“It’s the first serious institution we tangle with. But you’re right; a lot of people are still trying to ditch their high school preconceptions in midlife crisis.”
“Maybe I should thank Kitty O’Connor, if I could.”
“Thank her? Why on earth?”
“She really knew how to play me, play my conscience.Made me see I needed to reexamine my … I won’t say that old
clich� ‘priorities,’ but maybe my premises. I’m feeling strangely freer.”
“You are. Free of that harpy! Freer is good.” Temple smiled and looked up to the open sky as the warm breeze riffled their hair. It was like getting a scalp massage by the wind.
This was another cloudless Las Vegas morning, except for the straight chalk marks of jet vapor trails from Nellis Air Base. The day’s heat was still set low on simmer, and the sky was so blue it looked like a cool pool to jump up into.
Ahead of them the facade of Maylords’s one-story beige stucco building glittered like a high-end junkyard, though. Its glassless windows with their jagged-edge frames seemed almost deliberately arty. Helmut Newton territory.
In fact, a photographer was busily shooting away at the shot-out windows, either recording damage or creating a postmodern catalogue for the store.
When a security guy swaggered around the building’s corner, overbuilt legs and arms as stiff as a puppet’s, the whole area looked like a crime-scene wannabe.
Temple was so busy eyeing the damage and estimating the time and cost needed to repair it that she was startled when Matt tapped her on the shoulder.
“Stop over there.”
“Where? This lot is deserted. I don’t see-”
She scanned a line of mature pine trees that bordered the lot on the east.
Something hunkered in the early morning shade, something streamlined and silver. Matt had taken the Hesketh Vampire to the opening? The vintage motorcycle, formerly Max’s and famous for its screaming engine whine at high speeds, was a spectacular ride, but it was hardly a Datemobile.
Temple had gone for a spin on it once, long ago, with Max, but she couldn’t picture tall, dignified Janice Flanders riding
pillion with Matt … maybe she just couldn’t picture Janice Flanders with Matt, or didn’t want to.
No mystery was too small for Temple’s busy brain to ponder.
How had Matt gotten Janice home? Her car? Then how had he gotten back here for the Vampire? And why would he leave such a valuable bike in an unprotected parking lot? Forget hands! Idle questions are the devil’s_ workshop.
Even as Temple’s mind worried the question, one part of her cerebellum spun the Miata’s small steering wheel right. The car glided into the shade.
There Temple’s vision acclimated enough to reveal her mistake.
This was no Hesketh Vampire before her eyes. This was a candy-coated, supercool, streamlined silver, automotive baby the likes of which she had never seen.
“Matt? What is this thing?”
“A Crossfire.”
“Yeah. We did have a lot of that here last night. Bang, you’re toast … or tawny, or beige. Galloping gasoline prices, did
this thing sit on the lot the whole time? During all that destructive snap, crackle, and pop?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. I checked it out last night before I collected you for the ride home. Lucky I parked it in the most protected
and low-profile area of the lot.”
Temple followed him out of the Miata to circle the stranded car. It struck her as low and sleek enough for Las Vegas’s famous Fontana brothers (who favored Dodge Vipers) to lust after in triplicate. The two-seater had that squinty-eyed rear window all the newest speedsters sported.
“I see you have a vestigial backseat too,” Temple noted, trying shamelessly to attach herself and her new Miata to the Crossfire’s chrome dual exhaust pipes.
“It does look kinda impractical.” Matt’s sheepish frown only underlined his good looks. “But I don’t need a big vehicle shuttling back and forth from WCOO.”
“You could have made do with a golf cart. So what’s with the eye-candy car?”
Matt shrugged. “Maybe I’m tired of certain people complaining about my modest tastes. I don’t know, Temple. I guess I got carried away. I could, so I did. I’m feeling a lot that way lately. Big mistake, huh?““Not if you take me for a ride in this baby. What’ll it do?”
“I’m not sure. One-forty? Kind of pointless.”
“The most fun things in life are kind of pointless, or hadn’t you noticed?” Temple circled the Crossfire. “It makes my Miata
look like a Tinker Toy.”
“I don’t think this is a contest.”
“Cars are always a contest.” Temple didn’t ask what she figured the Crossfire cost: around thirty-five grand.
Hmmm. Matt was still resisting buying a microwave and a cell phone, but he sprang for this?
“When’d you get it? I mean, this is a major decision. I just bought a car. I would have been glad to help.”
“It was either a Prius or this. This gets okay gas mileage. And I did all the Internet research, so I didn’t need much help.” Temple shook her head. News flash: Matt was one severely conflicted ex-priest. This glitzy Crossfire road burner was like the evil twin to an eco-friendly, gas-saving Prius.
“Canned heat on wheels,” Temple diagnosed. “I think it’s great you got it, after running around in-”
And then Temple got it. Of course! This was his bustin’- free-of-his-stalker car. No more slinking around in Electra Lark’s old pink Probe painted white to blend into a landscape where boring bathtub white cars repelled the desert sun.
That reminded Temple of Max and his all-black cars and all-black wardrobe in the nation’s hottest city. What did that say about contrariness? Always living on the edge of invisibility. When was the last time she had seen him in the light of day?
She returned to admiring Matt’s new car. “Crossfire. Cool. It must have set you back a bundle.”
“Certain people,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth, “have been urging me to become a conspicuous consumer.” Oh.
That might have been her. She? Whatever!
“It rocks!” she said. “You’ll have to give me a ride sometime.” “I’d like to.”
Hmmm. The expression in his caf� noir brown eyes might even mean it literally.
Or Temple was fantasizing again, an unwelcome new development. She had to be responding to something new in Matt, something edgy and even a little hot. No! Matt was still too innocent to make sexy double entendres. Wasn’t he? Who knew what he had learned from a couple hours with a high-end Vegas call girl? Anyway, Temple was too committed to Max, even with their current enforced semiseparation, to think about other men’s meanings. Wasn’t she? She gritted her mental teeth. She must be the only woman in the world dithering about an ex-priest on one hand, and an ex-magician on the other. The only thing they had in common was in being uncommonly attractive. And her, of course. Youch!
“I’m glad you got it,” she said of the car.
“If you’re glad, I’m glad.”
“So glad we agree. Well, I’ve got to buzz over to the Bellagio for a meeting of Wong Inc.”
“Now who’s upscale?”
“It’s not me. It’s my client’s star guest, of whom I’ve seen zilch since last night. Amelia Wong is also the likeliest target of the shooting spree, if anyone specific was. It’s time I made up for that oversight. Wish me luck.”
“I probably should wish you good chi.”
He didn’t have to look so amused and so scrumptious at once. “Chi, thanks!”
Temple hopped back into her car and revved out of the lot.
If she couldn’t imagine Janice Flanders riding a motorcycle, she could sure picture the guilty pleasure of riding shotgun in a Crossfire made for two.
Chapter 16
Chi for Two
At least Temple now had a car that made parking valets’s eyes come up double cherries when she abandoned it to their tender, gaspedal-goosing-up-the-hotel-parking-ramp care.