“I’m sure the Fontana brothers can give us private security.”
“That’s not good enough in the long run, and I don’t want our nighttime whereabouts public knowledge. There’s one thing we urgently need to do, though.”
“What?” she asked, getting cuddly again.
“Temple, we’re going up to Minnesota to do the family meet thing ASAP.”
Temple threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Matt, I can’t wait to get you up to Minnesota, where you will knock my family’s socks off! It’s time. I’m so glad we’re finally free to live our lives without any monsters from the past messing with our future.”
“Amen.” He answered her with a long, breathless kiss that morphed into more. “Enough with business from the past. Still, where do you keep your maps and notes from the Synth magicians’ plan for a major magical heist, the Ophiuchus star map and all the Effinger Chicago lockbox leavings?”
“You don’t think someone was after that?”
“Not likely. Who knew about it but you and me and Mr. Magic Kinsella? Better let me keep it, though. Danny Dove put a hidden safe in my rooms.”
“Good thinking. Especially if we’re making a quick trip out of town. Oh, you are so smart.”
“Thanks.”
“And handsome.”
“Thanks.”
“And hot.”
The only answer to that required no further dialogue.
3
Off the Map
Midnight Investigations, Inc., is having a meeting of the board, and all I can conclude is that we are both bored by a—heh-heh…pawcity—of evidence. (I do know how to spell “paucity” but cannot resist an occasional pun for fun.) What we are dealing with is not fun.
The two principle partners, Miss Midnight Louise and I, have finished scouring the Strip from the Downtown Experience to the Excalibur Hotel and the lower Strip luxury hotels like the Luxor and the Mandalay Bay.
We have then zigzagged our paws east and west of the Strip like berserk sewing machines.
Three days, and not a trace.
Mr. Max Kinsella and Miss Kathleen O’Connor have left not a trace or track of themselves in this whole town that is not seventy-two hours old.
Even Miss Louise’s fluffier-than-mine tail is dragging. She curls it around her sharply manicured toes and gives the terminal hairs a listless lick.
My own agile, whip-thin appendage just lies there like a dead snake. Well, maybe a sleeping Black Mambo, because I am always armed and dangerous, even when I am discouraged.
Discouraged! That word is banned from Midnight Louie’s vocabulary.
“They are gone,” Miss Midnight Louise says. “Really and most clearly gone.”
“Most clearly and most sincerely gone,” I agree. “Even Nose E, the drug and bomb sniffing Maltese dog, could not inhale one recently shed skin cell from either of them.”
“At least it was not a violent departure,” she says. “We could not find a blood trail either.”
“That is even worse. Now we are not only totally in the dark as to whether the departure was forced or voluntary, but whether they went off separately, or”—here I shudder—“together, Bast forbid.”
Miss Louise’s head seems to nod morosely as she tongue-lashes her long black bib. “It is like sitting through the endless battles of the first two Lord of the Rings movies and never seeing that miserable ring go over the cliff into the fire in the third one. Who knows what epic battle of good and evil between Mr. Max and Miss Kathleen is even now occurring offstage?”
“And we shall never know what disposition has been made of our own local favorite magician, Gandolph the Gray,” I add, “or in what forgotten plot of the Old Sod his body may lie.”
“Oh, quit wailing like a Dublin pub band,” she snaps. I mean literally snaps.
I back off, pretty literally too.
“And,” she adds, “Garry Randolph’s stage name was Gandolph the Great, not Gray. You are confusing him with the fictional inspiration for his performance persona.”
“Same difference. Dead and gone is dead and gone.”
“Gandalf the Gray came back from the dead to Middle Earth,” she points out. “But no one is likely to fight to return to this glittering bit of High-end Earth. Listen to me, Da.”
I roll my eyes at her using the Irish version of “Dad”.
“We can be sure,” she goes on, “Mr. Max Kinsella is capable of charming news of his late mentor’s final resting place out of a four-leaf clover, but perhaps not if Miss Kitty the Cutter has lit out after him, as it seems.”
“He wants to lead that Hibernian headcase a merry chase away from our favorite people,” I say. “And the scene here is much more serene without him here, the awkward ‘X’ as in X-Acto knife, not to mention being a leftover leg of a romantic triangle.”
Miss Louise growls.
“Oh, I forgot, Louise. Your favorite person is Mr. Max, and now he has left you lovelorn and forlorn in dull olde Las Vegas while he engages in a deadly game with Miss Kitty in Ireland.”
“And that is yet another thing. Your Miss Temple was clever to nickname her ‘Kitty the Cutter’ for her lethal ways with a straight razor, but I am beginning to resent a pet name for our breed being constantly associated with a psychopath.”
“This is old business, Louise, and we avoid the main issue here. If Miss Kathleen O’Connor is gone, who has perpetrated the latest outrage on my Miss Temple? I was indeed farsighted to have the Cat Pack move a sizeable presence from the police substation to the Circle Ritz grounds.”
“You? It was I who convinced Ma Barker she needed to expand her territory.”
“Me, you. Schmee, schmoo. What are we going to do about it?”
“Obviously your duty lies with Miss Temple. The Cat pack got a generous sampling of the intruder’s DNA, but we do not have an inside operative at the crime lab to process it.”
“Much less a CSI with the skill and stones to remove the evidence from the claws of a pack of ferals. Besides, I think the last thing this poor excuse for a housebreaker wanted was an encounter with Miss Temple.”
“Why?”
“She leaves a night-light on in the second bathroom to facilitate my coming and going through the open narrow ‘eyebrow’ window. This is an example of her tender regard, for we know I do not need any night vision amplification. The intruder could have thought the resident was sleeping on the other side of the unit.”
“Seeing you eel your expanding midsection through an eyebrow window sounds like an entertainment I could sell tickets to. What was he after, then?”
“She has a bad habit of sticking genuine and costume jewelry in her bedroom scarf drawer. I have fished out an amusing string of freshwater pearls for my own entertainment a time or two.”
“Hmpfft. Besides the flash on her ring finger that Mr. Matt gave her, she has not much in the way of fine jewelry to interest a thief.”
“Or…” Here I pause, to build suspense. It does not work.
Louise merely rolls her eyes and yawns. “Senior moment, Daddy dude?”
“No! Or…someone is after the secret map of Vegas Miss Temple put together for where Miss Kitty’s secret stash of big-time money and guns for the IRA might be hidden in town, or hunting remnants of the Synth conspiracy to continue their aim to stage the Vegas heist of heists.”