“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Once my circulation system gets moving again.” She stretched out the numb leg and made a face. “Shake your legs out. When they say we can stand I’ll help you up.” Promises, promises.
But the chaos visible all around banished the glamour of the dark.
Everyone Temple could see had the dazed look of deer in the headlights. The contested buffet table, only thirty feet away, resembled a picnic attended by ants bearing Uzis.
“What a mess.” Temple shook her head instead of her legs. “This is going to be such bad press.”
Matt sprang upright, disgustingly tingle free, and extended a hand to pull her up. Temple used his support to take off first one, then the other of the Louie shoes.
“No footwear until the feeling is back in my feet.” She looked around. “Better head to the reception area.”
“I need to check on Janice,” Matt said. “I left her in the framing area.”
They nodded before parting ways, Temple hotfooting off to the entrance where a baker’s dozen of cops huddled. They wore vests marked LVMPD, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and SWAT.
This was the SWAT team. Whew. It felt good to still be standing in a situation that had brought out the heavy troops. Temple joined Kenny Maylord, Mark Ainsworth, a cluster of staff surrounding Amelia Wong, Danny Dove, and Simon Foster inside a larger ring of police personnel.
“Anyone caught or arrested, officer?” Kenny Maylord asked. “Not yet. Shooters tend to hit and run.”
A heavyset man in civilian clothes took charge. “Okay. We need to get the inside scenario down. You folks are key
players in the party tonight. Who turned off the lights?”
“I hollered that they should be out,” Danny Dove said.
A beige-uniformed cop with a notebook muttered something in the head guy’s ear. Point taken. “Okay, Mr. Dove, you had the theatrical experience. Good thinking to douse the lights. Who actually did it?”
Temple, who had been earnestly sprinting toward the rear area, said nothing, because she hadn’t made it. Intention didn’t count for much in an emergency.
“I did.”
Temple almost gasped when Rafi Nadir shouldered into the inner circle, looking like the world’s biggest chip was even more firmly implanted on his shoulder.
In that instant she glimpsed a replay of the attitude that had ended his law enforcement career in L.A.
“And you are?” the big guy asked with the same suspicious drawl John Wayne might have used.
“One of the security hirees for the evening,” Temple said. “Maylords put on extra crew.”
Danged if she hadn’t saved Nadir from his evil attitude by calling attention to herself. What was wrong with her? Just because he’d maybe saved her life once . .
“Who are you?”
“Temple Barr. I do freelance PR and am handling this event for Maylords. I heard Danny suggest we kill the lights and was trying to get to the control panel when they went out.”
Several police eyes focused on her bare feet and the glittering Midnight Louie shoes dangling from the first and second
fingers of her right hand.
So she looked like a vagabond shoe tree. So sue her. Another cop with a notebook stepped up and whispered sweet nothings from his notebook.
The big guy looked them all over again. “Okay. You, you, and you. And the, uh … communal … you. The Wong group. Stay here. We’re in the process of counting noses and taking testimony. Looks like there are no fatalities, but we have some injuries caused by flying glass. Paramedics are fanning out through the store. Once we have the bystanders recorded and sent to the emergency room or home, we’ll get down to the interviews. Sorry, folks, but make yourself comfortable on whatever pieces of cushy furniture around here that aren’t coated in glass. We have a long night ahead of us. We’ll try to get you out of here as soon as possible, but this is one big crime scene. Remain calm, cooperate, and you’ll be on your way sooner.”
Reluctant people dispersed into the nearest vignettes, stringing themselves out on various sofas, chairs, and ottomans like birds on a wire. Ottomans were apparently big again, Temple thought, settling on an orange suede one herself.
Feeling like a limp cafeteria entree under the artificial glare of the warming lights, looking out at the pockmarked night through the shattered glass store windows, Temple examined the dreamy, numb apathy of the victim that gripped her.
Nothing about the attack seemed personal. Its very remoteness was freaky. She watched attendees straggle out. Their
particulars taken, they let police officers escort them to the parking lot.
This was a major news story in these terrorism-haunted days, the retired newshound in Temple noted dully. That daily headline dog wouldn’t hunt for her tonight. She was as dazed and glazed as any other innocent bystander.
Everything seemed a dream, including … or especially… the strangely charged interlude with Matt on the floor. In the dark. Scared to death. Of bullets. Or of something else. Getting horizontal with someone of the opposite sex always made those ol’ devil hormones act up. And Matt wasn’t just “someone.”
It still haunted her. The strange lonely interlude in her life when her only serious significant other ever, Max Kinsella, was utterly gone-vanished. Just then Matt had turned up at the Circle Ritz … equally mysterious, and sincere, vulnerable … needing something. Maybe her. Now Max was out of reach again, and it unnerved her. Maybe she needed people who needed people. But who needed her the most? Who did she most need? Whom. If she could debate grammar she was still in one piece.
Danny and Simon came to share her huge ottoman. “How’re you doing, munchkin?” Danny asked.
“Not a yellow brick road in sight.”
“Overrated,” he said. “I prefer pothole-free asphalt. Gad, I wonder when they’ll let us go.”
“I was glad to hear your voice. I hadn’t thought of the lights.”
“Stagecraft Rule Number One. When in doubt, dowse the lights, people! What they can’t see, they can’t criticize.” Danny
laughed heartily.
“How’d you and Simon manage to find each other?”
“My gently modulated taskmaster voice, how else? I haven’t drilled fifteen million clumsy feet into oblivion without being able to give marching orders.”
“I was heading for you, too,” Temple said. “You were the only one sensible enough to keep us all grounded.”
“Danny isn’t sensible,” Simon put in. “He was making a damn-fool target of himself.”
“So I’ve been told by an associate myself,” Temple said. “It’s hard to just crouch there and do nothing.”
Danny nodded at Nadir, standing off by himself, watching the police action with a glower.
“He’s the guy who got to the switch. Funny. I’d peg him for the shooter. Talk about a bad actor.”
Temple sighed as she contemplated Nadir’s sullen face. She had a hunch all his buttons were being pushed in tandem
tonight.
Something moved in the fringe of her vision. She saw Matt escort Janice to a police officer, who checked his notebook, then nodded them out. It was odd to see Matt as part of a couple.
Temple shook her left leg, which still tingled. “How long can they keep us here?”
“We’re already cleared,” Simon said. “Danny wanted to stay and make sure you got home all right.”
“Hey,” Temple said in her best West Side Story gang-member voice. “I’m okay. Officer Krupke will see me safe to my
wheels. You guys peel outta here. I’ll be fine.”
Danny’s forehead crinkled with doubt under his tight blond curls. He looked like an obsessive-compulsive Cupid.
She punched him on the arm. “It’s okay. I’m okay. You’re okay. I just have to stay and make sure all my little chickens are okay. Head on home while there are still some macho men left to escort you to the parking lot.”