“Of course you are,” Temple said. “It shows. On your daughter and on you.”
“Yeah? You don’t think I’m the pond scum from L.A.?”
“Maybe at first, but not anymore. You get Mariah better than Molina does right now. I think it’s this awkward mother-daughter stage. And something is rubbing Molina raw lately.”
Temple didn’t add that maybe the something could be someone: Max still, or even Matt. It wasn’t human for Molina to be around, or at least know, two such, well, eligible men and feel nothing. But then, Molina hadn’t been letting herself feel human for a lot a years, according to Rafi.
“Why,” she asked, “don’t you just ask Molina for visitation time? You’ve got a steady job now.”
“She’d bite my head off if I asked her the time right now. Carmen is off balance somehow. I don’t know if it’s a guy or her job or hormones.”
“Hormones? She’s not that old!” Temple said, before she could stop herself from defending her bête noire.
“You’ve never had a kid. It can do things to your system.”
Temple doubted motherhood was that altering, but finding out he was a father certainly seemed to have straightened up Rafi.
“How’d you get that assistant-security-chief position at the Oasis, anyway? That was an impressive step up from temp jobs.”
Rafi shrugged the question off, like dislodging an itch between his shoulder blades. “Still knew some guys who could give me a decent recommendation. Guess it was more a question of why than how.”
Temple waited. People talked more that way.
“What pushed me to move on, and up, as it turned out, was that last temp job. Guy, uh, got killed on my watch.”
“Yeah? Some nut with a gun? You had to shoot him?”
“Nah. This guy shot himself, in a way. It was the guy in the sky at the Neon Nightmare. Bungee-cord act over the dance floor. He shot down from the peak of the pyramid, and instead of bouncing back up, slammed into the wall right in front of me.”
Temple’s pulse roughened. “I didn’t know you worked there. It’s a crazy maze of loud music and light, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah, those damn strobe lights and neon flashes made it insane to see,” Rafi said. “And the bosses were freaky and almost invisible. You’d glimpse them coming and going, seeming to slink into those funky black Plexi walls. I did my job interview in a room I never found my way back to again, with a guy in white tie and a woman in a turban.”
“Weird. How could you be an adequate security guard in that environment?”
“I couldn’t, when it came down to something really serious,” Rafi said, his features settling into a bitter mask of self-disgust. “After that bungee cord failed and the magician guy fell, I couldn’t find a pulse, couldn’t even see what was injured. It was so chaotic. I tried CPR, called an ambulance. The EMTs were right there and whisked him away. They probably kept trying to resuscitate him, but, uh, it was a lost cause, I bet.”
“Didn’t you check to find out?”
“Where? Hospitals don’t provide information like that. Newspapers didn’t run a word on the incident. Anyway, he wasn’t about to come back anytime soon, or ever, even if he survived that body blow.
“That was a life lesson for me. I saw we were all hanging by a thread, that I needed to hustle and get hold of a better one if I wanted a chance to get to know my kid more before my bungee cord ran out of rebound too.”
Temple nodded, but her composure was shaken.
Was Max’s death Rafi’s life lesson?
Synthesized
Temple drove back from Sunset Park undistracted by what she could see of the coinciding sunset in the surrounding mountains. Nature couldn’t soothe a mind and emotions whirling tornado style.
Max must have been seriously investigating the Synth at the Neon Nightmare and had never whispered a word about it to her. After he’d returned from vanishing on her a couple of years ago, he’d promised to keep her in the loop about any threats on his life.
He’d always protected her more than she liked. No more protecting her from his counterterrorism past, he’d promised. They’d figured out what the Synth was—even that there was a Synth—together. Together, they’d mourned the death of University of Las Vegas professor Jefferson Mangel, an academic with a puckish enthusiasm for “magic” and a sense of the mystical in life.
Professor Mangel had been found dead in his classroom-cum-magic museum, inside a drawing of the constellation Ophiuchus, the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, forgotten and dropped centuries earlier.
The ancients named it for the image they saw in those stars, a man struggling with a giant, entwining serpent. That image was not so different from another ancient one for eternity, a circling snake swallowing its own tail. That was called the Worm Ouroboros, in the sense that medieval dragons were often called worms.
Temple was starting to think the constellation’s human figure might be female. Jeff Mangel was not the only victim of an unnamed killer cluttering Las Vegas in the sign of the Synth. Wasn’t she herself entangled in struggling right now to put Cosimo Sparks’s death together with Jeff’s, not to mention the parking-lot murder of the retired assistant of Max’s magical mentor, Gandolph the Great, aka Garry Randolph, and the spectacular death of Randolph himself (undercover in female garb, no less, to unmask fake mediums) at last Halloween’s séance to raise Harry Houdini? So the victims with magical links were Gandolph first, then Jeff Mangel, then Gandolph’s assistant, Gloria Fuentes, and now Cosimo Sparks.
Oh! The personalities, the deaths, the timing, the circumstances, the sign of the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus found at the professor’s classroom death scene, scrawled in chalk, and at Cosimo Sparks’s. They were all tangled up in her head … three magic-related men dead and one’s retired assistant. All unsolved murders. Now this Phantom Mage at the Neon Nightmare could be another victim. And Max, another retired magician, was missing. Again.
Rafi’s comments increased her fears that Max had been trailing the rumored secret society in disguise at the Neon Nightmare. The Synth’s calling card was definitely the image of the major stars that formed Ophiuchus. Where the ancients saw tangled human and serpent flesh, Temple had seen the childish sketch of a house, askew, and now holding the splayed stick figures of two dead men, the professor and the Synth magician.
She couldn’t let the implications of what Rafi had inadvertently revealed lie there like a dead black mamba. Somebody had to stir up things in the Neon Nightmare snake pit.
As soon as she got home, Temple checked for Louie—apparently out or snoozing somewhere.
Her desk drawer burped up the handy, dandy table of unsolved murders and purported suspects she’d made and updated to keep victims and possible perps straight, even if one suspect was Max. A quick study of the table showed magic was the undying, unifying theme. She now, thanks to Rafi, had a new highly suspect site to investigate.
Temple then attacked her bedroom closet, grabbing a ruffled Reagan-eighties fuchsia taffeta fitted jacket, slim, short Vera Wang skirt suitable for nightclubbing, and her new Giuseppe Zanotti leopard-print suede wedges perfect for the urban jungle.
Temple hotfooted into her spare bedroom-office to raid that closet for a purple suede envelope-style clutch bag with a slim metal shoulder strap. It was flat enough for evening but perfect to hold the Colt Pocket Lite Max had insisted she’d learned to shoot.
The gun was in a closet shoe box (such a TV-show cliché) next to a small, surprisingly heavy box of bullets. The weapon was loaded and the safety was on: no resident kids to worry about, and Louie didn’t have an opposable thumb. Finding a firearm that fit her hand, and a trigger she had the finger strength to pull had taken many tries. A tiny twenty-two didn’t always fill the bill just because it looked feminine sized. Max had drilled her on proper firearm handling, but her palms still dampened as she lifted the Colt from its sheepskin-lined triangular leather case and put it inside her leather-lined purse. She wasn’t used to carrying either one: an ordinary-sized purse or a gun.