Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“You’d have to ask Mr. Randolph,” Max said. “My condition—”

“—is damn unfortunate,” Brian erupted. “Not much exchange of anything here. We hold all the ‘cards’ ”—he gestured to their files—“and you lot want all the old information.”

Gandolph had somehow pulled out his own file folder. Everyone noticed it at the same time, as if it had blossomed on the creased and nicked oak. The retired magician’s sleight of hand had sufficed to startle the two world-weary agents. That was a fine edge of advantage.

“We discovered,” Gandolph said, “where Kathleen O’Connor came from, which may explain a lot about her.”

“Kitty,” Max said, before he knew it was coming out. “Kitty the Cutter, we called her in Vegas.”

The Northern Irishmen couldn’t hide their eyebrow-raising surprise at that declaration.

“That’s just what we don’t have,” Kevin said. “Where she came from and where she went. The mayhem she wreaked in between, yes. We’re bloody experts on that.”

“She’s dead,” Max said harshly.

“You have proof?”

Max licked his lips and glanced inquisitively at Gandolph. “I don’t even know why I said what she was called just now.”

“Who was the ‘we’ who called her Kitty the Cutter?”

“I don’t remember.” Max refused to involve another innocent bystander like the Vegas redhead.

“What was the reason?”

“Ditto,” Max said. “I’m like that nowadays. Sorry, gentlemen. I know it’s a bore. It bores the hell out of me too.”

Another silence. This one lasted.

“Lad,” Brian, the older man, said softly, “everyone who ever saw Kathleen never forgot her. Everyone mentioned what a beauty she was. Elizabeth Taylor with ultramarine eyes instead of violet. I don’t think even amnesia is an excuse for forgetting that.”

Beautiful?” Max was apparently the one man who forgot all but an anonymous wedge of the temptress’s face, but he guessed she’d used colored contact lenses to produce those unearthly deep blue-green eyes no one forgot. “She killed my cousin and two fistfuls of innocents along with him.”

Eyebrows lifted again.

“How much did you fill him in?” Kevin asked Gandolph.

“Not that much. You need to understand he was almost killed in Las Vegas less than two months ago and escaped another attempt on his life in the Alps just this last week. He got himself to Zurich with two barely healed broken legs and what wits he has, memory or no memory.”

“I remember the common things of our lives and times,” Max said. “Just not my own damn history before I awoke from a coma a couple weeks ago.”

“So you think O’Connor’s dead?” Brian prodded. “We’d have to see for ourselves to believe that. She’s had more lives than a witch’s cat. She seems to thrive on trouble, other people’s, and exploiting it.”

Max buried his face in one eye-shading hand. They’d take it for stress. He was really trying to block out this torn photograph that had appeared in his dreaming mind’s eye: a pale white cheek on the dark ground, the just-recalled eerie green wink of a nearby cat’s reflective eye, a whole lot of disbelief on his part, and … guilt? Regret? Savage satisfaction? The exact emotions were as fugitive as his memory.

“We now know why this woman was so lethal,” Gandolph said. “I made these notes from our visit to a former Magdalen asylum on our journey from Dublin.”

He handed over a printed copy. Max thought he must have used the hotel’s business travelers’ setup. Dangerous, even printed direct from his laptop.

“Magdalen asylum? Sweet Jesus!” swore the younger man, Kevin. “She was kept in one of those places? No wonder.”

“She’d be young for that,” Brian mentioned, troubled, “even given her thirty-nine years or so.”

Max sat dazed for a moment, struck by the Irish lilt on the words thahr-ty nigh-en. It was hard not to imitate the tongue-misted accent that was like a lullaby for his troubled mind, maybe because he and Sean grew up in Catholic schools and churches where some of the older nuns and priests still kept a bit o’ the brogue.

“Forty?” he asked. “Kathleen would be forty now?”

“About that,” Kevin agreed.

“And she’s still wanted?”

“If she was involved in that pub bombing fiasco, yes.” Kevin consulted some pages. “Three loyal IRA men were named, and run down, thanks to an American kid named Michael Kinsella. ‘Cousin of one of the victims.’ You say you can’t remember being that young and fierce?”

Max shook his head violently to expel the image of a dead woman’s pale cheek. They took it for a simple no.

“You can’t remember,” Brian said, “but we’ve got many more files on her suspected activities. If anything here helps you recall anything we could use …” They passed him a couple of files while pulling Gandolph’s paper pile to their side of the table. It felt like the exchange of human hostages in paper-doll form.

Max flashed Gandolph a glance. They didn’t know about his Mystifying Max magician persona, then, or of his undercover counterterrorism work. If they still wanted information on Kathleen’s later activities, it might explain why someone still wanted to kill him.

Was it only about revenge for stalking and finding those IRA pub bombers all those years ago? Vengeance didn’t have a half-life, like nuclear waste did.

Max nodded agreement and pushed back his chair, liberating his legs from under the cramped table.

While Gandolph gave thanks, set up another appointment, and made farewell noises, Max tried to avoid hobbling to the door with the old-fashioned transom window above it. His body was dreading the long walk and then the worn, perilous stairs to descend, but his hopes were clutching at the files he’d turned to jam into Gandolph’s case. He’d need both hands free for the stairs, but at last his mind was liberated from day-to-day survival issues and could exercise its memory.

There had to be something more to the attempts on his life than ancient history, Ireland’s or his. Something as contemporary as last month or week.

The Vegas Cat Pack!

A seasoned sleuth senses when too much is going wrong and it is time to call in reinforcements.

Much as I am concerned about Midnight Louise’s puzzling disappearance from the Neon Nightmare’s secret maze of club rooms, I know I need to put executive decisions in motion before looking into her whereabouts.

I leave Miss Temple’s quarters and ratchet my way down the claw-marked slide of the Circle Ritz palm tree trunk to hit the hot parking-lot asphalt at a jog. I handled a murder case once, in the desert, for a coyote clan, and learned something from the lesser species: the endurance possibilities of the so-called dogtrot.

After my recent stint with the dance competition at the Oasis Hotel, I have also mastered the fox-trot. So I am now well seasoned with a new feral canine flavor—carrrumba!—and am perhaps the fastest so-called domestic cat on four feet in Las Vegas.

A secondary advantage to this pace is that my natural black sole leather is not getting singed as badly as it would on naked paving materials in this climate. Ordinarily, I can travel from scant oasis of shade to oasis of shade, be it of greenery or Detroit origin, but I do not have the time now to take a zigzag route.

Who knows what those Synth freaks would do in the Satanist way if they caught an eavesdropping quadruped of midnight hue?

Speaking of such a dastardly situation, I am now entering the Men in Beige zone and need to tread extra carefully. One does not go rushing into police custody, even if they seem friendly. Often they have extradition agreements with the local Animal House of Blues, aka the city pound.

This particular police substation near the Circle Ritz seems to have been civilized pretty well. Officers Shrimp Combo and Miss BO, short for Bicycle Officer, are fast-food aficionados. Not the ubiquitous doughnut, mind you, but a heap of protein in a slick waxed wrapper on a bed of mushy white bread that can be torn off and distributed to our feathered friends, who appreciate not being the Catch of the Day at these McDonald’s moments.

(Normally, I do not resort to brand names other than the occasional Las Vegas landmark, but in this case the fast-food place is a mere two blocks away. Also, I am well aware that chichi modern narratives are now fashionably littered with the best in clothing and cuisine. So far, my works have only contributed my roommate’s shoemeisters to that trend, except for a few painfully fashionable details from Mr. Max’s recent grueling European fling, which is entirely in my collaborator’s materialistic hands. You will note those episodes are decidedly and solely inhabited by bipeds and are the poorer for it.)

“Mr. Midnight, sir!” My advent through the cloaking oleander bushes is joyfully hailed.

I brush off my shoulders from young Gimpy’s greeting. He can certainly hurl himself over a lot of ground on those three legs. I straighten him up by the scruff of the neck. He wears a sporty striped suit that serves to downplay his handicap. It is bum luck to be hit by a car when you are a homeless kit and no one is around to get you to the hospital, so you lose your misshapen foreleg in a charity ward months later.

However, misfortune leads to improvisation, and little Gimpy could eke out enough free food to swamp the whole clowder, like Oliver Twist beseeching “More” from the local church choir instead of a villain of the piece.

As it happens, I have set up the entire Ma Barker gang pretty sweet here at the police substation, which I am peacefully explaining to Gimpy when a sharp-nailed mitt curls into my thick shoulder pad.

“The youngster does not need to hear your fairy tales,” Ma Barker spits. “I am the one who copped to this location, and now you have burdened me with my ex.”

“It is only a temporary thing,” I say quickly. “He has had a retirement gig as a restaurant mascot, but these trying economic and ecological times has erased his last employment situation.”

“Great Bast, son! You sound like one of those boring talking human heads on the nightly news. Forget the philosophy. When do I lose the loser? I already gave him the first heave-ho ages ago.”

It is trying to hear one’s sire discussed in such scathing terms. I fluff up my ruff and get to the point.

“The old guys who ran Three O’Clock Louie’s at Temple Bar on Lake Mead have snagged a hot new venue.”

“Is a ‘hot new venue’ something edible?”

“It will be: Three O’Clock Louie’s Speakeasy subterranean bar and restaurant at Gangsters, the underworld departure point for Vegas’s coolest high-speed underground mobster run.”

“I am confused here. Is this a seafood restaurant? With lobsters?”

“Naw, Ma. Not lobsters, mobsters that run with gangsters. Kinda like you,” I add slyly. “Gangsters Hotel and Casino is amping up its theme with an expanded mob museum and cosmetic redo.”

“Oh. Are any female mobsters represented in the Gangsters renovation?”

“Ah … I am sure your namesake, Ma Barker, will be represented, and an immortal gun moll or two.”

She seems “mollified” by that and adds, “I must confess that the human Ma Barker did precede me on the planet by a few decades. So. Three O’Clock is now again leading the life of Riley at a new human feeding station, and outta my hair. I know he took off for somewhere.”

“I promise, Ma. Meanwhile, my humans are facing a three-pronged Death Challenge. I need twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock operatives to cover the Crystal Phoenix, Gangsters, and the Neon Nightmare, along with some layabouts in the tunnel that is the immediate scene of the crime. So far.”

“You have Midnight Louise already at the Phoenix.”

“Bast be good,” I mutter, disturbed by having found no trace of Louise here at clowder headquarters. I would not expect to her to be slumming, but where can she have gone from the Neon Nightmare, and where might she now be? “I could use a couple more there. It is a big place.”

Ma cocks her whiskers at a pair of ninja-black shorthairs enjoying a Big Mac for two.

“These are your half brothers. Having Louise look-alikes on the grounds will be good cover.”

“Smart thinking, Ma.”

“I will ‘smart’ your ears if you condescend to me again, boy. I happen to have a lot of ‘midnights’ in my gang, so I can send a couple more to cover the Neon Nightmare. It is a rough place, I hear, and I do not let my people tackle gin joints like that without my personal supervision. Where will the duffer go? You need anyone out at Lake Mead?”

“Not now.”

Her yellow eyes bore into my green ones. At least I got my Black Irish coloring of black hair and green eyes from Dad.

“Might as well assign the Old Man and the Sea to Gangsters, where he belongs now.”

“The sea?” I ask.

“Me. Ma Barker. The mother of all mothers. Mother Ocean. Mother Hell-on-Claws. I gotta itch to see this Gangsters operation. See if it gets the Ma Barker seal of approval.” She slashes a foreclaw in the sand. “See what kind of cushy gigolo job your so-called father has got himself now.”

Three O’Clock and Ma Barker back on the same turf together again, after all these years. It kinda makes even a street-tough dude choke up … with horror at the prospect of the two of them mingling with the ex-prospectors of the Glory Hole Gang.

I fear my esteemed parents will require a referee, not a job assignment.

Bottoming Out

“Where can we meet,” the man’s deep voice on the phone asked Temple, “where nobody we know will be there?”

“‘We’?” Temple asked, still blinking from the recent departure of Rafi Nadir’s long-ago ex-girlfriend.

“Well, not your alley cat and me.”

Temple glanced to see if Midnight Louie had sensed himself being dismissed. Yup. He had no doubt left the premises by the open-bathroom-window route she had reinstated. As the sole resident second-story man now, he was a frequent patron of the exterior high road provided by an old, leaning palm tree trunk.

Her mind snapped back to her caller. “You and me lunching together, alone?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d decided I don’t bite.”

“But … why? Why the secrecy?”

“I’m not Mr. Popularity in some quarters. And the why is … personal. Do I have to send an engraved invitation?”

“No. I’m just … surprised. Ah, are you off work? How about a picnic in Sunset Park today?”

“Picnic? Sunset Park? It’s long after lunchtime.”

“I know, you’re not the picnic type. That’s why it’s an ideal locale. We’ll call it a picnic supper. I can’t imagine anybody we know loitering there after working hours on a weekday. And nobody can eavesdrop on one of those well-spaced picnic tables. How about six P.M. near the parking lot? We can hike to a likely spot from there.”

“Not if you’re wearing the usual spikes.”

“You shouldn’t be surprised at what I can do in high heels by now.”

His laugh sounded relieved. “Naw, I wouldn’t. Ciao.”

Good golly, Miss Molina, thought Temple as she hung up the phone. Good thing Matt’s out of town. Rafi Nadir was still a slightly sinister presence on the Vegas scene. Then she imagined how Molina would react to Temple having a private picnic with her long-ago live-in and giggled all the way to the kitchen to look up man-size-sandwich possibilities.

She arrived at the parking lot ten minutes early, raised the Miata’s top, and locked the car, then sat on the hood with her insulated lunch and tote bags, swinging her feet, realizing she should have asked the make and color of Rafi’s car.

What would he drive? Molina had that awful aging Volvo. About as sexy as support hose. Rafi … let’s see. He’d been on the skids, working temp security details, until he got that security job at the Oasis.

He’d quickly become assistant security chief and had seemed so solid-citizen lately that even Molina had thawed toward him. She’d thawed toward Temple too. Toward everybody but her teen daughter, Mariah. There she was Mama Bear in every sense of the word.

Poor Mariah, having a homicide cop for a mom! Mothers of teenagers had reason to be paranoid to begin with, and the Molina household had been violated by a stalker. At least Mama no longer thought that had been Max. As if he would have to force himself on women and Temple would be going with a guy who did! Molina was right. She was a horrid judge of men.

“Sensible shoes,” a deep voice said behind her, breaking into her mental tirade.

Temple looked over her shoulder to see Rafi standing at the Miata’s other front fender.

“Thanks,” she said, eyeing her broad-based but insanely strappy red wedge sandals. “For me, they are.”

She was about to hop down when Rafi came around and took her hand, quite the gentleman. He was about six feet, swarthy, around forty, wearing the usual black jeans and boots, not cowboy, and a black T. Just a regular guy. He was also carrying a cooler and incarcerated Temple’s insulated bag of sandwiches in it as soon as she was on level ground.

“How’d you get here?” she asked.

“Parked across the road and walked in.”

Meanwhile they were pacing along the hard-packed red clay hiking path toward the concrete picnic tables. Quacking ducks swam near the small artificial lake at the park’s center, when not beak-diving for snacks or waddling after bread-carrying tourists on the grass.

Temple was used to taking long steps to keep pace with Max’s six-foot-four stride. Nor was Matt an ambler. She may have worn high heels for business since college, but she’d never been a tiny-step totterer.

In three minutes she and Rafi were settled at a picnic bench under the concrete sun shelter. He’d brought bags of oven-roasted vegetable chips and Amstel Light beer and spring water to go with Temple’s roast-beef sandwiches on rye. Tasty spread. Temple accepted a beer, and Rafi took the water.

“Molina would have a bird if she could see us now,” Temple remarked after the first few bites of sandwich, “but not a duck.”

“No, she’d have an ostrich,” Rafi agreed, upping the ante. “Whole.”

“Never a flamingo,” Temple added, recalling the Las Vegas visit of concept artist Domingo with his thousands of pink plastic yard-birds.

Enough preliminaries, she thought.

“What’s this secret meeting about?” she asked Rafi. “I thought you and Molina had at least blunted the hatchet. You were a great go-to guy at the Oasis celebrity dance contest. Matt and I sure appreciated that; even ol’ C. R. seemed to.”

“Yeah.” Rafi rotated the plastic water bottle between his palms.

Temple was surprised. He seemed a tad nervous. Maybe he wasn’t used to talking about his feelings. Duh! An Arab-American grad of the L.A. police force from back in the days when ethnic borders were even edgier and bloodier on the streets than today. Guess not.

She prided herself on being able to cross most social barriers since her Minneapolis TV-reporter days. That was a huge asset in her freelance PR business. She decided to let Rafi take his time, and soon he’d be spilling like the Exxon Valdez.

“So,” he said suddenly, “how do I get the new, Dairy Queen–soft Molina to let me into my daughter’s life?”

“Ask?” Temple suggested.

He shook his head. “Too easy for her to give one of her knee-jerk responses. You know how wired she’s been lately. Apparently your ex did that to her?”

Temple was startled by another mention of Max, no doubt.

“Your ex-boyfriend,” Rafi said more specifically, “that magician guy. He may be gone, but, believe me, he’s not forgotten as far as Carmen Molina is concerned.”

“Max wasn’t … forgettable. I thought you ran into him on some of those freelance security jobs.”

Rafi shrugged. “Maybe. I ran into a lot of guys on those details. I’d have liked to shake his hand. He did a great number on Carmen and distracting her from her job, which she hates more than anything. Well, you oughta know. You two are always tenser than alley cats on the subject.”

“We were not fighting over Max. You’ve got that wrong, just as Molina got Max wrong. She was being a pig-headed cop, sure someone was guilty before she had any more evidence than her instincts.”

“Which are pretty sharp,” Rafi said.

“You actually admire her? After the way she’s treated you?”

“I give her credit, just as I give you credit.”

“Well, you don’t give me credit for keeping my men. You’ve implied both Max and Matt might have a love-hate thing going with Lieutenant C. R., she of the untamed eyebrows.”

“Untamed? Eyebrows?” Rafi laughed. “Women fight dirty, for sure. At least she doesn’t have the untamed love life you’ve had.”

“Me? Untamed? I am so boring and below the radar.”

“Yeah, sure, Zoe Chloe.” Rafi laughed again. “Look, that’s why I’m courting your good opinion.”

The word courting made Temple seriously leery. “Yeah?”

“You know Molina way better than I do.”

“I do?”

“Right. As a woman. I want to take Mariah to that father-daughter dance when she starts junior high in the fall. How can I ace out your handsome, morally superior fiancé for the job?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

“My line to you, bounced back at me. I’m serious, Miss Zoe Chloe Ozone Temple. If I let another man be there for Mariah because her thirteen-year-old brain thinks he’s ‘cool,’ I’ve got no chance at ever getting into her life. Unless you think I have no right to be a father to anyone because Molina had such a huge lack of faith in me fifteen years ago in L.A.”

“Why did that happen?”

“We were rivals on the force. Minorities and women were put into that position then.”

“It was a work problem?”

“Basically. Then she … got pregnant.”

“Not by herself. But a surprise.”

“A shock to the solar system, only she didn’t tell me, just held it in and ran. Reminds me of your MIA boyfriend.”

Temple wanted to get her back up, then realized Rafi was right. “Max only left Vegas that first time because some international bad guys were after him. He thought staying with me put me in the line of fire, and he was right. A couple of them trapped me in a parking ramp, wanting to intimidate Max’s whereabouts out of me.”

“From your body language just now, the creeps’ pressure got physical.”

“That shows? I’d almost forgotten about that nasty incident.”

“No, you haven’t. Your lips and eyelids tightened. Not much. Enough for a trained observer to notice. I’d say you’re lucky they only came calling once. So Kinsella was right to rabbit for the faraway hills. Where’d he go?”

“Canada.”

Rafi whistled. “Not easy to pull off on the run. Borders and visas and such.”

“Max knew how to vanish. There’s got to be a good reason for a pregnant Molina to run.”

“Like what?”

“You wanted her to have an abortion.”

“Since I didn’t know she was pregnant until I saw Mariah some dozen years later, when did I have a chance to dictate what she should do?”

“She knew you would.”

“She was wrong. And so are you. She ran because she thought I wanted her to have a baby, tricked her into it.”

“That’s just … crazy. From all I’ve heard, most guys are edgy about fatherhood at first. Especially unmarried, living-together guys.”

“Yeah. That’s the usual drill. It’s a stupid story we both should disown. Her birth control failed. She thought I sabotaged it to make her into a stay-at-home mommy so she couldn’t ace me out for promotions at work. She was a twofer. Ethnic and a woman. Management liked to handle ‘diversity’ by two at one blow. As for the pregnancy, I wasn’t ready to go anywhere bold on the relationship front. If I couldn’t hack a baby, we could have split. Simple.”

“She just took off without notice?” Temple said.

“Yeah. I admit it put me on an auto–self-destruct. She was good. There was no trace. She pulled a total vanishing act. She’d have made a great spy. You don’t know how utterly ineffective I felt. Me, a cop.”

“She did split, and it isn’t simple. What’s important is that you want a relationship with your half-grown daughter now.”

“Who knew I’d have father tendencies?” Rafi’s wry grin grew crooked. “She sure didn’t.”

“I can see,” Temple admitted carefully, “why her disappearing with no word would put you in a years-long tailspin.”

“That ‘maybe dead, maybe not’ question is a bitch, isn’t it?” he responded. “Even if you’ve got someone waiting in the wings this time.”

“You don’t,” Temple said, stung.

“That’s just a fact. I’m not blaming you.”

“Why didn’t you move on and find someone?”

“Let her disappearing throw me into a down cycle? I was a cop. I should have been able to find my girlfriend. It was a double whammy to my self-esteem.”

“What changed you?”

“Maybe Zoe Chloe Ozone.”

“What? She’s an annoying twerp.”

“I discovered a couple things doing security at that Teen Idol reality-TV house. I liked solving puzzles and I liked watching over annoying twerps who were smart and feisty. I may be wrong, but Mariah really grew up at that thing, didn’t she?”

Temple munched chips and sipped beer. “Yes, she did. And so did you.”

“Then Mama showed up for the big show with her down-and-dirty undercover cop.”

Oooh. Now Temple was doing the observing. Rafi Nadir did not like Dirty Larry Podesta at all. And it was over Molina.

Temple was sure she should be blushing here. She didn’t want to think of Molina and Rafi Nadir in bed. She didn’t want to think of Molina in bed with a man at all, period, especially that edgy Dirty Larry. You don’t get a nickname like that for nothing. Molina should know better. She was the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD, right?

Rafi glanced at Temple. “I’ve got to follow up on the rapport Mariah and I built at the murder house and now at the dancing competition. That’s why I’m asking you to figure a way around Molina. You actually do know what that feels like, to be run out on.”

“How am I going to influence Molina? She wouldn’t believe me about Max … not until recently. Why has she turned around on that?”

“Being so quick to judge has cost her. Again. Nah, she doesn’t regret leaving me. ‘Loser,’ she probably figured. All she ever regrets is being wrong. Maybe about Max Kinsella. Maybe even about me. And Mariah. Which is a big step for her. She might even believe I’m human enough to really care about my daughter.”

“Of course you are,” Temple said. “It shows. On your daughter and on you.”

“Yeah? You don’t think I’m the pond scum from L.A.?”

“Maybe at first, but not anymore. You get Mariah better than Molina does right now. I think it’s this awkward mother-daughter stage. And something is rubbing Molina raw lately.”

Temple didn’t add that maybe the something could be someone: Max still, or even Matt. It wasn’t human for Molina to be around, or at least know, two such, well, eligible men and feel nothing. But then, Molina hadn’t been letting herself feel human for a lot a years, according to Rafi.

“Why,” she asked, “don’t you just ask Molina for visitation time? You’ve got a steady job now.”

“She’d bite my head off if I asked her the time right now. Carmen is off balance somehow. I don’t know if it’s a guy or her job or hormones.”

“Hormones? She’s not that old!” Temple said, before she could stop herself from defending her bête noire.

“You’ve never had a kid. It can do things to your system.”

Temple doubted motherhood was that altering, but finding out he was a father certainly seemed to have straightened up Rafi.

“How’d you get that assistant-security-chief position at the Oasis, anyway? That was an impressive step up from temp jobs.”

Rafi shrugged the question off, like dislodging an itch between his shoulder blades. “Still knew some guys who could give me a decent recommendation. Guess it was more a question of why than how.”

Temple waited. People talked more that way.

“What pushed me to move on, and up, as it turned out, was that last temp job. Guy, uh, got killed on my watch.”

“Yeah? Some nut with a gun? You had to shoot him?”

“Nah. This guy shot himself, in a way. It was the guy in the sky at the Neon Nightmare. Bungee-cord act over the dance floor. He shot down from the peak of the pyramid, and instead of bouncing back up, slammed into the wall right in front of me.”

Temple’s pulse roughened. “I didn’t know you worked there. It’s a crazy maze of loud music and light, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, those damn strobe lights and neon flashes made it insane to see,” Rafi said. “And the bosses were freaky and almost invisible. You’d glimpse them coming and going, seeming to slink into those funky black Plexi walls. I did my job interview in a room I never found my way back to again, with a guy in white tie and a woman in a turban.”

“Weird. How could you be an adequate security guard in that environment?”

“I couldn’t, when it came down to something really serious,” Rafi said, his features settling into a bitter mask of self-disgust. “After that bungee cord failed and the magician guy fell, I couldn’t find a pulse, couldn’t even see what was injured. It was so chaotic. I tried CPR, called an ambulance. The EMTs were right there and whisked him away. They probably kept trying to resuscitate him, but, uh, it was a lost cause, I bet.”

“Didn’t you check to find out?”

“Where? Hospitals don’t provide information like that. Newspapers didn’t run a word on the incident. Anyway, he wasn’t about to come back anytime soon, or ever, even if he survived that body blow.

“That was a life lesson for me. I saw we were all hanging by a thread, that I needed to hustle and get hold of a better one if I wanted a chance to get to know my kid more before my bungee cord ran out of rebound too.”

Temple nodded, but her composure was shaken.

Was Max’s death Rafi’s life lesson?

Synthesized

Temple drove back from Sunset Park undistracted by what she could see of the coinciding sunset in the surrounding mountains. Nature couldn’t soothe a mind and emotions whirling tornado style.

Max must have been seriously investigating the Synth at the Neon Nightmare and had never whispered a word about it to her. After he’d returned from vanishing on her a couple of years ago, he’d promised to keep her in the loop about any threats on his life.

He’d always protected her more than she liked. No more protecting her from his counterterrorism past, he’d promised. They’d figured out what the Synth was—even that there was a Synth—together. Together, they’d mourned the death of University of Las Vegas professor Jefferson Mangel, an academic with a puckish enthusiasm for “magic” and a sense of the mystical in life.

Professor Mangel had been found dead in his classroom-cum-magic museum, inside a drawing of the constellation Ophiuchus, the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, forgotten and dropped centuries earlier.

The ancients named it for the image they saw in those stars, a man struggling with a giant, entwining serpent. That image was not so different from another ancient one for eternity, a circling snake swallowing its own tail. That was called the Worm Ouroboros, in the sense that medieval dragons were often called worms.

Temple was starting to think the constellation’s human figure might be female. Jeff Mangel was not the only victim of an unnamed killer cluttering Las Vegas in the sign of the Synth. Wasn’t she herself entangled in struggling right now to put Cosimo Sparks’s death together with Jeff’s, not to mention the parking-lot murder of the retired assistant of Max’s magical mentor, Gandolph the Great, aka Garry Randolph, and the spectacular death of Randolph himself (undercover in female garb, no less, to unmask fake mediums) at last Halloween’s séance to raise Harry Houdini? So the victims with magical links were Gandolph first, then Jeff Mangel, then Gandolph’s assistant, Gloria Fuentes, and now Cosimo Sparks.

Oh! The personalities, the deaths, the timing, the circumstances, the sign of the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus found at the professor’s classroom death scene, scrawled in chalk, and at Cosimo Sparks’s. They were all tangled up in her head … three magic-related men dead and one’s retired assistant. All unsolved murders. Now this Phantom Mage at the Neon Nightmare could be another victim. And Max, another retired magician, was missing. Again.

Rafi’s comments increased her fears that Max had been trailing the rumored secret society in disguise at the Neon Nightmare. The Synth’s calling card was definitely the image of the major stars that formed Ophiuchus. Where the ancients saw tangled human and serpent flesh, Temple had seen the childish sketch of a house, askew, and now holding the splayed stick figures of two dead men, the professor and the Synth magician.

She couldn’t let the implications of what Rafi had inadvertently revealed lie there like a dead black mamba. Somebody had to stir up things in the Neon Nightmare snake pit.

As soon as she got home, Temple checked for Louie—apparently out or snoozing somewhere.

Her desk drawer burped up the handy, dandy table of unsolved murders and purported suspects she’d made and updated to keep victims and possible perps straight, even if one suspect was Max. A quick study of the table showed magic was the undying, unifying theme. She now, thanks to Rafi, had a new highly suspect site to investigate.

Temple then attacked her bedroom closet, grabbing a ruffled Reagan-eighties fuchsia taffeta fitted jacket, slim, short Vera Wang skirt suitable for nightclubbing, and her new Giuseppe Zanotti leopard-print suede wedges perfect for the urban jungle.

Temple hotfooted into her spare bedroom-office to raid that closet for a purple suede envelope-style clutch bag with a slim metal shoulder strap. It was flat enough for evening but perfect to hold the Colt Pocket Lite Max had insisted she’d learned to shoot.

The gun was in a closet shoe box (such a TV-show cliché) next to a small, surprisingly heavy box of bullets. The weapon was loaded and the safety was on: no resident kids to worry about, and Louie didn’t have an opposable thumb. Finding a firearm that fit her hand, and a trigger she had the finger strength to pull had taken many tries. A tiny twenty-two didn’t always fill the bill just because it looked feminine sized. Max had drilled her on proper firearm handling, but her palms still dampened as she lifted the Colt from its sheepskin-lined triangular leather case and put it inside her leather-lined purse. She wasn’t used to carrying either one: an ordinary-sized purse or a gun.

The shooting range was months behind her, but if Max had been the Phantom Mage and had disappeared from the Neon Nightmare, as Rafi’s on-scene testimony indicated, she wasn’t going there without backup.

Poor Rafi. Witnessing that fall had made him “give up” on private security jobs and indirectly led him into a decent career. Poor Max, if it had been Max. She wouldn’t leave the Neon Nightmare tonight without finding that out.

The weight of the small revolver felt reassuring at her hip, where the purse rested. She could keep a hand on the top, as women do in crowds, and be ready for anything. What if Max had never left Las Vegas? What if he was being held prisoner at the Neon Nightmare? Rafi had mentioned the “bosses” coming and going, the place’s interior being a black Plexiglas maze, where reflective surfaces and neon almost blinded most eyes.

Temple opened the accessory chest’s top drawer. This was for jewelry and bigger accessories, unlike the smaller chest in her bedroom that contained the notorious scarf drawer, where she’d finally stashed Max’s ring. She plucked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the collection stored in shoe-box tops. She snagged a rhinestoned raspberry beret to obscure her strawberry-blonde hair, just in case someone knew her.

In the mirror, the effect wasn’t at all Zoe Chloe Ozone, amazingly.

“Okay, Retro-Disco Babe,” she told herself in the mirror. “We are gonna take the Neon Nightmare by its flaming electric-rainbow mane and shake it until the Synth and what happened to Max Kinsella, if he was there, come falling out into the light of day.”

Temple grabbed the Miata keys from the kitchen counter near the tiny entry hall, locked her condo, and headed to where a rearing neon mare surmounted a pyramid crammed with music, mania, and maybe magic and murder.

Sitting in the Miata in the fresh darkness with the top up a block from the Neon Nightmare, Temple finally allowed herself to check the temperature of her sandal-strapped toes, instep, and ankles. Yup, cold feet.

She shut her eyes. The longer she thought about it, the less she liked it.

Her cell phone felt like a magic egg in the palm of her still-warm hand. This was spring in Las Vegas. The desert air was hot and heavy from the hangover of sun-drenched daylight bouncing off all the concrete, glass, and asphalt.

She was bathed in the literal nightmare sign of many neon colors, flowing over her little car like a giant mane. She could leave a message for … not Matt in Chicago. Her landlady? No … Molina? God forbid. Rafi? No, he knew this place. He could rod right over and stop her. She wanted someone who’d miss her if she didn’t turn up, but distant enough to not think much of where she was and what that meant.

Whose number was on her cell phone that she could text?

She settled on Nicky Fontana. “Chkg out Neon Ntmr 4 G’s ideas. Disco TB. News at 11.”

His phone would record when she left the message—8:00 P.M.—and he wouldn’t bother calling her back or become concerned until after 11:00. Nicky was a casino watchdog. He stayed up at least until midnight every night.

Now. She had been as sensible as a one-woman fury could be. She was going inside that gaudy pyramid, and she wasn’t leaving until she had solved the puzzle of the Synth or died trying. Or, better, shot someone in self-defense trying. Hopefully not in her own foot in its flashy leopard-print suede wedge heels. Hey, maybe Bob Dylan of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” fame would write a song about them in her memory.

Dalai Lama Eyes

While my Miss Temple, looking like a floozy, is heading out the front door, I am out my special bathroom exit window, ratcheting up ye olde leaning palm-tree ladder to the Circle Ritz penthouse.

The sinking sun is haloing the distant mountains with a faded neon-rainbow glow, but scenery is not on my mind.

Once I have dropped down onto Miss Electra Lark’s penthouse balcony like a ninja, unseen and stealth footed, I pounce down the line of French doors, seeking the loosest hinges. There is always one weak link to everything and everyone, and Midnight Louie is a past master at sniffing them out.

Aha! I pause at an end door. Methinks I smell the blood of a purebred Birman female. Or at least I spot a long, white, airy whisker protruding under the door. It is locked, of course, but this is the same flimsy hardware as on Miss Temple’s balcony doors. Back in the nineteen fifties, when this joint was built, the crime rate was as low as the interest rate is now.

I do my patented leaps and twists, and am pleasantly rewarded much sooner than usual, when the locking mechanism bows to my superior strength. Unfortunately, I am at the apex of my leap and enter twisting my torso to land on my feet.

I make an awkward five-point landing—I also take it on the chin when I fall to the carpet—and look up to see a pair of red taser lights gleaming not six inches from my temporarily immobile eyes.

My shivs dig into the carpet as I rapidly scramble up to assume the “Halloween” martial-arts pose, feet clenched and back arched, rear member slashing.

“At ease,” drawls an unimpressed female voice. “Where is the fire?”

“What are you doing out in the open?” I wonder.

“Opening the door, dodo,” is the tart reply from the agoraphobic Karma, who is usually to be found lurking under large upholstered furniture.

“Uh, I did that,” I tell her, forgetting you can tell the telepathic or psychopathic … or whatever “ick” you want to call her … nothing. She knows all, sees all, says all.

“Uh,” she mocks, “I let you do that. I could sense your neurotic panic all the way from the second floor. It has quite curled my whiskers.”

The illumination in here is eternally night-light to accommodate Karma’s oversensitive nature, so I have to squint to see that her vibrissae have indeed curled inward at the ends as if under the influence of a permanent wave.

“I did that?” I cannot help sounding a bit pleased.

She sighs, heavily. “I cannot help you, Louie.”

This is bad news.

I do not normally buy this psychic hokum anymore than I regularly eat Free-to-Be Feline, but it is true that Karma’s breed is descended from the cats that defended the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, back when it was a sovereign and mystical place that harbored legends like the earthly paradise of Shangri-La (from which a naughty lady magician of Miss Temple’s and my acquaintance took her performing moniker).

The legends say that the souls of departed Tibetan priests inhabited the beige-colored temple cats. Frankly, they share much in common with the late Shangri-La’s performing Siamese, the evil Hyacinth: cream beige body with brown-masked face, brown legs, and tail, and stunning blue eyes, except they are longhaired (and have that uppity longhair air, as if they listen to harpsichord concertos all day on velvet pillows). The legend is that their coloring, especially the four white mitts, were awarded by a god when they tried to save a long-ago Dalai Lama from being killed by mountain marauders.

So I have to keep all this stuff in mind when dealing with Karma, as she is supernaturally sensitive.

“You do not know what I want,” I argue.

“Of course I do, Louie. I know what you want before you know it. And I am telling you that had you contacted me first, when you sent the clowder to their various far-flung posts, given the fact that you are related by blood to three of them, I could indeed have invoked Bast to lend you the mystical and ancient power called Oneness of Overmind so you could communicate long-distance.”

“I am related to three of them?”

“I can count.”

“Then Midnight Louise is indeed my—?”

“The product of your littering, yes. And now you are right to fear for her well-being.”

“How would we, uh, three, do this Oneness of Overmind thing?”

“I would perform the ceremony, but the effect is only temporary. It would require burning a whisker each and a few drops of communal blood, not to mention the sacrifice of one life apiece.”

“Cell phones are much more humane,” I say, shocked.

“Had our kind pockets … I sympathize with your concerns, Louie. Part of the permanent wave in my whiskers is from absorbing the danger haloing your recently departing human like the scent of death. I hope her recent departure does not become permanent.”

“But she has already left, and it will take time to summon the Cat Pack. I need paranormal help.”

“And I am giving it to you. I have consulted the stars, particularly the sinister sign known as Ophiuchus, and looked into the future, and I have this urgent advice for you.”

“Yes?”

“Run like hell.”

Room Disservice

“Somehow,” Gandolph chuckled as he hung up the room phone, “I doubt a room-service dinner with me will be as enthralling as with your friend Revienne.”

“I never said she was a friend,” Max objected, using his hands to lift each leg onto an ottoman and stretch out more than three feet of chronic ache.

“The over-the-counter pills help at all?” Gandolph asked, sitting in the upholstered chair.

Max shrugged. “I’m used to the discomfort, but those dank Old World buildings must have been built to make people uncomfortable, like that bloody convent.”

“The church probably inherited the manor house a couple centuries ago, and the Magdalen operation was a leftover from the age of Dickens, Max. The Old World was always harsh compared with the New. You’ve forgotten our small travails when we lived abroad. Daily comfort is an American concept. Think of all the toilet paper American tourists trekked on European tours for decades.”

“I spent enough time this unscheduled trip ‘roughing it’ in the Alps.”

“With a hot blonde waiting on you foot and foot.”

Max shrugged in surrender. “I’m spoiled. I know it. Speaking of which, I can’t believe these ‘recovering’ IRAers haven’t tumbled to the fact that ‘Michael’ Kinsella is the ‘Mystifying Max.’ ”

“My European counterterrorism associates and I kept your original identity up-to-date all these years. Comfort may not be their game, but subterfuge is. They’re way older at it than we are, living right next door to ancient enemies without any massive moats of ocean.”

“How the hell—?”

“According to the record, Michael Kinsella returned to the U.S., graduated from a state university with a … biology degree, and got a high-school teaching job.”

“I’m amazed. Maybe I should drop back into that phony life. Start over. I do seem to have a gift for biology,” Max added with a wicked glint.

Gandolph was perusing a folder. “What do you want to start with, duck soup or cream of potato?”

“Are you talking about my fake life, biology, or the room-service menu?”

“The menu. It’s quite decent.”

“High praise from a gourmand like you.”

“How did you like the kitchen in my former Vegas house?”

“Good grief. A memory of that room just flashed through my mind.”

“Excellent, Max! Good progress.”

“Your online redhead was in it, sitting on your granite-topped central island sipping a bubble glass of … probably merlot wine. Not a bad picture. Interesting composition of reds.”

“The bubble glass is all wrong! Someone must have added it to the household after I left.”

“Could have been me. Bubble glasses are fun magic props to have around the house.”

“I’m not catering to your indecisive mood. We’re having rainbow trout and stuffed rack of lamb, vegetable mélange, with brandied bread pudding for dessert. I’ll order the wines.”

“And a Celebrex chaser for my seventy-year-old legs.” Max remained silent for a moment. “You know what I’d really love for dinner?”

“What?”

“A Big Mac.” Max expected his companion to have a foodie fit over his low-end, high-fat craving.

“McDonald’s is everywhere,” Gandolph said briskly. “I’ll order you one up as an appetizer. You need to get some pounds back on somehow. A man bedridden for more than a month can really lose weight. Perhaps beer will help. We’re meeting our next sources in a pub.”

“You spoil me,” Max said. “I’ve been an ungrateful boy.”

“You’ve been through as much as you faced seventeen years ago in this very place.” Gandolph’s smile turned into a thoughtful purse of his lips. “It’s good you recalled ‘our’ kitchen in Las Vegas.”

“We’re here in Belfast so I can recall my teenage rebel past. Why are Vegas memories intruding in the Irish mist?”

“Because they are all linked, my lad. More than either of us might realize, or like, I fear.”

Ladies’ Neon Night Out

A doorman in a muscle T and dated gangster bling bowed her into the club.

“No cover charge, cutie,” he said. “Every night is ladies’ night at the Neon Nightmare.”

Temple sashayed in, having forgotten she would be welcomed as cash on the hoof by a nightclub’s management. She usually looked younger than her thirty years. All dolled up she probably looked just barely legal.

Men bought drinks for silly young women who dressed like they thought they were hot. Lots of drinks. Good. Temple was here to pick brains … and maybe locks.

Temple had never done the Las Vegas singles scene, although every bar in town was a singles scene. She’d moved here with Max, madly in love. His magic-show extravaganza at the Goliath ran twice nightly, so they’d played out all their love scenes at their Circle Ritz condo. It had been a very “married” existence, come to think of it.

Temple apparently didn’t look “married.” She fended off a couple of middle-aged salesmen-in-suits types who were obviously tourists, and the sale-eager bartenders, because no way was she opening her pistol-packing purse to pay for a drink at this elbow-squashing, people-packed bar.

That would be dangerous, even though she had the safety on. She was beginning to think she had overreacted to the idea that Max hadn’t just “gone missing again” but had been here and then never seen again … and was possibly really dead and she didn’t know it. The thought was intolerable.

“Let me guess,” a man’s voice said on her right. “Whatever you drink comes in a footed glass.”

Temple eyed the night’s first catch. Around thirty-five, with a face more pleasantly quirky than handsome. She rejoiced to see brown hair gelled into that central pompadour demanded of guys who would be Hollywood hip these days. Even Matt was being threatened with an “extreme make over” by a radio management going ever more online.

Temple glanced over the guy’s shoulder to the gyrating mobs on the dance floor and up into the pyramid’s distant dark peak, where stabbing light sabers of neon dueled with electric color.

“You’ve never been here before,” her bar partner guessed. “New in town?”

“Pretty much,” she lied. “You too?”

“No. I’m assigned here.”

Even better! “Are you a Neon Nightmare habitué?”

“I was right. Footed drinks and fancy French. What can I get you?”

“A wine spritzer?”

“That’s for lunch.”

“You’re right. A Spanish coffee.”

His peaked eyebrows became even more pronounced. “You don’t do the bar scene much.”

“Nope.”

“What’s in a Spanish coffee, besides the coffee?”

“Rum, Kahlúa, triple sec, cream, and sugar.”

“I admire a woman who can hold her calories.”

He ordered a beer for himself, surprising Temple. Had she actually drawn a moderate drinker she could pump for half an hour without him making a pass or sliding slowly to the mirror-black floor?

Her Spanish coffee arrived in a footed glass mug, looking like dark Irish Guinness stout with a head on it. Max-mission appropriate.

“Footed,” he pointed out. “Thanks for not proving me a liar. I’m Steve Fox, by the way, boy-wonder programmer. My company sent me out here for three months of skill upgrading.”

Temple had left all rings at home. Clutching her lethal purse in her lap with her left hand, she produced her right for a shake. “Temple Barrett. I do PR around town.” Okay, she would pull out the cliché: “You come here often?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact. The company suite-hotel makes one hope for bedbugs for entertainment. This place changes the neon show nightly. They used to have this wildman masked magician on a bungee cord who could do amazing illusions bounding all over the interior. Best free show in town.”

Temple sipped the warm, comfortingly sweet foam atop her dark, bitter, strong drink. Her heart was soaring and sinking at the same time. That magic man had to be Max.

“Why aren’t they advertising a primo attraction like that?” she wondered aloud.

“Maybe because I haven’t seen him in almost two months. Unsung when he performed, forgotten when he left.” He eyed her again. “What made you put on the Ritz and come sit at the bar here when you don’t want to be picked up? Don’t claim you’re a habitué. I’d know better.”

“Got me!” Temple laughed unsteadily. “I have an assignment, too, writing up trendy bars. I’d heard about your magician, but not that he wasn’t performing.”

“The Phantom Mage,” Steve recalled, sipping his brew. “Kinda hokey name. Smart psychology, though. You didn’t expect much and then, wham!”

“What was he doing here?” Temple mused, almost under her breath.

Steve had a fox’s sharp ears. “Making a buck. You’re not going to write about a dead act, are you?”

“I might.” Temple bit her lip at the double meaning she heard in Steve’s question.

“Drink too hot or too strong? Coffee will keep you awake and rum will keep you happy.”

“Exactly right. I better get down to business. Those neon fireworks up top are spectacular. Is that where the Phantom Mage made his entrance?”

“Right. And exit. Now that you say his name again, I guess it suited his act.” Steve squinted up into the light show. “I think there are invisible balconies up there.”

“Balconies?” That fit with Rafi’s seeing people “vanish” into the walls at all levels.

“You know, perches. He seemed to be walking on air at times.”

Temple’s heart clutched as her left hand fisted on her lap purse. That illusion was right from the Mystifying Max’s Goliath act, where he used strobe lights, like some of those that flashed over the dance floor here, to seem to fly.

“These strobe lights are so disco sixties,” Steve commented.

“Yeah. They pulse on and off, so people’s motions seem jerky.”

“Too bad a lot of them are jerks,” Steve said.

“You don’t like the bar scene either.”

“No, I’m a nerd, basically. Came here to see the light show and the flying magician. I just drink my two beers and people-watch. I’m heading home soon. You’re the first girl I’ve bought a drink for, Temple.”

“You’re the first guy I’ve let buy me a drink in … forever.”

They smiled at each other.

“You’ve got someone,” he said.

“He’s out of town. You too?”

“He’s back home in Oshkosh.”

Oh-kay. And here she’d been angsting about picking up guys in bars.

“Will I see ‘Temple Barrett’ in the next issue of Out and About in Las Vegas?” Steve asked.

Temple laughed. “Just a small-type credit at the very bottom, if I’m lucky. Have a nice trip back.”

“Thanks. I’ll try ordering a Spanish coffee in Oshkosh.”

“Good luck,” Temple said, “but I don’t think that will fly at most bars or restaurants.”

“Why not? It’s hot and bracing. Just what Cold Country needs. Don’t stay up too late.”

She sat and digested what Steve had told her after he left, studying the pyramid’s flashy interior. The interior was magician-made, both smoke and mirrors. Black reflective Plexiglas walls and floors, black mirrors, and bright lights—a giant magician’s illusion box. Of course there must be “balconies” along the interior sides. Although this pyramid was hollow, it must harbor plenty of room between the interior and exterior walls for light-and sound-show equipment and maintenance.

The dead body at the Goliath the night Max’s magic-show run had ended was found in one of those above-casino crawl spaces. The thought that Max might have been trapped here in a similar situation, and maybe even died here, made her determined not to leave this building until she knew what … and who … it concealed.

It wasn’t impossible that Max was also using the gig as training wheels for a new act. He’d been determined to unmask the Synth, and this was where he’d picked to do it … and where somebody got angry or alarmed enough to sabotage his investigation and try to take his life.

Temple sipped her Spanish coffee as slowly as possible to study the possibilities. Apparently her tête-à-tête with Steve had marked her as “taken.” Guys might be thinking he’d only left for the men’s room. The not-quite-empty beer bottle still sat in front of Steve’s empty barstool. That’s the kind of escort she liked in a place like this. Invisible.

Great. She was a free agent now. She eyed the dance floor, considered the advantages and disadvantages of performing over an audience’s head. When the Phantom Mage came sweeping down, they had to have looked up at the motion. What did they see?

She saw the dance floor as a wall-to-wall mob swept by glaring neon spotlights and winking strobe lights. It wasn’t all couples. Whoever pushed onto the deceptive, reflective surface could gyrate alone, with his or her image in the floor below, or with a cooperative stranger of any nearby gender.

Gosh! She wished things had been this informal when she was in high school and college.

She left two bucks on the bar to join Steve’s tip and slid off the high stool, never her most graceful moment, even in wedge heels, and even less so while clutching a purse for dear life. Or death.

The slick floor unnerved her, but she edged onto it, bobbing tentatively. It vibrated with the beat like a subterranean heart. Someone behind her bumped butts. Oh, rescue me! She gyrated around and faced a dreadlocked black guy doing the … Swim? Oh, retro me! Temple swam farther into the center of the dance floor, looking up.

The scene was as psychedelic as she’d heard the sixties were. Lights above, reflections below. You hardly knew where up and down ended. That was Max’s magician territory: confusing, sense-flooding, mystifying.

The pyramid sides were a blur of neon flashes. If she’d seen anyone “vanishing” into those walls, as Rafi had, she’d have thought of ghosts and freaked. Steve, sharp left-brained observer, had been right. There had to be perches for a flying magician to rest on before bounding into thin air and back to the wall again.

The impact of man with wall that Rafi had described reverberated with the driving, relentless rock/rap music in her head.

No one could survive that. Unless it was an illusion. Unless it had been Max doing the illusion.

She eyed the apex of the pyramid. Must be five stories. The neon lights at the peak spun around, making her eyes burn and her feet shuffle for solid ground beneath them.

She’d seen PBS shows about the solar system and the galaxies resembling this. Standing here in this mating swarm of loud music and shimmying torsos was like being in a science museum’s astronomy exhibition, if you actually looked up and enjoyed the light show.

Temple tuned out the mayhem and watched the signs of the zodiac spinning around the polestar. She realized the image at the apex of the pyramid was a blazing white horseshoe! One shod foot of the exterior nightmare actually “crashed” through the pointed roof to flash all the dancers below. It must be wearing a lucky horseshoe, of course.

Maybe seeing a lucky neon horseshoe was the same as wishing on a star. Temple was acting as a polestar herself. Standing still on the dance floor, she became a fixed point. People grooved all around, not caring what her shtick was any more than they cared whom they danced with or if they did.

Temple tried to picture a masked Max leaping on a bungee cord into this melee, pulling illusions out of his sleeves under all the signs of the zodiac. Look! There was Gemini, the twins, her birth sign. And Cancer, the crab. Then came Leo, the MGM lion. Not really, but in Vegas, was there any other lion on Earth or in the heavens? And Virgo, the virgin, a being as rare as a unicorn on the Vegas Strip. And Libra, the scales of balance and justice. Scorpio, with the curved sting of its tail lashing autumn into winter.

And then … Temple didn’t recognize the next constellation, or remember what zodiac sign came next. It didn’t offer a lot of stars but was rather peaked, like the top of Libra’s scales.

The one after it boasted a whole a rash of stars. Oh, that was the centaur shooting the arrow. Sagittarius, the archer. Capricorn, the goat, came next.

But … the hoofed centaur followed the scorpion. Temple was sure of it.

So … the constellation between Scorpio and the centaur had to be … shaped like a leaning house with a pointed roof—Ophiuchus!

Why did the Neon Nightmare include the rejected thirteenth sign of the zodiac between Scorpio the scorpion and Sagittarius the archer? Both shot stinging barbs. Ophiuchus combined man and serpent, which could sting as well.

Had Max air-danced beneath this bright and poisonous zodiac and been stung on the fly, falling to Earth and destruction?

Then where was the comet’s tail?

Why had such a spectacular death dwindled to mere memory and rumor?

Where was the body?

Playing It Koi

So here I am, at my former PI office, lurking in the canna-lily plants near the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, panting my lungs out so hard I can not even whisper “Dixie,” much less whistle it.

There was no time to hitch any rides, so I made the trip only on mitt leather, and I have worn my black soles pink. Some consider that a handsome retro color combination, but, let me tell you, it stings!

Luckily, I am too pooped to be distracted by the silken … undulating … translucent … fluttery fins on those plump piscine torsos in the nearby water attraction. Lake Mead may be a few trillion gallons shy a shoreline, but nothing will ever diminish or lower the water level in the hotel chef’s beloved koi pond.

I am hoping beyond hope for a rendezvous with Miss Midnight Louise. If she is not here, then my hasty mission to the Neon Nightmare club is doubly vital, for that is the last place I have seen her. So, by the shores of Getcha-gimme, while the koi beat their fins against the water in an odd familiar rhythm, I hear an internal mantra.

In the land of the Fontanas,

Lives the justice-maker’s daughter,

Mistress of the rising phoenix,

And the gleaming goldfish pond,

Born to run with nimble footwork,

Heart and mitt that move together,

She shall run upon my errands,

Midnight Louisa, laughing mocker …

Okay, the scansion on Miss Louise’s name does not quite work, but she is no Minnehaha, unless she is laughing at me. She would not be laughing now.

My vibrissae snap to immobile attention. I have spotted a familiar black hummock.

Midnight Louise is here on her home turf! Safe and stuffing her face. And here I was worried… .

Unfortunately, that still-crouched form is worshiping at the white-shod feet and medically white-clothed figure of Chef Song, arms folded on chest, the usual meat cleaver clutched to defend the precious foreign-named and fat goldfish from any interloper, like me.

I realize a delicate celadon green rice bowl sits between the kitchen god and worshiper, filled with fresh … shrimp or salmon perhaps, or tender slices of beef, or caviar, or octopus.

Preparing to make an end run to snag her attention, I watch the furred one sit up to perform after-meal ablutions. What, no warm, wet rolled-up towel? For shame, Chef Song!

By then the chef is turning away to gather goods to refill the bowl.

The diner strolls off into the canna lilies to finish his grooming. It is that big old lazy galoot of a purported father of mine, Three O’Clock! One would think the Glory Hole Gang’s test kitchen would suffice for his snacking.

While I eye him contemptuously, another black humped form is now worshiping at the about-to-be-refilled bowl.

Chef Song straightens. “You are hungry today, honorable cat.”

It is then I notice that he wears a pair of glasses that has slid down his nose, given all the serial kowtows he is making to my kind.

There is no chance even I would assume this latest bowl customer to be Miss Midnight Louise. She is more petite and curls her tail left when eating, and this bozo has a short, stumpy tail. I recall Ma Barker had promised to send some ninjas to patrol the Crystal Phoenix.

Pushing one’s face into a full rice bowl is not patrolling.

I can barely contain my impatience. I need to betray my position and go over to interrogate Three O’Clock without the looming, armed presence of my longtime foe, Chef Song. I am astonished he would lavish his bounty on all comers like this, when I am persona non grata.

I should snag a koi on the principle of it, while he is fawning over these street-gang strangers. The current customer also rises, flourishes his vibrissae, and ambles off to cleanse them in the canna lilies’ shade.

Before I can make a move, another black dude has appeared before the bowl, and while the now-vision-impaired chef is bent over watching the food vanish as if by magic, the dude is taking his turn. This is too much to bear.

If Chef Song cannot tell a senior citizen and a street tough from the dainty Miss Midnight Louise, he probably cannot distinguish me as his bitter enemy.

I strut into the open sunlight, stinging my footpads … ouch.

Nevertheless I march right up behind the current foodaholic. I will either join the chow line or I will bust it up.

Chef Song straightens as he spots me. With that tall, poofy white hat, he is as formidable appearing as a white Persian with its tail in full battle fluff. In other words, he and his meat cleaver do not scare me.

However, I am apparently so singular I am immediately ID’d.

“You!” he says. “You koi snatcher. You no longer resident. Get away from my private feeding station and pond or I will make minced shallots of your tail.”

Our set-to has spoiled the appetite of the latest freeloader, who hisses, spits, and runs for the canna lilies. Good. My posse is on their feet and ready to leave the luncheonette for the real scene of the action.

While Chef Song switches to uttering his own challenges in Chinese, I return full measure of hiss and spit, then show him the business end of my tail root and duck into the thick plant-stalk jungle.

Aaaah. Cool dirt between my toes, even though it will get stuck in my shivs.

“Okay, you worthless chowhounds,” I tell my now-assembled troops. “We have a mission. First, Three O’Clock, where is Midnight Louise?”

“I do not know. I just ambled over from the Glory Hole Gang’s test kitchen for some real food. Spuds Lonnigan is whipping up his specialty, potatoes, and I am not a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Meat, yes. Tater Tots, no.”

“You have not seen Miss Midnight Louise, either?” I ask the other two, while a singsong of imprecations continues above our heads and far, far away from our current concerns.

“Bast no, boss,” one says, with gratifying respect.

“Not since this old freeloader showed up at our new headquarters,” the other adds, indicating Three O’Clock with a quick flick of his shivs.

That is bad mews. Miss Louise should be long back here by now.

“Cut out that palaver,” the old boy orders me and his ex’s legmen. “I am washing my whiskers. The younger generation has no respect for the civilized formalities.”

“No time for cleanup work here,” I tell them, “there is a muchobad scene brewing at the Neon Nightmare, and we need to join Ma Barker and any minions she may have taken there right away.”

“I need time for my lunch to settle,” Three O’Clock complains. “I cannot do a long trek and then be ready for fisticuffs.”

“There is a shortcut,” I explain. “If Miss Midnight Louise had made it back here, she would have put one of you two on guard duty near it. And,” I tell the old guy, “no whining. The entrance to our Chunnel of Timely Crime Fighting is just behind the people-pool area. It is dark and cool and private. From there we can take a secret route into the bowels of the Neon Nightmare.”

I consider this a rousing speech to derring-do.

Three O’Clock hiccups and shakes his head. “My bowels are going to feel the earth move if I have to get going without my afternoon nap. After my seafaring life, I find the gentle waves of the subtly shifting koi pond essential and soothing.”

I shrug and eye the no-name muscle. They seem to have no digestion issues.

“Stay here and hold the fort, then, Three O’Clock. We need to be off and running to the rescue.”

I make a 180 swivel on my four-on-the-floor and take off, to the rewarding skitter of battle-ready shivs digging in behind me. The Cat Pack is on the hunt.

Drinkin’ Bitter Beer

After dinner and leaving the hotel that night, Gandolph led Max to the far edge of the tourist area, until the streets were deserted enough that they heard their individual footsteps.

“Soon,” he cautioned Max, unnecessarily, “they will find us.”

Almost eerily soon after that, a lone passerby bumped Gandolph into Max, who bumped into the corner of a building leading to a dark, narrow passage. Instantly, they were corned beef on rye toast, sandwiched between two thick, meaty wedges of Irish soda bread.

“Americans abroad, eh?” a coarse whisper crooned.

Now three men clothed in a damp wool scent hedged them in, one in the street, two in the alley.

Max had already taken a visual survey. All three were nearer Gandolph’s age than his, so they weren’t teenage hotheads unable to get jobs and turning to a bit of street violence if marching Orangemen weren’t available to attack.

Like most natives of a damp and cloudy climate, their Irish eyes were lighter than their hair color, which Max judged by their jaw stubble. Their heads were covered with knit fisherman’s caps, and they all wore that new and sinister urban fashion/disguise, hoodies, now pushed down into the monk’s-cowl position on their broad shoulders, the shoulders of workingmen or professional thugs.

The acrid odors of strong tobacco and ale were their cologne. Their narrowed eyes and tense mouth sets advertised the names of their signature scents: Suspicion and Up to No Good.

Ordinarily, Max would start flailing enough to distract two of them so Gandolph could belly-punch and shin-kick the third to the ground, by which time the second would come stumbling past him and get a disabling blow from the blackjack in the older man’s pocket. The other thug, of course, would be out cold by then, flat on the cool cobblestones two centuries old and witness to countless evening attacks of the same crude sort.

Except here, Max was handicapped from the outset, and Gandolph saw no point in making a fight of it. They surrendered to the hard, metal prods in their backs and faded a few steps away from the distant lights and tourists and traffic into the instant isolation of an alley that stank like a urinal.

So much for urban gentrification, thought Max.

“We know a little pub,” the same voice purred, with the velvet authority of being well armed.

Max shrugged and Gandolph nodded. They were here to take the temperature of Belfast today. These men weren’t muggers, or they’d be out cold and stripped of their paper, metal, and plastic belongings.

Max felt a frisson of fellowship to realize that he and Gandolph were long accustomed to being of like mind without words or gesture. For the second time since he’d awakened from his coma, his veins throbbed with a returning tingle of life and adventure. The first occasion had been with Revienne.

Mostly, he knew he wasn’t afraid, as a normal tourist would have been, but … pleased.

The “pub” was several blocks’ walk through ever-more-depressing slums. They passed a burned-out, graffiti-slathered office building and a cement-walled shopping arcade as dark as any crypt, before ducking down another alley to a low red-brick building from a couple centuries back.

Uneven cobblestones had Max limping badly by the time they arrived. He relished his obvious problem; it made their custodians careless. A gimp and an old man. Easy prey. For once, Max’s height wasn’t intimidating but made him appear awkward and unbalanced.

Shoved down some steps into a cellar, they found no warm, red-amber glow of wood and musical instruments and flushed crowds holding topaz-toned pint glasses filled with stout and ale and beer.

A lone bartender studiously refused to look up as they entered. The bar had only one customer, a powerful-shouldered man wearing a peacoat over a sweater and the ubiquitous billed tweed cap, huddled in a corner. Above them, hanging tin kettles and bellows dripped from blackened oak beams. Crude oil portraits of long-dead Irish Republican heroes made a sober row of faces along the dark wood walls.

They were shoved against a smoke-blackened brick wall, hemmed in by two of the shadow-jawed thugs while the third went to whisper to the man behind the scantily equipped bar.

Max pulled out two rough wooden chairs for Garry and himself. By the time they sat, the usual pint glasses filled with dark amber liquid topped by a dispirited frill of foam circled their table, dispensed from the barman’s universal round brown plastic tray.

“Not your usual elegant tourist surroundings, eh?” the waiting headman commented more than asked.

Max and Gandolph sipped in tandem and cocked their heads to signal they were listening.

“Came along like lambs,” another man chuckled. “You hardly needed all three of us, Liam,” they chided their leader.

“Yes,” Gandolph said, “we’re quite harmless, although not tourists.”

“I thought this lame beanpole was the great boy-betrayer, Kinsella,” another muttered into his first chugalug of ale.

“Great?” Max inquired with indifference. “I’m a great ale-drinker, ’tis true.”

“And blarney man,” the leader replied. “The fool has introduced me, but Liam is all you’ll know of me.”

“And your taste in ales,” Max said, nodding at the red-gold brew in their glasses.

“Aye, and you’re used to drinkin’ yours out of a bottle or a can, like a modern-day traveler,” the second man said. “Tourists, Liam, that’s what we’ve netted.” And he spat on the floorboards.

Max finally drew the tall golden glass closer to him. “I like to know the name of a man who has ambitions to spit-polish my shoes.”

A glowering silence held as all four Irishmen tensed while they made up their minds to be insulted or not.

Liam led again. “Honest Irish spit and sweat is worth ten times an Englishman’s piss.”

“Then,” Max said, “I’d be grateful for names of my drinking companions.”

“Just last names; they’re all common enough around here,” Liam agreed gruffly, after taking a long, considering dip into his very dark ale. He nodded at his cohorts: “Finn, Mulroney, Flanagan. I’m Liam, first and last, as far as you two are concerned.”

“And I’m Blarney,” Gandolph said, startling everyone, including Max, by breaking his stone-faced-elder silence. “I was darting about Ulster under the dark of the moon before you lot were even out of grammar school. Those surnames could serve well on a music-hall act, but not a one of them was key in the real IRA I knew of old.”

Dark-jacketed shoulders shrugged, lifting their sinister hooded hummocks. Max must have forgotten that the Emerald Isle required outerwear even in the spring. No wonder his leg bones ached. He should have bought long johns in Zurich, not designer togs. He wasn’t about to consider the image of himself in long johns with Revienne. The reality had been bad enough.

“And what are you grinning at, Kinsella?” Finn demanded. “Your last name is not only known but notorious. No laughing matter, even in these namby-pamby ‘peaceful’ days.”

“So the Ulster Easter settlement of ninety-eight is not as settled as some think?” Max asked soberly.

“The IRA fools!” Liam said. “Cowed by the specter of being compared to ‘Islamic terrorists.’ ”

“That nine/eleven slaughter did stir up worldwide revulsion,” Gandolph observed mildly.

Shoulders shrugged again, making Max swallow hard to keep his mouth shut. He too had reacted violently from rage and loss and cost of lives, to hear it.

Gandolph was an older, less-fit man, but he plowed courageously ahead.

“Then, too,” he mused in a maddeningly deliberate way, “after nine/eleven the U.S. Irish community had things closer to home to worry about than sending gun money to the Auld Sod, especially the British-run north of it, the nine counties of Ulster.”

“Shut your mouth or I’ll forget your age,” Flanagan said, half rising. His motion made the pints’ liquid contents sway like yellow hula skirts.

“Don’t spill the beer, man,” Mulroney said softly.

“Better beer than blood,” Gandolph answered, his expression harder than the parish priest’s on confession day. “You’re all youngsters compared to me, and I can tell you that you’ll tire of blood by the end.”

Max was as surprised as the Ulstermen to see Gandolph’s steel. He must not remember enough of the man who claimed to have been his mentor, and regretted it for not the first time.

“And the beer?” Max asked. “Does it have a name too, Flanagan?”

As Flanagan sank back down in his chair, the man clawed the glass into his grasp and pulled it to his chest like a miser hoarding liquid gold. “A Bass brew, once made here in Ulster.”

Max nodded at Liam’s much darker glass. “And that looks like a Moor house’s Black Cat.”

“Heaven forefend! You’ve been too long absent from the emerald shore, Kinsella. That nancy brew is tricked out with chocolate and coffee, like a Brit toff would swill.”

Max heard himself say, “Blame it on Belfast’s annual beer festival, where all the showy brews take home the prizes.”

How did he know that? Nobody regarded him as if he were mad.

Although Liam said, “You’re daft, man. No workingman drinks those devil-adulterated brews. Only U.S. yuppies.”

Again, Max didn’t know why or how, but he knew that yuppies were more than over across the Atlantic. He scrubbed his face with a hand.

“What’s wrong with your legs?” Liam asked.

“Broke ’em,” Max answered.

“Both of them, man? How?”

“Pushed off a mountain,” Gandolph said.

“The mountains here are nearer hills,” Liam noted.

“Lovely rugged Irish hills,” Max agreed. “No, a major peak was my downfall, thanks to someone’s unknown hand. Away on the Continent.”

“An Alp then, it would be,” suggested Mulroney, sounding suitably impressed.

Max nodded modestly.

The four men eyed at each other. “We know you by old reputation,” the spitter known as Finn said, “but you now appear to be as diminished in that respect as we are in ours.”

“What reputation?” Gandolph asked, his eyes darting from man to man.

Max stretched his aching legs under the table and watched the men’s bodies jerk slightly, like a quartet of puppets sharing the same oversensitive string.

“Easy, boys,” he said. “The damp isn’t kind to knitting bones.”

“That’s right,” Liam jeered. “You’re used to a balmy desert climate.”

Max eyed Gandolph. He was the Las Vegas expert as well, given Max’s memory was as bum as his legs on certain subjects, like his own past.

“Is there a man among you,” Gandolph asked, “that did as much as my friend here at seventeen?”

Silence, then Finn burst out, “He was a wonder, all right, a boy doing a man’s work—vengeance for his friend’s life. But he was on the bloody wrong side! He betrayed IRA men to the British taskmasters!”

Max was playing a role now, from Gandolph’s prompting on the plane trip from Zurich.

“He was a friend,” Max said, “that’s true, and we were boys, and we stuck our Irish American noses where they didn’t belong. But Sean Kelly was more than that. He was my cousin.”

“Ah.” Liam leaned back in his rickety chair. “Blood.”

“Blood,” Max repeated, with feeling, and, oddly enough, he felt what he didn’t remember. Loss. Rage. Guilt. And, he could reflect now, it must have been driven by a blinding surge of ungoverned testosterone, stirred by the incredibly damaged siren and Magdalen asylum escapee Kathleen O’Connor.

He was back there, at least emotionally, drowned in bitter regrets darker than Liam’s oxblood-colored ale. His hands were fists on the table, opening and closing without his will.

Gandolph put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “My associate has survived a major accident. So you know who he is and what he did. We know nothing of you. What do you want with us? All that is over and done with.”

“Injustice never fades away,” Liam said. “It festers.”

“We know that,” Gandolph said. “We’ve fought it in our way.”

“Yes.” Liam swallowed half of his pint at one go and wiped the foam from his mouth with one swipe of his jacketed forearm. “And we are weary and forgotten too. At least, Kinsella, someone cared enough to try to kill you. We can’t drum up more than a few callow youths to hurl Molotov cocktails at marching Orangemen.”

“What do you want of us?” Gandolph asked. “We’re long retired.”

“As are we,” Flanagan noted.

“We want our due,” Mulroney growled, not looking them in the eyes.

“Information,” Finn added.

“Odd,” said Max, feeling strangely sane and calm again, “that’s just what we want here.”

Liam leaned so far back in his chair it almost tipped over. Almost. Liam knew how to command attention too.

The barman picked up a tray and poured another round into a fresh sextet of glasses.

Now the serious bargaining would begin. Chances were it involved blood and something much akin to it.

Max wanted to think it might be love of homeland and loyalty to one’s comrades, but he knew what Gandolph had always thought, always known.

Gandolph knew it was money.

Guy Wire

Temple was jerked back down to earth by a … jerk.

“This is a dance floor, bimbo,” a tattooed Asian college-age punk assured her. “Shake something or get off it.”

“I’m gonna ‘shake’ you,” Temple said, turning and eeling sideways in dance moves until she finally reached the crowd’s fringe.

She wanted to sit down at one of those god-awful bar-height freestanding tables and resurvey the scene from top to bottom-feeder. She held the purse tight to her hip all the way, happy to find a deserted table and sling the heavy bag atop it while she did her Alp-climbing routine to get herself up on a seat and her wedgies, um, wedged onto a crossbar.

It seemed that everybody who was going to hook up here tonight had already done so, so she was relatively invisible and “safe.” From her perch she realized that the light works were flashing multicolored tattoos over the dancers and bystanders. The shiny black floor reflected the zodiac-sign patterns.

That made subtle sense. The classic pickup line was “What’s your sign?”

Temple almost wished some jerk would approach and ask her that.

“Ophiuchus,” she’d answer. “Rhymes with mucus.”

Now that was a turnoff!

Okay. The Neon Nightmare scene was making her crabby and snarky. That’s the mood she needed to snoop. She ordered a club soda with a lime wedge from a passing barmaid to secure her place at the table.

Then she watched the sides of the pyramid, with the light lasers glancing off their shiny black surfaces. Looking this hard, she realized the walls weren’t all smooth surfaces but a random pattern of black Plexiglas struts crisscrossing the entire interior to break up and further refract the lights.

Max would have been able to play off those fractured surfaces like a rock-climbing wall, particularly if he’d been tethered.

The barmaid returned with the club soda. At least with these high-rise tables and stools, Temple was actually on a level with the waitress’s punishing spike heels. Vegas glamour was hard on workingwomen’s feet.

“I’m not starting a tab,” Temple said, pulling out one of the twenties she’d stuffed down her purse’s exterior pocket.

“Struck out,” the waitress murmured sympathetically.

“Actually, I’m covering this scene for Whatsup magazine, the Vegas Restaurant Association guide.”

“Oh, yeah? Really? Then you’re like a reviewer?”

“Just like that.”

“We only serve appetizers, but they go like hotcakes.”

Good thing Temple wasn’t planning on quoting the poor girl. “I bet. I’m really reviewing the ambience.”

“ ‘Ambi’-wha? We don’t discriminate.”

“No, no. I mean the atmosphere. That neon lightning-bolt effect is, er, awesome.”

“Oh, right. Awesome.”

“Does it wear your eyes out, working in so much flashing light?”

“Naw, you get used to it. Don’t even think about it.”

“I hear the magic act you had until recently was awesome too.”

“Magic act?”

“Guy on a bungee cord, up in the pyramid?”

“Oh, him. Yeah, he was something out of Cirque du Soleil. A high-wire act, only with rebound. You know, at the big hotels.” She giggled. “He swept down one night and whisked my tray out of my hands just before I reached my table. Maybe he was a magician, because he bounced around and then set it right in front of my customers. Not a drop spilled.”

Temple was impressed. Max must have used the same natural laws of inertia that allow magicians to pull a tablecloth out from under a place setting without upsetting the glass and china.

“What about the bosses here?” she asked sympathetically. “They treat the staff okay?”

“Great. They’re almost invisible. Leave it to our floor manager, Craig. I think they’re—what do they call them?—‘backers.’ They trundle on past the bar and dance floor and sneak up to the offices they have up top that overlook the whole scene. Can’t blame them. It must be an awesome view, like overlooking Times Square in a New York City hotel, all those lights and people milling below.”

Temple glanced up, agreeing mentally.

It was time she found a different perspective on this case, this scene. A perspective the Phantom Mage had, and the Synth.

She gave up her primo seat on the crowded bar floor and headed for the blue neon Restrooms sign off to the side.

She had no intention of resting.

Once there, she took a hard right, putting her back against the pulsing, light-vibrating patent-leather black wall.

It did indeed vibrate.

Cool.

She edged along it, feeling behind her for those unmistakable vibes, hunting the angled crossbars that riddled the surface if you looked hard enough.

It took only a couple minutes to realize she was edging upward, a bit above the bar and dance-floor level. Another two minutes to understand she was ascending a very subtle interior ramp, like the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Or a pyramid.

Give or take a few thousand years, what was the difference?’

The purse at her hip swung with her motions, because both her hands were behind her, searching for some sensitive spot where she could feel a hidden door in the wall and enter the maze the Phantom Mage must have known well, which Max could have mastered.

Could they be one and the same? Maybe. She was unsure, not knowing if the Phantom Mage, a suggestive name, had hit the wall or pulled off a vanishing act in front of a nightclub full of people and a trained ex-cop. It was odd she’d never read about the accident, but Vegas establishments were used to making bad publicity disappear too.

When she glanced down, she realized she had moved upward to become one of those self-elevating mysterious figures often glimpsed on the fringes of the Neon Nightmare. Neon lights flashed across her fuchsia jacket and red hair, making her part of the artificial night sky. Making her into an object, not a person.

She continued edging upward, trying not to look down and get dizzy.

A spiderweb brushed her ankle.

What was she? An animated broom?

Oh. Another brush. Another spiderweb.

Her ankle almost turned as she suddenly stepped onto horizontal ground.

One of those “perches” Rafi had mentioned.

Temple shut her eyes and felt the flashing lights on her eyelids, the cold heat of their constant stabs on her body.

If one was the Phantom Mage … If one were Max … If one were one and the same, she might have stood here, on this narrow horizontal ledge, waiting to skydive into the dark below. She would never have done such a thing in her right mind. It was insanely dangerous.

So she took a step backward. Into the spiderweb. And felt the wall behind her swing inward. Her step backward became a stutter of steps as her weight sucked her inside. The purse at her side swung. Only her hand on the top edge steadied it. Steadied her.

Her back was against a wall again, but she was facing sideways to her previous position. The light and noise had vanished, as if she’d … passed through a giant cat door in the wall.

Now the airy tickle at her ankles felt familiar. Not a draft, but a wafting, supple furred tail.

Louie? There was nothing wafting and supple, or subtle, about him. He’d have used a claw tip to the anklebone to snag her attention.

Whatever. Whoever. She was inside the Neon Nightmare walls, where Rafi Nadir had never dreamed she could go. Had Max done this before her? Did cats see in the dark?

Did they? Because she could use a guide.

Temple edged along the smooth and dark but dimly lit inner corridor, watching the faint reflection of herself opposite. A vague glow of light lit this pathway. She wasn’t surprised when the wall behind her again gave way with a tiny click at the same time as a plumy fan wave brushed her knee.

With no fuss and some fear, she turned to face a softly lit room, like the intimate bar in an exclusive—and weren’t they all, with today’s prices?—Manhattan private club.

This was Vegas, though, and Temple knew she was standing there in the Synth’s inner sanctum, at the heart of the mysteries of unsolved murders and Ophiuchus—and Max’s disappearance.

Not that anybody other than a pussycat noticed.

Guns and Gravy

“We know,” Liam said when all the glasses were a fifth empty, “that you know about the Synth.”

Max couldn’t help smiling. Until last night, he hadn’t remembered.

“Stop yer eternal smirkin’,” Finn ordered in this thick brogue. “You’ve worked as a magician all over the Western world, accident or no accident. Whoever pushed you off that Alp wasn’t the only one willin’ to kill you. They evidently wanted to shut you up.”

“We want the reverse,” Liam said, interrupting his cohort. “Tell us what information you want first, and we’ll decide then whether we have the patience to tease what we want out of you two or should just beat your brains out for it.”

“Our bloody brain tissue,” Gandolph said, “would not be noted for coherence, but I see no reason we can’t trade fairly here. What you want to know means little to us, and I suspect the doings of Kathleen O’Connor all these years later are of scant interest to you, now that she’s dead and buried.”

“You know that for sure, old man?”

“Max bore her no good will and has vivid memories of witnessing her crash on a motorcyle. He checked himself that she was dead. The authorities who arrived after his anonymous call concurred, and they buried her.”

Max was glad Gandolph could speak for him. He didn’t know whether it was strategy or pride on his part that he didn’t want these political thugs to know his mind had been more damaged than his legs recently.

“Word is,” Liam told Max, with a relishing smirk of his own, “that you bore the lass plenty of love when you first met her all those years ago. Off wi’ her in the woodlands of Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park, communin’ with nature, weren’t you, when O’Toole’s Pub was becoming beer-soaked toothpicks with a blood chaser?”

Max could wince convincingly at Liam’s deliberately harsh words. He didn’t remember Kathleen or details of their physical encounter, thank God, but he knew he’d been the virgin in that transaction, and probably unaware of that at the time. The idea of being intimate with such a damaged young woman struck him with double guilt now, though he suspected she’d lured him into it. He knew, from that “Great Unknown Encyclopedia of General Knowledge” still allowing him access, that abused children can become manipulative and even hypersexual, convinced that the entire world is a lie and everyone in it a hypocrite and out to prove that to themselves and everyone else.

“She was a beauty, but a notorious slut,” Flanagan recalled, with nostalgia. “She’d sleep with anyone, even an American lad who didn’t know which side of his pants zipped.”

Max’s left leg under the table was long enough and his hip and torso just strong enough to hook an ankle around the man’s chair leg and jerk it out from under him. The pain was worth the gesture.

Flanagan’s rosacea-red face sank under the table like a surprised sunset, as the other three men made fists on the hops-stained wood.

“Have your fun at my younger days’ expense, but not at Kathleen’s,” Max said, his own fists white-knuckled. “We’ve just learned she was a Magdalen girl before she escaped.”

“No lie, man?” Liam exclaimed. “Truth to tell, no wonder she was of a mind to use herself hard. She was the only woman then strong enough to push her way into our patriot game and play a real role.”

Flanagan had pulled himself and his chair back to the table. “Peace, man. ’Tis a fact that except for you, she only slept with those who’d give us tip-offs or money. A bit jealous we were, you but a boy from America, and she gave it to you free.”

“Free it was not,” Max said. “My cousin died in that O’Toole’s Pub blast that occurred while she was spending her pinchpenny favors with me.”

“Ah, true.” Liam nodded into his glass. “It is blood indeed that drives you. And guilt. That I understand, and respect. Wealthy and poor Irish Americans may have paid millions before the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement to buy us guns and gravy and information, but even the fiercest of them little remembered what it was to live in a land, your own land for centuries, where you and yours were despised and spat upon and your religion persecuted and your children denied education and civil treatment and every opportunity every day.”

“My forebears immigrated to America,” Max conceded, aware that his own immediate family was a lost memory to him. Perhaps his Irish heritage was why he’d fallen for a natural redhead like Temple Barr.

“That’s just it!” Mulroney said. “Your forebears emigrated. Driven out of their own land by famine or force of some other kind, uneducated, unregarded, considered less than the sheep that graze the scant Irish leas.”

“Which is amazing,” Gandolph noted, “given how the Irish distinguish themselves abroad. Soldiers of fortune, law enforcement, politics, the literary and musical arts. Amazing how any downtrodden people or race always do distinguish themselves when out from under the tyrannical, biased boot heel. ‘The world is mean and man uncouth.’ I quote the late, great playwright, Berthold Brecht.”

“A man of the people,” Finn agreed, nodding.

“So tell us more of Kathleen O’Connor,” Gandolph said. “We wondered if her dark personal history and agenda sometimes played against even the IRA.”

“In what way?” Flanagan demanded.

“Max came to wonder, years later, if Kathleen didn’t toy sadistically with him. Now, we think, perhaps with all her lovers. The price of her body was his cousin’s scattered corpse. Max concluded she must have known about that IRA pub bombing ahead of time and let Sean die.”

“To torment the surviving lad?” Liam asked. “That would be … sick. If so, she wound up betraying our own daring freedom fighters, for we well know what your friend here did to locate the bombers and lead the British soldiers to them. We put a price on his head for more than a decade because of it. Don’t think a one of us has forgotten that, as young and foolish an American as he was then and as busted up as he is now.”

“I don’t ask any quarter,” Max said, “now, nor did I then. Patriots always overlook the death of innocents in their own just passion against injustice, though they commit the same sins. Sean and I, we came here to Ulster because we felt that same passion against injustice to our kind. You could have recruited us, instead of making an enemy of me.”

“And a relentless enemy you became,” Liam admitted. “The Agreement seems to have put a period to the ‘Troubles’ for good and all, or I wouldn’t be talking to you two, but standing over your dead bodies. Yet you boys are turnin’ my head around. You’re saying Kathleen, our secret weapon, as dedicated as a silver bullet, used our secret plans to punish you somehow? Why, man?”

“She hated all men,” Gandolph said. “And probably the clergy. Did you ever notice a taste for seducing priests?”

“She’d seduce a stump for the cause,” Mulroney said, rolling his eyes, “except us boyos. Said she didn’t want to stir dissension among us. We got not a bit of it, just the money from her ‘adventures.’ When the doings in Ulster simmered down, and the U.S. money slowed down even for the alternative IRA after nine/eleven, she was off to any Catholic country she could find to ‘recruit’ wealthy Irish émigrés her own way, on her back. She screwed her way across the U.S., of course, and Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, even the Caribbean and Continental Europe.”

Liam nodded. “She traveled constantly the last years after the settlement in ninety-eight. Always a faithful source of supply, no matter the mood of the moment.”

“And then she disappeared,” Max suggested.

“Spectacularly,” Liam said. “She was talkin’ about sending us a bloody fortune and even a shipment of smuggled assault weapons from Mexico. Had us all salivating. Then … the Peace Agreement happened, to the surprise of most of the world, including us.”

“The most surprising thing,” Max said, “is that the Agreement has worked.”

“Nine/eleven did us in,” Mulroney said, shaking his head. “Our cause was just, and our people had paid with their lives and souls and hearts over centuries of oppression, but that mass destruction of what would be a fair-size town here, of seeing the same New York City that had finally allowed our immigrants to thrive have its tallest buildings attacked from the top, the very sky—”

“It shook our souls,” Flanagan allowed.

“The IRA listened to the widows,” Finn said, “our own and others from all over the world.”

Max nodded.

“That doesn’t mean,” came Liam’s slow, soft voice, “that we’re willin’ to surrender what’s ours. Guns, yes. Money … no. We have our widows-and-orphans fund, with plenty in need, and our own loyal boyos maimed or their minds frayed like denim at the knees.”

“You want Kathleen’s score,” Max said.

Liam’s pale eyes glinted. “Correct. You don’t be needin’ to put any polish on it, as you see. That money was donated by our American kin. We need it for putting our people right here in Ulster.”

“And you think we’d know its whereabouts?” Gandolph asked.

“I think if you don’t, you’d know how to find it.”

“The woman is dead!” Gandolph said. “My friend was almost killed.”

“And why would that be?”

“Some avenging Irish soul from the past, perhaps?” Gandolph was now taking over negotiations.

Max realized they had played these roles before—one leading, one subsiding, always in tune, always partners. He watched the older man as Liam would see him: shrewd, a bargainer, a man with the confidence of unspoken but serious connections and faith in his partner.

Damn! Max thought. I am a lucky man.

And he wondered if he’d been as lucky in love recently, and his traitorous memory also had betrayed him there.

“You both know Las Vegas,” Liam was saying. “We’d go there ourselves, but we’re village boys, as lost there as those be-damned nine/eleven terrorists who wanted a last girly show for all their hatred of the West.”

“You’re expecting my friend,” Gandolph said, “to go back to where he was almost killed?”

Liam eyed Max. “He was ‘almost killed’ a lot of places and had the nerve to come back here, didn’t he?”

“We know and honor loyalty,” Flanagan put in. “It’s kept us alive long enough to see peace. We just want what’s ours.”

“What do you want?” Liam asked.

“The whole truth about Kathleen O’Connor,” Max said. “That woman dogged my life from boyhood on and created plenty of collateral damage.”

“You lived to see her dead, man,” Liam urged. “Let her go.”

“People died because of her. I killed indirectly because of her. Truth is still truth,” Max said, “and we haven’t found all of it.”

“Granted,” Liam said. “We can help you find what you want, if you find, and deliver, what we want.”

“How are we to know the money is for the community good, as you claim?” Max asked.

“We are all brothers of Erin,” said Liam.

“Money is the root of all evil,” Max answered. “Neither my friend nor I need Kathleen’s … dark dowry. If we find it, we could donate it to the organization of your choosing.”

“And ask if we trust all the bureaucrats who run cities and countries any more than we trust you two.”

“We’ll be in Belfast a while longer,” Gandolph said. “I’m sure we can negotiate further.”

“And you have other contacts here willin’ to lay out Kathleen’s trail of broken hearts and blood money?” quiet Flanagan said, slamming a fist to the tabletop.

“Perhaps,” Gandolph said. “You of all men know that negotiations are always open and situations change and men’s motives and hearts with that.” He stirred to get up, being older and more likely to telegraph his intentions.

Liam and his friends leaned tight across the table as the headman spoke. “You’re not leavin’ until you commit to a deal. We’re alone here and outnumber you, a cripple and an old man who’s not been out in the field for too many years.”

Max stood, pushing the wooden table over on them as Gandolph drew two collapsible metal canes from his trench-coat pockets and snapped them to full length into stiffening steel whips.

By then Max had smashed two pint glasses on the table’s downed edge and was holding them like jagged glass fists.

The pair backed to the door, an eye on the barkeep, wary behind his sleeve-polished wooden barrier. The reek of spilled beer steamed up from the damp wood like purified piss.

Max and Gandolph pushed open the heavy pub door with their backs and inhaled the night chill and mist on matching deep breaths.

“They let us go because they can find us anytime they want,” Gandolph said, after a deep gulp of air.

“And we them.” Max darted his eyes up to the lit-up pub name above. O’Flaherty’s.

“It’s good to have contacts on both sides of the law,” Gandolph said. “Peace doesn’t mean total harmony.”

“We don’t need Kathleen’s blood money,” Max agreed, “but we need to find out more about where it came from and where it is now. We know she was haunting our backyard recently. Damned if this little set-to hasn’t exercised my memory as well as my legs. Don’t tell me I’m going to have to go back to Vegas to track down the last bloody acts of Kitty the Cutter and look up that little redheaded spitfire you like so much.”

“Oh, Max,” Gandolph said, mopping his brow with a fine white linen handkerchief he pulled from a breast pocket. “You’ll be the death of me yet.”

“Meanwhile, let’s get the hell back to our hotel,” Max proposed.

“And pick up a Big Mac on the way.’ ”

“I hope you’re referring to a firearm.”

“Sounds like we’d have better luck at that back in Vegas, after all.”

Getting Their Irish Up

Blackie and Blackjack (people are so unimaginative in coining street monikers for strays, but that is how I was named, back in my Palo Alto days) are running alongside me now that we are in the tunnel, aka Chunnel.

“This is a terrific shortcut, Mr. Midnight,” Blackie tells me. (I have instructed them in proper protocol and respect.)

“I love all these wall-to-wall billboards,” Blackjack adds. “I love to watch people-fights.”

“The urge is mutual among species, unfortunately,” I say. “But these images are from motion pictures. They form what is called a diorama, and when those tracks are filled with automated vintage cars, the place will be Slaughter City for ignorant cross-traffic. Keep your eyes peeled for rats and cut the chatter. We need to save our wind for a long subterranean journey with a pyramid climb at the end of it.”

“Wow, Mr. Midnight,” Blackie says. “You sure know your way around exotic Las Vegas nightlife.”

What can you do with a pair of wet-behind-the-ears two-year-olds? Granted, the ear wetness is from grooming, which is commendable, but I could use some second wind here.

“Say, what is that big silver metal door?” Blackjack asks, as I skid to a stop.

“Our path to enlightenment, boys, and reunion with our clan. It is called a ‘safe,’ but it was not very for the murder victim found inside recently. See that rat hole to the side of it? Dive in there.”

“Huh? We are not hungry.”

“Look, Blackie, I do not care about the state of your stomach. You should not have been duping the Crystal Phoenix chef and gorging yourselves in Midnight Louise’s place. Now I want you two to shimmy-shimmy inside there until you get behind the safe. The rat-size tunnel widens there to boxer size.”

“Ooh, people-fighting,” Blackjack says, sparring with his front mitts.

“I meant dog-breed boxer-size. Just shut up and move.”

Both are still street-skinny, which I cannot say for myself. I hope they will push the passage a wee bit wider for me when I bring up their rears. And do not make any smart remarks bringing up my rear. I am not in the mood.

Anyway, I finally writhe my way through, leaving too many excellent side hairs along the trail. Blackjack and Blackie are waiting in the dim light of the tunnel beyond, their eyes gleaming the same eerie green I am told mine do when viewed at the right angle in the dark. I instruct them further.

“We need to be quiet once we reach the big warehouse under the Neon Nightmare. You will hear much thumping and caterwauling and chaos from the nightclub. Ignore it. We will walk secret ways known only to Bast and me.”

The luminescent greens of their eyes grow rounder. That is what I need, cowed underlings. Pity there are no humans I can call on to do the job, but this requires the small and wiry underground fighter.

Really, this mission is getting to be like herding people. Blackie and Blackjack are ever ready to go off task, speculating about the reason for the tunnel, and then oohing and aahing like tourists when we hit the huge storeroom I anticipated would underlie the Neon Nightmare.

I am not about to waste time explaining a giant neon-sign graveyard to the uninitiated.

“Start climbing, and make it snappy,” I order. “This is not a kit playground. This abandoned jungle gym for giants could be dangerous.”

Above us, the ceiling that is the Neon Nightmare floor vibrates with the thump of deep bass speakers. Occasional flashes of the nightclub fireworks penetrate the depths.

My two intrepid assistants run under a giant 3-D high heel to hide.

“Thunder and lightning, Mr. Midnight,” Blackjack whines. “Ma Barker would never let us out in it.”

“Ma Barker is not here, and I am. Would I hide behind a human woman’s footwear, no matter how large, like even Miss Lieutenant Molina size? I would not! Now get out and get moving. I need every set of shivs and fangs available.”

“Ma Barker runs our clowder, Mr. Midnight,” Blackie says. “The rules are rules, and we obey, or we get a home fixing, and I do not mean a nice hot meal.”

“Great. I have robo-mice for muscle. I guess I will have to do some home fixing myself.”

“Nooo, Mr. Midnight!”

I rush the arch where they are cowering and suddenly notice that the two sets of green-eye reflections I am rushing are now … three. And the third set has a half-moon on one side.

“Ma Barker is here,” a raspy voice announces. “B and B, get yourselves back in the open.”

“Where are the rest of the troops?” I ask. “My partner is missing.”

“Which one?” Ma asks.

“Miss Louise. I have not seen her since we did some reconnaissance here a couple days ago.”

“Not good. Where is Three O’Clock?”

“Uh …” I cannot betray my threatened gender. “He is guarding the tunnel’s other exit at the Crystal Phoenix.”

I fix Blackie and Blackjack with a fierce glare and a significant mitt gesture. They gulp and keep their mouths shut.

“What about your human partner?”

“She was headed here, bearing arms.”

“They all have arms. We all have legs. What of it?”

“No, Ma. Firearms. Well, just one.”

“Your red-cream is carrying … carrying something besides that giant tote bag of hers? Not good.”

“Have you found the secret hallways to the big club room at the top of the pyramid?” I ask.

“We were guarding the exit of this tunnel on the main floor and nearly putting our hearing out,” she answers.

“Up above is where I last saw Miss Midnight Louise. That is where the suspect club called the Synth meets.”

“Then that is where we will go,” Ma says. “Onward Blackie and Blackjack, to join Blackbeard and Blacktop, then it is up, up, and away to the roof on this crazy pointy-topped joint.”

Ma Barker as Santa Claus? Please. But she does know how to crack the whip.

So we are soon to be six strong and storming Synth headquarters. I scamper along, newly invigorated. Knowing the head-strong ways of Miss Midnight Louise, I am sure that she is lurking somewhere ahead.

Armed and Dead

Temple felt she had walked onstage in the middle of a play.

Probably the climax of a murder mystery.

She had entered the room between two huge bookcases, putting her in a shadowed niche, and the lights were dramatically dim.

So she kept as still as if in a childhood game of “statue” and took in the scene.

Five people in profile were in the midst of an intense scene, three arrayed on or near the room’s furnishings, two in front of a wood-paneled wall that had obviously also concealed a door.

Of the two seated women, one obviously was the femme fatale, the usual slinky brunette. Why were blondes and brunettes always slinky and redheads just … cute? The other woman was a chubby Electra Lark caftan-wearing type: electric and eclectic and eccentric in dress. Where Electra spray-dyed her halo of white hair rainbow colors, this lady wore a large paisley turban on her perm-frizzed gray hair.

A Max-tall man about twenty-five years older than he, wearing a chocolate brown suit and rust silk T-shirt, stood by a gas-log-equipped fireplace, the leaping flames making his face a craggy mask.

And then there were the two Darth Vader types in floor-length black cloaks and Cloaked Conjuror full-head masks, holding sleek handguns on the three apparent club residents. Double Darths. Double firepower. How … not nice.

Temple’s right hand still clutched the top of her purse. In only a few quick motions she could open it and draw the gun. So few seconds and yet far too many; she saw that now. Any movement on her part threatened to uncork the physical violence that was still frozen into verbal exchanges.

Unless … she started her moves now and nobody noticed, which seemed most unlikely too. Instead of being armed and dangerous, she could end up being found armed and dead.

Both parties were staring exclusively at each other, the way lovers do. Or haters.

“We know nothing about the money stash,” the older woman in the ridiculous turban said wearily. “Cosimo handled all that. He was the main contact with … you people abroad.”

“If they are the real contacts,” the tall man said. “Can your gazing crystal tell us that, Czarina?”

The other woman present ignored him to taunt the intruders in a calm contralto. “Did you start by murdering the Phantom Mage?” she asked the masked pair. “Then Cosimo? Now us? That’s the way to get your damn stockpile of money, all right.”

“The money is not ours,” one bizarre, androgynous voice answered. “It was held in trust for our just cause.”

“ ‘Just cause,’ ” the standing man echoed. “That’s a laugh. You needed our magical bag of tricks for the most astounding multicasino heist in Las Vegas history, and were prepared to pay us ‘royally’ for preparing and carrying it off on your command.”

One of the gun barrels lifted.

“Hal, Carmen,” Czarina cautioned in a low, trembling tone, “we’re in no position to argue.”

“We’re in every position to argue—for our lives,” said the fiery brunette named, of all things, Carmen. No wonder C. R. Molina hated her given name. “We know nothing of where the funds were kept, or in what form. Cosimo Sparks was our leader, our emissary to you people. And you killed him.”

“We did not,” the voice of the other figure in Darth drag answered. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of killing you. Perhaps one of you wanted all the funds—they’d been just lying there for so many years—and killed Sparks in an attempt to get them.”

“And then,” the other Darth’s twin voice suggested, “you moved everything. The cash, the bearer bonds, the guns, and explosives.”

“There were explosives?” the brunette asked, astounded.

“Of course, Carmen,” Hal answered her. “The actual robbers would have needed them for the heist, and we would have needed them as a distraction to turn the Strip into a bigger sound and light show than the Fremont Street Downtown Experience while the robberies were going down.”

“ ‘Lying there for so many years’?” Czarina asked. “That’s absurd. The Synth has been active for only the last three, when Cosimo recruited us and a—”

“There are more members than you?” one cloaked figure demanded.

“None that knew of the scheme or the stockpile of money and weapons,” Hal answered. “Only some disgruntled minor prestidigitators we convinced to be part of our ‘mystical, magical’ alliance, so we’d have ‘extras’ to deploy for our Grand Strip Illusion, which would be the talk of the nation and the world. We are the Synth, the synthesis that old alchemists dreamed of, the creators of a method to turn base material into gold. Only we were after taking a golden parachute out of the demeaned profession that magic has become in these days of media manipulation.”

Temple noticed that the paired gun barrels had lowered slightly. The masked invaders were surprised by what they were hearing. Could the Synth talk itself out of such a double-barreled threat?

“What of this Phantom Mage you mention?” one Darth asked.

Carmen stood, also sensing their confusion. “Only our most prized and recent recruit. He was a marvel. He could have produced the Strip-long illusion you demanded. He maintained his anonymity to the last, but I know he was Max Kinsella, playing a double game as himself and this lowly nightclub magician named the Phantom Mage.”

Temple felt a gentle tap on her calf and glanced down without moving her head.

Her eyes finally had adapted to the room’s dimness. She saw a long black furry tail.

Louie!

No. This was a longer-haired, plumed tail. Midnight Louise had guided her here.

Thanks a lot, sister, Temple thought. Maybe you can distract them while I claw out my gun.

“Who the bloody hell is Max Kinsella, and why would anyone want to kill him?” one transgendered voice demanded.

The three Synth members seemed struck dumb, as Temple was. Come on; Max had starred in a major Strip hotel show, billboards and all! True, he’d performed sans surname, but the Mystifying Max had been huge until he had first disappeared two years earlier. Where had these Vader creeps been, on the dark side of the moon?

“Did one of you, perhaps?” the other Vader twin asked.

The entire scene was getting so absurd and Alice-in-Wonderlandish that Temple was forgetting to be afraid and was getting angry instead. Which was dangerous, but also liberating.

She waited for the Synth’s answer—her presence “unbeknownst,” as some put it, to the others, making her the third armed but so far invisible person on the premises.

“We don’t know,” Hal said. “As we told you, Cosimo was our maestro, our go-between. He’s the one who would tell us what to do, when we were called upon. Meanwhile, I guess we felt useful, part of a pending, monstrously amazing illusion, our parting shot to the world that had once applauded us. We were all in the same sorry boat—passé and poor. Cosimo waved his magic words, and we believed we’d get the best revenge—living well. We trusted him.”

“And he betrayed us!” the pair of Darths said as one.

“I doubt it,” Czarina said.

“You saw it in your crystal ball?” a Vader jeered.

“No. I just knew Cosimo. We trusted him because he was a straight shooter.” She regarded the leveled weapons. “Oh.”

“Perhaps Cosimo was robbed,” Hal said. “If you knew of this … hidden treasure, wouldn’t others of your … type also possibly know of it?”

Silence prevailed. Temple was watching a true stalemate. The intruders wanted information, not blood. The Synth as represented here certainly was nothing sinister, although that Ophiuchus and alchemy mumbo jumbo would appeal to anyone with an occult mind, like those drawn to magic. Someone had been playing both ends against the middle, and it was getting obvious to everyone in the room that they all might be the “ends.”

Standing there, Temple let the key phrases stamped on her mental tape recorder replay: money and guns and explosives, oh my … stockpiled for years, oh my … all-time major Vegas heist, oh my … a team of magicians providing a distraction … just cause … bloody hell.

She remembered that some 2001 Al-Qaeda surveillance tapes of Vegas casinos, including New York, New York, with its faux-Manhattan exterior skyline, had turned up from foreign sources years later, and that Mohamed Atta and his 9/11 suicide crew had visited Vegas before the world-devastating plan was put into motion on the other coast… .

Terrorists were drawn to Vegas as a target … of destruction or bankrolling. Civic powers were always underplaying, perhaps even concealing, that fact to keep the tourists coming.

And … years ago, before 9/11 in 2001, before the previous bombing at the Twin Towers in Manhattan, another terrorist group had issued a “dead or alive” Western-version death fatwa on a teenage Max Kinsella for his youthful antiterrorist activities. The Irish Republican Army, aka the IRA. Temple knew Max’s thriller-novel past, but had always considered it a cul-de-sac of personal ancient history. Not a current concern.

The connections jumped synapses in her brain, jumbling around, not adding up to a scenario she could link into anything sensible.

The Synth members were having trouble too.

“Look,” said Hal, striding forward, “you’ve—”

Carry a gun in your purse, and you’re depending on crooks to give you time to react.

Hold two guns in your hand and—

The chilling, preliminary double clicks seemed simultaneous with a booming, double-rapping sound. The burnt whiff of firearms discharge in the small room was overwhelming. Temple’s hands clapped over her ears before her conscious mind could kick her in the damn-fool shins.

The motion brought every eye to her … and then came the sickening sound of clicks from all sides, triggers being pulled to release a hail of … not bullets, but—

—hidden doors all around the room springing open at once! A swarm of black screaming figures leaped through them like a circus act of black panthers—a riot of cats hurtling onto Darth Vader cloaks and climbing them, heavy fabric rending with audible groans from the weight of three swarming feline bodies to a cloak. The wearers bent at the knees, screaming as leaping cats clung with all fours to their forearms, while the third attached to each climbed their heads from behind to start clawing the sinister face masks, all the while screaming like, well, tomcats fighting, a sound echoed in double strength by their startled victims.

By then, both visitors’ guns had hit the carpeted floor with a thunk, thunk.

Apparently the Darth Vaders were all scary masks and no bloodlust. They’d fired warning shots into the floor. Now they were cursing and backing away in tattered cloaks through two of the open doors, pursued by … cannibal cats.

Temple had no intention of following the fading Vader invaders, even if they were disarmed. The Neon Nightmare offered too many escape routes. Carmen was eyeing the fallen semiautomatics like a hungry tiger, but the other two were staring at Temple. Temple heard a soft click behind her and felt an opening door bump her rear. She knew it was time for a dramatically astounding exit.

“Sorry,” she told the literally shell-shocked Synth members. “I was looking for the restroom. This place is a maze. Anyone ever tell you that? And you have a very bad infestation of really big rats. I won’t be coming back.”

By then the attack cats had also ebbed into the “maze.” Temple backed through the door Midnight Louise had opened, leaving the Synth still immobile and herself in the slightly lambent dark. Which was lit by an honor guard of vivid green irises pointing the way to a presumably vermin-free path downward and out to the main nightclub floor.

She took it and would ask questions later.

At least she knew for sure that Max’s magic fingerprints had been all over this place. If he had also been the Phantom Mage, the odds he had died were fifty-fifty. What Rafi had described had sounded too traumatic for any sane person to set up for himself. On the other hand, a master illusionist like Max would want any feigned final exit to look impossible to survive.

Murder in 3-D

When Temple awoke the next morning, she felt as if she’d been in that old Memorex tape commercial. “Was it real? Or was it Memorex?”

Her memory felt hung over. The Synth showdown she’d witnessed at Neon Nightmare unwound in her mind like a dream, even though a nightmare scenario involving disgruntled but corny stage magicians, the disbanded IRA, and Max Kinsella was starting to add up to something big.

Her nightclubbing clothes were strewn around the room—not like her—and she was curled into a ball because Midnight Louie’s hot, hairy body was plastered against her legs. Surely her eyes had been playing tricks on her in that creepy, dark lightning-struck nightclub with its network of secret passages.

She couldn’t have really seen Midnight Louie cloned to the ninth power and in frantic attack mode, or any Darth Vader clones either.

Temple decided to reach out to the real world. First she checked her iPhone for messages.

Matt had called and left a long, sweet, sexy missing-you message that had her kicking Louie out of bed to run to her computer to download it for future replay on rainy days and the next time Matt was out of town.

Then … darn! Nicky Fontana’s message wanted her to attend a fancy-dress gala command performance at Gangsters at 4:00 P.M. Temple checked the bedside clock and groaned. Eleven A.M. already!

She quick-dialed Nicky to question the wisdom of plowing ahead with the Chunnel of Crime and got her marching orders instead. Yes, the police were totally okay with them “test-driving” the vintage cars rail-run. The vault and environs had been released as a crime scene and the Olympic games could be held there, as far as Detective Ferraro was concerned.

No, there was no progress on the Sparks killing, but the police seemed to find everything involving the Glory Hole Gang, “Concrete Boots Benson,” the Chunnel of Crime, and cats too outré to deal with. Just don her glad rags and get over to Gangsters for the dry run.

Temple, exhausted and confused after her intense night before at the Neon Nightmare, knew a PR person must be on call around the clock, especially in Las Vegas. Holding a “dry run” near a bar and restaurant named Speakeasy’s was a contradiction in terms that tickled her funny bone, and she much needed something distracting at the moment. Besides, Nicky was her boss. He was so jazzed about introducing the installed 3-D Chunnel run. Previewing an ambitious new Las Vegas attraction was an invitation Temple couldn’t refuse, even if several pesky mysteries simmered behind the scenes.

She decided to consider touring the Chunnel a welcome break in her investigation, especially now that she’d penetrated the Neon Nightmare–Synth connection. She replayed Matt’s message, showered, microwaved an individual pizza and gulped it down, raided her closets for a slinky, black-crepe thirties tea gown and some kicky heels, replayed Matt’s tape, and by three thirty was riding the cocktail carousel down to Gangsters’ lower and most lurid depths.

The Chunnel of Crime was fully gussied up for company now. It resembled a subway tunnel without any stops except beginning and end. Black-and-white gangster movie stills wallpapered the tunnel sides. These bigger-than-life scenes of movie mayhem would appear almost animated as the limos glided past on tracks. The blowups also served as background “sets” for the 3-D filmed scenes of vintage movies Santiago had projected onto both sides of the tunnel.

For now, only one side was activated, so the trial-run spectators could stand against the clear opposite wall to watch the rail-adapted vintage cars glide by like the showboats of style they were.

Some were elegant conveyers of moneyed mobster kingpins; others looked like they’d been grabbed on the run outside a just-robbed bank. Almost all of them were shiny basic black with slit-windowed and cavelike passenger compartments. Until now, Temple had never realized that the automobile designs of early decades emulated the closed, private-to-the-point-of-paranoia urban carriages of the nineteenth century. People today were used to full exposure, more than ever, with every cell-phone camera a potential online media nexus.

The cars’ exuberantly accessorized exteriors were a different matter.

Even the lowlier cars sported bubble fenders and running boards. They had Bugsy-eyed headlights sitting up high and lonesome above twin chrome horns and fog lamps, alongside dazzlingly large vertical chrome grills, almost like horizontal harps. Some big-city mobstermobiles screamed “sleek and expensive.” Others hoarsely declared “Clyde Barrow’s hijacked budget back-road Fords.” Some were pricey Packards and Buicks, according to Nicky, who introduced the lineup like a proud father. One was a gorgeous dark purple Hudson Terraplane.

“Did they have stretch limos in the gangster days?” Temple dared to ask.

“Since before the real Depression, little girl,” Macho Mario replied. “I’ve ridden in a beauty like that Hudson, only it was painted a rich cream color. That car was class. Black is for funerals.”

“Cream is too visible for a getaway car,” Nicky pointed out.

“Since nineteen twenty-eight,” Eduardo Fontana said, bending down to answer Temple’s question. “That’s when the stretch limos first came in. There are plenty of the oldies still out there. We picked up some for this light-rail gig. Our own street chauffeuring business relies on creating new lavishly customized stretches with a Vegas theme.”

Temple nodded, having seen the mind-blowing old and new selection in the car service’s parking lot.

“These smooth rides-on-rails are perfecto,” Santiago proclaimed, his white tropical suit blossoming into the Fontana’s dark pinstriped midst so he looked uncannily like a ghost of the brothers’ usual selves. “In South America, older American cars are treasured.”

Temple swallowed her natural comment. She could picture Santiago being driven around Vegas in a white stretch 1961 Cadillac limo with chrome fins from here to eternity to match his ego.

Meanwhile, Macho Mario was playing the tribe elder and escorting the renovation’s main forces into various cars.

“Here.” He gestured the five booted and bejeaned former miners, who looked the most at home in a dark tunnel, into a six-seated thirties Ford. “You Desert Rat Pack boys can ride in the Longhorn-mobile.” He gestured to the pair of chromed steer horns riding the car’s narrow hood.

Nicky joined the diminishing knot of guys surrounding Temple. She was surprised the Fontana brothers and Glory Hole gang had gathered around her and Santiago, when not thirty feet away, Van von Rhine stood with her statuesque blonde classmate from Swiss finishing school, Revienne. Two sleek blondes should attract more men, Temple thought, especially the charm-spreading Santiago.

Hey, Temple thought again, Van had snagged the first Fontana brother to ever wed. Opposites do attract, and Revienne seemed born to snag another bachelor Fontana brother. Then Temple would have a fourth bridesmaid for her so-far-fictional wedding party. Better to dwell in the future than the confusing past.

She cocked her head and cast an inquiring glance from Eduardo to Revienne to Eduardo. “I’m surprised you and your bros aren’t making a beeline to that foreign honey.”

His head shook almost imperceptibly. “She’s taken.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s my job. I work in a ‘people’ business.”

“She says she’s single.”

Eduardo discreetly elbowed his nearest brother, temporarily known as Ralphie the Wrench, in the, ah, elbow. When Ralph looked his way, Eduardo shifted his eyes sideways to Revienne.

“Nice icing, but no go, bro,” Ralph murmured, smartly shooting his suit sleeves to reveal the onyx links on his baby’s-blush-pink shirt cuffs.

Fontana Brothers were so cool.

If guys unafraid to wear pink were wary of Revienne, it explained why Temple found her troubling. It seemed the woman was watching them all, Temple especially. Temple must be imagining that, because she was not the type people took seriously enough to watch. Which was their mistake. So maybe Revienne was not just foxy looking, but foxy sharp.

Temple glanced back as the last Glory Hole Gang scuffed boot heel disappeared into the vintage Ford. They’d never had the money their old associates, Boots and Jersey Joe, had cheated them of, but then they were here, still kicking and cooking; Boots was just a bizarre museum piece, and Jersey Joe, the ghost of a sad, reclusive bankrupt.

Temple’s heart warmed to see the Glory Hole Gang together again, jazzed on a new enterprise at their ages, a recognized historic part of the Vegas scene, worthy of a prime seat at the pre-pre-pre-opening run of this groundbreaking new attraction.

Nothing really got lost. Even Boots had experienced his new day in the sun, if a bit too literally. And, thanks to his supposedly hidden loot, Jersey Joe Jackson had remained a force around the Crystal Phoenix long past his death.

Heck, with all the dead actors resurrected for these still and moving media effects, this could be considered a zombie jamboree. The party certainly was of mixed company.

Lined up along the dark place where dark floor met dark faux-stone tunnel wall was Midnight Louie … and Midnight Louie and … Midnight Louie and … Midnight Louise with the waggly, fluffy tail.

Maybe Temple’s suddenly misty vision was turning Louie into multiple images. She wasn’t surprised to see him. He often decided to go everywhere that Temple went, and his coat was black as coal. His last command performance with the Cat Pack had been stellar.

She was sure Macho Mario wouldn’t have a free car to usher Louie and Louise and pals into. Three O’Clock Louie she recognized on second thought. He had finally moved his center of operations from Lake Mead to the Glory Hole Gang’s Gangsters suite and the Speakeasy bar and restaurant.

She recognized from the Neon Nightmare the cat among them with the half-masted eyelid. Poor thing. She’d take it home to the Circle Ritz if she could catch it … which didn’t look likely from the battle-scarred condition of that eyelid.

“Okay,” Macho Mario announced behind her, addressing his nephews, “boys, you climb into the stretch nineteen thirty-seven purple Hudson Terraplane.”

“There are eight of us,” Julio’s deep voice objected.

“Bend your knees and scrunch. Besides, purple complements that girly pink in your pinstripes.”

“Ah, Uncle Mario,” they moaned in chorus.

“Guys are secure enough these days to wear pink and carry mother-of-pearl pistols,” Ralph said.

“Only on Broadway, boys, only on Broadway. Now, scat!”

Temple turned to watch. It was like loading up a clown car, all those tall, lean, butch but modern and sensitive Fontana brothers, crouching to enter the Tom Wolfe–extravagant Chrome-Covered Purple-Flake Streamline Baby, baby!

Revienne should be so lucky to have such a ride.

Temple took a step forward to get into the next free car, a totally cute black thirties number that was tiny and low-slug but all bubble curves, when Nicky’s hand on her arm held her back.

“Getting whisked away by your own publicity plans?” he asked softly. “Let Van and Revienne ride in that petite mobster motor.”

“But …” Temple watched two smooth blonde heads duck inside and sighed. “Oh. Yeah. It suits them.”

She had to admit, blondes seemed made for black gangster cars. Maybe she could hitch a ride on a Mickey Rooney jalopy with a rumble seat.

“We’re the ones who orchestrated this trip down memory lane,” Nicky went on. “You, me, Santiago, and, of course, Uncle Mario as a rep of the old days, will bring up the rear.”

“Right,” Temple agreed, no longer carried away by her own hype.

Count on Nicky to save the best for last. The next car was to drool over. It was the always-elegant-and-deadly black, of course, with whitewalls and a running board and dainty, classy, cuff-link-size touches of chrome here and there and everywhere, like diamond jewelry on wet black velvet.

Nicky gestured Santiago in first, so Temple had less far to crawl in. Santiago doubled over, but his wool-silk suit blend didn’t wrinkle, just as his face never did. So mahogany rich and dark and sooo smooth.

Nicky bent to take the opposite seat, his uncle easily managing to follow. Macho Mario had inherited the Fontana empire when short and stocky genes ran in the family, before the next generation got their cod-liver oil and vitamins and added a few inches to better show off designer Italian tailoring.

Temple bent only slightly to walk into the commodiously high seating area. Before Nicky could draw the door shut after her, a wave of Cat Pack oozed inside to circle Temple’s bare ankles—and help show off her black-satin forties-style strappy platform heels, which matched the car with their rhinestone-buckled ankle straps.

She giggled.

The Cat Pack tickled.

“Well,” said Macho Mario, eyeing the four black cats. “Some people think these things are unlucky, but I say, at least we’ve got personal protection against those dirty rats we saw down in the tunnel at the empty Jersey Joe Jackson vault. I always said Jersey Joe was all hotel and no capital. And his Action Attraction never got tourist traction. This will be the first time the old fool made money in Vegas, instead of hiding it.”

Santiago seemed uneasy about the foot-level feline honor guard. He shook out his pale, exquisitely flared boot-cut pants legs and muttered, “Black cat hairs,” with a shudder. “Not unlucky, only tasteless.”

He moved to edge away from his window seat, but Nicky put a hand on his arm.

“Better stay put. We’re not using seat belts yet. No time to install them in these vintage honeys before the trial run. Hang on, we’re moving!”

The cars were indeed starting up, but it was a smooth, whoosh sort of thing, no “road feel” that Temple could discern.

Oh, wow. The ride was so smooth and creamy, while the film images projected on the static poster images on the tunnel walls created this jagged, wild, video-game double-action scene that was instantly adrenaline pumping and absolutely hypnotizing.

Santiago might be a prima donna pain, but his media work was … magic!

Temple leaned her head closer to his to see out the dark-tinted side window, mentally dodging bullets and tough talk, looking Edward G. Robinson in the eye as he aimed a big pistol right at her, and then a bullet sound whizzed by in an echo of harmless but heart-rate-upping rat-a-tat-tatting. She’d only been so sound-surrounded at a Cirque du Soleil show, when massive timpani drums had everyone’s seat bottoms and pulses throbbing into breath-catching heart-attack mode.

Her pulse was leaping now, but in a good way, a live-entertainment high. She was feeling breathlessly alive, as if they were all escaping the past and daily life and death. What a pseudorush.

Then the tinted window she was craning past Santiago’s sharp, sun-baked profile to see through, viewing the visual wonders, turned 3-D. The scene morphed. She was staring into a face hanging in space outside the tinted car window, a face that was a combo of the Joker’s twisted clown visage from Batman and the talking Magic Mirror from Snow White. Its features, almost Silly Putty human, seemed totally real. They moved in their own space and plane, and reassembled into … Jersey Joe Jackson’s.

Temple was amazed Santiago had reached that far back into local history. Jersey Joe’s name was known, but you’d only see his photographed face on Internet sites, if you bothered. As she had.

Now a voice whispered, inside the car interior, right next to them all.

“Welcome to my ‘Chunnel of Hidden Trea sure.’ If you come to rob me you will find only empty vaults and busted dreams, but if you come to enjoy the ride, you’ll get more than you bargained for… .”

At that, the facial image dissolved into a younger, plumper visage, a face suspended over a formal winged collar and tie. It reminded Temple of some slot machines that featured a magician’s face and disembodied white gloves laying out the video poker cards … and now here came the gloves, protruding their fingers into the actual passenger compartment. Oooh, spooky!

Only the cards it laid out were tarot cards.

“The magician, oh my,” the face said, in stagy tones, white gloves flaunting the card in question.

It was amazing how the bones of the face pushed through the window glass, as if it were only a cellophane cerement. Temple cringed back as an actual tarot card flipped into the limo compartment. Louie reached out a clawed forefoot and snapped it down to the carpet, anchoring it with a sharp nail.

She stared at Santiago, wondering. Had he used this multimedia display to program something personal?

The echoing voice filled the car interior.

“Magic never dies,” it pronounced. “Am I mere bones in a morgue or a disembodied voice on a manipulated movie screen? Does it matter? I live, I speak, I watch, I intrude. I am the ghost in the machine. I live to avenge untimely deaths. Murders. I take vengeance.”

Temple jerked back, surprised.

What a lifelike effect. What a gruesome segment. Maybe too scary for the public … She’d have to mention that to Nicky and Van. Whoa! She had goose bumps, though. Super effective.

Oops, Temple thought. My lord, it resembles an actual, animated death masque. Not exactly promotable. Temple was betting the wax sculptor who’d created the Boots concrete memorial had accomplished the model for this filmed resurrection.

“Where is the money?” the eerie voice intoned from the 3-D death masque. “Follow the money. It was in the vault. Then I ended up there, dead. Stabbed.”

Temple knew by the prickling of her thumbs that something wicked this way comes… .

Actually it was by the prickling in her panty hose, had she been wearing any. She could feel the cat hair around her calves flaring and prickling instead of tickling.

And cat claws in three-four time, kneading warning into the unseen black carpet on the car’s floor.

She had to admit she hadn’t expected this demo ride to be so … ghoulish, so in your face.

So … like from a major historical theatrical masterpiece, like Hamlet.

“The play’s the thing,” to prick “the conscience of the King.” The king … of chutzpah?

“This is absurd,” Santiago objected. “This part is not of my creation. This is a cheap fright show. I demand you restore my immortal and elegant Rat Pack figures—Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. They had charisma, talent, a deathless magic.”

“Like Cosimo Sparks?” Nicky asked. “He was a stage magician once, still dressed like a magician of the old school, in white tie and tails. Was it hard to stab him through that starched shirt?”

“I? Santiago?” His chiseled features tightened with dismay instead of warming with rage. “How dare you! I am internationally renowned, as you well know. I am not some cheap … gangster, stabbing someone with a … shiv.”

Midnight Louie leaped up between Temple and Santiago and issued a low rumbling growl, the likes of which she had never heard from him. It gave her chills and forced Santiago cringing into the corner of the car. Louie was a big cat, and every black hair was puffed out like hackles as he stared at Santiago, until the man blinked and looked away.

“Get that wildcat away from me,” Santiago snarled in turn, his head turned into the car window as if about to kiss the now-frozen grotesque face of Cosimo Sparks.

“We’ll get you away,” Macho Mario assured him, “for a lot of years in prison.”

Midnight Louie leaped onto Temple’s lap, so she tumbled over sideways, just as Nicky and Macho Mario pulled major iron from their shoulder holsters. Like guns. Like big guns. Like they were ready to use them for real.

Santiago tried to lurch somewhere, his hips slamming Temple’s back into the hard leather seat, his hands meshing with the taunting 3-D face in the car window.

He’d worked this audiovisual magic. He knew it was an illusion, a high-tech, amazing, and breathtaking illusion—didn’t he? Magicians like Max and Cosimo Sparks knew illusion from reality. Santiago, mystic architect, did not seem to know.

His hands crashed through thick tinted glass as they sought to touch, to stop, to strangle the dead man’s image, spraying blood and sharp shards, some maybe of bone.

Temple cringed against the seat back as the whole Cat Pack clan joined Louie in surrounding her with a moat of fang and claw, and she felt boas of black cat fur wreathing her torso.

And lots of sharp claws braced on her—ow!—thighs.

Macho Mario and Nicky grabbed Santiago and pulled him onto the opposite seat, stuffed immobile between them and two gun barrels.

The window image had vanished. Only the faces on the graphic tunnel walls flashed past, and then the steel vault, all impressive metal facade and empty significance.

“That’s the wrong vault,” Santiago shouted. “That vault is a substitute. It’s empty. It’s not supposed to be empty.”

“Nor are you,” Nicky said, producing handcuffs from his jacket side pocket and wrapping Santiago’s back-pinned wrists as Uncle Mario kept the gun at the man’s chest. “You’re just another empty suit, Santiago, running a scam to feed your greed. And we Fontanas hold the key to your past and your future. Arriba!”

“Thanks for taking us for a ‘ride,’” Macho Mario chortled, holstering his revolver once the man was manacled. “Brings back the bad old days in the most delightful way. Unfortunately, modern times are not in favor of ‘offing’ bad apples on the spot. We have Detective Ferraro and other officers of the law waiting at the other end to take you into custody for killing Cosimo Sparks. Thanks for the really thrilling ride.”

Scowling and handcuffed, a silent Santiago remained bracketed by the Fontana family while the car rushed past the effects he’d created.

Temple, upright again, with four cats for seatmates, leaned across to whisper into Macho Mario Fontana’s ear.

“I’m surprised you’d let a girl go along for the action and danger.”

“Ah, Nicky told me you’d get more violent if we didn’t than if we did,” Macho Mario whispered back. “The detective did whisk Van and her long-stemmed girlfriend out of harm’s way.”

“Santiago could have been armed,” she admitted, leaning back to her side of the car.

“Only by his massive ego,” Nicky put in. “He thought he was home free, and also free to hunt a second vault’s cache to his heart’s content.”

“And, besides,” Macho Mario said, reaching inside his jacket, which made the haughty Santiago flinch, “I have a little something—”

Temple pulled her feet in tight as the black boa gathered close to her and emitted a ganglike growl.

“Not to worry, little lady and little kitty cats.” Macho Mario extended a long cream envelope to Temple. “Here’s a gift certificate for a big little shopping spree at Gangsters Moll Mall for any damage our ride here might have done to your rolled-down hose.”

He managed to sneak in a pat on her bare knee as she took the envelope. His thick, still-jet-black eyebrows rose. Macho Mario hadn’t realized hose was passé for modern, comfort-driven women.

“Uh, sorry for ruffling your … fur, Miss Barr,” he said, hastily reclaiming his hand before any of the four cats could snap it off, and sending Nicky an apologetic look.

Macho Mario Fontana might be old mob, but he had no idea who possessed the important fur not to ruffle in this gangster car, Temple thought, looking down and smiling on a constellation of green, and one set of gold, cats’-eyes.

That would be Midnight Louie and the latest hot new gang in town, the Cat Pack.

On Thin Ice

After uniformed officers had hauled away the urbane and protesting Santiago, who claimed he had lawyers on three continents and would use them to sue everyone in Vegas involved in this travesty, Detective Ferraro asked “the principals” to remain behind, while the Glory Hole Gang and the Fontana brothers—the elegant Revienne escorted in their midst—took the trio of Chunnel elevators up to the exit on the Crystal Phoenix’s landscaped grounds.

Nicky and Van and Temple and Uncle Mario had no such luck losing their accompanying four cats, who ignored police wishes and stuck around, sometimes quite literally. Midnight Louie and Louise shadowed Temple and Van, while Three O’Clock glued himself to Nicky’s pant leg. Uncle Mario had somehow ended up with Ma Barker at his feet, favoring him with frequent upward but off-eyed glances that were either admiring or murderous.

“I hope you enjoyed your Columbo moment, Mr. Fontana,” Ferraro began.

“Of course,” Macho Mario beamed. “It was a pleasure to nail that phony.”

“I meant Mr. Nick Fontana,” Ferraro said. “That was a risky stunt, but it was worth shaking that cool customer up for interrogation. I had no idea Miss Barr would be on board for it.”

“She pushed her way into the car. What could I do?” Nicky asked innocently.

“You couldn’t overpower her?”

“You don’t know women, detective. The smaller they are, the more tenacious. They don’t call those stiletto heels for nothing.”

The detective eyed Temple’s spike heels. “I guess those are oddly fitting today.”

She immediately got the allusion. “Because Cosimo Sparks was murdered with a very thin dagger, like a stiletto?”

“And how do you know that?”

“Just … guessing from the context.” She’d never squeal on Coroner Bahr. She wasn’t a dirty rat.

“Pretty clever,” Ferraro said, turning to Nicky. “You got the evidence?”

Nicky reached into his breast coat pocket and pulled out a tiny tape recorder, not a firearm. “He didn’t actually confess, but he was pretty rattled by the dead man’s rerun appearance in his own media show. Broke the car window.”

“Glad the blood on his hands is his own doing,” Ferraro noted, pocketing the tape.

“Well said,” Nicky answered. “I’m just glad the Glory Hole Gang is cleared.”

“What?” Temple demanded. “Have I been totally out of this loop? They were suspects?”

“You should be ‘out of the loop,’ ” Ferraro said, his lean face stern. “I’ve heard a bit about your civilian snooping. Not to be encouraged. Yeah,” he finally admitted, “they were mixed up with Jersey Joe Jackson and his stolen silver dollars and rumored hidden stashes of other assets through the years since the late forties. We couldn’t come up with a motive for Sparks’s murder other than attempted robbery.”

“Not Sparks’s attempted robbery?”

“Could be, and Santiago could have come on him cracking the safe while inspecting the tunnel before the vault was opened, but why would a rich guy—and he is—kill someone for an empty vault? It looked more like money from the past was involved, with those few silver dollars found in the vault. When we searched the old boys’ suite …”

Temple’s jaw dropped and she stared at Nicky.

He nodded confirmation. “The police asked, so we got them all out of there on a pretext.”

“How could anyone think the Glory Hole guys … ? They’re in their eighties.”

“Greed never dies, Miss Barr, you should know that.” Ferraro’s lip quirk could have been the start of a smile. “Anyway, we found an ice pick among their test-kitchen supplies. It looked as clean as a whistle and new as a store-bought razor blade, but forensics found Santiago’s DNA on it, which was easily obtained from all over the media wizard’s Fontana Suite.”

“Why would Santiago kill Sparks?” Temple asked. “Greed is a pretty broad category.”

“For some reason, Santiago could have been looking for Jersey Joe’s treasure, now that he was in the vicinity.”

That just lay there, as linguistically lame as it was as a motive for murder.

“What about the hesitation marks on Cosimo’s body?” Temple asked.

Ferraro frowned at her as fiercely as he had at Midnight Louie. “You have some inside access to the forensics report, Miss Barr? I thought Lieutenant Molina had enough of your fringe investigations.”

“I was a reporter, Detective Ferraro. I hear things.”

Midnight Louie chose that moment to take a long stretch up the detective’s pant leg. His full-length reach was awesome, almost crotch-high.

Ferraro stiffened like a frozen haddock, winced, and gazed down into Louie’s big green eyes. Louie’s big black claws had probably pricked through his lightweight slacks fabric into his skin, but very delicately.

“I hate cats,” Ferraro said, “almost as bad as amateur dicks. Get this one off me, and I’ll overlook your possession of police information,” he told Temple, never breaking Louie’s stare.

“Louie! Down!” Temple ordered, as if he were a dog. She wasn’t sure how he’d react to that indignity.

Louie held his pose and Ferraro’s gaze for a long, deep moment of mutual standoff, then dropped back on all fours.

“We won’t keep you, Detective,” Nicky said. “We’ll, uh, read all about it in the Review-Journal.”

Ferraro turned to go.

Temple spoke. “What if those ‘hesitation marks’ on the body were prod marks?”

Ferraro turned back, looked at her, at Louie, and then nodded. He knew a bit about prod marks personally now.

“Good point. Sparks failed to find the loot, and once Santiago saw the empty safe, he thought he’d been deliberately led astray and tried to ‘prick’ Sparks to give out the ‘real’ location of the Jackson treasure. For some reason, Sparks couldn’t, or wouldn’t, then Santiago lost it, like he did in your car,” Ferraro said, nodding at Nicky.

“Frankly, despite his DNA on the ice pick, the motive is all iffy and airy-fairy, and I doubt we’ll convict. Where did Santiago run into this slightly eccentric retired magician? Why would a sophisticate like him buy this bizarre Jersey Joe Jackson hidden-money rumor, and then kill over it? Right at the site of his brand-new toy about to debut. He would have had to have had a lot more visceral motive than a rich man’s unending greed to go through all that.”

“I don’t know,” Temple said, who thought she did, “but he was in and out of the Glory Hole Gang’s suite and test kitchen next door to his like a neighbor with a borrowing fetish. I saw that while I was visiting the old boys briefly.”

“At least,” Ferraro said, “your ultrasenior-citizen friends are in the clear. If I were you, I’d leave it at that and be happy.”

Temple nodded quickly. “You’re right, detective. All’s well that ends well.”

He actually grinned, but it looked forced. “We’re in agreement on that.”

She turned to Nicky when it was just her, him, Macho Mario, and Midnight Louie again.

“I can’t believe you engineered that stickler detective into letting you take Santiago for a ‘ride’ to his arrest.”

“It was a hard sell,” Nicky admitted.

“And you didn’t even tell me? I’m your PR person, Nicky. That was … cold.”

“I only told Uncle Mario, and I had to do it that way.”

“Well, letting Santiago luxuriate in his own setup and then slipping in a whole new scenario—how’d you do that, anyway?”

“Please. Vegas is teeming with special-effects people. You got the dough, they got the go. But the police demanded secrecy.”

“I get that, but why the big production?”

Nicky waggled his handsome head from side to side and shrugged with his hands in his pockets like a misbehaving twelve-year-old.

“The police came to me with their evidence and suspicions. It was all as thin as an ice pick, but I knew a high-profile arrest couldn’t go down at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel itself. People sleep there. You can’t have them thinking murderers are floating around. Van would kill me!”

Macho Mario nodded soberly. “Definitely.”

“So …,” Nicky said, “down here it fits. It’s all part of the ambience, right?”

“I suppose there’s a certain poetic justice to Santiago riding the rails to his own arrest.”

“You can work with that? I mean publicity-wise?”

“I can work with that. Publicity-wise,” Temple said. “You know, I’d just like to sit down here in the car seat and collect my thoughts.”

“Van wants all us Crystal Phoenix folks up in the Jersey Joe Jackson Ghost Suite for a cocktail calm-down in half an hour or so.”

“Just folks?”

Nicky glanced down at the four cats still swarming at Temple’s ankles.

“My brothers will bemoan the black cat hair on their usual pale and expensive Ermenegildo Zegna suits, but two of these four felines have lived at the Phoenix, and the quartet does seem to be the new Cat Pack in town. So sure, bring on the dander.”

On those not-feline-flattering words, Nicky grabbed his uncle’s arm and they headed for the elevators.

Temple sat, unsatisfied and uneasy.

Yes, it was good Santiago had been unmasked as someone criminal. Even now, he might not be fully unmasked. What if he’d been one of the foreigners in the Synth club room?

Whew. The Synth and its schemes remained a conundrum that could go any of a dozen ways. Whether the Synth’s extravagant mass casino heist scheme was a group delusion or they were being used by terrorists, it was best to keep them out of the limelight until some real evidence existed. The secret underground link between Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix and Neon Nightmare needed to stay that way for a while too.

Temple was sure the new Cat Pack would be patrolling it for rats of any variety now.

Maybe stopping and arresting Santiago would end all the plotting. The Synth had lost their real leader, Cosimo Sparks, but had he been truly linked to a larger scheme, or playing some game of his own? The silver dollars and rat-snatched bearer bond proved the vault had once been full of filthy lucre. Had it been hoarded IRA money, though? And where had the guns and explosives gone, if so? Had Sparks gotten greedy or scared and decided to move the hoarded IRA money? Had he just found a Jersey Joe Jackson hoard and had he been trying to save the Synth’s Neon Nightmare investment? Or was he a true loyalist to the last-gasp alternate IRA cause, trying to protect its holdings from elements who’d raid it? Had he died rather than give Santiago the location of the moved treasure? Or had he simply known … nothing? And died because of that?

If Temple kept quiet about all these unsettling questions, maybe Max Kinsella’s name would never need to come into it. And he was the last thing she needed on her mind with a marriage to plan.

Besides, Detective Ferraro had been dubious a solid case could be made against Santiago. As long as all these questions remained unanswered, Max’s possible connections to all and any of it remained unknown to anybody but her.

Unfortunately, that put news of his fate in a similar limbo.

Might it be better for all concerned for the situation to stay that way?

Forever.

Beside her, Louie, surrounded by his triplets, meowed plaintively.

“Right,” she told him. “The old-time gangsters knew that sometimes ‘mum’s the word.’ That’s ‘meow’ to you.

“I’ll keep quiet about your street gang connections and we’ll all move forward. And you can be ring bearer again.”

Da Denouement, Dudes

I have been the life of the party before.

I have also been the death of the party, if the party in question deserved it.

All in the line of duty, defending my partner and her interests, whatsoever they may be.

I must say, she is sufficiently grateful. Although my not-inconsiderable contributions to subduing crime in Las Vegas and meting out punishment are often overlooked by officialdom (this was even a problem for Mr. Sherlock Holmes), my Miss Temple never fails to see that I get in on the celebratory party.

Hence, we are all gathered in the Jersey Joe Jackson Ghost Suite at the Crystal Phoenix, where a feast of gourmet appetizers is laid out for the guests of honor: yours truly, Pa Three O’Clock, Ma Barker, and the kit chit, Miss Midnight Louise.

A bunch of Fontanas also happen to be present, and the Glory Hole Gang. Actually, Miss Van von Rhine, being the hostess from whom all good things edible and drinkable flow at this affair, and my roomie are the only females present, the Midnight family femmes excepted.

Apparently, Miss Van von Rhine’s hot blonde foreign friend, Revienne, had a headache after all the Chunnel of Crime ride excitement and is dining quietly in her room. Fine. Leaves more for me and mine.

And what a spread the Glory Hole Gang helped lay out! The overgrown members of our party are nibbling from a long table with some foodstuffs the Cat Pack is being polite about and leaving for demolishment later.

Along a classy plastic runner on the vintage carpet are exquisite Asian dishes tricked out with exquisite tidbits of world cuisine, including anchovies à la orange, shrimp and liver with sautéed giblets, and catfish in a sauce of liver and milk.

Maybe not your menu, but right up my alley.

“The Jersey Joe Jackson Ghost Suite is filled up to the gills,” Miss Temple notes.

I do like her figure … and figures of speech. “Gills.” Aaah. I foresee a leisurely midnight dip at the koi pond.

So does Chef Song, who is presiding over the buffet table and knifes me a sharp warning look. I am reminded that the kitchen is among the most likely places for an “accident” in the house, and that a kitchen tool was the murder weapon in this case.

“Stifle yourself,” Midnight Louise hisses in my ear. “This is the family ‘coming out’ party at the Crystal Phoenix. There shall be no crude fishing expeditions.”

“Look at that cat’s poor eyelid, Nicky,” Miss Van von Rhine croons, bending low to examine Ma Barker’s puss.

I squint my eyes shut. Miss Van von Rhine will get four in the first three epidermal levels from Ma for that liberty.

“I know a great eye surgeon for that,” Miss Van von Rhine goes on, speaking directly to Ma, “if you would consent to drop by my office with Midnight Louise and let me treat you to Gangsters’ new spa for a facial and even maybe a tummy tuck. We will have a plastic surgeon on hand for Botox and laser eye lifts.”

Eek! A tummy tuck is my mark of honor for surviving a premature surgical attempt on my, er, fur balls.

I am amazed to see Ma Barker erupt in a purr and rub on our hostess’s ankles.

Female! Thy name is vanity! What a traitor.

Whilst I am stewing about the turn of events—I seem not to be the object of every eye—Miss Midnight Louise slinks up to me again.

“Good job, mein papa. Who knows what that South American terrorist would have done to our poor human associates had we not been there to staple his treacherous suit lapels to his epidermis through his trachea.”

Females can be so visceral.

I do see how Ma Barker, after her harsh street life, might be ready for the Queen for a Day treatment. As for my esteemed pater, Three O’Clock has drifted to sleep with his whiskers in the catfish pâté. Pater is in the pâté. What a family! I could die.

“Louie,” says my Miss Temple, “it has been a busy day, and I think you and I should head home to the Circle Ritz.”

Sweeter words were never spoken. I cannot wait to hit the solo sack with her and have my … tummy tuck scratched. I am the exclusive sort.

Meanwhile, there are some tiresome matters, always as clear as a crystal phoenix to me, that the humans always have to settle.

“What made you suspect Santiago, Nicky?” my Miss Temple asks.

“Actually, my brilliant wife. Van, do you want to explain?” He turns to her with a bemused smile.

She shrugs charmingly. “It was nothing. Merely my broad knowledge of international finance.”

Macho Mario barks out a laugh at the word “broad,” which evokes cocked shivs in the Midnight family females, not that anyone biped would notice.

“I always say, Nicky,” he predictably says, “if you do not have it, marry it.”

Mr. Nicky Fontana is a modern dude and knows to give credit where credit is due. “And how did your superior knowledge save the whole project and remove the blot of a murder rap from all my nearest and dearest? Dearest.”

“You … flattering phony Santiago, you,” Van answers with a smile. “Temple came to my office and asked me to explain bearer bonds, after we found that one … ‘rat dropping’ in the tunnel.

“I explained that they had been a convenient way to do international transactions and were available for up to ten thousand dollars apiece. The investment was poor because they often did not earn interest, and their usage is being phased out as we speak.”

Nicky frowns. “We knew any valuables found in a Jersey Joe Jackson stash would be … out of date.”

“Yes. Of course, dear.”

Uh-oh. That is the prelude to a forthcoming contradiction.

“However,” Miss Van von Rhine goes on in that sweet, reasonable, feminine way that always stiffens my hackles into boar bristles, “bearer bonds are worth the loss of interest to international illegal parties who need ready cash. In fact, despite the colorful update of Gangsters attractions, we Americans have been pikers in the ‘gangster’ stakes since Prohibition was reversed, at least north of the border, as Las Vegas is.”

“Agreed, my dear niece-in-law,” Macho Mario rumbles from his kingpin seat on the chartreuse satin chair, which is usually my private throne.

I guess I will submit to age before beauty. This time.

“Anyway,” Miss Vanilla goes on in her tooth-decaying way, “bearer bonds have remained popular in South America, which made me wonder why a North American rat was playing Foosball with one. Upon further studying of the document in question, I saw that it was dated.”

“It was in Jersey Joe’s locker, albeit it was otherwise empty,” Eightball O’Rourke puts in, while chowing down on a caviar cracker. “He has been gone since the seventies.”

Ouch! Not true, especially here in the Ghost Suite. And maybe now!

The hairs on my backbone are standing up and singing “Clementine.” And I cannot even carry a tune, much less wear a size-nine boot or carry a bearer bond. I do so hate to see humans of my gender rushing toward their doom, unless it is Santiago.

“The bearer bond was dated nineteen ninety-seven,” Miss Van puts in, as if we should all get it now.

“So it is a teenager,” Macho Mario disparages. “It is still worth the ten thou. That is a pretty good baccarat-room tip in these times.”

Are mine the only vibrissae that are reaching for the ceiling in this room? Can Macho Mario be that behind the times?

Yes.

Miss Temple takes up the theme. “What was a major world event in nineteen ninety-eight, one that was actually positive?”

There is a long, long silence. Nobody remembers much by years, only by personal ups and downs.

“Uh …” comes a lone, cautious response from a Fontana brother. Ralph, the second youngest to Nicky. “… Windows Ninety-Eight?”

“Good answer!” Miss Van responds. “But not relevant.”

Frankly, the last thing on the Fontana brothers’ minds is being relevant, and the whole clan heaves a sigh of relief.

“And,” Miss Temple adds, “on the pesky international front, the peace accord in Ireland.”

“What should peace have to do with this mess here today?” Macho Mario asks.

“After what Temple told me she learned at the Neon Nightmare, a lot,” Miss Van von Rhine says. “I will let her take up the narrative.”

“I do not want a ‘narrative,’ ” Macho Mario says. “I want an answer to who killed who, so long as it is not a relative, and why.”

“Commendable,” Miss Van says dryly. “I will let Temple continue with what she risked life and limb to learn at the Neon Nightmare.”

Macho Mario frowns. “Her knees did seem to be dry and nubbly today.”

My Miss Temple rolls her eyes. “It is not what happened in nineteen ninety-eight, it is how what happened in the Irish peace process that year that made the U.S.’s nine/eleven attack so earthshaking over there. I did some research and—”

“—And I hope this is not another boring TV news thing,” Macho Mario says.

“I will cut to the chase,” Miss Temple says. “On record, there is only one ‘beneficiary’ of nine/eleven, as admitted by the Dean of Saint Anne’s Anglican Cathedral in Belfast. He cited the ‘worldwide revulsion against terror it sparked.’ As American dollars to support the IRA cause vanished almost overnight, the dean concluded for the Protestant side that ‘We here in Ireland are perhaps the only beneficiaries of nine/eleven.’ ”

“What do the Irish have to do with it?” Macho Maria demands. “Gloomy northern folk with a jones for justice and music and alcohol hard and soft, like their heads.”

“Yet they did what almost no one in the world has managed in recent decades, Uncle Mario,” Nicky says. “They made peace.”

“And because of that wonderful step forward for humanity,” Temple says, “the core of this whole puzzle of murder and magic was a war chest.”

I yawn and make my way to the buffet. I see that this is going to be a talky party, and I prefer rebuilding my strength to social chitchatting. I have a lot to face in the future: having both Three O’Clock and Miss Midnight Louise hounding me when I visit the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters and the additional stress of Ma Barker crowding me near the Circle Ritz.

And having someone sleeping in my bed again, when Mr. Matt comes back.

I am starting to feel very crowded by family on all fronts. Maybe I should just move! I could run away and join the Big Cats and the evil Hyacinth at the circus, or more realistically, the Fontana brothers at Gangsters. Nobody crowds them.

Do not worry for one minute about Midnight Louie not landing on his feet in some lavish and satisfactorily lethal new situation. Yes, sir, I have more options than a trader in pig futures.

Closing Call

“Back to the hole-in-the-wall pub with the alternative IRA chappies?” Max asked, after Gandolph had thoughtfully shut his cell phone.

Max was reclining against one of the made-up beds’ headboard, his stockinged feet and legs stretched out on the goose-down coverlet.

They were digesting an informal but fine dinner they’d had at a restored restaurant on the square: pepper steak with béarnaise sauce for Max, and pan-fried monkfish with curry-mango sauce for Garry. The after-dinner coffee had been dark and rich, and the Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur that accompanied it absolute heaven: Irish whiskey and cream that would draw any cat in the world away from looking at a queen.

“Back to the alternative IRA,” Gandolph confirmed, “if you can move your lazy after-dinner Irish-American frame.”

“Barely,” Max admitted. “You know, that’s one ‘memory’ that came to me after the coma: after-dinner coffee with you when I was young and green and listened to everything you said as gospel.”

“Good. The way to a man’s memory is through his stomach, then.” Garry stood, slapping one of Max’s feet. “Come on; Liam sounded excited. I think the scent of money has recharged his desire to deal. We can take the Mondeo.”

“And drive down that rat hole of unrestored slum streets?” Max asked, rising.

Gandolph fetched their black trench coats, bought on the square, from the narrow hotel wardrobe. The night often misted. “Yes. My GPS has the coordinates, and I checked the computer maps for routes. That’ll spare your legs, at least.”

“Modern spy ware,” Max mocked. “I’ve been retired too long.”

“Not long enough,” Gandolph said. “We’re in this only to name and disarm your would-be murderers. I don’t want you back in the counterterrorism game. It’s totally new, more brutal, and not happening in our bailiwick anymore. One last round to ensure your future safety, and then we’re retired for good.”

Max nodded. “Agreed. Four votes from me and my damaged legs and brain.”

“Recuperating, Max. Not damaged.”

“No,” Max said, struggling to stand while shrugging into the hokey trench coat. “Not damaged as Kathleen O’Connor was, glory be. Lead on, Macduff.”

Gandolph laughed. “We’ve got something from these guys or they wouldn’t have called! We can tell them some Las Vegas legend in repayment. Maybe give them the location of Ted Binion’s now-empty vault.”

Max laughed. “You’re bad, Garry. I wager these Old World types never heard of that. A hidden, secret underground vault in Las Vegas. It sounds like Nancy Drew.”

“Then Temple Barr would be in on it,” Garry quipped back.

Temple Bar or Temple Barr? Max produced a crooked grin. At least that name was securely etched on his memory now. Too bad the woman wasn’t.

Gandolph was now a geographical magician, Max admitted to himself.

The Mondeo was parked down a narrow street, where its black body color vanished into the ill-lit night. Yet they were only a two-alley walk on rough stones from the bar. Max had his fists in his coat pockets and his head down against the coat’s turned-up collar. He might look like a skulker, but it was bone-chilling weather, not that cold to a Midwestern-boy but cutting deep with the dampness.

“I never thought I’d welcome the sight of this place,” Max said, holding the unwelcoming thick wood door open for his senior partner.

“If this is useful, with what we know from the Magdalen asylum, we can head home to sunshine and slot machines.”

“Was I ever a gambling man, Garry?”

“Only with your life, Max. Only with your life. Which is starting anew now, believe me.”

Max nodded, caught up in his old friend’s sense of achievement. A life all came down to a D. H. Lawrence title, didn’t it? Friends and Lovers.

Max was so mellow he was able to look on the dour set of disenfranchised revolutionaries with a historical distance. Their battles and time and temper were over. Here, at least, it was a new and more peaceful world.

This time Max and Garry bellied up to the bar and brought their pints to the table, not as prisoners, but peers.

Brusque nods around the scarred table were a somewhat sheepish welcome.

“You’re walking better,” Liam observed.

Max didn’t mention he’d walked less far to get here.

“What have you got?” Garry asked. “Something ‘fresh,’ you said.”

“Oh, fresh, all right,” Liam answered, lifting his glass. “Fresh as County Antrim cream.”

Max and Garry exchanged glances as they sat. That sounded good.

“First,” the leader said, “we want something for the pot from you.”

Gandolph nodded. “You may have heard Las Vegas was founded by American mobsters.”

“Aye. Not the Irish mob. The Italians and the Jews.”

“The Irish aren’t much for the desert,” Max put in.

“Unless we’re pounding railroad tracks through it.”

“That would be the Chinese out West,” Max said with a smile. “The Irish stuck to the mines and the East Coast.”

“ ‘Suckin’ up the coal dust into our lungs,’ ” Mulroney said, quoting an old work song.

“Desert dust in Las Vegas, lads,” Garry said. “Sometimes gold dust, but more often silver. If you check the Web, you’ll see there’s been news of a hidden vault opened under a Las Vegas hotel.”

“Empty,” Liam sneered. “You think I don’t get the news of the world hourly?”

Max was astounded, and thus was gagged from saying anything to back up Gandolph.

“Still …” Garry went on, “there’s a Vegas cadre of magicians—”

“Magicians?” Finn hooted. “We’re to be interested in a gang of magicians?”

“You should be, because a lot of deaths over the past two years or so could come to lie down like lambs at their feet, and they may roar like lions before this hidden-vault business is over. Such a vault was found a decade ago in the desert, loaded with collectible American silver dollars worth millions. Millions, lads. Wouldn’t that do your ‘charitable’ causes some major good?”

“A treasure hunt is what you’re offerin’ us instead of solid information?” Flanagan said.

Liam put a hand on Flanagan’s sweater-clad arm. “Our American sympathizers gathered millions and millions in treasure for our cause over the decades. This lad and his cousin came here almost twenty years ago because they were afire with our just grievances. I’ve never doubted the sincerity of our American cousins. Do you, Michael Kinsella, swear that there might be something to this Synth and its hidden treasure?”

“I’ve trusted this man with my life since he whisked me away from your lot,” Max said, “after I found and triggered the O’Toole’s Pub bombers in the name of my slain cousin.” He regarded Gandolph with complete sincerity. “I believe that every word he’s told you now is true.”

“You betrayed our kind and our cause, but not your kin and kith,” Liam said. “In our old days there would be a blood price, but in these new days, we cannot deny it’s no more than we would have done.”

“So,” said Gandolph. “We’ll return to Vegas and endeavor to find your lost promised fortune. What is this … jewel … of information you have for us?”

“Kathleen O’Connor is your lost jewel, yes?”

“If you speak in terms of long-delayed vengeance,” Max said.

“Hard to get over kin betrayed and slain, is it? And ye’ve only had twenty years of it, lad.”

Max nodded, soberly. These men had truly had cause. Centuries of it, enough to no longer feel like men, but trapped, snarling animals. If he and Gandolph indeed found Kitty the Cutter’s last savagely patriotic stash, they’d send it to the widows and orphans of Ulster, both sides.

He glanced at Gandolph, knowing his unilateral resolve would be honored there.

“All right, then,” Liam said, hunkering down over his pint and lowering his voice. “You’ve proven your mettle to me. We asked around, as you wanted. We asked about Kathleen O’Connor. No man who saw her forgot her. Some didn’t wish to speak of her, defending her to this very day. Some spat at the mention of her name. One, only one woman who is our liaison to the charities knew of her.”

Max and Garry leaned in and strained their ears to hear Liam’s soft conspiratorial tone.

“She’s contributed to the charities within the past year.”

Max reared away, almost physically seared by the implications. “No. I saw her dead.”

“I don’t know what you saw, man, but she put forty thousand American dollars of bearer bonds into the widows’ and orphans’ coffers within the past three months.”

“How do you know it was she?” Gandolph asked, his grammar precise even during the stress of hard bargaining.

“Because Rose Murphy, one of our longest, loyalest supporters, said it came in from a name Kathleen used to use. From the U.S.”

“And what name was that?” Max asked.

“Rebecca.”

Max tensed again. He and Garry and Liam knew from the documents that was Kathleen O’Connor’s name in the Magdalen asylum.

“Just Rebecca?” Gandolph asked. “A lot of women bear that name. How can you be sure it was Kathleen, then?”

“Not just Rebecca. Rebecca Deever. That was the code name she used for all her U.S. activities after she left the homeland. Even I recognize it from ‘donations’ and weapons shipments before the bloody ‘peace accord.’ ’Twas from her, no doubt. Even I didn’t know about these last decade’s sendings. She went around me and my associates. Directly to the women. You see, it worked both ways, Max, you and Kathleen. We IRA men blamed her for inflaming you so much our bombers were tracked down by your vengeance.”

“Then she did know O’Toole’s was scheduled to be hit while Sean was there?”

Liam shrugged. “Should have. You understand, man, we were as mad at you for bein’ with her at the time as you became angry with yourself. We never understood why she spent her time and self with you.”

“Causing heartache and guilt and murderous jealousy,” Max said. “That was the only real ‘cause’ that drove her, setting men against one another over her and enjoying the mayhem. She was avenging herself on the entire male sex, and Irishmen particularly.”

“For the years at the Magdalen asylum,” Finn suggested.

“And,” Max reminded them, “for that recorded teenage pregnancy and the baby taken away, never to be found.”

Liam nodded, eyeing his fellows. “We played into her hands as well, then.”

“So does it matter, then, whether the money is from her or her ghost?” Max asked. “Isn’t that where you intend any money Kathleen raised in the States to go? To your widows and orphans?” He kept his voice disingenuous yet silken.

“Mostly,” Liam whispered back, “but we do have our own priorities, even now. Remember. You’ve promised to help find her stash of cash. Even if she’s not still alive, there’s a backup pile of it, and we deserve every bit of it.”

“You certainly do,” Gandolph said abruptly, with Oliver Hardy emphasis. Max marveled that his own mind could remember eighty-year-old Laurel and Hardy comedy routines, but not the tragedies of his recent life.

Gandolph put down his pint glass and sat back. “A fair bargain. We want her; you want her amassed foreign treasure. We still both need each other, but mostly we—Michael and I—need to get back to the States to hunt her and the guns and roses and money she promised you.”

At Gandolph’s prodding, Max rose.

He felt like a walking zombie. Nothing settled. He’d been prepared to bury Kathleen O’Connor as an old enemy dead and gone for both their benefits. Now he had to deal with her resurrected and still poisonous? Did forgiveness go that far? Recovering terrorism money for shaky, defanged terrorists? What was Gandolph thinking?

Probably way ahead of him and his on-off memory.

Max swaggered to the pub door, because it was either that or limp. Gandolph was right behind him.

Then the door crashed inward with a crowd of dark-coated men behind it … five, by an instant count: the two ex-IRA men they’d met with and three more of that ilk.

He and Gandolph had led them here, for sure.

“Out of the way,” Gandolph shouted, pushing Max into the wall and then through the open door behind the incoming newcomers. The room behind them exploded with Irish curses and splintering wood and glass as the two gangs met full force.

Max was out in the misty night, scrambling over the slippery-damp cobblestones, his hand rushing Gandolph along with him to the sanctuary of their car.

He grappled the keys from his pants pocket as he ran and used the unlocking device to open the doors from twenty feet away. The customary beep sounded like a siren in the echoing, hard empty streets of Belfast.

He shoved Gandolph around the Mondeo’s rear and into the passenger side. The older man clutched his computer and briefcase to his chest as Max leaped around the car’s front, then slammed himself into the driver’s seat, gunning the engine and careening down the left side of the narrow way. No headlights, no seat belts, no time.

The wheels screamed around a corner, into the so-far-deserted dark.

They heard muffled voices bursting out into the night and the choked sound of at least two cars or vans hastily starting behind them.

“Damn!” Max’s fist pounded the steering wheel.

“Damn for the interruption or because Kathleen may still be alive?” Gandolph grunted, with frequent interruptions, wrestling to buckle his seat belt while keeping hold of his precious computer and briefcase.

“Damn everything,” Max muttered, watching his side and rearview mirrors. “There they are,” he exclaimed, as the inside of the car was washed with a streak of headlights from the rear.

“I can get up a street map of this section,” Garry huffed, opening the laptop and making keys cluck like chickens.

“I haven’t time to crane my neck and eyes at small-screen maps,” Max said in frustration.

A screech of corner-turning wheels at an upcoming deserted cross street made him suddenly veer into the right lane … the wrong lane for this city.

Behind the Mondeo, a black Morris Mini crammed with men streaked forward fast … and toward the front fender of a crossing Ford Focus. Max squinted into the rearview mirror, watching both cars swerve away from a collision. He lurched the Mondeo into the proper left lane as a pair of high, bright headlights riding behind a sustained horn was about to smash into them head-on.

“Oh, my God, Max!” Garry averted his face. “I’ll expire from cardiac arrest.”

“They had the near miss, not us,” was Max’s reply. “Why did the ex-IRA raid the alternate IRA, and why they are now both after us?”

“Money. Kathleen was a master moneymaker, and both sides see no reason to let any hidden funds go to the other, or to foreign pilgrims like us seeking something as intangible as closure.”

“We wouldn’t keep any of that money, but give it to a common cause,” Max said.

He jerked the steering wheel and car down another side street, which turned out to be one-way the wrong way. He gunned the motor to shorten the time exposed to a head-on collision. Another cross street flashed by, with oncoming cars from both ways. Both drivers hit their brakes, and both cars spun sideways.

“Duck!” Max cried, as bullets slammed the Mondeo broadside from both directions. He covered the steering wheel with his crossed forearms and hit the gas so the oncoming cars would be shooting at each other.

A seat belt would have kept him from banging up his legs and head in this seesaw maneuver. Too late to buckle up now.

Max heard the driver’s window shatter and felt a hot zing of air behind his head as his forehead jerked toward the windshield. He braked reflexively.

His right foot reversed the slowdown with a to-the-floor shot of gas. The Mondeo jackrabbited forward. His forehead bounced briefly off the windshield. He leaned back hard and applied the brakes to the floor again.

The two pursuing cars were spinning into each other’s now-bullet-riddled frames with engines steaming as they crashed in a glassy, metallic shower of body parts.

Max released a huge breath. “Close call. Are you all right?”

He glanced over, glad to see Garry upright in the seat. The passenger-side window was shattered too.

“We need to dump this car and hoof it to our hotel to decamp ASAP,” Max thought aloud. “Good thing you belted yourself in. I almost gave myself another memory concussion, but I’m okay. I think.”

Something tickled down his right forehead, making his eyelashes wet and sticky. Head wounds bled. Awkward, but not serious.

His hands and feet tingled as if they’d been “asleep” at the wheel. His knees and hips felt jolted, but solid. Best to get going while his body was still numb and couldn’t tell him where it had broken down until he was committed to moving it, to running.

“You take the briefcase,” he told Garry. “I’ll manage the computer. What’s the matter? Is your seat belt jammed?”

Max brushed the blood from his forehead, checking the rearview mirror. He heard a distant siren.

“Come on, we’ve got to move.” He grabbed Garry’s shoulder.

The older man was staring straight ahead. He should be moving by now, Max thought. He’d always been Max’s goad, not the other way around. Max focused on the shattered window haloing his friend’s familiar profile. Ruby red mixed with the diamond-edge crackle pattern shining in the light of a semidistant street lamp.

No… .

His stunned brain replayed the moment. The bullet that had shattered his window, meant for him, to stop their escape, had sped by a millisecond behind his head as the brakes jolted him forward, no seat belt to impede his reflexive motions.

Garry, belted in, held still, became the perfect target.

Now Max could see the small round hole in the grayish hair at Garry’s temple.

“No!” he cried, ripping Garry’s seat belt out so hard it gave at the door mount.

He pulled the old man’s body onto his shoulder, shedding bloody, blinding tears.

No, no, no. Not this loss too. You up there, take it back!

Garry—the name ran through his hobbled brain in a rhythm like a song—Garry, I hardly knew ye. Again.

Move, Max. The voice came out of the aching, blinding despair in his head. No matter who, no matter what. You’ve got to move on. Mourn your losses later. Move now!

“Why?” Max asked the empty car interior. “This isn’t a mission to save anything but my sorry past. Garry, I won’t leave you. You’ve never left me.”

And his faltering memory hadn’t resurrected all he’d known of the living man. Maybe it never would, now.

Listen to me. No matter how bad the situation, you have only one option. Always. Action. Move, Max!

“Why am I remembering your advice now? When it’s too late. It’s too late, Gandolph. I can’t do a damn thing about anything. That fucking seat belt!”

His voice and questions filled his mind, the car. There were no answers but the mantra that Gandolph had planted in his head over the years, released like a long, old-fashioned tape recording.

Trust me. Move, Max. Move on. It’s what you’d want if the situation were reversed. Let it go. Let me go.

“No. Your body. Who will claim your body? Buried and forgotten like a Magdalen asylum woman? No!”

A vehicle was rushing into the shattered night of broken cars and men, flashing blue lights.

The Belfast police.

Max, for God’s sake, move!!! Find out what you must, do what you must, what we determined we must do. Find Kathleen O’Connor, if she’s there to be found. Tell her “Sláinte” for me. Then find your heart’s desire.

Max pulled the torqued driver’s-side door open, grabbed both legs, and kicked them out as battering rams against the balky steel, hoping they’d break again. The door creaked agape. And Gandolph’s body slid farther into the driver’s seat Max was abandoning.

He let a calm thought cross his mind, then grabbed the laptop and briefcase, Gollum’s “my precious” times two. He’d read The Lord of the Rings, even if Garry claimed he hadn’t.

Everything they’d learned, that Gandolph had learned, for his sake, rested inside these fragile cases, one of paper and leather, one of pixels and plastic.

Max pushed himself up, out of the Mondeo’s stuck-forward seat, into the clean, misty night air. The sirens screamed louder, and blue lights washed over the street like a Kmart special offering capture and unanswerable questions.

He needed escape and survival.

With no glance back but in his heart, Max lurched down the empty wet cobblestoned street, unerringly finding the shadows and blending with them. He knew he could operate under the dark of the moon with the best of them, but he had a long way to go as just a crippled shadow of himself.

Moving Issues

“Matt!” Temple rejoiced into the cell phone as she recognized his voice. “You won’t believe what mayhem we’ve had here, solving the Chunnel of Crime murder.”

“Mayhem in Vegas,” he answered. “What’s not to believe?”

“Right now, I want to hear all about The Amanda Show appearances and the family soap opera,” Temple said.

“Oh, it is a soap opera, way more exciting than anything currently on TV. But I’ve got other news, something that could really remodel our lives.”

“Oh?”

“For the better. I’m getting tired of working night shifts.”

“I can live with that.”

“That’s just it. We don’t have to. The Amanda Show producers have offered me my own, ah, gig.”

“Your own gig?” Temple felt confused. “You don’t sing… . Is it the dancing?”

“Lord, no. It’s what I do. Talk to people.”

“A talk show?”

“Right. A daytime talk show. No more me rushing out before midnight six nights out of seven like Cinderfella.”

“But … you are Mr. Midnight.”

“When we’re married, I want to work normal daytime hours, like you do.”

“Talk shows are tricky, Matt. Eighty zillion more have gone down than have made it.”