little stuff that gets really mean.”

“Okay. I have an assignment for you.”

“You’re not my teacher.”

“I’m better than that. I’m sexy. You gonna listen to me?”

“Always.” Said with adoration. Jessica was getting a lot of time with Mr. Midnight.

“You write something you feel strongly about. You write an essay. Not like an assignment, like what you really feel and you’re not afraid of feeling.”

Silence.

“And then you show it to your parents. Yes, you do. Because it will be good.”

“Oh, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t have them going to the principal, outing me. It would be horrible.”

“Yes. But they’re not going to do that. You’re going to tell them you want to submit the piece to the Huffington Post.”

“Get outa here.”

“Did you know anyone can ask to submit a piece?”

“No! No way. No way they’d accept anything I wrote.”

“Why not? You’re a ‘Young Person’. The media world wants to hear from Young Persons nowadays. Your experience and hopes are as valid as those of any adults. Don’t abuse that chance on crazy, ‘sexy’, show-offing. Have gravitas, Jessica. I know you have it already.”

“You think?”

“Everyone your age does, you just get distracted from showing it. What have you got to lose? A rejection? But you will have been considered, and you can try it again.”

“It could backfire on me.”

“It could. That’s why your parents have to read it. Where do you want to make an impact? In high school? Or in the future?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, gravely.

She thought about something else during ten beats of radio silence.

“Gosh, Mr. Midnight, you’re way better than sexy.”

Matt smiled. “Thank you, Jessica. Thank you very much.”

The next voice was a world away from soft teenage girl doubt. It was deep, hoarse, male, and there was no doubt about it.

“Hi, there, Mr. Midnight. I’ve been around the block. I’m usually giving advice, not asking for it.”

Matt felt his throat tighten. No doubt, this was Woodrow Wetherly, the Molina-referred retired cop now turned creepy.

“And I’m usually not up this late, Mr. Midnight. Gotta admit I’d never tuned in your show until lately. My, those sweet little female fans you draw…nice work if you can get it.”

“You say you’re asking for advice—?” Matt waited for the name.

“Call me Old Bill. Old Bill come due. Heh-heh-heh-heh.” That long wheezing high-pitched laugh was more sinister than the man’s usual low rumbling voice.

“Bill will do,” Matt said. “We don’t need to age ourselves before our time.”

“You may not, but I am just darn old. You don’t sound that way. You sound young, sonny. Too young to be handing out advice.”

“You don’t have to take it. In fact, we’ve got a line-up of calls waiting, if you don’t—”

“Oh, no. No kiss-off. You gave that pretty little thing plenty of time. Just because I ain’t a fan is no reason to cut me off.”

“You need to state your problem, sir, or the moving finger of fate moves on in talk radio.”

“All right, all right. Keep your pants on. Or I guess you don’t have to since you’re on the radio.” Another wheezing laugh.

Dave was about to cut Woody off, when Matt shook his head “No” and the old man complied simultaneously.

“My problem is a lie, Mr. Midnight. Call me old-fashioned, and I already told you to call me Old Bill. What happens when someone you don’t know from Adam introduces himself nice and proper, comes with recommendations even, and you find out he’s a liar, and he’s got a whole lot more in mind than you know.”

“Are you talking about someone out to defraud you, sell you an insurance plan you don’t need? I can direct you to the Better Business Bureau or the Senior Services division of your local government…”

“Darn it! I want to know what you would say. If you were in my shoes.”

“I’d want to be sure he’d told me a lie. And then I’d ask him why.”

“Yeah, I could do that. But I only have his work number and I’m old-school, as I said. It’s not right to call someone up at his work number and hassle him. And if I found his home number and called him there, it might upset the family. Maybe they don’t know what he’s gotten himself into.”

“Bill—”

“No, wait. I got it now. Thanks. I’ll find another way to send him a message.”

“Old Bill come due” hung up and a woman’s voice wafted into Matt’s ears.

“Oh, Mr. Midnight, I’m so glad I got through…”

Matt looked at his watch. Like Temple, he liked the assurance of the time right there with second hands, but the multi-device wrist was here.

Stuck here for an hour and a half more, Woody’s threats running like rats on the treadmill of his mind. Stuck here trying to catch the caller’s problem. He pulled out his cell phone to dial Temple. It went to message. She always had her phone on. She was always in the condo at this hour. Had there been another intruder? Should he cut and run? Or had he let Woodrow Wetherly spook him?

“Yes,” he heard himself encouraging the caller to talk herself out while he figured what to do. What he could do.

Luckily, it was the usual lonely hearts call, and Matt could advise her by rote. He hated his own glibness, but she ate up every self-help cliché and hung up gushing thanks.

Dave’s bushy eyebrows raised along with his right forefinger. Signals that meant, Wow. A hot one incoming.

Matt sat up straighter, more than ready to hear the next caller. The show was dying.

It was another male caller, with a pleasant, deep, drawling voice.

“Mr. Midnight, I like what you said to that little girl. She needs to know she counts. She needs to know she’s treasured. I grew up with that, and it made all the difference. You are our Las Vegas midnight hero, local boy gone syndicated. Your voice has the right pitch to make the mic go and fall right in love with it.”

Matt felt a chill up the back of his head. “Did you grow up in Vegas, sir?”

“‘Sir.’ I like that. Real polite. You can never be too polite. Did I grow up in Vegas?” A deep rolling chuckle let the mic have its way with it. “You could say that, though I’ve been away for forty years. Hardly seems it. Forty years. On the other hand, you could say I did not grow up at all in my early Vegas moments, if you know what I mean.”

Dave signaled Matt frantically through the studio glass window, circling his forefingers to “keep going”. Matt got it. FBI guy and ex-priest Frank Bucek would signal the same thing if he were here. And Matt’s former seminary mentor just might be somewhere in Vegas. Matt had thought he’d glimpsed him once. Not in a good place. Outside the nudie bar where Wetherly had taken him in the name of research into Cliff Effinger.

Dave was tapping on the studio glass, frowning and waving.

Matt shook off that memory and saw all the phone lines were lit up.

“You ‘didn’t grow up in Vegas’?” He fought for time to adjust to a voice that seemed so familiar…to everyone. “What do you mean?”

“Aw, I was so young, wanted every toy I’d never gotten, every girl. So I did what they wanted and let ’em ‘market me’.” He dropped into an eerily spot-on Marlon Brando voice saying an iconic line. “I coulda been a contender. Done real movies instead of sappy stuff. I had every line in every part of my first movie memorized when I got to Hollywood. Man, if I hadn’t have let Colonel Parker demand first billing over Barbra Streisand on that A Star is Born remake… She had a heck of a voice and was a producer to boot. That would have been an A-1 acting job. I shoulda taken some heavy non-singing roles, like Frank.”

“Frank?” The name of Matt’s mentor-turned agent from seminary again. “Oh, you mean Frank Sinatra.”

“Yeah. The Frank. He owned Vegas, but I overtook him, after all.”

“You could have overruled Colonel Parker on the Streisand film. He was just your manager.”

“Oh, no, sir. He did so much for me, and my mama was gone and there was only him to guide me.”

“He became notorious for mismanaging you and your money.”

The drawn-out sigh could have auditioned to be an aria. “I won’t say folks didn’t lead me astray. Things look different from a different place, a different time. But I can’t leave Vegas. This is where I laid it all down, every night. For my fans, my audience. Anyway, I have some tips for you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. The billboards show you’re a blond guy. I hear you’re going TV.”

Matt cringed to hear that going out over the radio. The opportunity was hush-hush and very uncertain. Only four people in Vegas knew that. How—?

“Anyway, why I’m calling is I have some career advice. I was born blond. A natural blond. Not good. I noticed when I was real young dark-haired guys did better on the screen. Tony Curtis. Robert Taylor. I decided right then I needed to be dark-haired onstage…only those film actors didn’t have to sweat the rock and roll until the hair dye ran down into their eyes. And I did. That stung, and worse.

“But I don’t see your new talk gig involving a lot of sweat. So ditch the blond hair.”

“Thanks. I’ll consider it. Anyway, it’s good to hear from you. Again.”

“I’m a performer. Gotta stay up to wind down after my shows.”

“And you’re back at the International causing a sensation,” Matt pointed out.

“So they say.” The voice turned wistful, younger. “I’d like to try something new, but everyone wants the same old, same old. I finally was jus’ about to die of boredom, you know what I mean?”

“Well, hey, you gotta love your new Vegas digs. It’s a shrine, really.”

“Yeah. Classy. Everything I loved once is there now as well as in Graceland. My wheels, my wardrobe. Even Priscilla sometimes. Big change from my first gig in Vegas, that they said the usual gray-hairs in the audience didn’t get and wasn’t successful. It was, my man. They just didn’t know how. How I got some new tricks off the stage.”

“You know how back as a kid in Tupelo, Mississippi, I’d go to black clubs to hear the blues, and anywhere I’d go to black churches to listen to Gospel?”

“I know you loved blues and Gospel,” Matt said with a smile in his voice. “I do too. Especially Gospel. I went to black churches to hear it myself.” Matt didn’t mention he’d been a Catholic priest at the time.

Dave was smiling on the other side of the glass and every phone line had gone dead. People were just listening to that slow, musing voice.

Whether this was one of hundreds of Elvis tribute performers and wanna-bes, an obsessed fan, a deranged actor, a ghost, or a mass hallucination, it was ratings gold. And, Matt believed, the King might be feeling lonely tonight, but he had a message for Matt.

“You have a good show there, Mr. Midnight. Cool handle. You offer good advice, like to that little girl who doesn’t quite know where she’s going, or can go. I seen lots of little girls like that.”

“Thank you.” Matt quashed an impulse to add: “Thank you very much.”

“Nice and polite, but nobody’s fool. Now that ‘old Bill’ guy who called in. I don’t have a good feeling about him. There is something ‘off’ there. Reminds me a bit of the Colonel. Yeah, I know now he was bad for me in the end, but he tried real hard at the beginning, and I don’t have to see or hear or think about him anymore. We aren’t in the same place now, if you get what I mean?”

“I do”, Matt said. “And am glad to hear that.”

“I don’t wish anybody ill. We all are just all doin’ the best that we can, from where we come from and where we’re going.”

“You know, maybe I should turn this show over to you.”

The laugh was long and musical. “No, but you should get that black dye job.” The voice grew fainter and reminiscent.

“Jumpin’ Jack Robinson. Black cat. Wore a black-and-white, pin-striped zoot suit. He was like a fistful of jumpin’ jacks, all right. Man, he could make those zoot suit pantaloons and that long, long steel cat chain at the side shake, rattle and roll. Proud that chain came off a toilet. Makin’ do and makin’ do well enough to own his own club. Down some rickety stairs to a basement like in speakeasy days. Way off from where the New Frontier was on highway US-91.

“When I got married at the Aladdin in sixty-seven, Howard Hughes was buying the New Frontier and some guy named Steve Wynn had a small interest in it. I remember seein’ that in the paper and remembering my first Vegas gig. The New Frontier had a big cut-out image of me at the curb, grinnin’ with my guitar like I was a ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign. The city was not very welcomin’ that first time, until the Colonel got some teenagers in on the weekend.

“Anyway, after our performances, me and my three band boys didn’t go for gamblin’ casinos. We visited other acts. They were all white in those days, but we heard about this weird little place.”

Matt’s heart almost stopped. He knew what was coming.

“The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club. Learned some moves off that cat I never did in Memphis. Killed, though. He was hung by that make-shift cat chain. Not long after I left town.

“Nobody much noticed me, until I had my TV comeback Special and came back to Vegas in sixty-nine. Whole different Vegas then. The Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Two crooners, an actor-in-law to President Kennedy, a comic and a singin’, dancin’ dude like two Jumpin’ Jack Robinsons, all on the main stage of the big hotel-casinos. Like I was. The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club wasn’t even history. No surprise. I was almost history before my comeback. Then the Rat Pack soon became history and Vegas was mine. For a time, Mr. Midnight. I think you know that. For a time. A time is all anybody gets and we need to make the most of it.”

Matt’s feelings and intellect suspended. Elvis at eighty, had he lived, back on the radio? Might as well be with half of Graceland a Vegas attraction now. A smart business decision. The “Memphis cat” and his heartland house and legend needed more tourist exposure.

What next? A Disney cruise? Elvis would love his Vegas shrine. He could relive his earliest days, when he used to sneak nights into the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club along with other performers around the dark side of the Strip.

“You still with me?” Elvis’s voice took Matt’s mind off of Jumping Jack Robinson’s murder, not suicide.

“So, Mr. Midnight. You should live up to your name. You wanna do some ebony black hair, so dark it gets blue highlightenin’. Blue Lightning. And don’t knock sweat. I don’t think a talker like you will sweat enough. A rocker will. That’s what they loved me for. I sweated my heart out for them. Once they don’t see you sweat, they don’t love you anymore. You’ve got to let it pour out.”

Dave was signaling something as the caller’s voice faded and stopped.

Pore out, Matt thought. Right. It’s all right, Mama. No, it wasn’t. Not after Mama died. What do you do when you’ve got everything in the world except the one who loves you?

Dave had queued up his closing song. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Matt sat in the WCOO parking lot, his silver Jaguar from the Chicago producers the last car left, sitting under a glaring light, for security against theft. Two thirty a.m. and even the engineer had left. WCOO would broadcast canned music until dawn. It was a small station, lucky to have two syndicated shows.

The greenish lamp above highlighted his white-knuckled grip on the leather steering wheel. Visibility was now not a haven, but a liability. He finally started the car and moved it, purring contentedly, to the darkest side of the lot, overshadowed by a high wall of Photinia bushes. Cars were made to run, but maybe ex-priest amateur detectives should consider it too.

Maybe he and the car they gave him should run right to the network TV executives who’d offered him a juicy talk show gig in Chicago, with Temple riding shotgun, literally. The Bonnie and Clyde of the Circle Ritz.

Matt laughed aloud, softly, at his self-mocking scenario. That was something Temple would dream up.

He eyed the dashboard clock. He couldn’t sit and think long now that he and Temple were sleeping at her place. That made his clandestine investigations harder to conceal. The whole point of sleeping together had been to avoid hypocrisy before they married…well, other benefits were the real draw.

He knew a threat when he heard one. Now that Woodrow Weatherly was joining Elvis in stalking him on The Midnight Hour, his quest to unravel his stepfather’s grisly murder was even more dangerous. Trouble was, something just as sinister seemed to haunt the Circle Ritz vicinity, or inhabitants.

He let the idling car off its leash and headed onto the randomly lit two-lane road that led through a flatland of deserted industrial park buildings. Radio stations were built on urban fringes. The Strip’s ever more towering Babel of new hotel-condominiums around the iconic brands of the Caesars Entertainment and MGM Mirage consortiums made the distant horizon glare look like a sunrise was imminent.

Not for him.

He couldn’t feed his need-to-brood mood any longer.

A bright yellow headlight appeared behind him, far and small, but incoming.

The mysterious motorcyclist who had followed him months ago was back. Along with Elvis. Or…Elvis himself?

Matt blinked and saw the oncoming light glaring on his inner eyelids.

The usual suspects burned a similar single-minded path through his brain.

Vengeful psychopath Kathleen O’Connor had left the country for Ireland. Probably traveling with Max Kinsella, the chief object of her homicidal obsession, who was drawing her away from Temple and himself. Also a motorcycle lover.

That left, most whimsically, the King. Elvis, obsessed with anything that had an engine. Cars. Big buses he personally drove to Las Vegas. A private jet. And motorcycles.

And Matt himself, who’d used Max’s ’cycle for a time and had probably drawn an even uglier antagonist down on them all.

Matt glanced at the single headlight.

“Padiddle,” he said under his breath. It was a road game. Call out that word when you spot a car with a single headlight or remove on article of clothing if you don’t.

But this was not a car and he wasn’t into strip poker of any type. So, like Elvis, he needed to discover what kind of engine it had. Had to know if it was Max’s vintage Hesketh Vampire Brit motorcycle he’d left stored in Circle Ritz landlady Electra Lark’s shed.

Only one way to find out. The Hesketh earned its name from the otherworldly scream the motor let out at high speeds.

He had a straightaway to the main highway and a car that did zero to sixty miles an hour in four seconds. He’d never stretched it much over the legal limit. He did now, even though he was doing forty. With spine-numbing speed, he was slammed back in the seat. The Jag leaped ahead, smooth as a steel arrow, a racehorse from the gate, like the famous leaping chrome jaguar hood ornament, already charging.

Matt was surprised by an adrenaline kick of pure escapist joy followed by a grim satisfaction that nothing could catch him unless he wanted it to.

The pinprick of light in the dark of the rearview mirror grew larger, but lagged and seemed to stop.

No wonder. Holy St. Sepulveda. The entry lane to Highway 91 was right…here. Hard, hard right. The car squealed genteel protest at rough handling, but smoothly entered the highway, unclogged by heavy traffic at this wee hour of the night.

Matt tried to spot a motorcycle following along on the access road, but found no sign of a light.

He continued on into Las Vegas proper (if one could ever say that about Vegas) via the notorious “Spaghetti Bowl” interchange at a mannerly and legal sixty-five miles an hour.

That successful maneuver had reminded him of another big cat, this one domestic.

Midnight Louie never hesitated to leap into action against foes bigger than he. He’d lunged for the intruder in Temple’s bedroom and forced him onto the balcony for Matt to attack from the floor above.

Matt shook his head to shake thoughts of his second Elvis audio experience. There would be buzz about that on the social networks, but if you don’t go there, you don’t have to answer for anything.