Time for thought was done. The spotlights brightened on each platform, forty feet apart. A lithe figure in fluttering white stepped forward. A massive Darth Vader–like persona in black stepped forward.
Max swung out from the ceiling, dark but neither light nor heavy.
He swept out and down, catching Shangri-La’s torso in one arm, and rappelled off the side wall to deposit her in the niche where Midnight Louie held the big cats at bay. Maybe she was too light to tip the balance.
He pushed his feet against the wall again and caught up with the Cloaked Conjuror just as the platform broke and plummeted from his booted feet to the floor below. The crowd roared with fright.
He’d snagged CC by one arm. Their combined weight pulled Max’s bungee cord down, down, down toward the Lexan onion dome that both revealed and guarded the newly installed scepter.
Drop CC and the prize was his.
Instead they fell together like a lead weight, until the top of the spiral staircase leading to the scepter was just below.
Max let CC go. He dropped perhaps four feet.
Max kicked off the onion dome, swinging over the installation.
In an instant, he had seized the scepter and ricocheted from the base of the installation. The piercing whine of an alarm ran up and down the scale as the bungee cord rebounded up to the ceiling, making him a Spider-man about to go comic book splat!
Max caught at the collapsed platform that had been CC’s downfall. His body bruised into it, but his grasp held long enough to slow his rebound.
Then the platform sagged and broke free, falling down into the heart of the screams and scattering audience members below, including Temple.
Max had no time to look back. He bounced off the looming ceiling, slowed, in control again.
The big cats, cowed perhaps as much by the unscripted chaos as Midnight Louie’s fierce stand, had backed away from the treacherous platforms they’d been trained to mount on the music’s cue. If Midnight Louie could intimidate two panthers who outweighed him a hundred-to-one, Max guessed he could pull Shangri-La to safety.
She was using her considerable acrobatic skills to take her weight off the disintegrating platform beneath her feet, which were hampered by arch-deforming ballet toe-shoes. They produced a graceful image for an airborne magician-acrobat, but they were useless for establishing any foothold on a disintegrating web of wooden platforms and elastic bungee cords.
Max sailed down, the scepter in his belt flashing in one of the hidden mirrors above. He glimpsed Shangri-La’s makeup-masked features, her exotic beauty and grace, dismissing her ambiguous role in shady events past and present. Her life and lifeline made her as fragile now as a blown-glass ballerina.
He caught one wrist as she was slipping away. It was sharp and thin, a bundle of razor blades. Every sinew in his arm strained, but he had only to dive low, release her over a safe landing point, then fly up like Peter Pan dropping Wendy back at home.
But CC’s rescue had strained his synapses as well as tendon and bone. He could barely hold on to her. . . . Then a fiery cactus exploded on his back and shoulders.
He heard a martial arts yowl, cat style.
That damn Hyacinth, thinking to protect her mistress, was dooming her instead. Max’s fingers tightened, flinched, then felt skin and bones slipping through his grasp.
They were still thirty feet above the hard marble flooring.
The white butterfly fluttered free below him, spinning and glittering in a graceful, fatal trajectory.
Max, freed from the dead weight, rebounded against the ceiling so fast it took all of his remaining strength to slow the snap, to grab disintegrating platforms on his rebound, to become an unseen spider in a lethal web high above.
The cat slid off his back and fell, a tangle of bungee cords serving as its precarious cradle. It swung there, its shrill voice mimicking the relentless, heartbeat-stirring siren of the alarm.
The canned music hid the sound of whatever impact there had been. The scepter installation site looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.
Below him, people—heads of all colors—gathered, unthinking, around a shining reverse-Rorschach ink-blot pattern of fallen white on the pale floor far below. No one else seemed injured.
Max had no time left to linger, look back, regret. He unsnapped his trusty bungee cord, the only safe one because whoever had sabotaged the magic act had not known about his own arrangements. Then he ditched the boots, cloak, and CC mask, and his spider self slipped from the ceiling handholds and down the narrow escape tunnel he and Gandolph had made.
The Cloaked Conjuror and the big cats had survived to perform another day, thanks to Max—and Midnight Louie—being on the scene. Shangri-La definitely and possibly her cat Hyacinth were among the collateral damage.
“Damn,” Max hissed to himself over and over as he elbow crawled through the passage, its existence now publicly betrayed.
He struggled to keep the invaluable scepter from scraping on the narrowing ductwork. His spectacular theft had turned into a botched heist and a messy, semifailed rescue operation.
A woman lay dead on the exhibition floor. Temple’s assignment as well as his own were both terminally damaged. The Cloaked Conjuror’s show and career were tainted, perhaps beyond redemption, like his own.
He had let down everyone who depended upon him, whether they knew it or not.
And . . . the Synth would not be pleased. Or maybe those manipulative shadow figures would be delighted with the carnage, and the publicity.
Poor Temple! Her career was at stake, and he had not only meddled in it, but devastated the site of her greatest PR triumph.
Damn!
His back burned with raw fire, the badge of a cat’s tragically misguided courage. Otherwise he could have saved a human life, no matter his suspicions about its purpose. Shangri-La had been a mystery, maybe a criminal, but until tonight, she had been living. Her life had hung from his hands and slipped away.
He felt sick, as sick as when the IRA pub bomb had turned his boyhood best friend, his cousin Sean, into exploded bits of flesh and blood.
How could he face his uncle and aunt, his family?
He couldn’t then.
He couldn’t now. He had to go away, run far, find some way to make reparations. Leave home. Leave Temple. Leave Las Vegas, leave life and death behind him. Again.
Damn!
Cat’s Cradle
Triage is not a skill you usually find in PIs, or the apparently humble pussycat.
But I gaze down from the lip of the Big Cats staging area about as horrified as I have ever been in memory.
Shangri-La lies there, a mangled white butterfly on the white marble floor, a small pale form, framed by pieces of black platform that circle her like flotsam from a shipwreck. A shipwreck in the sky.
What to do? Where to go?
The Cloaked Conjurer is stirring at the mouth of his staging area where Mr. Max deposited him with superhuman strength. For even he cannot fool Midnight Louie. I would know those moves anywhere.
I glance at the Big Boys, who have realized that the act has turned deadly wrong.
“Return to your cages and sit tight,” I tell them. “Someone will come for you when they think of it.”
They retreat as meekly as the Cowardly Lion after Dorothy has slapped his nose. I am afraid I had to unsheath my shivs and do a little nose whacking myself to force them back from the deadly, drop-off edge.
I dash around their cages and to the connecting hall, taking a left and another left in the ill-lit maze all backstage areas are, the better to keep audiences from seeing in.
I have guessed right. CC is pushing himself up to his knees and leaning over the edge in an attempt to view the same horrible sight I have seen. He is shocked and groggy, so I am forced to take a stand in his path. I hiss and growl and slash him back, as if I were the trainer and he the cat act.