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You go to Gangsters or the Crystal Phoenix hotels and you get a real “ride,” speeding limos trekking tourists back and forth through the underground tunnel past Pirates of the Caribbean–like vignettes of mobsters at play and pay from B to C, Bugsy to Al Capone. Anything mob would flash past your tinted glass “mobmobile” … Chi-Town, the Big Apple, the Big V in the Mojave. Inside you’d be sipping champagne and gulping Glenfiddich. Outside you’d become a spirited-away witness to the bloodiest crimes of the mob era, a CSI tech on speed. Hot cars, hot crimes, hot times.

Did she have a commercially twisted mind, or what?

What would Matt think?

Nowadays? He would totally get it.

And Max?

He would think she was unsafe at any speed, as usual.

But surely not as much as he would be, if he was still alive.

Again with the macabre thoughts!

A ghostly waft on her calf made Temple jump and look down.

A black cat was waiting to cross her path. Not Louie. Midnight Louise was standing at her feet, swishing her plumy black tail. Midnight Louise’s coat was far too long to have left the skimpy black hair on the chartreuse chair, though. That was a souvenir of Mr. Midnight himself.

Temple had to wonder if he still visited here, and visited Midnight Louise, here. The female cat had not been in sight when Temple entered. She’d looked the place over.

Temple studied the closed door to the hallway. It didn’t look completely closed, but she had drawn it fully shut.

Someone had let the cat in after she arrived.

Midnight Louise was the house cat now; maybe she’d made a deal with the house ghost. The suite was always on the chilly side, and now was no exception. Goosebumps stippled Temple’s arms.

She picked up her tote bag and walked out the slightly open door into the hall. She turned back to see Midnight Louise curled up on the (warmed-up) chair seat she’d left. The blinds seemed slanted at a more-open angle to allow light to stripe Louise’s languid form. The gray satin drapes on the left where the blind cords would be were stirring, almost taking shape as if someone was hiding behind them… .

Temple pushed the suite door almost shut, just enough for a cat to paw ajar and get out.

Five steps down the hall, she heard the gentle click of it closing.

Not her business.

Merciless Tenders

“Woo,” Max mocked as he stretched to full length outside the Mondeo’s driver’s side door and took a long look around. “ ‘I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ ”

He smiled at Gandolph, who got the Daphne du Maurier reference right off.

“So you remember the creepy manor house in that forties suspense movie? When I see iron gates and red brick grandeur, I always wonder, mansion or prison?”

Max studied the place.

“The Convent of the Little Flower looks more forbidding than one would think from the quaint name. Good thing we stopped for lunch and a chance to fill our bladders with ale and empty them. I bet the nuns inside could make a hardened felon piss his pants, if I recall my fleeting memories of the good sisters in grade school.”

“You once told me the grade-school nuns were Old World, even in Wisconsin. And that the Christian Brothers ran a tight ship in your high school too.”

“Apparently they did, if Sean and I graduated as virgins. He died one too. Poor bastard.” Max sighed. “That was the purpose of Catholic same-sex education. Worked for quite some time, until the free workforce dried up.”

Max momentarily shut his eyes. Behind his studied cynicism, an image was assembling in pieces like a torn photograph. Gaptoothed twelve-year-old grin, a freckled face growing angular with hints of a man’s strength. Sean. As redheaded Irish as a leprechaun. Max was Black Irish. Dark hair, no freckles sprouting in sunshine as freely as mushrooms do in the shade for him. Always a flat-black dark seriousness beneath any age-appropriate banter. Temper. An icy vengeful temper that gives nothing away, and no quarter. And never forgets, without the intervention of amnesia … even now.

That surge of teenage memory and emotion shook him. If he was getting pieces of himself back, he couldn’t control them as he’d probably learned to by age thirty-four, the hard way. He’d have to recall and reclaim every stupid, vain, idiotic, maybe crazy puzzle piece and subdue it again. Apparently Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella had been that obsessed. Apparently Garry Randolph, Gandolph the Great, cared enough to do his very best to fulfill that man’s crazy boyish bequest.

Max clapped the old man on the back. “You’ve teased your audience-of-one’s attention to the breath-stopping point, Gandolph. Show me the payoff behind the facade.”

Sister Mary Robert Emmet was older than God, who was older than Earth.

She wore a long black gown, and fanciful arrangements of starched white linen surrounded her face and shoulders, but the “penguin” look framed features worn with incalculable worry.

“Perhaps Mr. Randolph told you, Mr… . ?”

“Kinsella.”

A slash of sunshine flickered on the shadowed terrain, a smile.

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