And not the roar of some souped-up behemoth like the Hesketh Vampire, but the fifty-cc spit-and-choke of a Honda.
The motor's buzz up ahead reassured Max that only one shot was intended--whether as a warning or to be fatal, no one would know but the shooter.
He maneuvered the Trans Am into the right lane. By the time it stopped for the red light 150
feet ahead, at which point he could finally push the button and loft the top into place, the motorcycle sound was a faint whine.
He turned right on Flamingo, peering through the sparse!" traffic, and thought he saw black flyspeck shooting into the darkening blue haze of night.
Chapter 28
Close Shave and a Haircut
"You're sure it was a bullet and not a razor?"
"Hurled razors. An innovative idea. Let you be the audience stooge in one magic show and you want to innovate the act. Ouch!"
"Alcohol stings." Nurse Temple winced in sympathy. "This could start a new punk hair style: a horizontal part from ear to ear. It's not bleeding much."
"Then I'm incredibly lucky. Scalp wounds are notorious bleeders. The white leather seats on the Trans Am are safe."
"You're incredibly lucky that your leather wasn't ruined for good. Where is Moby Dick, anyway?"
"I left it in the Caesars parking lot. It's history."
"You're not going to collect it later?"
Max shook his head, inadvertently scouring his wound on the cotton ball Temple held against it.
"Ouch, again! It's been identified. I'll notify the proper parties, who'll pick it up and drive it out-of-state. They'll leave something else for me."
"Darn! I never got a chance to drive it, either, especially with the top down."
"No more convertibles for me until we can prove my head is no longer a target for somebody."
"Somebody. That's a long list, I bet."
Temple, her ministrations done, tossed the rusty cotton balls in the wastebasket and turned to screw the cap back on the bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Suddenly Nurse Barr of the coolly competent quip under pressure was gone. The cap wouldn't turn on the neck's grooves and the opaque plastic bottle wouldn't fit into the curve of her hand.
It tilted, tipped, slipped. She grabbed for it, but it was Max who caught it.
"What--?" Temple hated being clumsy.
Max set the bottle down and took her hands. It was only in contrast to their steadiness that she realized hers were trembling.
"This is ridiculous!" Temple regarded her shaking hands as if they were alien appendages.
"You were the one who was shot at."
"Passengers nerves," he diagnosed with a smile. "The person who's driving when the car narrowly misses a collision at least can take action, has a sense of control. The hapless passenger just along for the ride feels totally helpless."
"We're not talking a fender-bender here."
"No. We're talking a near-miss with a lethal weapon. I could quote some cliches: a miss is as good as a mile, for one. But I'm not sure that I was meant to be hit; this could have been a warning shot that came a little too close as easily as a murder attempt that missed."
"How can you discuss it so calmly?"
"Your own peril is always easier to take than someone else's, because there you're really helpless. Call it a noble human trait."
"There's nothing noble in a coffin. Temple conceded the fact that her knees were wobbly and leaned against the counter.
The Welles/Randolph/Kinsella house had a truly palatial master bathroom, vast and dark and elegant as an Egyptian tomb.
Tomb. She didn't want to picture herself picking out a casket for Max.
"Hey," he said. "I'm all right, but you're a mess." He pulled her into an embrace that felt good but smelled too strongly of rubbing alcohol to ease her anxiety.
"Maybe if I'd been along, I'd have been better off."
"I told you. I have to do this on my own. It's confidential."
"It's hard to be left out of the loop."
"I really can't tell you the specifics, except that it's not a big deal."
"So what you were doing in L.A. bad nothing to do with the shot in L.V.?"
"Probably not."
"At least you're being honest."
"I've always been honest with you, Temple. I've just not always been thoroughly frank."
"Hair-splitter," she accused, then realized the reference was grotesquely apt.
"That's better," he said as she laughed in his arms. "I'd tell you if I could, but this one is really sensitive. I can tell you what I think about the shooter, though."
"Oh, great. I always want to know about shooters."
"The Synth."
"The Synth? That weirdo magician's group? Max, get real. Magicians play with scarves and doves and little white bunny rabbits
onstage. They don't shoot people."
"Anybody can shoot people. And don't forget the messages on the computer. They've been coming to this house longer than I've been back. Did you watch those Fox specials about how magic tricks are done?"
"No. Oh, I saw them in the TV listings, but I hate those instant specials: watch animals eat animals; watch people behaving badly; watch accidents happen. Inquiring people want to descend to the lowest common denominator."
"You're an admirable bastion of taste and integrity, Temple, but you are not the average TV-Watcher. Droves watched those shows."
"You mean those hokey tell-alls with the masked magician spilling the beans? Please!"
"Those shows resulted in death threats."
"Get real!"
"I can't get any more real than that. Listen." Max lifted her atop the black marble counter top, which iced her backside. But his eyes were so intense she forgot to complain. "Magicians have always patented certain tricks, certain devices that permit those tricks to be performed.
They can spend decades perfecting the perfect illusion. When they die, they will them to chosen successors. And they never tell how. If a magician becomes a tattle-tale, he threatens the brotherhood's very survival. It's serious business. Gandolph's zeal to expose false mediums came close to giving away trade secrets. My resolve to finish Gandolph's work threatens that magical secrecy. Houdini himself felt that push-pulclass="underline" He hated cheats using our ancient and secret methods of entertaining to hilclass="underline" trusting souls. But by exposing them he admitted that we all have trade secrets. Our very reason for being diminishes if everyone knows how it's done.
They can know it's a trick; they just can't know how we do it."
Temple leaned her forehead on his shoulder. "International terrorism. Magic. You're telling me that one is as much a matter of life and death as the other. That's . . . ludicrous. Even if you had never become involved in antiterrorism, you're telling me that finishing that poor old man's book could be as lethal as turning in an international mass murderer?"
"Everything's dangerous, Temple. It's just a matter of degree. What about what you've been getting involved in lately?"
"All right. I've been an amateur snoop, but before then, everything was so much safer."
Max pulled her away from him so he could look in her eyes.
"Was it? Was it really? I don't think so. It just seemed safer, like ail dream worlds. I know. I used to live in one until Sean died."
"When I grew up in the Midwest, worked there, nobody wanted to hurt you, though."
"No? What about your claustrophobia? Kids held you under a box, didn't they? Your older brothers."
"Little kids do things like that."
"Yeah, they do. And so do big kids. You told me about why you left TV news."
"It was that awful suicide-murder scene."
"In the double-wide in Mankato, l know. But did you leave because of that, or because you weren't getting the assignments you thought you'd earned, because of the in-fighting with the other reporters on staff?"
"Well, nobody took me seriously. It's because I wasn't tall enough and thin enough. And blond. Being blond would have helped."