I shut my ears, my ears flattened back, waiting for the flying water-drops that betoken her imminent midnight dip in the mighty Nile of the Strip.
I hear a muted growl of annoyance, and peek.
Miss Louise is dangling from the mummy's head like a mouse from an alleycat's jaws, her sharp little shivs clinging to mere gauze.
Her tail works wildly, trying to compensate for her unbalanced position.
But, sure enough, the gauze is giving, ripping away, stripping off the mummy's anonymous face.
I squinch my eyes half closed. I do not like to see the dead violated, especially if the dead in question is maybe a couple of grand old in years. Is there no respect for age anywhere? Even if this is just a mock mummy, I expect the unseen face to be the usual freeze-dried skeletal mess that plays so well on TV late shows. Cannot an old dude even be allowed to rot in peace, If not rest in peace?
But I am wrong.
There is plenty of flesh on the face so slowly being revealed by the weight of Miss Midnight Louise's hanging form. Fresh flesh. Fresh kill.
Miss Louise claws upward to avoid losing her grip and swags down more of the material. I glimpse open eyes, like cueballs with black leeches on them.
Speaking of black leeches, that is what Miss Louise herself looks like dangling from the deceased.
Finally, even one of the lazy-faire workers around here wakes up enough to spot her swinging like a bell from the prow of the barge.
"Hey!" he shouts originally. "Get off that prop."
I do not see an airplane propeller anywhere in the vicinity (although if you would wind up Miss Louise and swing her by the tail she might resemble one), but she evidently decides that she has done her duty in attracting human attention to the obvious scene of a crime.
She climbs the poor dead dude's face like he was chopped liver and scrambles over the prow-top to repeat her tap dance down the oars and to the dock.
Without a word, we act as one and dash back into the shadow of some shed.
Meanwhile, yon worker shambles over like the man with the hoe in the famous painting.
He stops where I had sat to observe the unveiling, and stares long and hard at the prow and the tawdry figurehead.
"Mummy," he mutters, but he is not calling for his maternal parent. "We didn't have no mummy up front. It was an Egyptian mermaid. With great boobs." He edges toward where the dock meets water, and looks harder.
I was not aware of such a thing as an Egyptian mermaid, although, judging from the figurehead fronting Cleopatra's Barge Restaurant at Caesars Palace, great boobs appear to have been a classical human theme. That asp must have had a field day.
Anyway, yon slow-witted witness suddenly straightens and hollers. "Hey! Guys! There's this stiff on the prow. Get over here!"
A stiff on the skiff. Finally, the light dawns. Louise and I eye each other in the dusk of our cover. Are we going to make a night of it and see what happens next? You bet your best sarcophagus!
Chapter 14
Bedtime Max
"Bedtime snack?" he asked.
"Hmm?"
Temple struggled awake, still worrying about intact contact lenses.
`"Sweet and sour sauce. Try some."
"Chinese? In the middle of the night? What time is it?"
"You need your energy."
"My energy is history."
"But not for long."
The sweet and sour was not on the pointed ends of a pair of chopsticks, but on a tongue.
"Oh, Max."
"What?"
"What . . . what."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Who knows. You're impossible."
"I'm a magician."
"Former magician."
"Retired magician."
"This is retired?"
"You're not very retiring, I know. In fact, you seem wide awake now."
"No thanks to you."
"Thanks."
"You're welcome."
He was.
Chapter 15
The Unkindest Cut
"I made it through Christmas," the raspy voice on the phone complained at 2:45 in the morning,
"and it was a jingle -bell bust. Why should I hang on any longer?"
"Because you made it through Christmas. Now you can make it through New Year's."
"Aw, just shoot me now, Brother John. I got no money, no friends, no one who cares. What am I supposed to do, drag through one holiday after another? Next you'll be telling me to live for President's Day."
"You're the one who's attaching your survival to holidays.
What did you expect from Christmas?"
"I don't know. Some kind of . . . high, I suppose. A lucky run at the craps table. A handout from some big winner. I came here because I thought Las Vegas was always up, you know? And I'm still down."
"Time of year and location don't have the most to do with highs and lows. You do."
The caller sighed. He spoke in the slow, flat liner tones of the chronically depressed. Matt didn't think he was suicidal, but he was certainly toying with the possibility.
"You need a helping hand, but not a handout," Matt told him. "Maybe some short-term medication. I can refer you--"
"Refer me, schmer me."
But the man finally took down the information.
"Call right now," Matt said.
"It's too late."
"Nope, not in any sense of the phrase. Call, and someone will get right back to you.
Someone will even keep you company until you can get in for an appointment tomorrow."
"Appointments to make life worth living. It's a crock."
"But you'll call?"
"Yeah. Thanks. I guess."
Matt hung up, shaking his head.
Bennie in the adjoining cubicle scuffed his chair back to see Matt.
"Another happy, dancing holiday depressive, huh? Jeez, I hate pulling these holiday shifts.
Everybody who calls is so down. But you seem okay, buddy. You seem more than mellow."
"I thought I was always mellow."
"Uh-huh. Quiet, but not mellow. You are new-minted mellow, dude. So what's happening?"
It was almost three a.m., when Matt finished his shift. Bennie had another three hours to go, until dawn's early light. They were alone.
Matt shrugged, then smiled. "I took care of some old family business. Took my own advice and confronted and buried the past, or at least some of it."
"So that's why you took off over the holiday. What did you do New Year's, then, more family business?"
"Uh, no. Just. . . fun. I had a date."
"A date! Fun's okay too. Oooh, I bet Sheila will be sorry to hear that."
"Why should she be?"
"She's interested in you."
Matt shook his head.
"Hey, yeah, man. Listen. Old Bennie knows these things. So tell me about your New Year's date."
"Not much to tell." Matt found himself unwilling to get into a roll call about Temple, their relationship. "Yet."
"Oh-ho!" Bennie wiggled his bushy eyebrows and made hand signals like a baseball pitcher that Matt couldn't decipher, except they implied a male camaraderie.
He realized his "yet," meant to indicate that the outing hadn't resolved the relationship, had been interpreted as a prediction of lascivious things to come, of scoring. He hated to disillusion Bennie, but if anyone in his and Temple's relationship this far had cherished hopes of scoring it was more likely Temple. Matt himself was still experiencing fear of flying.
The line rang, too late, given Matt's shift, for him to pick up.
Bennie scooted his chair back into his phone cockpit.
"See you another night, amigo."
Matt grabbed his sheepskin jacket from the battered wooden coat rack by the door--all the office furniture was donated--and pushed the glass door open into the Las Vegas dark.
Here, away from the Strip, you'd never know you were standing in Neon City, Nevada. He shrugged the jacket on while rounding the building corner for the side parking lot. The night was cool but hardly cold. His fingers prodded the jacket pockets for his gloves.