Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 47

Found and Lost

The two men stared at the shoe, immobilized as it was.

To Molina, it looked like it was either jauntily hooked there for a fashion shoot. Or like it was impaled there in its owner's extremis.

Molina's job was to know first which case fit the scenario. She stepped forward to aim the flashlight at the casket bottom, automatically using her body to block the others' view.

No use letting the nearest and dearest view the situation first.

The flashlight picked up the steel glint of handcuffs. Molina relaxed slightly. You don't handcuff a dead body. Then again, lack of air, a drug overdose . . . Her flashlight beam on the face produced squeezed- shut eyelids. Molina began to turn.

But as if sensing her verdict, the men jerked into motion again, both reaching for the contents of the casket.

Remarkably, they managed to work in concert. Kinsella pulled up Temple's shoulders; Devine picked up her ankles.

In seconds she was sitting against the box that had confined her, woozy and blinded by the light.

No one asked if she was all right. They simply watched her, trying to gauge her condition.

Midnight Louie had no such inhibitions. He meowed in a forlorn tone and came stalking up to her, rubbing his side against her flexed knees, pushing his face into her arm.

"Louie?"

Temple's voice, always husky, was a dry desert rattle.

"He came along for the ride too," Molina explained. "In his own carrier."

" 'Carrier.' " Temple tried to laugh but it was hard to do with no sound effects. "Pretty good."

Devine knelt beside her. "Water. Is there any way, any-where--?"

"Gas station," Molina said. "On the way back."

Kinsella also knelt beside her, picked up her handcuffed wrists as if they were Dresden china.

He thrust the stubby file from the nail clipper into the mechanism. Presto changeo, the cuffs sprang open like Tiffany bracelets.

Kinsella handed the implement back to Devine.

Temple's wrists separated into a poignant, empty gesture, as if she'd begun it hours before and had been stalled from finishing it. The note of panic in her voice was heartbreaking.

"Max. She took my ring. She never gave it back. It's gone."

He gathered her against him as someone would a hurt child. "It's all right. There are other rings. Dozens and dozens of other rings."

And only one Temple.

The unspoken sentiment was echoed by Matt Devine's silence as he stood, stepped back, ebbed out of the picture.

"Where are we?" Temple finally asked. "It was so dark and the box was jostled around so much . . . and they stuck me. My elbow."

"Left?" Kinsella asked.

"How'd you know?"

"That's usually where right-handed people administer injections, and most people are right-handed." He held her inner elbow up to Molina's flashlight beam.

"Ultrafine needle," she diagnosed. "Probably some of their 'hyasynth' in liquid form. She seems exhausted and disoriented, but not in the throes of an O.D."

Kinsella nodded, a curt agreement.

"Can she stand?" Molina asked.

"Does it matter?" Kinsella's anger was as sudden and clean as a switchblade.

"Yes," Molina said much more gently than she felt like saying. "See if you can get her upright."

Temple rose on the support of his arm, shaky. "My shoe."

"Here." Matt Devine had retrieved it. "But you better not wear it right now. Better give me the other one."

He went down on one knee like Prince Charming while she balanced herself against Kinsella.

The absence of the single shoe restored balance to her body. She leveled her shoulders, looked stronger, leaned less on Kinsella.

"How did you find me?" she asked, looking at them all in turn.

Her unspoken question was: what are you natural enemies all doing here, together?

You, child. You.

"Mr. Kinsella realized something was wrong when you disappeared," Molina began.

" Before she disappeared," he corrected.

She ignored him. "Mr. Devine noticed Mr. Kinsella was gone from his seat--"

Temple looked at Matt, with a lucid and questioning gaze that made even Molina look away and hurry on. "Then I decided to explore the understage areas. Devine tailed me, I found Mr.

Kin-sella shaking up empty prop boxes and a few empty-headed ninjas. We suspected that you were gone, and since the DEA was tailing the show's semitruck, which took off about when you did, they followed, I followed, your swains twain followed. I would say even Midnight Louie followed, except that he was already aboard in his own traveling compartment."

Temple quirked a smile at her. Molina was actually, deeply, momentarily afraid she might have to like her.

"Sounds like Keystone Kops." Temple put more weight on her hose-clad feet. "With accessories before and after the fact." She whispered like The Shadow from the old radio show.

"So why do you want me upright, Lieutenant?"

Goddamn, but she could be fast, even after an ordeal like this.

"Let's go outside. Get some fresh desert air."

Devine joined Molina. Kinsella brought up the rear with Temple.

"How did you find me, really?" Temple was rasping like a sick child.

"We followed the yellow brick squad-car light," Kinsella said in the tone of a long-time teller of fairy tales.

Molina sighed. Matt Devine eyed her with some compassion. It should be the other way around, but at the moment she was willing to take what compassion she could find. She certainly couldn't give it. Not now.

He jumped down off the truck bed before her and held up a hand to break her leap.

Poor Matt. No lady fair but a lady lieutenant.

She touched his fingers as a courtesy but landed without his help.

Kinsella loomed over them, preparing to hand Temple down like an Egyptian mummy. Both of them reached up for her, broke the impact.

Matt held out the shoes. "You'll need these on the sand, such as they are."

Temple grabbed Molina's sleeve in one hand, and Devine's sleeve in the other then released each one in turn while she forced her feet into the dainty-toed slippers.

Then she leaned close to Molina and whispered in her ear.

Molina nodded at the men. "We're going around the trailer for a bit. Don't wander anywhere."

Temple put a hand on the truck side and tottered around to the other side.

"Are you sure there's no other choice?" she asked Molina.

"Absolutely sure."

"But I don't think I can."

"You say you can't wait."

"Yeah . . . but--"

"Here's a handkerchief. I always carry one. Leave it when you're done."

"But out here. In the dark. There might be snakes and spiders. I don't know."

"Think of mountain streams," she advised, like any veteran mother.

"Right," Temple croaked, grabbing the handkerchief from Molina's hand.

She tottered into the darkness on her absurd shoes.

Molina sighed again. Someday Mariah would be up to this. Soon.

When they came back around the truck corner together, Kinsella and Devine had the uneasy look of men abandoned by women for reasons not clear.

"What are you up to?" Kinsella, who had stripped off the latex gloves while they were gone, stepped forward to ask.

"I've asked Miss Barr if she'd mind delaying her return to civilization for a few minutes. The DEA has a couple suspects in hand. I asked them to hold them for Miss Barr."

"You had no idea that 'Miss Barr' was even here," Kinsella raged.

"Ah, but I had you to look for her, didn't I? An expert hunter. And she was. And is. So I'd like her to stroll past the suspects and see if she recognizes anybody."

"The men who grabbed me," Temple put in hoarsely, "... I think they were the masked ninjas. I didn't see any faces."

"That may not be the question," Molina put in silkily. Her eyes stayed on Kinsella. He was the mastiff. "If Mr. Devine will help me escort you to the front of the truck, this could be over in a few minutes."

"Something you don't want me to see, Lieutenant?" Kinsella jeered, already panicky at losing even temporary custody of Temple.

She could almost sympathize.

"Not something. Someone. Sit tight, magician."

Matt Devine, like a good partner, had materialized on Temple's right.

The two of them steered her over the shifting sand beside the road to the fire-breathing dragon-painted tractor.

Two men stood against the upright bulk of steel, their hands cuffed behind their backs; four men in DEA gear watched them.

Molina walked Temple close enough to see the mens faces in the lurid light of the pursuit-car headlights.

Temple gasped, and sagged between them.

Molina turned and guided her back down the trailer's Christmas-tree-lit length. Kinsella waited in the dark at the end of the overlit tunnel, like a gunfighter.

"Those aren't the men," Temple tried to say.

"Which men?"

"I don't think so. Not the men who grabbed me tonight. But definitely the men from ..."

She faltered, and it was Devine who held her up. "From the parking garage."

She bent a distressed look on Molina. "Everyone said they were probably dead."

"It's a good cover, isn't it?"

"Max said they were dead."

"Max isn't infallible, is he?"

"He found me, didn't he? He opened my handcuffs."

"But those are the two men who attacked you in the parking garage last summer?"

"Yes. Yes, I recognize them." Temple leaned her head on Devine's shoulder.

"Good. Good work. That gives us something to go on. Now I think we can drive back to Vegas, and then you can go home for some rest."

"Home," Temple said, sounding not only hoarse, but rueful.

Kinsella was waiting for her, but Molina wasn't done yet.

"Wait." She raised a traffic-cop hand.

He almost bulled right past it to reclaim Temple.

"I need to ask you a few questions, Mr. Kinsella. And now, I think you owe me a few answers."

He hesitated, like a trapeze artist on the brink of missing the crucial bar as it swung past.

Then his shoulders relaxed. "Whatever you say, Lieutenant. Where do we talk?"

"Down the trailer a bit."

"I'm all yours." He cocked Temple a smile and turned to follow Molina into the bright dark.

In the distance, the DEA officers loaded the rig's pair of drivers into their sole remaining van.

The vehicle spurted into the distance until it was only a pair of red taillights, shrinking like bat's eyes in the night.