Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Max nodded. “But you can see from the earlier events tonight how many unemployed aerial workers are available around Vegas now. Speaking of risk and the impossible, I knew you could do it.”

“Do what?” she said in her turn.

“Get that instinctive yet clockwork mind of yours ticking on the real dynamics of the Synth.”

“My theories would never get an arrest warrant or play in court.”

“Maybe not. Maybe not yet.”

“Is the Synth defanged now?” Temple asked Max.

“Pretty much. I can always yank out an extra tooth if they get forgetful.”

She looked up into the vast dark disappearing into a peak, the disco lights now crackling in the night, heat lightning, and bathing their faces and bodies with a dizzying round of zodiac signs. Hers Gemini. His Aries. Theirs … always, Ophiuchus.

“I will never forget—and coming from a recovering amnesiac like me, that’s something,” Max said. “I will never forget you saying ‘Max, come home.’”

Temple knew what she had to say then, but she didn’t know what to say now. So she let Max speak.

“When I did come ‘home,’ and I saw you, your situation, I thought ‘This woman must be crazy.’”

Temple shrugged. That’s what you do when you can’t quite speak.

“I call this stranger that my best friend, my mentor, said I loved and I can’t even remember, and she says, ‘Come home.’”

Still silent, forced to keep silent. He didn’t seem to notice.

“My biggest regret about still being alive—”

Temple tried to cut off that horrible way to put it.…

His hand lifted, the magician hypnotizing an audience into silence.

“—is that I still don’t remember. And I promise, if I ever do, I will never, ever let you or anyone else know that I do.”

Max grasped her shoulders and, slowly, kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll wait outside to follow your car home. Just in case.”

He left.

Chapter 50

A Very Vegas Affair

Temple was having a nice, private nineteenth-century “swoon” on her living room sofa the morning after overseeing the total disintegration of the Synth and proposing a solution to three murders that would likely remain in cold case files for eternity.

What was frying her brain were the unpleasant facts. For every loose end and murder she might have tied up at Neon Nightmare last night, several messy threads remained. Not the least was the murder of the suspected multiple-killer himself, Cosimo Sparks.

If world-class architect Santiago had done it, as seemed possible, why would he risk killing such a deluded and low-level crook? And if the three head Synth members had appropriated the Darth Vader look for their panicked heist schemes, who were the real Vaders, the pair that had raided the club headquarters carrying serious weapons?

And where was the Jersey Joe Jackson loot, which had expanded from rare silver dollars from the Vegas early days to bearer bonds and weapons of mass seriousness?

Not to mention a series of unsolved “falling” deaths all over town.

Too much information for even an action heroine to process. She definitely needed downtime.

In fact, she was lacking only a mint julep and a pool boy (of her acquaintance, of course), when Midnight Louie leaped before looking and made a four-point, twenty-pound landing on her midriff.

“Oooph, you big oaf! That hurt. Can’t a girl have a time-out to soothe her nerves around this place?”

Apparently not. Louie added insult to actual injury by using her as a springboard to the newspaper-strewn coffee table. Louie proceeded to dig frantically on the papers he’d been peacefully dozing upon barely a minute before.

Temple had to feed her leisurely daily print addiction; besides, nothing washed glass to sparkling perfection better than ammonia and ink-stained newsprint. Cats shared Temple’s fancy for outmoded communication forms, and Louie especially.

Now his big paws were hurtling whole news sections off all four sides of the big low table.

“Lou-ie. I’ll have to get up, bend over, and pick up your mess. I’m not in the mood for physical exertion. You should understand that better than anybody. Use a litter box!”

When another Louie swipe revealed her cell phone screen lying one razor-claw away from disfigurement, she leaped upright and grabbed it from harm’s way.

It purred its thanks in her hand.

No wonder the cat had disrupted the newspapers. Louie’d been sleeping on her hidden smartphone, and it was set on vibrate, not sound. She bet that had been one big buzz in the behind.

She put the phone to her ear and heard Matt saying, “Temple. At last I’ve reached you! I’m back in town; something monumental has happened.”

“Matt? What?”

“I’m on my way to our place. Your place. At the Circle Ritz. I’ve been running around town at my wits end. I’m almost there.”

“What’s the emergency?” she asked. “Has something bad happened?”

“No! Yes. Something beyond inconvenient. They’re arriving this evening on my heels. Where the heck am I going to stow them? What will I do with them? Who can I get on such notice besides an Elvis imitator? Help.”

“Holy Hysteria! Are aliens landing?’