Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 3

Nightmare in Red

Temple must have edged into the Twilight Zone.

She had a sense of not quite losing consciousness, but of losing track of time, and perhaps space.

She could still hear Electra rustling in the kitchen of her unit, but she felt suspended somewhere else, between two opposite poles, one as fiery and relaxing as hot wax, one icy and full of frozen tension.

Her oddest delusion was that Midnight Louie had swelled in size, as perhaps her face was doing. His warm length had stretched along her right side until he seemed to match her height.

Cats will do that, and Louie could twist himself like a licorice rope to an impossible length, front and back limbs flung to their farthest extremes.

But Louie wasn't panther-size the last time she looked.

So she looked again, cautiously, through her uncorrected vision.

Louie's fuzzy (thanks to her deficient eyes, not his sufficient hair) tail dangled off the California queen-size bed's edge, and his heating-pad-abetted body heat ran alongside her all the way to the top of her head on its mound of pillows.

Louie was large and flexible, but not that large and flexible. Not unless he was doing magic tricks these days.

Temple turned her head--far too quickly and far too far for her condition--and squinted into the green eyes that looked as large as saucers in her unfocused gaze.

"Midnight. . . Max! How did you get here?"

Before he could answer, Electra hallooed from the next room. "If you've got everything you need, dear, I'm leaving now."

"Fine. Thanks," Temple managed to mumble.

She heard the landlady's key turn in her door, locking her in, with Max.

His fingers played with her hair, startling her. Seeing through a veil, palely, made even the lightest touch threatening.

"Poor baby. I found your old glasses in the medicine cabinet. Will they help?"

"Yes!" Temple grabbed at the blur dangling from the invisible hand at the end of a black sleeve and shoved them at her face like a mask.

"Ooh!" Even lightweight plastic hurt as it touched the bridge of her nose and curled behind her ears. But at least she could see. Max was clad in magician's black from neck to toe, lying alongside her pillow- and ice-packed body like a human breakwater.

"What are you doing here? How did--?"

"Electra wisely called for reinforcements, especially when you refused to go to an emergency room. I gave her my number when I came back. She was terribly worried, said you had hit your head."

"Something hit my head. Mainly I got slapped."

She lifted her left hand to her cheek and winced. Why did one have to probe a hurt to make sure it was real? "Ouch!"

"Don't mess with it." Max captured her hand and held it. Her fingers felt icy in his warm grasp, but maybe that was from touching the ice packs alongside her face and neck.

"Temple," he said, "I understand why you want to avoid a medical record on this, but I'm not sure it's wise. It's not the mouth cut and the black eye. You could have a concussion; that's what worried Electra too."

"Black eye! Where?"

"Where they usually are. How are you feeling? Sleepy?"

"No. Just . . . numb. All this ice--" She started to push the packs away, but Max stopped her hand again.

"You need it. That's my job. If you won't go to the hospital, I'm here to see that you don't push off your cold packs and that you don't go to sleep."

"Well, you were always good at that last part--ow!"

"What's the matter?"

"I guess I breathed too strenuously. And how come it feels like my mouth is stuffed with cotton wool?"

"Swelling from the cuts to your inner cheek. When you're stable enough to standi you can rinse your mouth with warm saltwater. The icepack stopped the bleeding, so you won't need stitches. Lucky you. Inside mouth stitches are pesky."

"Aw," Temple moaned, beginning to realize what an utter mess she was.

"And don't flail your legs. Electra put antibiotic ointment on the cuts and scrapes."

She sighed, and Max sighed soon after.

His voice lowered to an intimate tone she would have called pillow talk except that there was no danger of any hanky-panky here and now.

"Temple, I can't tell you how sorry I am that this happened again. Those first two thugs look like goners by now, and I was complacent enough to assume new goons wouldn't spring up to take their places. Electra thought you hadn't been under attack for very long when she got there, but two seconds is too long, as far as I'm concerned. Damn my past! I've no right to think you can have anything to do with me."

It was a very nice speech, Max beating his breast with copious mea culpas. She was almost tempted to leave things as they were, nurse Kinsella clucking over her, the pet patient, and feeling so deliciously guilty. She deserved pampering and penitence for at least a few more minutes.

"Oh," she commented astutely, making noise more from moral than physical discomfort.

"This hasn't got a darn thing to do with you, Max, you conceited ass."

"It doesn't? You were simply mugged? Any self-defense expert could warn you that you're most vulnerable entering and leaving your car, in parking garages, parking lots. ..."

Temple was even more tempted to leave him there, stubbing his toes on his next half-baked conclusion. But her conscience writhed as much as her over sensitized skin.

"Not exactly any old mugger."

"How can one be 'not exactly any old mugger.' "

"He can be a shady character known to someone of the victim's acquaintance."

Max was silent, translating her reluctant, roundabout confession.

"You knew the creep?"

"Only by description."

"Don't play with me, Temple." Max's lips brushed her unhurt cheek. "I'm tired of half-meanings."

"This had nothing to do with you. At least not directly. It was. . . Matt's stepfather."

"Cliff Effinger? But why would he mess with you? I know that Devine turned him in to Molina. ..." He moved his face parallel to her mostly immobile features. "He took it out on you, is that it, to get to his stepson?"

Temple swallowed, then regretted it. All the muscles on the left side of her face protested major movement. Even talking was wearing her down. As was Max.

"Was that it?" he persisted. "Just. . . blink your eyes 'yes.' "

She tried to laugh, another painful procedure. "What's 'no,' then? Or don't you want to hear any of those?"

"Effinger went after you in revenge for Devine's tracking him down?"

"A warning, he said."

"Matt Devine." Max savored the name as much as spoke it. His tone was not so much antagonistic as rueful. "His purely personal quest stirred up a hornet's nest, I'll give him that.

And now the wasps are stinging everybody in sight. Nobody wanted to see Efflnger located by the police. Nobody," Max added in particularly grim tones.

"Your eyes are green again," she said out of the blue.

"What? Oh, I forgot. These are my Las Vegas eyes."

"And your Minneapolis eyes. Maybe I'll try to lose these stupid glasses again, see if I can adjust to contact lenses. Give it another try. I could have kaleidoscope eyes then, too. A new color. A new me. What about. . . violet."

"Lovely." Max's finger touched the tip of her nose. "But not you."

"Who says? Mr. Chameleon the shape-shifter?"

"True. I'm no one to discourage a changed appearance." His fingers toyed with her hair again, as his mouth nibbled delicately at the good side of her face. "You'll be better by morning, Temple, and then you can make appointments with your dentist and optometrist. At least you should be pretty well healed by New Year's. We'll go out, in disguise and dark glasses, someplace extravagant to see the New Year in."

"Ummm," she agreed, distracted from aches and pains and everything else by Max's minor amorous attentions. She was definitely not up for the majors this evening.

Then her sedated memory and its coconspirator, guilt, kicked in again.

"No, Max, I can't go anywhere with you New Year's Eve, not even with dark glasses!"

"Why not?"

"Urn, I have an appointment."

"An appointment on New Year's Eve?"

"A meeting."

"With whom?"

"You're so grammatical in crises; I should have known there was something suspicious about you from the first."

"Forget the first, what about the first of the New Year?"

"I'm going out. With Matt."

"Devine?"

"The very one."

If she had not been banged up, he would have dropped her like a hot potato, his shock was that palpable.

"Why? After New York--"

"This is to finish up before New York business. Matt asked me as soon as I got back. I haven't heard the gory details of his track-down of Effinger."

"You have plenty of gory details relating to Cliff Effinger yourself. If that's why you were attacked, why hang around the cause?"

"Because. I haven't told him yet."

"About us. Simple. There's a phone right on the nightstand. Call him and tell him."

"Max! I can hardly talk right now."

"You won't be that much better by New Year's."

"You just said--"

"That was before I knew you had other plans."

"I'll feel better if I'm with you?"

"Yes! And you'll be safer too."

"I don't know. You two are about even when it comes to safety factors."

"My wasps are dead."

"Presumed dead. Some of them. Should I, like, tell Molina about this?"

"God, no! Your instincts about the police are dead right. Otherwise I'd never let you sweat this out at home."

"Freeze is more like it."

Max sighed at the reminder and drew closer. "I shouldn't agitate the invalid."

"Exactly. Especially if you intend to hang around all night."

"I do."

"Whatever happened to Louie?"

"He dove over the side when I showed up."

"Oh, poor guy, he's feeling shunted aside."

"Poor guy is pretty bright."

"He's used to sleeping next to me."

"Funny, I'm used to not sleeping next to you. Guess we'll have to work it out."

"He'll think you're moving in on him."

"I wish I could, but it's better I stay under the radar for now. I'm still partially responsible for your problem, Temple." Max rested his chin oh-so-lightly on the top of her head. "Effinger is one of my problem players too. He doesn't just belong to Matt Devine. And neither do you."

"I don't 'belong' to anyone."

"I know. But let's pretend."

"Urn, Max. I'm not supposed to do anything strenuous."

"Nothing strenuous," he agreed, as incorrigibly amiable as always.