Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

The ancients named it for the image they saw in those stars, a man struggling with a giant, entwining serpent. That image was not so different from another ancient one for eternity, a circling snake swallowing its own tail. That was called the Worm Ouroboros, in the sense that medieval dragons were often called worms.

Temple was starting to think the constellation’s human figure might be female. Jeff Mangel was not the only victim of an unnamed killer cluttering Las Vegas in the sign of the Synth. Wasn’t she herself entangled in struggling right now to put Cosimo Sparks’s death together with Jeff’s, not to mention the parking-lot murder of the retired assistant of Max’s magical mentor, Gandolph the Great, aka Garry Randolph, and the spectacular death of Randolph himself (undercover in female garb, no less, to unmask fake mediums) at last Halloween’s séance to raise Harry Houdini? So the victims with magical links were Gandolph first, then Jeff Mangel, then Gandolph’s assistant, Gloria Fuentes, and now Cosimo Sparks.

Oh! The personalities, the deaths, the timing, the circumstances, the sign of the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus found at the professor’s classroom death scene, scrawled in chalk, and at Cosimo Sparks’s. They were all tangled up in her head … three magic-related men dead and one’s retired assistant. All unsolved murders. Now this Phantom Mage at the Neon Nightmare could be another victim. And Max, another retired magician, was missing. Again.

Rafi’s comments increased her fears that Max had been trailing the rumored secret society in disguise at the Neon Nightmare. The Synth’s calling card was definitely the image of the major stars that formed Ophiuchus. Where the ancients saw tangled human and serpent flesh, Temple had seen the childish sketch of a house, askew, and now holding the splayed stick figures of two dead men, the professor and the Synth magician.

She couldn’t let the implications of what Rafi had inadvertently revealed lie there like a dead black mamba. Somebody had to stir up things in the Neon Nightmare snake pit.

As soon as she got home, Temple checked for Louie—apparently out or snoozing somewhere.

Her desk drawer burped up the handy, dandy table of unsolved murders and purported suspects she’d made and updated to keep victims and possible perps straight, even if one suspect was Max. A quick study of the table showed magic was the undying, unifying theme. She now, thanks to Rafi, had a new highly suspect site to investigate.

Temple then attacked her bedroom closet, grabbing a ruffled Reagan-eighties fuchsia taffeta fitted jacket, slim, short Vera Wang skirt suitable for nightclubbing, and her new Giuseppe Zanotti leopard-print suede wedges perfect for the urban jungle.

Temple hotfooted into her spare bedroom-office to raid that closet for a purple suede envelope-style clutch bag with a slim metal shoulder strap. It was flat enough for evening but perfect to hold the Colt Pocket Lite Max had insisted she’d learned to shoot.

The gun was in a closet shoe box (such a TV-show cliché) next to a small, surprisingly heavy box of bullets. The weapon was loaded and the safety was on: no resident kids to worry about, and Louie didn’t have an opposable thumb. Finding a firearm that fit her hand, and a trigger she had the finger strength to pull had taken many tries. A tiny twenty-two didn’t always fill the bill just because it looked feminine sized. Max had drilled her on proper firearm handling, but her palms still dampened as she lifted the Colt from its sheepskin-lined triangular leather case and put it inside her leather-lined purse. She wasn’t used to carrying either one: an ordinary-sized purse or a gun.

The shooting range was months behind her, but if Max had been the Phantom Mage and had disappeared from the Neon Nightmare, as Rafi’s on-scene testimony indicated, she wasn’t going there without backup.

Poor Rafi. Witnessing that fall had made him “give up” on private security jobs and indirectly led him into a decent career. Poor Max, if it had been Max. She wouldn’t leave the Neon Nightmare tonight without finding that out.

The weight of the small revolver felt reassuring at her hip, where the purse rested. She could keep a hand on the top, as women do in crowds, and be ready for anything. What if Max had never left Las Vegas? What if he was being held prisoner at the Neon Nightmare? Rafi had mentioned the “bosses” coming and going, the place’s interior being a black Plexiglas maze, where reflective surfaces and neon almost blinded most eyes.

Temple opened the accessory chest’s top drawer. This was for jewelry and bigger accessories, unlike the smaller chest in her bedroom that contained the notorious scarf drawer, where she’d finally stashed Max’s ring. She plucked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the collection stored in shoe-box tops. She snagged a rhinestoned raspberry beret to obscure her strawberry-blonde hair, just in case someone knew her.