“Anyway,” he continued, “I knew I had to get to you and Baby Doll’s. Molina knew she had me in her sights and she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. I’d been in the same spot with her before and got away, but not this time.”
“Sights? She’d pulled a gun on you?”
“Right. I convinced her I wasn’t carrying and that I’d go anyway and she could justify the shooting however she liked.”
“Max! You shouldn’t bluff an angry, prejudiced person with a gun.”
“Wasn’t bluffing.”
“Max!”
He shrugged. “She’s not a killer, just a damn determined woman. I knew she wouldn’t shoot, and she knew I knew that. So . . . that woman has balls, I’ll give her that. She slams her semiautomatic on the hood of the nearest Ford 350 and decides to keep me from leaving using hand-to-hand combat.”
“She’s really crazy. You’re strong from all that stage work.”
“Used to be. Molina’s no lightweight, plus she’s trained. And, I didn’t want to hurt her.”
“You’re a gentleman.”
“Maybe. Mostly because an assaulting-an-officer charge is hard to defend against if she did manage to haul me in. The point, Temple, is she was costing me time. She was keeping me from getting to where I knew you were exposed to the real Stripper Killer. I tried to overpower her, but she wasn’t having any of it. We were too evenly matched, given my overriding concern to get away and get to you. I couldn’t clobber her outright. And I couldn’t gain enough advantage to get away fast enough and far enough. It was a stalemate. I had her pinned to a van, but the instant I let go, my advantage was gone. I had to get her off-guard, really shock the shield off of her.”
By now, Temple was listening like a kid at a campfire ghost-story telling. What would Max do? What clever magician’s trick?
“You remember my face after that night?”
“It was scraped.” Temple was jolted by the change of topic in the story.
“That’s because I let her take me down and cuff me. That finally became the only way I could get out of that damn parking lot and into her car where I could pick the handcuffs and unite her and her steering wheel with them until death did them part, then get out and get to Baby Doll’s to, I thought, save you. Except you and Rafi Nadir had already turned the trick.”
“And Midnight Louie. He alerted me to someone stalking me.”
Max put his head in his hands. “Don’t mention stalkers. I never want to hear that word again. Temple, when I had that woman up against that van, all I could think of was how to throw her off-guard. What would distract her the most so I could get away without hurting her or myself. What would shock her. So . . . you had to have been there . . . I sort of came onto her. Loathing me as she does, it was the only trick I had left up my sleeve. And it did freeze her into next week. I almost got away before she recovered and I had to play ‘possom. That’s really why she ground my face in the asphalt and why she might think I’m her stalker.”
“Oh, wow.” Temple put her own head in her hands. “Like what did you do, say?”
“It was the heat of the moment. I don’t even remember.”
“She sure does.”
Max cleared his throat. “I might have implied she was . . . frigid. That she was putting all that energy into chasing me because—”
“—she really wanted you.”
He shrugged.
“That is so sexist, Max Kinsella! And so is thinking that I always need to be rescued.”
“There’s the one common denominator in my sins: thinking of you, caring about you, wanting to protect you.”
“You have to leave me with no word for a year to protect me? You have to hit on another woman to protect me? I think I’d rather not be protected.”
“That’s what Devine said. That I had to come clean with you now, before Molina embarrasses you later.”
“Embarrass nothing! Humiliate is more like it. And then the fact that you’re involved in the Czar Alexander scepter going missing. . . . Creating the worst publicity fallout in my career is not ‘protecting’ me. I’d be much better off without you doing that.”
“Or without me?”
“I don’t know! Everything’s crazy. I don’t know what I think anymore, except that you and I are just not working out. We’ve tried, God knows, but as long as you have to play peek-a-boo with the law,
I’m never going to know where you and I really stand, and I can’t . . . stand . . . that anymore. I want stability. I want openness. I want—”
“Someone else,” he said shrewdly.
“I was going to say ‘Molina off my case.’ ”
“I’ll be the first to admit that my secret status quo has changed, and I can’t tell you one word about it. But something’s changed for you too, and I don’t think it has to be secret. You just want it that way.”
Temple calmed down and thought. She supposed a parking lot faux-seduction was maybe no worse than some desert dirty dancing.
“Thanks for telling me about Molina. I will be happy to break it to her that you didn’t mean anything by whatever you said or did. Unfortunately, I can’t report a meaningless . . . crisis in my own life. While we’re being so honest, I have something to confess. Matt has proposed.”
“To you?”
“Well, not to Molina!”
“Marriage?” Max seemed dazed.
“Yup, the usual.”
“He can’t.”
“He can.”
Max finally let her go. There seemed more space between them than one small sofa could produce. He thought it over.
“His stalker is dead, unlike my current bête noir, Molina. He’s safe at last, a free soul. He loves you. I’ve known that for way too long. Makes a decent wage. Has a night job, but you got used to that with me. You could do worse.”
“Max! You sound like my mother!”
“I’m just weighing the competition. He’s good looking, but too moral to succumb to bold hussies. He’s got an edge he tries to hide, so he could protect you the next time you need to masquerade as a murder victim. Outside of Midnight Louie, I can’t think of anybody better for you.”
“Max, don’t you care?”
“I’ve always cared too much, Temple. My problem, not yours. I thought, swore, when we connected again in New York that I could elude my past and become what I’d masqueraded as for so long: just your average headlining Las Vegas magician.”
He grinned at the immodesty of that description. The grin vanished as fast as a Cheshire cat. “But things have . . . changed. My shadow life is looming larger than ever these days, and a lot more than the Czar Alexander scepter depends on it. I can’t guarantee to be there for you. I can’t guarantee not to muck up your job site for hidden, but we hope, higher, purposes. I can’t guarantee that I won’t have to drop out of sight again. I can’t guarantee to keep all the flying axes in the air anymore.
“It’s time for you to get a life of your own. I can’t be a dog in the manger anymore.” Max stood. “Molina isn’t imagining things, but I never meant anything but a ploy by it, and she almost fell for it. You remember that when she comes calling. Make Matt’s day, or night, when the time comes for it. Remember me, now and then.”
Temple stood too.
The magician was heading toward her entry hall. He was going to walk out her front door like a mortal man. It was wrong, no argument, no sudden paper flowers, just leaving, it sounded like . . . forever.
“Max—!”
But the door had closed, and when she ran to open it, he was gone.
Temple hung on the door, swung a little with it, so dazed that the insistent sound inside her unit didn’t register until it had been so insistent that she feared it would escape her.
She ran back in to pick up the phone a split second before her answering machine kicked in.
“Temple?”
She couldn’t speak, but the caller rushed on.
“It’s Randy. It’s the hugest frigging wonder of the world. The Czar Alexander scepter is back! Sitting under its Lexan onion dome as big as life and eight times more glitzy. This will be huge! The publicity will be the best thing the hotel has ever had. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t! Come view the New Millennium’s vanishing scepter while you still can . . .’ Are you there? We are no longer in deep doo-doo. We are saved!”