“I like someone who looks like the blood is running through her veins again. You and Danny were right on the lights thing, but I bet the long wait for the police interviews was more wearing than anything else. Did, ah, Molina make it out there while I was off being Mr. Midnight for WCOO?”
“No. Not a rhinoceros-thick hide in sight. You were lucky they questioned and let you go early. Not only because you made your showtime but you avoided the stultifying tedium of that many people being interviewed, very sympathetically, by the police. I can’t believe the police actually can have a heart. Maybe it was because Molina wasn’t on the case. It’s hardly homicide.”
“But it could have been. Still, it was obviously a random attack.”
“Was it? I mean, how do we know someone special wasn’t the target? Like Amelia Wong.”
“Because nobody was hit, which is downright miraculous in a mob like that. The police seem to think it’s malicious
mischief, attacking the building, not the people in it. They said the land the store is built on was a vacant lot for a long time.”
“I didn’t know.”
Matt nodded and sipped his drink, leaning against the kitchen counter. “That’s what they told me. A lot of the local hoodlums liked doing target practice on the site. Probably resented that Maylords took their fun away.”
“I’m relieved to know that, and glad that you could see me home, but I feel kind of rotten about abducting Janice’s escort
for the evening.”
“The evening is over, or hadn’t you noticed?”
She checked her watch. “Five A.M., good grief! It’s hardly worth going to bed.”
“This is when I usually do.”
“This late? I mean, early?”
“I get home from the radio station about three, unwind a bit and presto! Five o’clock in the morning.”
“At least you’re in no danger of waking up with the three A.M. blues.”
“No. Are you? I can stay.” He nodded to the living room sofa. “Matt, what about Janice?
“Shouldn’t you be asking what about Max first?”
“Is this like a game Concentration? Which cards are two of a kind? Max. Janice. They’re … both not here.”
“But I am, and I don’t want you waking up scared and alone.”
She almost pushed it by answering, “You don’t want me?” But then they’d both be stuck with whatever he answered. “I don’t need baby-sitting.” She pushed herself off the support of the kitchen countertop. Surviving a mass attack was like getting very drunk very fast. “I’ll have you know I’ve been called a ballsy little broad by a professional bodyguard.” “My phrase for it would be stubborn and proud.”
“I don’t believe that stubbornness is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.”
“It could be.” Matt shook his head. “Just call if you can’t sleep.”
He went to her door before she could summon an answer. “I’ll sleep,” she called after him down the short entry hall. It sounded like an afterthought. Like bravado.
I just hope to Hannah I don’t dream, she told herself as she turned the key to lock Matt out and herself in. Locked in.
She had hoped Midnight Louie would have been home togreet her, but when she reached her bedroom there was no sign of the big black cat … except for several black hairs on her comforter. Were any of them Max’s? she wondered.
Here yesterday, hair today. The story of her singular single life.
Chapter 13
Mad Max
Gandolph the Great stood by the kitchen island literally whipping up a magical postmidnight snack of crepes a la Orson.
Max Kinsella watched his mentor’s sleight of hand with the wire whisk. Gandolph still had the dexterity for cooking gourmet dishes, but his age-thickened knuckles were past their prime for magical illusions one couldn’t eat. “Temple,” Max observed, “can’t cook.”
“Won’t cook. Everyone can.”
“But not exquisitely. She has always appreciated the few simple kitchen tricks I learned from you.”
“I wish I could meet her.” Garry Randolph, the man behind the stage name, looked up from under bearish eyebrows. “Being presumed dead can be damned inconvenient. I never thought you’d settle into any kind of domestic arrangement, not with the tigers you had on your tail.”
Max sat on a sleek aluminum-and-leather stool. “I shouldn’t have.”
“But you did even though you shouldn’t have. What kind of siren is this Temple Barr, anyway?”
That question made Max smile. “Remember Charlie Brown’s ‘little redheaded girl?’ She’s like that, only all grown up, with sense and spirit.”
“Hmmm. And she knows about your past?”
“Pretty much.”
“Never all, though. We can never tell all.”
“No.” Max pulled an apple, a red Roman Beauty, from the wire fruit bowl playing centerpiece on the cold stainless-steel countertop. He balanced it on his fingertips for a moment, as if contemplating making it vanish. Instead, he bit into it.
The crisp sound echoed in the hard-surfaced kitchen.
Garry turned to the huge industrial stove to pour batter into a copper-bottomed pan sizzling with melted butter.
“I’m in training again:’ Max complained mildly. “I should be on protein and complex carbohydrates.”
“Even the Olympic athlete deserves dessert once in a while. It is so good to be back in this kitchen.”
“It’s good to have you back. Your supposed ‘death’ fooled me completely. I thought your new career of exposing fraudulent mediums had finally pushed you over to the Other Side.”
“No, no, no, Max. I genuinely hate phony mediums, of course.”
“It was nice to know that you’d retired to such a benign pursuit.”
“So that you could too, with your little redheaded girl?”
“That was the general idea. Once, a year or so ago, before the past caught up with me.”
“I saw the notices of your ‘abrupt departure’ from Vegas. What happened?”
Max took another bite of the apple and chewed over his thoughts before speaking again.
“I was finishing up a run at the Goliath. I never told anybody this, but the Crystal Phoenix was offering me an even bigger bundle and a multiyear contract to develop a new act for them, a boutique magic show, small and stunning, a one-man Cirque du Soleil. Anything I wanted to work up.” Max found a rueful smile on his face. “I never told Temple. She’s got an in at the Phoenix.
We almost would have been working together.”
“And-? Because none of this happened, did it?”
“The past showed up. Two IRA hit men.”
“Took ‘em long enough to finally catch you. What? Sixteen years?”
Max picked another apple from the basket. And one more. He began juggling all three.
“It turned out they wanted money first, then murder.”
The aromas of butter and brandy on the crepes almost made Max miss an apple. But he didn’t.
“I used my magical arts, under duress, to get them into the crawl space under the Eye in the Sky setups over the Goliath
casino floor.”
“And then?”
“Why do you think there’s an ‘and then’?”
“Max, my boy, you are never less than four-dimensional.”
“I led them over a highdollar craps table where they could observe the money-changing-out routine. Only it’s always easier
to enter air-conditioning ducts than to get out again, unless you’re double-jointed. I left. They didn’t. But that turned out not to be such a clever act, after all.”
Garry turned from the stove to slip two pairs of fruit-filled crepes onto two crystal dessert plates. “Yes?”
“They tried to shoot me.”
“In an air-conditioning duct? What idiots.”
Max caught one spinning apple and held it between his thumb and little finger while keeping the other two apples bouncing between his hands and the ceiling.
“One shot the other, which should have gotten both of them off my back, except the deadweight of the victim fell through the flimsy ceiling panels right smack onto the middle of the hot craps table.” He caught the second apple, and held it.