Temple’s jaw dropped as she seized Silas T. Farnum by his skinny forearm. “What is that? You must know. You concocted this.”
“That, Miss Barr, is the girl in the fishnet hose and pink satin bustier. What you really want to see is right in front of you. There. Look.”
She forced her focus down from the show in the sky to find one of the damn things had landed, silently, right in front of the new construction. It was gigantic, and hovered above a narrower shaft of swirling color and light, like a pseudopod it had lowered. She thought of a mushroom cloud equipped with a death ray the size of the Superdome tethering it to Earth.
This all being a conventional film version of a flying saucer spewing down alien lights was not reassuring. Her sky was now a huge hunk of alien metal hovering like a sting ray shadow over the entire lot, pulsing with surface tension and emitting the odd watery phosphorescence of exotic undersea creatures.
The saucer’s thick “edge” alone was two or three stories high. Its circumference was … not visible. Temple was aware of shrill ringing in her ears, but that was probably her blood pressure hitting a high C. As far as she knew in her current altered state of stupefaction, this UFO did not sing like the one in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She heard no reassuring, blurted mellow chords that reminded Temple of an engaging—and harmless—kiddie toy.
She barely heard a muted pulsing sound she’d describe as the mating call of a sprinkler system and a legion of seriously leg-chafing crickets. Mechanical yet natural, and even somewhat … calming, like white noise. Her fluttering pulses were evening out. She found herself breathing more slowly and deeply.
The concentrated stalk of light, the softly shifting dark shadows behind the saucer’s beaming edge gave her a sense of quiet and peace, as if she were meditating, chilling out in a rosé wine happy hour all of her own. As if she was being … hypnotized.
And was that so bad? Everything light and bright and … what was that small black dot, that minuscule floater on an eye chart’s lighted screen, that tiny, invasive, moment-ruining spot doing? Streaking across the light-bathed ground, shifting shape into an arch of black, and then into a vanishing point, a horizontal line?
Temple blinked. If she hadn’t seen a startled cat streaking away like a superhero …
Her senses reassembled. That pinch on her elbow was Silas T. Farnum’s gnarly age-curled fingers. The ripple pattern under her shoes she’d taken for that last lick of waves on a tropical beach was the gritty, stone-strewn ground. The dazzling gigantic magic mushroom of an unearthly space ship was … once again a roughed-in ten-story building with a few security lights glowing here and there.
Looking toward the Strip, she watched the last of the bouncing balloons vanishing south toward Arizona.
She turned on the only possible target. “Silas T. Farnum, this is a hallucination. Your entire project is a hallucination. And probably the money behind it. Unhand me! You’ve probably been dusting me with psychedelic something.”
He released her and stepped back, leaving Temple to wobble without support, which she much preferred to being suckered.
She ground her soles deeper into the detritus. “I have friends in police places,” she told him. “And here you are violating a crime scene.”
“It’s just dirt, Miss Barr. It’s been released as a crime scene. The police are perfectly satisfied with my credentials and alibi.”
“The police are never satisfied. They just let you think they are. This is Las Vegas. People here enjoy extravagance and make-believe, but they don’t want to be hoodwinked any more than they are at the gaming tables.”
“This is not hoodwinking.” He stood his ground, planting his cane like a claiming flag. “You have just seen an astounding sight, haven’t you? You have just heard the angels of our better beings singing, like the mermaids, for you. You have been transported.”
Temple remained silent. Finally she said, “It was a pretty good illusion.”
“That’s just it. It wasn’t an illusion. It’s real. I needed to prove that. I needed you to see what I have here.”
She glanced over her shoulder to the Strip. “That fleet of UFOs is fake. Radio controlled.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said, swaying on his polished tippytoes in excitement. “Those are meant to be debunked. Rule One of stunt PR. First you raise expectations, then you flatten them, and then you bring them back from the dead to universal applause.”
“All right. My First Rule of Ex-clients. First I evaluate their credibility, then I grade them on a scale of minus-five to zero, and then I kick them off my client list.”
“I had to give you a preview of the attraction, Miss Barr, so you wouldn’t lose faith. So I had to distract all of the Vegas Strip to give you a peek unveiling of my little beauty behind the curtain.”
“Projecting your video concept on the deserted building frame and all that curtaining plastic and canvas is very clever, Mr. Farnum. In fact, a recent project of mine, a new attraction between the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters, employs ultra-sophisticated audiovisual holographic effects, so don’t think you can pull the pixels over my eyes.”
“Exactly!” Farnum sounded triumphant. “It takes one to know one, and you now know I’m creating the real deal, with more advanced techniques than ever seen before outside of a secret laboratory run on the level of a Stephen Hawking operation. This is not only mind-bending, it is space and time-bending as well. And, after all, isn’t that what aliens are all about?”
“I’m getting a terrible feeling, Mr. Farnum. One of your ‘silent partners’ wouldn’t go by one name?”
“Yes! Brilliant deduction. You are such the right woman for the job. So intuitive.”
“That man is a person of interest in a recent murder in town, and you have him working on a project where a dead body was found?”
“No, that can’t be true.” Farnum was so crestfallen, his five-hair comb-over seemed to shrivel to three. “Domingo has an international reputation.”
“Domingo? He’s not under suspicion of murder,” Temple conceded.
The renowned international environmental artist had come to town before to mass thousands of pink plastic flamingos around the Strip, making a statement about overblown popular taste, but that’s as close to a crime as he’d gotten.
She couldn’t imagine why Domingo would return and expand into fleets of mini-UFOs, but supposed it was another statement, perhaps about the usual suspect: the alienation of modern life.
“I’m not mollified,” Temple told Farnum, “but I can see how Domingo would be interested in a similar stunt … uh, artistic installation.”
“You do know ‘spin,’ Miss Barr.” He produced a happy grin. “However, even better, Domingo is not the only international cutting-edge figure involved in my project.”
“Oh?”
“Indeed. My other silent partner is as serious as Domingo, but in an allied field.”
Well, that had her stumped.
Farnum literally tucked his thumbs under his seersucker suit lapels in the tried and true pose of pride. “His name is Santiago.”
And that guy was under suspicion of murder.
Chapter 23
All at Sea
The pool was cool but felt like silk.
Matt pulled himself through the water, arm over arm, like pulling a liquid rope toward and past him. The underwater lights created a turquoise spring at either end that drew him like an aquatic moth. Then he pushed off the solid poolside and pulled into the second half of the lap, performing like a thread on a loom.
Swimming had always seemed a form of meditation to him, and it reminded him to breathe, deep and steady.