Wanting as much light as possible against the dangers of the lonely night. Sounded just like what his call-in clients craved.
Matt grimaced. Life was a metaphor, especially when you earned your living as a radio shrink. Still, he glanced carefully around. There was one particular “fan” he hoped never to see again. She made a habit of jumping him after he got off work in the wee hours, both here at WCOO and before that at ConTact, the hot line counseling service where he’d honed his phone advice technique.
Each parked vehicle reminded Matt of its owner: the producer/radio personality known as Ambrosia’s late ’70s red Cadillac convertible; Dwight the technician’s beat-up minivan; Keith’s decidedly downscale aging Toyota hatchback with its spindly tires about as wide as a ’60s necktie and that’s all.
Then there was his transportation.
Locked and tilted toward one of the sentinel parking lot lights the Hesketh Vampire’s convoluted silver silhouette looked like it belonged in a movie. The British custom motorcycle was borrowed wheels, but it could make a faster escape than the Volkswagen Beetle that was recently his, courtesy of Elvis. Or Elvis’s ghost. Or one of Elvis’s whacked-out impersonators. Or fans.
After his most recent unscheduled encounter with the woman Temple had nicknamed—Ouch! “nick” was the name of her game, all right—Kitty the Cutter, Matt felt safer with the ’cycle’s speed and agility, although more exposed on the bike than in a car. He still wasn’t sure that the phantom biker he glimpsed now and again wasn’t Miss Kitty. Then again, it might not be. If not, who was it? How about a ghost?
Matt smiled at his own fears. Monsters and ghosts. He was acting like a kid scaring himself with the dark. Except that it was indeed dark at this hour, and getting darker. Another metaphor.
He stopped thinking, an occupational hazard in both the radio talk-show game and his old vocation of priest, and went over to the streetlight-turned spotlight to unlock the bike, don his helmet and gloves, then spur the metal steed into the dull roar that would soon become a whine as it hit the streets and cruising speed.
Like any performer coming down from a late-night show, Matt was in no hurry to head home to the Circle Ritz.
He found himself pondering the mysteries of human, and more often inhuman, behavior after an hour of hearing everybody’s miseries. Now he had his own lethal mysteries to ponder. The current crop made his recent search for his lost stepfather look like a cake-walk. Poor Effinger, the ultimate loser; outclassed by an uppity hit-woman.
At least he assumed that was what Kitty O’Connor was. An odd, sadistically seductive hit woman, with a modus operandi of introducing herself to her victims. And, in his case, she had an even odder price. Or was it only his case? Was he part of a longtime pattern with her?
She had been Max Kinsella’s Waterloo years ago, when he was still a teenage tourist propelled into the lethal jig that politics, bombs, and the IRA had played for decades in Ireland. Now Kinsella, all grown up, was Matt’s personal bane, ever since he’d come back and taken Temple back, not that Matt had ever had her. It was easy to blame Max for Kitty’s brutal entrance into his own life. And wrong.
Wanting to resent Kinsella for every loss in his life, Matt tended to overlook one key fact: Kathleen O’Connor had first approached him during his hunt for Effinger. To this day, she still didn’t seem to know that Matt had become infatuated with Temple while Kinsella was among the missing. So Kitty was stalking him long before she could suspect any connection between him and Max, via Temple. She still seemed blind to the faint outlines of a former romantic triangle, and Matt would do anything to keep it that way. Temple must be protected at all costs. That was probably the only issue he and Kinsella would agree on.
The howl of the Vampire’s famously loud motor mimicked the chaos of his thoughts. The bike almost took its head like a willful steed. Soon the powerful motor was idling in another parking lot, this one utterly empty, except for the cold puddles of blue-green night lights.
A large, low building huddled like a bunker in the moonlight.
Matt locked the bike, hung the silver moon of his helmet on one handlebar, where it reflected its twin sister in the sky. Then he ambled across soundless asphalt to the sidewalks leading into the man-made Garden of Eden beyond the building.
Well, part Garden of Eden, he corrected himself. The other part of the Ethel M candy company’s famous cactus collection was Garden of Gethsemane. Garden of thorns. Where Jesus had spent his last hours before submitting to the mockery of trial, torture, and death.
Naturally, an ex-priest in Las Vegas needed to find someplace lone, harsh, and absolutely natural for contemplation. The area was meant for self-guided tours, kind of like life itself, and was a no-man’s-land at this hour, even in around-the-clock Las Vegas: 24/7, like they said. Everywhere was getting onto Las Vegas time nowadays: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Somewhere in that blur of time, Sunday had been swallowed up. Were God interested in creating Las Vegas, which Matt was pretty sure He would pass on, as He had on Sodom and Gomorrah, He’d probably skip taking the seventh day of rest off. Las Vegas and the Internet never slept.
Matt’s footsteps ground slightly against the paved walks someone had slipped into his Garden of Woe when he wasn’t looking.
When he’d first moved to Las Vegas, straight from leaving the priesthood, Matt had come here often, especially in the punishing summer heat. It reminded him of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness before he began his ministry, and struck him as fitting that he should tarry in a cactus garden at the end of his own ministry.
Tonight, though, Matt found that someone had paved purgatory (if not put up a parking lot, as the song said) since his last visit. Instead of raw sandy footpaths, broad sidewalks meandered among the cactus specimens. He couldn’t read the small identifying markers impaled in the ground by moonlight, but the plants’ bristling forms were somehow even more satisfying half-shrouded, their exact identities hidden.
A handsome wooden bench was now the centerpiece of an artistic break in the gently hilly layout. Matt sat on it, surrounded by shadow and silence.
He didn’t know if he sat in a paradise about to be lost forever, or a garden of thorns, of the uncertain angst that precedes the final agony.
He knew he was at a crossroads. Someone actually wanted his soul besides God. That’s what a religious vocation was, giving your soul to God. What happened when you walked away from that path? Did God return your soul, slightly used? Was it now up for grabs? Not that many people aspired to soul robbing these days.
That made Kitty O’Connor unique.
Was she the Devil then? Or just his private edition? He had to take her at her word. She wanted to force him to do the thing he least wanted to do. With her, anyway. Her weapon was to threaten those he cared about, anyone around him, really. Even a mere acquaintance like Sheila had been injured at the New Millennium Hotel only a few days ago. So Temple, Lieutenant Molina’s preteen daughter, Mariah, anyone he associated with, was in danger.
Therefore…he would associate with no one.
And she had won.
Or…he lived his life as before, took his chances. And gambled with the lives of everyone who touched his.
Temple. Sheila. Mariah. Electra Lark, his motherly landlady at the Circle Ritz. Another name joined the roster. Janice. He’d forgotten about her telephoned invitation to dinner Monday night. Tomorrow.
Who else would be coming to dinner?
Sitting there, alone in the dark, he heard the occasional hiss of tires on a nearby thoroughfare. When he’d first come here, the world had seemed so remote. Now it crowded in, smelling and sounding like city.
Or was he just now hearing the civilization that had always hemmed in his private piece of wilderness?