Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 44

The Last Time with Temple

The night had settled into a game of follow-the-dotted-line.

The dotted line of the highway center divider.

Max Kinsella drove it, but Matt Devine rode it in his head, on the Hesketh Vampire. A motorcycle was made for following a line, a thin, endless high-wire road through nowhere.

Matt had never realized, until confined as a passenger in this car, how much he had converted to the lone, whining whiplash of a two-wheeler.

He had never understood, until that last time with Temple, how much of himself lay unexpressed, like raw ore in the ground, waiting to be found and valued.

"Why Temple?" he asked. "It began with her ring, but then they took her. Why?"

"Why you?" Kinsella rejoined. "Why were you there at all, with Molina of all people?"

"I was a witness." Matt suddenly saw that role as both horrific and ironic. "I was supposed to identify the woman who cut me. Why she was supposed to be there, I don't know. Ask Molina.

She seemed so very sure."

"She's paid to seem certain."

Kinsella drove like someone who could take it or leave it. Like driving was a means to an end, not an end in itself. It was hard to imagine him caring enough about the Hesketh Vampire to own it.

"What are we paid to do?" Matt asked.

Kinsella was silent. Then he hit the door buttons and the win-dows rolled down, letting in chill desert air.

His unconfined hair blew back like an Art Deco pennant, dramatic, decorative. He looked like the Pontiac Indian: aloof, superior, alien.

"We're paid to care," Kinsella finally said.

Matt tasted the idea. That described his job all right. His hours on the headset, connected to strangers. How did it describe Kin-sella's reality? Paid"to care? Matt hoped not. He hoped humanity was not a mere commodity.

"Temple cares without being paid," Matt noted after a while, into the wail of the wind.

"Temple is a throwback," Kinsella said shortly.

Matt was silent. The expression made Temple sound expendable, when Matt realized that was the last thing Kinsella had meant to say. Temple was a hark back to old-fashioned values.

That was why he was so drawn to her. She looked before she leaped. She weighed right and wrong. She considered other people's feelings. And he had castigated her for trying to spare his.

Matt leaned his head into the wind, felt the fresh, sundown whip of night in motion.

Molina seemed to know what she was doing.

Kinsella always acted as if he did.

Matt would have to count on them being at least half right, because there was nothing else he could do.

*****************

A constellation had fallen to earth.

Mars, Venus, the Crab Nebula lay across the long, lone strip of highway, blinking wildly.

Matt took in the convention of red, blue and yellow-white lights.

"Accident?"

"Roadblock."

Coming up fast.

The Taurus's brakes took, but not before the car did a graceful, screeching half-turn on the empty road.

Beyond all the ground-bound official lights blinked an alien vehicle. Twinkling like a rectilinear Christmas tree, big as a double-wide house on wheels.

A semitractor and trailer. West Coast mirrors. Twin trucker CB antennas. Eighteen wheels and chrome Playboy bunny mudflaps. A true UFO brought to earth by a squadron of police vehicles, most of them vans bristling with antennas.

Above them, a helicopter hung like one mighty mad hornet, buzzing.

"Wait," Kinsella cautioned, turning off the ignition.

Wait? When Temple's fate was winking somewhere out there in the chaos.

Matt opened the Taurus door, got out, began walking toward the commotion.

Kinsella they probably would have crucified against the nearest empty van as a suspicious character.

Matt they left oddly alone, as if he were invisible.

Perhaps fifteen men milled around the truck. Matt spotted the white Crown Vic and headed that way. The red light on top still circled endlessly in the night, washing desert and sky and van in sweeping turn.

Molina waited on the road, hanging back as the bulky men in commando gear swarmed over the parked tractor-trailer.

When he came alongside of her, she didn't seem surprised.

"It's their show. We're just a sideshow." She meant the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police.

"And Temple?"

"A featured attraction. I've got to let them do their thing. All we've got is suspicion. They've been working this case for months."

She glanced over Matt's shoulder into the desert darkness. "Hitch a ride with a friend?"

"You know better than that."

"He's still out there." It was a statement.

"Yeah."

Molina nodded, satisfied. "We'll get our turn."

Matt wasn't sure what she meant: that they'd get their turn at Max Kinsella, or at the truck.

Molina leaned against the car fender. "Kinsella's smart. He's got the best seat in the house.

We're standing on hot asphalt waiting for a pretty-please chance at the evidence."

Matt shrugged. Only the rotating lights made the site hot. The air was actually chilly.

"Are you saying," he asked, "that their drug bust has priority over a kidnapped person?

Temple could be--"

"I frigging know it," Molina said. "These guys have frigging priority. Mess with 'em and you get a slow sentence on their time clock."

But she swaggered forward, finally buttonholing one of the chunky guys in commando gear.

They talked. Hands gestured. Molina returned.

"And?"

"They're not finding anything. I made a deal."

"What deal?"

"You bring Kinsella over for a search."

"Kinsella?"

"This semitrailer is loaded with magic-show gear. The cast of thousands, including the human and feline stars of the show, has vanished elsewhere. This major drug bust has nabbed two drivers whose underdeveloped muscle has displaced their brains. Errand boys. There's apparently nothing in the trailer but elaborate empty boxes. The narcs want to take the truck back to their secured lot and go over it with a fine-tooth flea comb tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow morning? Temple could suffo--"

"So I told them we have an expert searcher. Better than a drug-sniffing superdog. A human nose when in comes to magical paraphernalia. Think he'll come running if you ask him nicely?"

"I think he'll come running if I tell him that no one cares about looking for Temple until they feel like it."

"I don't care what bait you use. I only care that the fish goes for it."

"Fine." Matt trotted back to the Taurus, angry with both faces of the law.

He leaned over the open driver's side window.

"The drug enforcement unit has priority, but it can't find a thing. The truck will wait in a lot until morning unless you search the magic-show gear for hidden narcotics. If you find Temple, the drug guys won't object."

"Politics."

Max got out and slammed the car door shut. "I suppose my services are Molina's idea?"

"She's along for the ride, just like us."

"She's along for the kill, don't you doubt it."

Kinsella strode forward with seven-league steps, forcing Matt to lengthen his stride. He felt like Chester Goode limping after Mr. Dillon.

Molina greeted Kinsella's arrival with a weary tilt of her head toward the open maw of the trailer. "It's all yours."

Kinsella slicked his hair back from habit, but without an anchor for the pony tail it did no good.

A bulky man in what looked like a flack vest blocked Kinsella's way. "This is what you're looking for." In the light of a flashlight, Matt glimpsed purple-and-white capsules on a palm.

"Pills, or plain powder, like crack. We've done a cursory search, but that truck bed's loaded with mumbo-jumbo stuff. Can't make head or tail of it. The lieutenant said you could."

Kinsella threw a glance over his shoulder. "I guess I'm enough of a politician to be good at mumbo jumbo. Got a light?"

The man handed Kinsella latex gloves and a flashlight as he walked into the squad car spotlight trained on the gaping rear doors. The big rig sat marooned like an island of hollow steel.

Kinsella entered the truck with one superhero leap.

Beside Matt, Molina started, as if afraid he had vanished.

"Always a showman," she commented.

"Maybe he has to con the narcs into letting him have a fair shot at it. Do you think Temple's in there?"

"If she isn't we don't want to speculate where she might be."

"Lieutenant--"

She put a hand on his shoulder. "Do you think I like using Kinsella as a hunt-dog? He's got the best chance. The drug group doesn't believe in magic, that it's possible to hide someone in a hollow box."

"She just. . . disappeared."

"I know. What's worse, she was always meant to."

"Why would drug smugglers care about Temple?"

"Why would Effinger?"

"You like bringing it back to me?"

"No. But that's where it goes back to. So tell me why she was there with him. "

They both knew they were no longer talking about Effinger. They walked away from the truck doors, away from the Crown Vic into the deep velvet dark of the desert. Where they walked, skitter and chitter and grind halted. They carried their own desert with them, empty and dry and silent.

"They're together again," Matt said. Strange how honest that sounded.

"Not at the moment," Molina noted dryly. "I suspect it's more his fault than yours."

"The kidnapping?"

Molina might have nodded. She sighed. "Right. One thing I like about Las Vegas."

"Yes?" He felt like a straight man.

"No mosquitoes."

"No mosquitoes," he agreed. But there were sand fleas and chiggers and a thousand other annoying insects of the high desert. "I'm sorry I didn't spot the woman you were looking for."

"I was looking for an untoward event. We got that."

"You weren't looking for Kinsella."

"No. Sometimes I do love this life."

"Not always."

"No. My instincts tell me she's in that truck."

"Then why doesn't anybody see, hear anything?"

"These are instruments of illusion, packed to the gills and probably transporting narcotics.

They'd be clever about concealment."

"Powder and pills, maybe, but Temple's a human being."

"Small, though. Give me that. Small. A regular Thumbelina."

"You think that has something to do with why they can't find her?"

"I hope so. I hope so."

They turned without further conversation and made their heavy-footed way back through sand and scrub.

The lights were still trained on the inside of the truck.

When the lieutenant stopped to consult with the drug team commander, Matt moved to the very lip of the stalled semi's storage area.

A forest of strange boxes and pedestals resembled a struck stage set for some Mount Olympus drama from the 1930s. Matt listened, and heard the faint mewling of a seagull.

In the desert?

There was Lake Mead, but how many seagulls were trucked in?

"Do you hear--?" Matt intended to ask Molina, who stood only fifteen feet behind him, but a voice much closer answered.

"Shh! I'm following the sound." Kinsella appeared from around a Gothic grandfather clock with a sword for a pendulum.

"That's the only sound you hear?"

"The way these props are built, sound doesn't much escape the perimeters. Magicians are smooth and silent, like the dead, didn't you know?"

Kinsella grinned into the garish light, then vanished behind a gypsy caravan.

Beyond Matt, impatient combat boots ground sand to silica.

"I heard a mewling sound," Matt said hopefully when Molina came up.

"Please. No more cats. This case was heralded by cats. I don't want to see another one."

"What do you mean?"

"Mister Midnight Louie and Miss Midnight Louise were present when Effinger's soggy body was dredged up from the Oasis barge-pool."

"Louie was there? And that cat from the Crystal Phoenix?"

"Yes. I hope you set as little store by the presence of cats on the scene of the crime as I do."

"I'm not superstitious. Still--"

" And everywhere that Temple went, her cat was sure to go?' "

"No, that would be too ridiculous. In fact, lately, Midnight Louie has been showing a marked dislike for his old haunts."

"Has he indeed? Could this be a cat with taste? With deep and eerie instincts? What do you think?"

Before Matt could answer Molina's sarcasm, Max Kinsella appeared from behind a mummy case.

"Might these be what the chaps in the moon-invasion outfits want?" His palm flowered open to reveal a cluster of capsules, half-clear, half-purple.

The drug team gathered around like hash-sniffing hounds.

"Where'd you find those?"

"Baggies of them. Under the celestial robes of the automated Fortune-telling Mama from Yokohama."

"All right!"

Combat boots beat a tattoo on the trailer's metal floor as the men raided the premises.

Max leaned against the trailer's side. "Now that the smuggled drugs are confiscated, I suppose I'm to be allowed a little peace and quiet to search the rest of the props?"

"Hyacinth!" a muffled masculine voice called from inside the truck. "Bingo."

"That's the name of the narcotic?" Matt asked, incredulous. "Hyacinth? That's what the note in Effinger's pocket referred to?"

Molina smiled and braced a hand on the truck level. In an instant she had pulled herself up to the trailer floor level. Kinsella applauded her feat, not easy in a skirt. Then Matt jumped up.

"Hyasynth," Molina repeated. "S-y-n-t-h. A designer drug fresh from Hong Kong. They needed to get it out before the Communists took over and quashed all sorts of dubious private-enterprise factories. One component is a digitalis replica taken from hyacinths as a base to produce the usual high."

"I don't get it." Matt was honestly confused. "Why Las Vegas?"

"Because it wasn't Hong Kong." Max pushed his long frame off the trailer opening. "Perfect cover. A magician's props. Are these clodhoppers going to get out of my way soon, Lieutenant?

I've got a Very Important Person to find."

"Got your evidence?" Molina shouted into the trailer's long metal cavern. "Get 'em into the van. We've got missing persons to find."

"Missing persons?" Matt asked.

She shrugged. "Kinsella did hear a mewing sound."

The men, carrying garbage bags full of gently clicking capsules bounded off the trailer end in formation, the vehicle shaking as each man leaped to the ground.

The moment the drug-hounds had deserted the trailer, Max began moving his fingers over the nearest cabinet as if searching for Braille.

Matt's alarm grew as he watched the magician's swift and serious search.

Before this, everyone had seemed so laid-back, as if there were no hurry. Now, it was all hurry.

"I've been hearing a faint cry," Kinsella said, finding a hidden spring and clicking open a sword-swallowing taboret.

The cinnabar-red painted interior was empty.

Matt moved among the magical furniture, listening for clues.

A banshee's cry came from far within the trailer.

"Eeeeeeroooooooow. "

Kinsella bounded in that direction, still using the flashlight Molina had commandeered.

"That doesn't sound like anything human," Molina pointed out.

"You wouldn't sound very human if you'd been locked in a virtual coffin decorated by mandarin-fingernail painting," Matt said, as Kinsella wrestled another tall case away from the side wall. His long fingers made spider-light tracks across the front surface.

When Matt joined him, he tilted the unit forward just in time for Matt to catch the brunt of its weight, then did the same thorough finger-walking over its lowered top and revealed bottom.

At last a secret lower drawer clicked out and jammed into the trailer floor.

Kinsella rooted through a tangle of rainbow-colored scarves, then rose and pushed the cabinet upright.

Some pieces were covered in tarps. Kinsella began ripping them off. His early handling technique had been cautious, even respect-fill. Now he was indifferent to the magical cabinet-maker's art.

Matt heard a squeak, or a cry. "There!" He pointed to a low shrouded oblong.

The elasticized ropes binding the piece snapped like suspenders in Kinsella's eager fingers.

He knelt before the revealed object.

It reminded Matt of an altar from a Black Mass. Chains and locks crisscrossed its sinister battered leather surface, which was scribed with arcane signs scrawled in the deep burgundy-brown color of old blood.

Kinsella rubbed his hands together, as if stimulating circulation. He tapped on the trunk in various places, tested the chain links, rattled the locks.

"If Temple were confined in something like that," Matt demanded, exasperated, "wouldn't she have run out of air by now?"

Kinsella shook his head. "These props are all made of wood. Wood breathes. It never joins as tightly as it should. These may be built to look as solid as a steel safe, but in magic everything is the opposite of what it appears to be."

"In life, too, I'm beginning to think."

The man grinned up at him in the harsh glare of the flashlight. "Sounds like you're learning."

"If we don't have keys, we need .. . picks, hatchets."

"Violent, aren't we?"

Kinsella's hands roamed the heavy metal keys like a pianists. He unthreaded a length of chain then jerked. Two loops fell free.

"I suppose," he told Matt in a confidential us-guys tone, "that if I asked Molina for a nail file, and she did have one, she would stab me with it."

Matt dug in his pockets. "I've got a nail clipper, one of those deals with a short pull-out file.

"Good work, Scout Devine! I'll take it."

Kinsella fanned out his bare hand like a surgeon anticipating the slap of a scalpel on his palm.

Matt complied, a little harder than he had to.

"Male nurses can be so violent," Kinsella said, chuckling and handing Matt the flashlight.

Kinsella flipped out the two-inch ribbed-metal file--utterly useless for smoothing off hangnails, Matt had always found--and began probing the keyholes as if they were open wounds in need of cleaning out.

Matt aimed the light at whatever lock Kinsella explored.

Sometimes he gave up and moved on. At other times, a lock conceded with a click that sounded like applause to Matt's blood-pulsing ears. Then Kinsella would draw another long length of chain free and into a puddle on the floor.

Ten minutes became fifteen by the watch Matt's mother had given him, that he wore only on occasions "out."

"You believe she can breathe, if she's here somewhere?" he asked at last.

"These devices aren't made for smothering someone, merely containing them, concealing them, letting them escape. It's too bad I never taught Temple some tricks of the trade. . .. ah!"

Another lock sprung open. More chain pulled through Kinsella's agile hands to coil on the metal floor.

An almost unheard whine hailed the fall of the last length of chain.

Kinsella shook his hands, spread his arms, fanned his fingers over the trunk's front corners, and lifted.

The metal-banded maw cracked, then split, then elevated upward.

Matt felt his blood slow in his veins. The trunk was big enough to hold Temple, especially if her body were curled up. And why would it be curled up? Because someone had forced her into that position to fit into the trunk? Because she had assumed it herself? The ever-comforting fetal position? Or because she had curled up and died. That expression didn't exist for nothing.

The flashlight he held glared like a nova sun into the darkness inside the trunk. Anyone alive in there would have reacted to the bright light, would have stirred or protested.

But all Matt saw were the trunk's dark corners outside the overheated circle of the flashlight beam. No one was inside.

Relief felt like the flu, his arms and legs aching as if all the blood in his body was draining.

The next thought was: if not this casket, what about the next? And the next. And the next.

This was like playing hide-and-seek in a funeral-parlor coffin-display room and he had very recent reason to be familiar with that grimly hushed arena.

And then the darkness moved, leaped up at him and the flashlight, struck the portable lamp from his hand.

"What the devil--?" Kinsella was caught off guard too.

Matt jumped back to retrieve the light where it lay rocking on the floor.

Something brushed his leg as he did so, and he couldn't restrain a shudder.

He swept the light across the floor, until its beam nailed the perpetrator. Matt saw flattened ears, frown-ruffled forehead blinking eyes with the pupils narrowed to a vertical slit the width of a straight pin. A tail lashed the trunk's outside corner.

"Louie?"

"Oh, no," came Molina's groan from outside the truck. "Keep searching."

Kinsella bent to pick up the cat.

Louie's feet flailed against the magician's chest, and from the expression on his face, a few claws connected.

"Who wants this fireball?"

"Put him down," Matt suggested. "Maybe he knows where Temple is."

"This is a wild goose chase," Molina said from her distance. "We should go back to the theater and conduct a more thorough search there."

Kinsella was quick to answer. "We haven't conducted a thorough search here yet."

Matt heard the mockery as Kinsella repeated her official phrase: conduct a thorough search.

He could afford to mock the routine, the methodical means of the law. He was an outlaw.

Before Matt could decide which side to join--stay with Kinsella until every box had been broken down or rush back with Molina to strip-search the theater topside and below--Kinsella spun violently forward and tore the tarp from a concealed shape.

What he revealed made even Matt catch his breath.

"It's the cabinet Temple disappeared from! But how can that be? Did they break down the stage props that fast?"

"Or a duplicate," Kinsella suggested.

He grabbed the pulls centered on the pierced Oriental brass circles. Both doors swept open.

Matt glimpsed a figure inside: shadowy, still. Like a statue.

Kinsella mimicked its frozen attitude. Only his lips moved.

"Lieutenant, you better split your skirt seams again and get up here."

He stood as still as a man face-to-face with a striking snake, his tone severe. Matt turned with a swoop of the flashlight beam and ran to the truck apron to help Molina make the giant step up.

Her hand was already reaching up when he got there. Between his alarmed pull and her push she was up beside him as lightly as an acrobat.

Their feat surprised them almost as much as Kinsella's alarm.

They rushed to the rear of the trailer.

Kinsella still stood before the open doors he had forced into revealing their contents.

Matt's flashlight beam probed the open space beyond him. The demonic figure inside wore a familiar face indeed: Max Kinsella's.

The box's back wall was a mirror.

"You need to see this, Lieutenant," Kinsella said tightly, like a man afraid to move even his lips, as if something transient and shocking might melt away at too much attention.

Molina stepped past Matt to stand behind Kinsella, so close that she finally saw what he saw.

Matt watched her shoulders stiffen.

He edged next to her place, straining to see the devilishly reflected light, the mirror-refracted light.

He saw Kinsella's facade, as through a glass darkly. Saw the glass that reflected it. Saw . . .

scratches upon the glass. Sand-painting. Scrawls.

The letters were printed in a shade the flashlight illuminated as ox-blood red.

Big letters, lavishly covering on the glass. At a slight angle, up to the right.

R-e-m-e-m-b-e-r m-e

y-o-u b-a-s-t-a-r-d!