The shooting range was months behind her, but if Max had been the Phantom Mage and had disappeared from the Neon Nightmare, as Rafi’s on-scene testimony indicated, she wasn’t going there without backup.
Poor Rafi. Witnessing that fall had made him “give up” on private security jobs and indirectly led him into a decent career. Poor Max, if it had been Max. She wouldn’t leave the Neon Nightmare tonight without finding that out.
The weight of the small revolver felt reassuring at her hip, where the purse rested. She could keep a hand on the top, as women do in crowds, and be ready for anything. What if Max had never left Las Vegas? What if he was being held prisoner at the Neon Nightmare? Rafi had mentioned the “bosses” coming and going, the place’s interior being a black Plexiglas maze, where reflective surfaces and neon almost blinded most eyes.
Temple opened the accessory chest’s top drawer. This was for jewelry and bigger accessories, unlike the smaller chest in her bedroom that contained the notorious scarf drawer, where she’d finally stashed Max’s ring. She plucked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the collection stored in shoe-box tops. She snagged a rhinestoned raspberry beret to obscure her strawberry-blonde hair, just in case someone knew her.
In the mirror, the effect wasn’t at all Zoe Chloe Ozone, amazingly.
“Okay, Retro-Disco Babe,” she told herself in the mirror. “We are gonna take the Neon Nightmare by its flaming electric-rainbow mane and shake it until the Synth and what happened to Max Kinsella, if he was there, come falling out into the light of day.”
Temple grabbed the Miata keys from the kitchen counter near the tiny entry hall, locked her condo, and headed to where a rearing neon mare surmounted a pyramid crammed with music, mania, and maybe magic and murder.
Sitting in the Miata in the fresh darkness with the top up a block from the Neon Nightmare, Temple finally allowed herself to check the temperature of her sandal-strapped toes, instep, and ankles. Yup, cold feet.
She shut her eyes. The longer she thought about it, the less she liked it.
Her cell phone felt like a magic egg in the palm of her still-warm hand. This was spring in Las Vegas. The desert air was hot and heavy from the hangover of sun-drenched daylight bouncing off all the concrete, glass, and asphalt.
She was bathed in the literal nightmare sign of many neon colors, flowing over her little car like a giant mane. She could leave a message for … not Matt in Chicago. Her landlady? No … Molina? God forbid. Rafi? No, he knew this place. He could rod right over and stop her. She wanted someone who’d miss her if she didn’t turn up, but distant enough to not think much of where she was and what that meant.
Whose number was on her cell phone that she could text?
She settled on Nicky Fontana. “Chkg out Neon Ntmr 4 G’s ideas. Disco TB. News at 11.”
His phone would record when she left the message—8:00 P.M.—and he wouldn’t bother calling her back or become concerned until after 11:00. Nicky was a casino watchdog. He stayed up at least until midnight every night.
Now. She had been as sensible as a one-woman fury could be. She was going inside that gaudy pyramid, and she wasn’t leaving until she had solved the puzzle of the Synth or died trying. Or, better, shot someone in self-defense trying. Hopefully not in her own foot in its flashy leopard-print suede wedge heels. Hey, maybe Bob Dylan of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” fame would write a song about them in her memory.
Dalai Lama Eyes
While my Miss Temple, looking like a floozy, is heading out the front door, I am out my special bathroom exit window, ratcheting up ye olde leaning palm-tree ladder to the Circle Ritz penthouse.
The sinking sun is haloing the distant mountains with a faded neon-rainbow glow, but scenery is not on my mind.
Once I have dropped down onto Miss Electra Lark’s penthouse balcony like a ninja, unseen and stealth footed, I pounce down the line of French doors, seeking the loosest hinges. There is always one weak link to everything and everyone, and Midnight Louie is a past master at sniffing them out.
Aha! I pause at an end door. Methinks I smell the blood of a purebred Birman female. Or at least I spot a long, white, airy whisker protruding under the door. It is locked, of course, but this is the same flimsy hardware as on Miss Temple’s balcony doors. Back in the nineteen fifties, when this joint was built, the crime rate was as low as the interest rate is now.
I do my patented leaps and twists, and am pleasantly rewarded much sooner than usual, when the locking mechanism bows to my superior strength. Unfortunately, I am at the apex of my leap and enter twisting my torso to land on my feet.
I make an awkward five-point landing—I also take it on the chin when I fall to the carpet—and look up to see a pair of red taser lights gleaming not six inches from my temporarily immobile eyes.
My shivs dig into the carpet as I rapidly scramble up to assume the “Halloween” martial-arts pose, feet clenched and back arched, rear member slashing.
“At ease,” drawls an unimpressed female voice. “Where is the fire?”
“What are you doing out in the open?” I wonder.
“Opening the door, dodo,” is the tart reply from the agoraphobic Karma, who is usually to be found lurking under large upholstered furniture.
“Uh, I did that,” I tell her, forgetting you can tell the telepathic or psychopathic … or whatever “ick” you want to call her … nothing. She knows all, sees all, says all.
“Uh,” she mocks, “I let you do that. I could sense your neurotic panic all the way from the second floor. It has quite curled my whiskers.”
The illumination in here is eternally night-light to accommodate Karma’s oversensitive nature, so I have to squint to see that her vibrissae have indeed curled inward at the ends as if under the influence of a permanent wave.
“I did that?” I cannot help sounding a bit pleased.
She sighs, heavily. “I cannot help you, Louie.”
This is bad news.
I do not normally buy this psychic hokum anymore than I regularly eat Free-to-Be Feline, but it is true that Karma’s breed is descended from the cats that defended the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, back when it was a sovereign and mystical place that harbored legends like the earthly paradise of Shangri-La (from which a naughty lady magician of Miss Temple’s and my acquaintance took her performing moniker).
The legends say that the souls of departed Tibetan priests inhabited the beige-colored temple cats. Frankly, they share much in common with the late Shangri-La’s performing Siamese, the evil Hyacinth: cream beige body with brown-masked face, brown legs, and tail, and stunning blue eyes, except they are longhaired (and have that uppity longhair air, as if they listen to harpsichord concertos all day on velvet pillows). The legend is that their coloring, especially the four white mitts, were awarded by a god when they tried to save a long-ago Dalai Lama from being killed by mountain marauders.
So I have to keep all this stuff in mind when dealing with Karma, as she is supernaturally sensitive.
“You do not know what I want,” I argue.
“Of course I do, Louie. I know what you want before you know it. And I am telling you that had you contacted me first, when you sent the clowder to their various far-flung posts, given the fact that you are related by blood to three of them, I could indeed have invoked Bast to lend you the mystical and ancient power called Oneness of Overmind so you could communicate long-distance.”