Cat In A Topaz Tango

While she was ambling toward the judges’ table arm in arm with Matt, Olivia’s shoe had hit a slick spot on the shiny wooden surface. One high heel kicked out from under her.

She was going to land flat on her back, the worst kind of impact. Especially for a sexy senior citizen.

Matt’s knees buckled as he tried to push himself beneath her before she hit, hard.

Molina and Rafi were sprinting onto the dance floor as were a bunch of beige shirts from hotel security, not to mention Dirty Larry slinging his camcorder strap over his shoulder to rush down the aisle to the scene of the accident.

Another dirty trick—sabotage—was all anyone in the know could think. The triumphant couple went from a strut to the judges’ table to being swallowed by a clot of converging security personnel.

The center of the stage looked like a football field with a loose ball.

Temple charged over, late, picturing Matt and his already disabled arm crushed at the bottom of the pile.

Feet lost purchase and skidded, bodies and arms flailed about on a floor as slippery as an ice rink.

Danny was standing, leaning over the judges’ table on the dais that gave him an overview of the melee. “He’s holding something! Striking. Get him!” Danny yelled with the overriding vocal command of a choreographer who could call whole chorus lines to attention.

A mantra of screamed “Die, bastard, die” came from the unseen heart of the struggle.

“Get him. Get him. Get him!” male voices chanted between desperate grunts. “Get who?”

“Man in beige,” Danny bellowed, leaping over the tabletop to help. “He’s got some kind of weapon.”

Midnight Louie, long MIA, suddenly came streaking past Temple’s side vision, making for the tumbled bodies in the pile.

He paused to eye the flailing limbs and feet, lifting a snarling face featuring an amazingly wide and bloodred maw lined with white, sharklike fangs.

Then he leaped onto the struggling pile of flesh, bones, and clothing with what Temple would swear later was a martial arts cry. Or the feline version, anyway.

Louie chomped down hard on one particular exposed khaki butt, ripping a back pocket clear off, so the contents scattered, including a small brittle comet that flew across the wood floor.

The accosted man screamed with pain and reared up, revealing a clenched fist.

It was the oddest sight. All the other men in the pile lifted up too, as if it was a modern dance movement, chaotic, brutal, choreographed.

The man Louie had targeted was pushed up by their pressure, one fist held high, something in it.

“Matt!” Temple cried, spotting a pool of black at the very bottom of the pile.

She charged forward, glimpsing Danny Dove on her left trying the same rescue maneuver. Her brand-new shoe sole slipped, but it wasn’t an issue.

She was suddenly stopped in midleap by a blow at her midsection that knocked the breath out of her, partly because of her own rash forward momentum.

Matt! her mind screamed.

Her body was being hoisted in a lift, and then slammed back down to earth, every bone shuddering from the impact.

She couldn’t move. She was held fast to a living wall and every eye was turning to her and whatever imprisoned her, the guards’ . . . Danny’s . . . Molina’s . . . Matt’s . . . a black cat’s . . .

The silence in the ballroom became profound, like total deafness.

A fist shook in front of her vision. Big. White-knuckled. Clutching . . . something small and silly and insignificant.

She could hardly see it.

A thread? A hair? A cat whisker?

“Thisss,” a guttural voice in her ear whispered, and then shouted to everyone. “Thisss is a sssyringe of pure, uncut heroin. One jab and she’s dead meat.”

Temple realized that her feet in their empowering platform wedgies were dangling, that the man had again hoisted her like a Barbie doll.

Damn! She always knew there was some seriously big disadvantage to being short and slight. On the other hand, she might be able to do an Olivia and kick her Goth shoe up behind her, right into the family vault.

“Don’t move,” Molina ordered. “Anybody.”

The policewoman was pushing herself up from the floor like a Greek tragedienne coming back to life, like a really pissed off Medea.

“Hank,” Rafi Nadir called from the rear. “Give it up.”

The guy spun, Temple’s limbs flopping doll-like as he turned.

The chest she was pasted against heaved, powerful and iron-hard, like a machine. “I can’t get the bastard,” the voice heaved out behind her, “I can get her. Again. And again and again.”

She saw his arm rising above her. He wasn’t brandishing a cat whisker. It was a hypodermic needle. Heroin! No, God!

She’d seen slow-motion, damning scenes like these in live theater. The helpless chorus writhing in joint impotency on the floor. The mad, cursed central figure lifting an arm to tear out his own eyes, to drive daggers into her innocent children’s bodies, to rend garments at the cruel fate the gods decree. . . .