“So you think O’Connor’s dead?” Brian prodded. “We’d have to see for ourselves to believe that. She’s had more lives than a witch’s cat. She seems to thrive on trouble, other people’s, and exploiting it.”
Max buried his face in one eye-shading hand. They’d take it for stress. He was really trying to block out this torn photograph that had appeared in his dreaming mind’s eye: a pale white cheek on the dark ground, the just-recalled eerie green wink of a nearby cat’s reflective eye, a whole lot of disbelief on his part, and … guilt? Regret? Savage satisfaction? The exact emotions were as fugitive as his memory.
“We now know why this woman was so lethal,” Gandolph said. “I made these notes from our visit to a former Magdalen asylum on our journey from Dublin.”
He handed over a printed copy. Max thought he must have used the hotel’s business travelers’ setup. Dangerous, even printed direct from his laptop.
“Magdalen asylum? Sweet Jesus!” swore the younger man, Kevin. “She was kept in one of those places? No wonder.”
“She’d be young for that,” Brian mentioned, troubled, “even given her thirty-nine years or so.”
Max sat dazed for a moment, struck by the Irish lilt on the words thahr-ty nigh-en. It was hard not to imitate the tongue-misted accent that was like a lullaby for his troubled mind, maybe because he and Sean grew up in Catholic schools and churches where some of the older nuns and priests still kept a bit o’ the brogue.
“Forty?” he asked. “Kathleen would be forty now?”
“About that,” Kevin agreed.
“And she’s still wanted?”
“If she was involved in that pub bombing fiasco, yes.” Kevin consulted some pages. “Three loyal IRA men were named, and run down, thanks to an American kid named Michael Kinsella. ‘Cousin of one of the victims.’ You say you can’t remember being that young and fierce?”
Max shook his head violently to expel the image of a dead woman’s pale cheek. They took it for a simple no.
“You can’t remember,” Brian said, “but we’ve got many more files on her suspected activities. If anything here helps you recall anything we could use …” They passed him a couple of files while pulling Gandolph’s paper pile to their side of the table. It felt like the exchange of human hostages in paper-doll form.
Max flashed Gandolph a glance. They didn’t know about his Mystifying Max magician persona, then, or of his undercover counterterrorism work. If they still wanted information on Kathleen’s later activities, it might explain why someone still wanted to kill him.
Was it only about revenge for stalking and finding those IRA pub bombers all those years ago? Vengeance didn’t have a half-life, like nuclear waste did.
Max nodded agreement and pushed back his chair, liberating his legs from under the cramped table.
While Gandolph gave thanks, set up another appointment, and made farewell noises, Max tried to avoid hobbling to the door with the old-fashioned transom window above it. His body was dreading the long walk and then the worn, perilous stairs to descend, but his hopes were clutching at the files he’d turned to jam into Gandolph’s case. He’d need both hands free for the stairs, but at last his mind was liberated from day-to-day survival issues and could exercise its memory.
There had to be something more to the attempts on his life than ancient history, Ireland’s or his. Something as contemporary as last month or week.
The Vegas Cat Pack!
A seasoned sleuth senses when too much is going wrong and it is time to call in reinforcements.
Much as I am concerned about Midnight Louise’s puzzling disappearance from the Neon Nightmare’s secret maze of club rooms, I know I need to put executive decisions in motion before looking into her whereabouts.
I leave Miss Temple’s quarters and ratchet my way down the claw-marked slide of the Circle Ritz palm tree trunk to hit the hot parking-lot asphalt at a jog. I handled a murder case once, in the desert, for a coyote clan, and learned something from the lesser species: the endurance possibilities of the so-called dogtrot.
After my recent stint with the dance competition at the Oasis Hotel, I have also mastered the fox-trot. So I am now well seasoned with a new feral canine flavor—carrrumba!—and am perhaps the fastest so-called domestic cat on four feet in Las Vegas.
A secondary advantage to this pace is that my natural black sole leather is not getting singed as badly as it would on naked paving materials in this climate. Ordinarily, I can travel from scant oasis of shade to oasis of shade, be it of greenery or Detroit origin, but I do not have the time now to take a zigzag route.
Who knows what those Synth freaks would do in the Satanist way if they caught an eavesdropping quadruped of midnight hue?
Speaking of such a dastardly situation, I am now entering the Men in Beige zone and need to tread extra carefully. One does not go rushing into police custody, even if they seem friendly. Often they have extradition agreements with the local Animal House of Blues, aka the city pound.
This particular police substation near the Circle Ritz seems to have been civilized pretty well. Officers Shrimp Combo and Miss BO, short for Bicycle Officer, are fast-food aficionados. Not the ubiquitous doughnut, mind you, but a heap of protein in a slick waxed wrapper on a bed of mushy white bread that can be torn off and distributed to our feathered friends, who appreciate not being the Catch of the Day at these McDonald’s moments.
(Normally, I do not resort to brand names other than the occasional Las Vegas landmark, but in this case the fast-food place is a mere two blocks away. Also, I am well aware that chichi modern narratives are now fashionably littered with the best in clothing and cuisine. So far, my works have only contributed my roommate’s shoemeisters to that trend, except for a few painfully fashionable details from Mr. Max’s recent grueling European fling, which is entirely in my collaborator’s materialistic hands. You will note those episodes are decidedly and solely inhabited by bipeds and are the poorer for it.)
“Mr. Midnight, sir!” My advent through the cloaking oleander bushes is joyfully hailed.
I brush off my shoulders from young Gimpy’s greeting. He can certainly hurl himself over a lot of ground on those three legs. I straighten him up by the scruff of the neck. He wears a sporty striped suit that serves to downplay his handicap. It is bum luck to be hit by a car when you are a homeless kit and no one is around to get you to the hospital, so you lose your misshapen foreleg in a charity ward months later.
However, misfortune leads to improvisation, and little Gimpy could eke out enough free food to swamp the whole clowder, like Oliver Twist beseeching “More” from the local church choir instead of a villain of the piece.
As it happens, I have set up the entire Ma Barker gang pretty sweet here at the police substation, which I am peacefully explaining to Gimpy when a sharp-nailed mitt curls into my thick shoulder pad.
“The youngster does not need to hear your fairy tales,” Ma Barker spits. “I am the one who copped to this location, and now you have burdened me with my ex.”
“It is only a temporary thing,” I say quickly. “He has had a retirement gig as a restaurant mascot, but these trying economic and ecological times has erased his last employment situation.”
“Great Bast, son! You sound like one of those boring talking human heads on the nightly news. Forget the philosophy. When do I lose the loser? I already gave him the first heave-ho ages ago.”
It is trying to hear one’s sire discussed in such scathing terms. I fluff up my ruff and get to the point.
“The old guys who ran Three O’Clock Louie’s at Temple Bar on Lake Mead have snagged a hot new venue.”
“Is a ‘hot new venue’ something edible?”