“Want Barrett and me to do some digging there?”
“Higher placed minions of the law than you and me have done that for years and came up with harassment suits and ACLU press conferences. Besides, the Goliath death is iffy, at best.”
Alfonso stood, taking a stab at pulling his belt up over his ballooning belly. “If the words ‘she left’ show up on this Vassar’s corpse, though, let me know.”
“You and half the force.”
Chapter 30
All in Another Night’s
Work: Split Personality
Max was finding his new double identity, established on an impulse, quite handy.
He was back at Neon Nightmare on a crowded Friday night in his Phantom Mage persona.
Given the circus of acrobats, dancers, and magicians who performed nightly at the place’s pinnacle and then came down to earth when their gigs were over to mingle with the audience, the Phantom and his hokey half-mask fit right in.
Max knew he was like a moth drawn to flit around the fatal flame the Synth threw off, but the building was itself a maze that demanded further exploration before he could hope to penetrate to the heart of the labyrinth, the Synth and all its works, and its workers.
What he didn’t learn now by clandestine explorations, his own self could return later to learn by subterfuge.
So he began at the bar, buying a drink and moving along it to entertain its patrons with a card illusion, an instant manifestation of a filled glass, a silk-flower bouquet, whatever cheap tricks would make him a familiar and accepted figure in their midst.
He gyrated out onto the dance floor a time or two, thankful that the music’s volume made conversation impossible. The place was a mime’s paradise, actually, a high-volume meat market for the young and the restless, transient singles in search of momentary connection.
After ninety minutes another breath-defying bungeetrapeze act was flashing through the neon stampede high above. Drums beat like pounding horse hooves, so loud they made the floor shake and teeth ache and almost impinged on sanity.
During this perfect distraction, Max turned the white side of his mask to the wall and slunk along it in search of a door to an area he had not yet investigated.
The place was as riddled with hidden chambers as a Swiss cheese. He still hadn’t erected a mental map of the place, unusual for his swift and certain skill at 3-D visualization.
And the doors were the same seamless built-ins that could only be cracked like a safe in the pitch dark: with the help of sensitive fingertips in finding the fulcrum that controlled the swing mechanism.
A piece of wall became a door under the pressure of his fingers. Once cracked, it remained only ajar. Max tried to listen for any sound beyond it, but the chaos of the nightclub concealed it and also filtered through now that it was open. Best he dart within before the sound leak betrayed his snooping, and explain himself to anyone inside later.
Not only doors opened at his fingertips, but a cover story was always a moment’s inspiration away.
But the area beyond the door was empty and dark, and when Max pushed the door’s opposite point, it swung smoothly shut.
He moved quickly, feeling the limits of his particular box of darkness with his hands and feet. As long as he expected anything—unseen stairs leading up or down, sud-den openings, a demanding resident or guard—he would be surprised by nothing.
Voices murmured faintly ahead to his left. Probably the club room of the Veteran Magician’s Society. The Phantom Mage was an upstart to them, and would not be as welcome as an established act like the Mystifying Max.
He almost chuckled aloud at how easily he could approach the Synth from two different personas, now that he had found their hideout.
But that was just it. Had he truly found the Synth? No one had mentioned the name during his introductory interview three nights ago. Max guessed that they were a front organization, and that not all the members even knew about the Synth.
Still, Rafi Nadir’s presence outside the club Wednesday night was a bad omen. First he shows up in Las Vegas and gets his ex-girlfriend Molina’s paddle holster in a snarl. Then he shows up at the TitaniCon science fiction convention as a hired guard in alien guise. Then he’s out at Rancho Exotica in another semiofficial role. Next he’s in a strip-club parking lot just in time to see Temple attacked by a serial killer. Then he’s hired as security at the Cloaked Conjuror’s secret estate. Now, here he is at Neon Nightmare. True, men who take muscle jobs move around like pawns on a chessboard, busy as beavers while the more powerful people behind them move glacially slow, preferring to sacrifice the front men rather than their own safety.
But Nadir was turning up like funny money in a Monopoly game.
Max’s fingers, which had never left the smooth sheet-rocked walls and had felt every taped seam, again encountered one of the featureless doors. The pressure points changed from door to door, never turning up in the same predictable position, as a doorknob would. He stretched high and low and finally found the right spot.
Low-level light outlined the rectangle of a slightly open door.
Max eeled inside, finding himself in another comfortably clubbish room, but this one offering a wall of Eye-inthe-Sky television screens reporting from various spy points throughout the building.
The seat before the console was a burgundy leather wing chair. Max sensed this was a recreational watching post for the most part. He sensed the mind of a nonsexual voyeur. A dilettante of surveillance, who enjoyed the power of looking out over this dark and neon-lit realm. Not that the board couldn’t be manned by a serious surveillance team if necessary.
He quickly checked all the camera locations so he would know what to avoid on his next visit.
A half glass of wine sat on the cherry wood console. He came near, sniffed like a dog. A dessert wine, sweet and expensive.
He could picture some enormous Nero Wolfe of magical misdeeds sitting here overseeing his hidden realm.
Enough theorizing! Time to leave before the oeneophile returned.
Once again in the dark beyond a closed door, Max waited and listened, then moved farther into the building.
Suddenly, a grid of hot pink glowed ahead of him.
Moving along the wall he almost felt a part of, Max discovered the passage widened. A giant blocked his path.
Elvis, maybe nine feet high.
His white suit glowed, accented with garish magenta and indigo lightning bolts and the famous Taking Care of Business initials: TCB. Indigo streaked his hair and his hot-pink guitar had strings of poison green.
He was executed all in neon, of course.
Max moved out of the dark and into a neon Wonderland. Behind Elvis lurked a red neon shoe big enough for a potion-expanded Alice, dotted with patriot-blue stars. A neon lion boasted a mane that lit up in alternating strands of orange and hot pink.
The place was a hidden museum of neon. Max moved among the gigantic figures, noting that most of the styles seemed to date from the advertising art’s heyday, say the fifties and sixties.
After the concentrated darkness behind the scenes, Max felt he now inhabited some Technicolor dreamscape. A galaxy of neon icons loomed over him, reminding him of fabulous dreams he had as a child, when illuminated pinwheels of planets and galaxies in the night sky spun just above him and he could only gaze in wonder. He’d never forgotten those dreams, and had never had them since. Sometimes he wondered why, wondered what he had lost, what all children lost.
Yet here this universe of forgotten neon silently winked on and off, lighting up a space as vast and dark as a jumbo-jet hangar. Who would imagine Neon Nightmare harboring such a huge hunk of neon paradise?
Max rarely played the tourist.
He never blinked at the neon icons on the Strip, although he admired their gorgeous chutzpah. Those signs, the Flamingo Hilton’s chorus line of hot-pink feathers, the Four Queens’s glittering card faces downtown, were the showgirls of the Strip, bejeweled, beplumed, bedazzling. Living in Vegas, you quickly came to take them for granted. Maybe you even wanted to apologize sometimes for their blatant appeal.