“I am related to three of them?”
“I can count.”
“Then Midnight Louise is indeed my—?”
“The product of your littering, yes. And now you are right to fear for her well-being.”
“How would we, uh, three, do this Oneness of Overmind thing?”
“I would perform the ceremony, but the effect is only temporary. It would require burning a whisker each and a few drops of communal blood, not to mention the sacrifice of one life apiece.”
“Cell phones are much more humane,” I say, shocked.
“Had our kind pockets … I sympathize with your concerns, Louie. Part of the permanent wave in my whiskers is from absorbing the danger haloing your recently departing human like the scent of death. I hope her recent departure does not become permanent.”
“But she has already left, and it will take time to summon the Cat Pack. I need paranormal help.”
“And I am giving it to you. I have consulted the stars, particularly the sinister sign known as Ophiuchus, and looked into the future, and I have this urgent advice for you.”
“Yes?”
“Run like hell.”
Room Disservice
“Somehow,” Gandolph chuckled as he hung up the room phone, “I doubt a room-service dinner with me will be as enthralling as with your friend Revienne.”
“I never said she was a friend,” Max objected, using his hands to lift each leg onto an ottoman and stretch out more than three feet of chronic ache.
“The over-the-counter pills help at all?” Gandolph asked, sitting in the upholstered chair.
Max shrugged. “I’m used to the discomfort, but those dank Old World buildings must have been built to make people uncomfortable, like that bloody convent.”
“The church probably inherited the manor house a couple centuries ago, and the Magdalen operation was a leftover from the age of Dickens, Max. The Old World was always harsh compared with the New. You’ve forgotten our small travails when we lived abroad. Daily comfort is an American concept. Think of all the toilet paper American tourists trekked on European tours for decades.”
“I spent enough time this unscheduled trip ‘roughing it’ in the Alps.”
“With a hot blonde waiting on you foot and foot.”
Max shrugged in surrender. “I’m spoiled. I know it. Speaking of which, I can’t believe these ‘recovering’ IRAers haven’t tumbled to the fact that ‘Michael’ Kinsella is the ‘Mystifying Max.’ ”
“My European counterterrorism associates and I kept your original identity up-to-date all these years. Comfort may not be their game, but subterfuge is. They’re way older at it than we are, living right next door to ancient enemies without any massive moats of ocean.”
“How the hell—?”
“According to the record, Michael Kinsella returned to the U.S., graduated from a state university with a … biology degree, and got a high-school teaching job.”
“I’m amazed. Maybe I should drop back into that phony life. Start over. I do seem to have a gift for biology,” Max added with a wicked glint.
Gandolph was perusing a folder. “What do you want to start with, duck soup or cream of potato?”
“Are you talking about my fake life, biology, or the room-service menu?”
“The menu. It’s quite decent.”
“High praise from a gourmand like you.”
“How did you like the kitchen in my former Vegas house?”
“Good grief. A memory of that room just flashed through my mind.”
“Excellent, Max! Good progress.”
“Your online redhead was in it, sitting on your granite-topped central island sipping a bubble glass of … probably merlot wine. Not a bad picture. Interesting composition of reds.”
“The bubble glass is all wrong! Someone must have added it to the household after I left.”
“Could have been me. Bubble glasses are fun magic props to have around the house.”
“I’m not catering to your indecisive mood. We’re having rainbow trout and stuffed rack of lamb, vegetable mélange, with brandied bread pudding for dessert. I’ll order the wines.”
“And a Celebrex chaser for my seventy-year-old legs.” Max remained silent for a moment. “You know what I’d really love for dinner?”
“What?”
“A Big Mac.” Max expected his companion to have a foodie fit over his low-end, high-fat craving.
“McDonald’s is everywhere,” Gandolph said briskly. “I’ll order you one up as an appetizer. You need to get some pounds back on somehow. A man bedridden for more than a month can really lose weight. Perhaps beer will help. We’re meeting our next sources in a pub.”
“You spoil me,” Max said. “I’ve been an ungrateful boy.”
“You’ve been through as much as you faced seventeen years ago in this very place.” Gandolph’s smile turned into a thoughtful purse of his lips. “It’s good you recalled ‘our’ kitchen in Las Vegas.”
“We’re here in Belfast so I can recall my teenage rebel past. Why are Vegas memories intruding in the Irish mist?”
“Because they are all linked, my lad. More than either of us might realize, or like, I fear.”
Ladies’ Neon Night Out
A doorman in a muscle T and dated gangster bling bowed her into the club.
“No cover charge, cutie,” he said. “Every night is ladies’ night at the Neon Nightmare.”
Temple sashayed in, having forgotten she would be welcomed as cash on the hoof by a nightclub’s management. She usually looked younger than her thirty years. All dolled up she probably looked just barely legal.
Men bought drinks for silly young women who dressed like they thought they were hot. Lots of drinks. Good. Temple was here to pick brains … and maybe locks.
Temple had never done the Las Vegas singles scene, although every bar in town was a singles scene. She’d moved here with Max, madly in love. His magic-show extravaganza at the Goliath ran twice nightly, so they’d played out all their love scenes at their Circle Ritz condo. It had been a very “married” existence, come to think of it.
Temple apparently didn’t look “married.” She fended off a couple of middle-aged salesmen-in-suits types who were obviously tourists, and the sale-eager bartenders, because no way was she opening her pistol-packing purse to pay for a drink at this elbow-squashing, people-packed bar.
That would be dangerous, even though she had the safety on. She was beginning to think she had overreacted to the idea that Max hadn’t just “gone missing again” but had been here and then never seen again … and was possibly really dead and she didn’t know it. The thought was intolerable.
“Let me guess,” a man’s voice said on her right. “Whatever you drink comes in a footed glass.”
Temple eyed the night’s first catch. Around thirty-five, with a face more pleasantly quirky than handsome. She rejoiced to see brown hair gelled into that central pompadour demanded of guys who would be Hollywood hip these days. Even Matt was being threatened with an “extreme make over” by a radio management going ever more online.
Temple glanced over the guy’s shoulder to the gyrating mobs on the dance floor and up into the pyramid’s distant dark peak, where stabbing light sabers of neon dueled with electric color.
“You’ve never been here before,” her bar partner guessed. “New in town?”
“Pretty much,” she lied. “You too?”
“No. I’m assigned here.”
Even better! “Are you a Neon Nightmare habitué?”
“I was right. Footed drinks and fancy French. What can I get you?”
“A wine spritzer?”
“That’s for lunch.”
“You’re right. A Spanish coffee.”
His peaked eyebrows became even more pronounced. “You don’t do the bar scene much.”
“Nope.”
“What’s in a Spanish coffee, besides the coffee?”
“Rum, Kahlúa, triple sec, cream, and sugar.”
“I admire a woman who can hold her calories.”