And then she curled her toes, flexed her knee and worked the loose shoe up, up the cushy side of the rolling coffin to her hip. She caught its pointed toe with her fingertips.
She brought it, heel first, to her head.
Temple took a deep breath. It was harder to strangle without a gag in your mouth. And now she could yell. But should she, right now? Better to wait until she sensed that someone beside ninjas might hear her.
The shoe lay on her chest, between her handcuffed wrists.
Now what? It couldn't spring steel. Maybe she could work her-self half upright and pry away at the upholstery. There must be wood underneath, and nails or screws. She fought the flutter in her stomach at the word "screws." Screws were hopeless.
No, screws were harder, but not hopeless.
Chapter 44
The Last Time with Temple
The night had settled into a game of follow-the-dotted-line.
The dotted line of the highway center divider.
Max Kinsella drove it, but Matt Devine rode it in his head, on the Hesketh Vampire. A motorcycle was made for following a line, a thin, endless high-wire road through nowhere.
Matt had never realized, until confined as a passenger in this car, how much he had converted to the lone, whining whiplash of a two-wheeler.
He had never understood, until that last time with Temple, how much of himself lay unexpressed, like raw ore in the ground, waiting to be found and valued.
"Why Temple?" he asked. "It began with her ring, but then they took her. Why?"
"Why you?" Kinsella rejoined. "Why were you there at all, with Molina of all people?"
"I was a witness." Matt suddenly saw that role as both horrific and ironic. "I was supposed to identify the woman who cut me. Why she was supposed to be there, I don't know. Ask Molina.
She seemed so very sure."
"She's paid to seem certain."
Kinsella drove like someone who could take it or leave it. Like driving was a means to an end, not an end in itself. It was hard to imagine him caring enough about the Hesketh Vampire to own it.
"What are we paid to do?" Matt asked.
Kinsella was silent. Then he hit the door buttons and the win-dows rolled down, letting in chill desert air.
His unconfined hair blew back like an Art Deco pennant, dramatic, decorative. He looked like the Pontiac Indian: aloof, superior, alien.
"We're paid to care," Kinsella finally said.
Matt tasted the idea. That described his job all right. His hours on the headset, connected to strangers. How did it describe Kin-sella's reality? Paid"to care? Matt hoped not. He hoped humanity was not a mere commodity.
"Temple cares without being paid," Matt noted after a while, into the wail of the wind.
"Temple is a throwback," Kinsella said shortly.
Matt was silent. The expression made Temple sound expendable, when Matt realized that was the last thing Kinsella had meant to say. Temple was a hark back to old-fashioned values.
That was why he was so drawn to her. She looked before she leaped. She weighed right and wrong. She considered other people's feelings. And he had castigated her for trying to spare his.
Matt leaned his head into the wind, felt the fresh, sundown whip of night in motion.
Molina seemed to know what she was doing.
Kinsella always acted as if he did.
Matt would have to count on them being at least half right, because there was nothing else he could do.
*****************
A constellation had fallen to earth.
Mars, Venus, the Crab Nebula lay across the long, lone strip of highway, blinking wildly.
Matt took in the convention of red, blue and yellow-white lights.
"Accident?"
"Roadblock."
Coming up fast.
The Taurus's brakes took, but not before the car did a graceful, screeching half-turn on the empty road.
Beyond all the ground-bound official lights blinked an alien vehicle. Twinkling like a rectilinear Christmas tree, big as a double-wide house on wheels.
A semitractor and trailer. West Coast mirrors. Twin trucker CB antennas. Eighteen wheels and chrome Playboy bunny mudflaps. A true UFO brought to earth by a squadron of police vehicles, most of them vans bristling with antennas.
Above them, a helicopter hung like one mighty mad hornet, buzzing.
"Wait," Kinsella cautioned, turning off the ignition.
Wait? When Temple's fate was winking somewhere out there in the chaos.
Matt opened the Taurus door, got out, began walking toward the commotion.
Kinsella they probably would have crucified against the nearest empty van as a suspicious character.
Matt they left oddly alone, as if he were invisible.
Perhaps fifteen men milled around the truck. Matt spotted the white Crown Vic and headed that way. The red light on top still circled endlessly in the night, washing desert and sky and van in sweeping turn.
Molina waited on the road, hanging back as the bulky men in commando gear swarmed over the parked tractor-trailer.
When he came alongside of her, she didn't seem surprised.
"It's their show. We're just a sideshow." She meant the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police.
"And Temple?"
"A featured attraction. I've got to let them do their thing. All we've got is suspicion. They've been working this case for months."
She glanced over Matt's shoulder into the desert darkness. "Hitch a ride with a friend?"
"You know better than that."
"He's still out there." It was a statement.
"Yeah."
Molina nodded, satisfied. "We'll get our turn."
Matt wasn't sure what she meant: that they'd get their turn at Max Kinsella, or at the truck.
Molina leaned against the car fender. "Kinsella's smart. He's got the best seat in the house.
We're standing on hot asphalt waiting for a pretty-please chance at the evidence."
Matt shrugged. Only the rotating lights made the site hot. The air was actually chilly.
"Are you saying," he asked, "that their drug bust has priority over a kidnapped person?
Temple could be--"
"I frigging know it," Molina said. "These guys have frigging priority. Mess with 'em and you get a slow sentence on their time clock."
But she swaggered forward, finally buttonholing one of the chunky guys in commando gear.
They talked. Hands gestured. Molina returned.
"And?"
"They're not finding anything. I made a deal."
"What deal?"
"You bring Kinsella over for a search."
"Kinsella?"
"This semitrailer is loaded with magic-show gear. The cast of thousands, including the human and feline stars of the show, has vanished elsewhere. This major drug bust has nabbed two drivers whose underdeveloped muscle has displaced their brains. Errand boys. There's apparently nothing in the trailer but elaborate empty boxes. The narcs want to take the truck back to their secured lot and go over it with a fine-tooth flea comb tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Temple could suffo--"
"So I told them we have an expert searcher. Better than a drug-sniffing superdog. A human nose when in comes to magical paraphernalia. Think he'll come running if you ask him nicely?"
"I think he'll come running if I tell him that no one cares about looking for Temple until they feel like it."
"I don't care what bait you use. I only care that the fish goes for it."
"Fine." Matt trotted back to the Taurus, angry with both faces of the law.
He leaned over the open driver's side window.
"The drug enforcement unit has priority, but it can't find a thing. The truck will wait in a lot until morning unless you search the magic-show gear for hidden narcotics. If you find Temple, the drug guys won't object."
"Politics."
Max got out and slammed the car door shut. "I suppose my services are Molina's idea?"