Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“Being so quick to judge has cost her. Again. Nah, she doesn’t regret leaving me. ‘Loser,’ she probably figured. All she ever regrets is being wrong. Maybe about Max Kinsella. Maybe even about me. And Mariah. Which is a big step for her. She might even believe I’m human enough to really care about my daughter.”

“Of course you are,” Temple said. “It shows. On your daughter and on you.”

“Yeah? You don’t think I’m the pond scum from L.A.?”

“Maybe at first, but not anymore. You get Mariah better than Molina does right now. I think it’s this awkward mother-daughter stage. And something is rubbing Molina raw lately.”

Temple didn’t add that maybe the something could be someone: Max still, or even Matt. It wasn’t human for Molina to be around, or at least know, two such, well, eligible men and feel nothing. But then, Molina hadn’t been letting herself feel human for a lot a years, according to Rafi.

“Why,” she asked, “don’t you just ask Molina for visitation time? You’ve got a steady job now.”

“She’d bite my head off if I asked her the time right now. Carmen is off balance somehow. I don’t know if it’s a guy or her job or hormones.”

“Hormones? She’s not that old!” Temple said, before she could stop herself from defending her bête noire.

“You’ve never had a kid. It can do things to your system.”

Temple doubted motherhood was that altering, but finding out he was a father certainly seemed to have straightened up Rafi.

“How’d you get that assistant-security-chief position at the Oasis, anyway? That was an impressive step up from temp jobs.”

Rafi shrugged the question off, like dislodging an itch between his shoulder blades. “Still knew some guys who could give me a decent recommendation. Guess it was more a question of why than how.”

Temple waited. People talked more that way.

“What pushed me to move on, and up, as it turned out, was that last temp job. Guy, uh, got killed on my watch.”

“Yeah? Some nut with a gun? You had to shoot him?”

“Nah. This guy shot himself, in a way. It was the guy in the sky at the Neon Nightmare. Bungee-cord act over the dance floor. He shot down from the peak of the pyramid, and instead of bouncing back up, slammed into the wall right in front of me.”

Temple’s pulse roughened. “I didn’t know you worked there. It’s a crazy maze of loud music and light, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, those damn strobe lights and neon flashes made it insane to see,” Rafi said. “And the bosses were freaky and almost invisible. You’d glimpse them coming and going, seeming to slink into those funky black Plexi walls. I did my job interview in a room I never found my way back to again, with a guy in white tie and a woman in a turban.”

“Weird. How could you be an adequate security guard in that environment?”

“I couldn’t, when it came down to something really serious,” Rafi said, his features settling into a bitter mask of self-disgust. “After that bungee cord failed and the magician guy fell, I couldn’t find a pulse, couldn’t even see what was injured. It was so chaotic. I tried CPR, called an ambulance. The EMTs were right there and whisked him away. They probably kept trying to resuscitate him, but, uh, it was a lost cause, I bet.”

“Didn’t you check to find out?”

“Where? Hospitals don’t provide information like that. Newspapers didn’t run a word on the incident. Anyway, he wasn’t about to come back anytime soon, or ever, even if he survived that body blow.

“That was a life lesson for me. I saw we were all hanging by a thread, that I needed to hustle and get hold of a better one if I wanted a chance to get to know my kid more before my bungee cord ran out of rebound too.”

Temple nodded, but her composure was shaken.

Was Max’s death Rafi’s life lesson?

Synthesized

Temple drove back from Sunset Park undistracted by what she could see of the coinciding sunset in the surrounding mountains. Nature couldn’t soothe a mind and emotions whirling tornado style.

Max must have been seriously investigating the Synth at the Neon Nightmare and had never whispered a word about it to her. After he’d returned from vanishing on her a couple of years ago, he’d promised to keep her in the loop about any threats on his life.

He’d always protected her more than she liked. No more protecting her from his counterterrorism past, he’d promised. They’d figured out what the Synth was—even that there was a Synth—together. Together, they’d mourned the death of University of Las Vegas professor Jefferson Mangel, an academic with a puckish enthusiasm for “magic” and a sense of the mystical in life.

Professor Mangel had been found dead in his classroom-cum-magic museum, inside a drawing of the constellation Ophiuchus, the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, forgotten and dropped centuries earlier.