“Not discreet.”
“Not discreet. I got out of there, but I couldn’t go home again.”
The last apple came to rest in the palm of his free hand. Max heard his own voice, hard and ironic. He’d been an exile for seventeen years, and still found new places, and people, to be exiled from.“So you left the little redheaded girl and fled …
where?”
“Canada.”
“Refuge for many a conscientious objector.”
“The only thing I was objecting to was false imprisonment. I worked as an itinerant corporate magician/comic and didn’t dare contact Temple for almost a year.”
“So you lost her?”
“No.”
“No? She waited for you, despite hearing nary a word?”
“Redheads are stubborn. And Temple is tougher than she looks.” Max took the extended plate artfully drizzled with raspberry sauce and melted dark chocolate. “Let’s just say she took exception to a certain relentless homicide lieutenant who thought I’d done the dirty deed and that Temple had to know why and where I’d gone to. Ah. You haven’t lost your gourmet skills.”
“Very satisfying work concocting a difficult dish. I could be content to remain … er, dead, and allowed to indulge my palate, here in this house that my fellow gourmand Orson Welles once owned. I feel quite willing to let my legend rest in peace.” “I can’t understand how you managed to quit the counterterrorist game, Garry. God knows I’d do it if I could.”
“Being presumed dead helps, Max. But I haven’t quit. Not at all.”
Max stopped enjoying the seduction of tender, sweet, warm crepes on the tongue.
“Damn it, Garry. You had retired. That’s why you gave me the use of this house that time forgot, and luckily everybody else. You were off to see the wizard, unmasldng phony mediums.”
“Tut. Just a cover, my boy. I’m glad even you accepted it. I’ve never retired.”
“But your book.” Max was standing now, angry as much as surprised. “Your book on fraudulent mediums. I was finishing it in your honor. In memoriam.”
“Such a nice thought, my boy. I’m quite touched.”
“I’ve been banging away at that computer keyboard like a cow in boxing gloves. I’m no typist, no writer. It’s the toughest
thing I’ve ever tackled.”
Garry chuckled through the forkful of crepe he’d hoisted into his mouth like a prize. “Very flattering, Max. In every way. If
we both survive the next, critical few months, I’ll certainly share a byline with you on it.”
“I don’t want a byline, I want a life!”
“I’m afraid, my lad, that the only way you’ll get it is by courting Lady Death one more time.”
Max frowned as he nodded in concession. It was Temple he should be courting now, before it was too late. From what Gandolph said, though, this one last assignment would make him a free man, And, ultimately, that would make Temple a happy woman.
Chapter 14
Clean Sweep
Midnight Louise and I pussyfoot through the empty lot that is dead center across from Maylords.
“Coyote,” she declares after a long sniff of the ground. “So what else is new? That Wild Bunch runs this town after dark.” “Might be a witness.”
“You that eager to see a coyote after one almost made you the main course?”
“A witness is a witness,” she says. “Besides, that other one would never have come within shiv range had I not been thrown from the motorcycle saddlebag and knocked out.”
“Well, you were, and it is lucky that I was around to face off Fangpuss.”
“Good job, Popster! His two front teeth must have been older than your latest whisker growth, though.”
“That was a primo coyote and you would have been Instant Appetizer, had I not been there. Next time you may not be so quick to
secretly tail a bad actor. That motorcycle joyride into the desert dark could have fricasseed your fantail. If I had not been tailing your tail they would not have been able to peel you off the asphalt in the morning.”
“Yadda, yadda,” she says. This younger generation has no respect for anything but MN. “Nose to the groundstone, Daddyo. Everybody and his brother and sister and second cousin have been marking territory on this lot. Not much vacant land left in Vegas.”
The chit is correct on both counts: bare desert scrub is a rarity inside the city limits. Where it exists, every life form except alien invaders tries to establish a beachhead. I sniff coyote, all right, and domestic dog. Ugh! And rat and mouse, and several of the lizard variety, even tortoise.
What I am looking for, though, is Man. Not woman. I am not about to cross woman off my suspect list, but high-powered rifle attacks usually indicate the male of the human species. Unless we are talking somebody aberrant, like Miss Kathleen O’Connor, whom I have seen dead with my own eyes, after my associate Miss Louise offed her on a desert road.
Of course, I do not tell Miss Louise that she offed her. I encourage the fiction that it was an accident. I like my little dolls feisty, which means that I do not want them feeling guilty about their lethal tendencies.
“We can clearly see here,” I note, “the shell casings where the dastard crouched to take aim. I am sure that this
once-vacant lot will soon be crawling, quite literally, with crime-scene investigators.”
“We should brush out our tracks.” Louise sits and twitches her long, bushy extremity over a swath of dirt, sand, and
gravel.
Showoff! She is more than somewhat vain about her long hair. She makes it clear that my buzz-cut one is not a very efficient broom. Just as well. I do not do women’s work.
I am forced to stand back from the mini-dust storm her cleanliness fetish is stirring up.
While doing so I detect something interesting: pads other than ours have been all over this lot for a long time. My practiced sniffer gets into the act. After several impassioned sneezes and a long walk around the perimeter I return to Miss Louise and her obsessive-compulsive cleaning motions.
“Forget the yard work,” I tell her.
“Why? You want the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to come calling at the Circle Ritz and the Crystal Phoenix with
plaster casts of our feet?”
“Forensics is not into pad-prints. Besides, this place is loaded with them, not just ours. Nice, fresh ones. I think we have a few dozen witnesses to track down. From the way they scattered in all directions, they must have been on the premises when the first shots were
fired.”
“A colony?” she asks.
“Not exactly,” I answer.
“Then what?”
“A gang.”
“Oh, great. Gangsters will not unbutton their lips for us.” ‘This gang will. I know the top cat. One Ma Barker.”
“Ma Barker! What a name for a self-respecting feline! She must be one lowdown excuse for female empowerment.”
“I cannot say,” I answer mildly. “All I know is that she could be your grandmother.”
Miss Louise’s big gold eyes widen like headlights on high power. “That is the old dame who claimed to be my elder at the cloaked
conjuror’s place?”
I cannot wait to bring her home to mother.
Chapter 15
Hot Car
Temple and her Miata returned Matt to the Maylords parking lot at a time of morning much brighter and earlier than a nightshift man was used to.
When she mentioned this, he smiled ruefully. “Maybe I need to shake up what I’m used to. Having had a stalker decree your every move, your every moment, makes you question yourself on a pretty deep level about what’s important.”
“Like having the world’s most demanding home-room teacher.”
He laughed. “We all kinda freeze in the high school hierarchy somehow, don’t we? Getting it in our heads what we are and what other people think of what we are way too early.”