Great. Maybe he’d gotten into the potent Tylenol Threes.
Temple awoke in alarm.
She couldn’t quite remember why her arm was propped on tepid plastic baggies, or why she felt like Midnight Louie’s nigh-twenty pounds had been pussyfooting all over her in the night. The cat no longer lay next to her.
Moonlight leached through the fretwork of the French doors, throwing a pale plaid on the parquet tile.
Then it all came back to her. She sat up, panicked, heedless of the pain rapid movement brought. Her blood was battering at all her pulse points as if for exit. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t catch her breath—maybe that’s why her pulse was pounding, she’d been running in her dreams to catch her breath....
A light sweat dappled her entire skin in an instant, chilling her in the relentless spin of the ceiling fan’s Plexiglas blades. Hot flashes at her age? Well, she was pushing thirty, she thought glumly. Combine that with recent shocks and it could happen. Wait. The pills! Strong, Electra had said. Maybe she was having a bad reaction.
Temple forced herself out of bed, hearing herself gasp for air in the tranquil silence.
Her bare feet stuck to the wooden floor as she skated for the door. It opened onto her living room. Moonlight from the bank of the French doors drenched that end of the room and bleached the walnut floor to white pine.
It also silvered the huge, alien form crouching low in front of the doors like an albino tiger. Temple skittered away into the living room proper—and found herself knocking into a larger, whiter unexpected shape.
“Temple?” a man’s voice asked from the dark.
Max!
And then all the alien elements in the room—the two misplaced hunks, the man’s voice—spun a little in her senses as she recognized them for familiar things out of place... her cocktail table turned stumbling block, her sofa turned bed, her neighbor turned watchdog-cum-counselor.
“Yes,” she answered shakily. “I woke up suddenly. I couldn’t remember at first.”
“That was probably the Tylenol wearing off. Time to take another pill.”
“Yes. No! Not just yet. I want to feel like myself for a while.” She sat on the misplaced bed’s foot. “Did you see Louie leave?”
“Was he here?”
She nodded, then remembered that the room was dark and Matt wasn’t used to its nighttime shapes. “Decidedly here, keeping me company in the bedroom. Maybe he went out.”
“How? I never opened the French doors.”
“The spare bathroom window is always cracked open.”
“But that’s two floors!”
“That’s Louie’s private exit and entry. Don’t ask me how. Oh,” Temple said despite herself, still feeling rocky.
“Are you all right?” Matt shifted in the bed.
Temple finally realized why she had such trouble making out his figure in the dim room. He was wearing his martial-arts outfit as pajamas. The pale material blended with the ivory-colored sheets. She had to credit him with coming up with a neat answer to the awkwardness of sleeping over. She wondered what he wore—or didn’t wear—when he didn’t have to be prepared for strange women barging into his sleeping area.
“Are you all right?” he repeated.
“I’m woozy from the pill, I guess.” Matt waited. “And I think I just had a panic attack.”
She could see the moonlight-gilded sheen of his hair nodding.
“That’s why I’m here. Your body knows better than your mind what it’s been through. You’ll be extra jumpy for a while.”
“Maybe I’ll have reason to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just realized something else. I’m afraid I was in mental as well as physical shock last night. I haven’t been honest with you.”
After a silence, Matt said, “How?”
“I didn’t want to make it common knowledge, or maybe I didn’t want to face facts. Those weren’t two strangers that attacked me—I mean, they were strangers, to me. But they weren’t to someone I know. Knew.”
She heard the sheets rustle as Matt sat up and pushed them back. “What are you saying?”
“That it hadn’t occurred to me, but they could come back, could come here. It isn’t fair to let you do guard duty without letting you know that there’s more to be worried about than me just freaking out.”
“Why? Why are they after you?” He came around to sit beside her on the bed’s edge.
“Not me. Max.”
“Hmm.”
“What do you mean, ‘Hmm’?”
“Electra mentioned that you’d had a friend. A stage magician, she said.”
“What else did Electra mention?”
“Only that he’d moved on,”
“She didn’t say how?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Restrained of you. Well, Max overdid the magician bit one day, and vanished. Just like that. Four months ago. Left behind a few of his few favorite things. Me. A motor' cycle I didn’t know about, I’ve since learned. Some clothes and CDs.”
“The men who assaulted you wanted him?”
“They wanted to know where he was.”
“And you couldn’t tell them.”
“No. Wouldn’t, either, if I could help it.”
“Is that why you and the police lieutenant—”
“Why we don’t get along? Sure, along with plain, rock-bottom mutual antipathy.”
“I was going to say—why you know each other?”
“Oh. Well, we don’t get along. God, I hated telling Molina about those creeps being after Max! She’s after him herself, you know. Until tonight she wouldn’t tell me why. Even what she finally told me sounds like only half of it.”
“Why, then?”
She glanced at Matt. The moonlight reached the end of the bed, so she could see his features, and he could read the truth of hers.
“The night Max vanished, he’d finished a run at the Sultan’s Palace in the Goliath. That same night the body of the casino’s security assistant was found in a secret hideaway in the ceiling—not the ordinary surveillance area above the gaining tables, but a hidden, unauthorized observation post.”
“Coincidence,” Matt said, shaking his head.
“Molina doesn’t believe in coincidence. She thinks Max had the expertise to fashion that hidden post, to get in there, and to get someone else in there, maybe to kill that person. ”
“So why is she down on you?”
“Because when she came looking for answers about Max, I didn’t have any.”
“Or were you just not giving out any?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have talked if I knew, but I didn’t know! And Molina didn’t believe me any more than those men did, although I gotta say her interrogation technique, much as it leaves to be desired, is infinitely preferable to theirs.”
“Poor kid,” Matt said impulsively, his fingers pushing into the curls at the nape of her neck.
A kindly gesture, abstracted almost, but Temple felt a silken shiver down her spine that had nothing to do with panic attacks.
That’s when she realized something else had awakened her and driven her out of the bedroom—loneliness under pressure, a need for comfort and care after a terrifying ordeal.
And here they were, all alone together. She wouldn’t even have to worry about violating a bed Max and she had shared. No ghosts but the man dressed only in white martial-arts garb and moonlight.
She held herself still, neutral, and Matt’s hand dropped away.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I stayed because I knew that you wouldn’t feel safe from those men for a long time, especially tonight. If they do come here, I’d be ready for them. I’m the human self-defense machine, remember? If they’re really out to get you specifically, you should do more than contact that self-help group. You should study martial arts yourself.”
“Oh, Matt! Who’d take me seriously? Martial Arts Mouse strikes again. These guys were big.”
“Size has nothing to do with martial arts. They teach little kids.”