“I’m sorry. That must be … surreal for you,” she told Penny.
“I’ve learned to focus on pieces of a person. Like hair color, clothing, mannerisms, posture. Freckles! No go. Can’t see ’em. You’re freckle-free with me, kiddo! Just remind me about the red hair and high heels next time we cross paths.”
Temple doubted their paths would cross again.
“Do you know what the worst things about this condition are?” Penny asked.
Temple shook her head. She was almost afraid to hear.
“One, it makes me brutally honest, so I have a hard time keeping friends. I can’t lie, because I won’t recognize the person I lied to. So I tell the truth at all times. That can get to be a real pain.”
“So you genuinely forgot Crawford Buchanan,” Temple mused aloud, remembering his confusion.
“Yes, at first. But then I remembered his oily hair—way too much product, dude! So I played dumb just to tick him off because he was a stuck-up, phony sort of person. I got to snub someone for a change. Everyone always thinks I’m snubbing them in public, like you did here, when they see me in passing on the street and I don’t recognize them.”
Temple couldn’t begin to contemplate the adjustments such a condition would demand of her and her job, but she had a suggestion for one issue: “Just be a smiley person and nod at anyone you pass who makes eye contact. Strangers will think you’re a bubbly personality, and people who know you will probably stop to chat and you can use your ID system, or get a clue from their conversation.”
“Hmm. I’m not a bubbly person. I told you, I have to be brutally honest.”
That was a problem. No wonder Penny was so attached to Rens. His love was unconditional. He’d leap for the sound of his name and know her voice.
“Can you recognize Rens’s face?”
“It’s the same, except dogness is easier to isolate.”
“One other thing I’m curious about,” Temple said.
“Only one? You’re easy.”
“With this problem, why come out to join a mob of people like this, all faces you can’t really see? And you are really skeptical of the UFO fever all around here.”
“Simple. It’s a great laboratory. I practice remembering strangers in the crowd by things beside their faces. Plus, I think they’re all silly for getting caught up in this UFO and ancient-alien stuff. Any aliens who are out there, we definitely don’t want to meet.”
“Even if you don’t have to see their weird alien faces.”
“Especially if I have to remember them by other traits. I mean, who’d want to have a memory of tentacles?”
Chapter 33
Synth You’ve Been Gone
Once Rens—that walking contradiction in genetics, the mini husky Chihuahua—was restored to his person, I begin to think I could safely lock myself back in the Miata with my Miss Temple being none the wiser.
I am about to make myself scarce on the alien flash mob scene, when something familiar flashes across my field of vision and kisser like a chorus girl’s black ostrich fan.
I sneeze, not the suave reaction I hope for during an encounter with a chorus girl. Once my eyes blink open again, I am disappointed to discover the firm’s junior partner has joined the melee.
“Off cadging free lunches again, huh, Pops? This time with the local vermin of a canine nature,” Miss Midnight Louise admonishes me.
If she really were my daughter, as she claims, she would defer to my parental role and let me do the admonishing. Or … maybe not. Miss Midnight Louise does not take correction well at all. She is what they call liberated and I call impertinent to her elders.
“A guy has got to keep his energy up.”
“For what? Naps?”
“Research has shown that the dude who naps lives longer to nap again.” That comment does not quite come out right.
“You were not napping when you did that swan dive off the top of the so-called parking garage. You are drawing the public’s attention to a lot of bodies of late. You could damage Midnight Investigations, Inc.’s reputation.”
“You know I did my earlier body-discovery work for Ma Barker’s clowder.”
“Yes. I am also invited for lunch with them at the police substation from time to time, and get caught up on all the gossip then.”
“You lunch on Big Macs and Red Lobster?”
“And Tastee Crème doughnuts,” she adds in a nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah tone.
“I have never been invited. I am just asked to do the dirty work.”
“Oh, come on. I have dipped into the trash containers at the Circle Ritz. Your Miss Temple is lavishing oysters and shrimp and sirloin beef tips on your Free-to-Be-Feline bowl.”
“Yes, but it all has a certain odor of—” I cannot contain a shudder. “—FTBF.”
“Yeah, there is a definite army green vibe to your roommate’s health food of choice. Have you ever tried putting some of it in her half-used cereal boxes and forcing her to face the stuff first thing in the morning?”
“I would never subject my Miss Temple to such a dirty trick.
“Although, Louise … maybe it would banish Free-to-Be-Feline forever. I would have to make it look like Miss Temple had mixed up the bag and the box contents. That could be done if I woke her up earlier than usual in the morning with one of my purr-massage-love-rub sessions.…
“She would stumble into the kitchen half-asleep and—presto!—Free-to-Be-Feline in her bowl, with low-fat milk.
“No, I cannot do that to low-fat milk.”
“Anyway, Pops, I am not here to discuss cuisine.”
“No kidding. What hair-brained scheme are you laying on me now?”
“We need to break into the coroner’s office on Pinto Lane.”
“What!? Are you crazy? Do not answer. That was a rhetorical question. Louise, the facility will be screwed down tighter than a rusty bolt with all these Alien nut jobs in town. Everybody from paparazzi to amateur bloggers wants to break in to eyeball and photograph The Hunk Who Fell to Earth. At the moment, he is more popular than Elvis. And that is going some in Las Vegas.
“Do they fret about me? Are they worried about my delicate limbs being broken, along with my shivs? Am I on their cell phone and camcorder films? No. I am just a dust mite in a media-mad world, a tiny Cinderfella at the ball. An unsung hero.”
“Yeah, yeah. Fame is fleeting, also YouTube hits. I am telling you. This is serious. I was there when you fell—”
“You were? I did not see you rushing up to succor me.”
“Hah. I was busy rushing up to the falling body once it hit the dirt, before any curious onlookers got a glimpse of it.”
“So some dead human is more important than your supposed old man. I am really glad we are not related now.”
“That is your unlikely story.”
Louise can be merciless, but she is the female of the species. Bloodthirsty. Her mind is back on the corpse. She mews on. “I cannot say for sure—unless I inspect the body in the morgue. But…”
Females are ferocious hunters and killers, did I mention that? Forget the cliché of them quailing at violence and mayhem.
“And…,” she says after a final pinprick of her claw into my shoulder just in case I am not paying enough attention. “I think the scars on this guy’s back and sides were put there by the Cat Pack I led to defend the Synth from the two armed individuals in Darth Vader outfits at the Neon Nightmare, now defunct.”