That made subtle sense. The classic pickup line was “What’s your sign?”
Temple almost wished some jerk would approach and ask her that.
“Ophiuchus,” she’d answer. “Rhymes with mucus.”
Now that was a turnoff!
Okay. The Neon Nightmare scene was making her crabby and snarky. That’s the mood she needed to snoop. She ordered a club soda with a lime wedge from a passing barmaid to secure her place at the table.
Then she watched the sides of the pyramid, with the light lasers glancing off their shiny black surfaces. Looking this hard, she realized the walls weren’t all smooth surfaces but a random pattern of black Plexiglas struts crisscrossing the entire interior to break up and further refract the lights.
Max would have been able to play off those fractured surfaces like a rock-climbing wall, particularly if he’d been tethered.
The barmaid returned with the club soda. At least with these high-rise tables and stools, Temple was actually on a level with the waitress’s punishing spike heels. Vegas glamour was hard on workingwomen’s feet.
“I’m not starting a tab,” Temple said, pulling out one of the twenties she’d stuffed down her purse’s exterior pocket.
“Struck out,” the waitress murmured sympathetically.
“Actually, I’m covering this scene for Whatsup magazine, the Vegas Restaurant Association guide.”
“Oh, yeah? Really? Then you’re like a reviewer?”
“Just like that.”
“We only serve appetizers, but they go like hotcakes.”
Good thing Temple wasn’t planning on quoting the poor girl. “I bet. I’m really reviewing the ambience.”
“ ‘Ambi’-wha? We don’t discriminate.”
“No, no. I mean the atmosphere. That neon lightning-bolt effect is, er, awesome.”
“Oh, right. Awesome.”
“Does it wear your eyes out, working in so much flashing light?”
“Naw, you get used to it. Don’t even think about it.”
“I hear the magic act you had until recently was awesome too.”
“Magic act?”
“Guy on a bungee cord, up in the pyramid?”
“Oh, him. Yeah, he was something out of Cirque du Soleil. A high-wire act, only with rebound. You know, at the big hotels.” She giggled. “He swept down one night and whisked my tray out of my hands just before I reached my table. Maybe he was a magician, because he bounced around and then set it right in front of my customers. Not a drop spilled.”
Temple was impressed. Max must have used the same natural laws of inertia that allow magicians to pull a tablecloth out from under a place setting without upsetting the glass and china.
“What about the bosses here?” she asked sympathetically. “They treat the staff okay?”
“Great. They’re almost invisible. Leave it to our floor manager, Craig. I think they’re—what do they call them?—‘backers.’ They trundle on past the bar and dance floor and sneak up to the offices they have up top that overlook the whole scene. Can’t blame them. It must be an awesome view, like overlooking Times Square in a New York City hotel, all those lights and people milling below.”
Temple glanced up, agreeing mentally.
It was time she found a different perspective on this case, this scene. A perspective the Phantom Mage had, and the Synth.
She gave up her primo seat on the crowded bar floor and headed for the blue neon Restrooms sign off to the side.
She had no intention of resting.
Once there, she took a hard right, putting her back against the pulsing, light-vibrating patent-leather black wall.
It did indeed vibrate.
Cool.
She edged along it, feeling behind her for those unmistakable vibes, hunting the angled crossbars that riddled the surface if you looked hard enough.
It took only a couple minutes to realize she was edging upward, a bit above the bar and dance-floor level. Another two minutes to understand she was ascending a very subtle interior ramp, like the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Or a pyramid.
Give or take a few thousand years, what was the difference?’
The purse at her hip swung with her motions, because both her hands were behind her, searching for some sensitive spot where she could feel a hidden door in the wall and enter the maze the Phantom Mage must have known well, which Max could have mastered.
Could they be one and the same? Maybe. She was unsure, not knowing if the Phantom Mage, a suggestive name, had hit the wall or pulled off a vanishing act in front of a nightclub full of people and a trained ex-cop. It was odd she’d never read about the accident, but Vegas establishments were used to making bad publicity disappear too.
When she glanced down, she realized she had moved upward to become one of those self-elevating mysterious figures often glimpsed on the fringes of the Neon Nightmare. Neon lights flashed across her fuchsia jacket and red hair, making her part of the artificial night sky. Making her into an object, not a person.
She continued edging upward, trying not to look down and get dizzy.
A spiderweb brushed her ankle.
What was she? An animated broom?
Oh. Another brush. Another spiderweb.
Her ankle almost turned as she suddenly stepped onto horizontal ground.
One of those “perches” Rafi had mentioned.
Temple shut her eyes and felt the flashing lights on her eyelids, the cold heat of their constant stabs on her body.
If one was the Phantom Mage … If one were Max … If one were one and the same, she might have stood here, on this narrow horizontal ledge, waiting to skydive into the dark below. She would never have done such a thing in her right mind. It was insanely dangerous.
So she took a step backward. Into the spiderweb. And felt the wall behind her swing inward. Her step backward became a stutter of steps as her weight sucked her inside. The purse at her side swung. Only her hand on the top edge steadied it. Steadied her.
Her back was against a wall again, but she was facing sideways to her previous position. The light and noise had vanished, as if she’d … passed through a giant cat door in the wall.
Now the airy tickle at her ankles felt familiar. Not a draft, but a wafting, supple furred tail.
Louie? There was nothing wafting and supple, or subtle, about him. He’d have used a claw tip to the anklebone to snag her attention.
Whatever. Whoever. She was inside the Neon Nightmare walls, where Rafi Nadir had never dreamed she could go. Had Max done this before her? Did cats see in the dark?
Did they? Because she could use a guide.
Temple edged along the smooth and dark but dimly lit inner corridor, watching the faint reflection of herself opposite. A vague glow of light lit this pathway. She wasn’t surprised when the wall behind her again gave way with a tiny click at the same time as a plumy fan wave brushed her knee.
With no fuss and some fear, she turned to face a softly lit room, like the intimate bar in an exclusive—and weren’t they all, with today’s prices?—Manhattan private club.
This was Vegas, though, and Temple knew she was standing there in the Synth’s inner sanctum, at the heart of the mysteries of unsolved murders and Ophiuchus—and Max’s disappearance.
Not that anybody other than a pussycat noticed.
Guns and Gravy
“We know,” Liam said when all the glasses were a fifth empty, “that you know about the Synth.”
Max couldn’t help smiling. Until last night, he hadn’t remembered.
“Stop yer eternal smirkin’,” Finn ordered in this thick brogue. “You’ve worked as a magician all over the Western world, accident or no accident. Whoever pushed you off that Alp wasn’t the only one willin’ to kill you. They evidently wanted to shut you up.”
“We want the reverse,” Liam said, interrupting his cohort. “Tell us what information you want first, and we’ll decide then whether we have the patience to tease what we want out of you two or should just beat your brains out for it.”