Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit Read online

  “People die on the streets from vehicular accidents too.”

  “But I’m not down in that pit with them. Biggest risk to undercover agents? Not gettin’ fingered or found out. Not getting killed. Getting hooked.”

  “So why am I the receptacle of all this useful information from the opium den?”

  “Just explaining where I’m coming from and going to.”

  “Going to. Which is?”

  “One more big score. There’s a funny ring operating. Dirty Larry can’t get near it. I’m going to have to come back as someone else and try again. Meanwhile, I detox on Traffic Accident detail. But the instincts don’t turn off.”

  “And … ?”

  “And I never bought your act the other night with the report on that Nadir guy. I can read upside down and backward in my game too, Lieutenant. That address pan out?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Why would you think you could con an undercover guy?”

  “Because I had to.”

  He nodded. “Good reason. Why did you ever think you could keep Carmen a secret?”

  “Because I want to.”

  “Better reason.”

  They each sipped from their drinks, gazing at the spectacular 180-degree view, then back at each other.

  “If you don’t want something,” she said finally, “and everybody does, why did you get me away from the office?”

  “What’s the worst I could do with what I know?”

  “Blackmail? But I don’t think so.”

  “No. Just exposure.”

  “I deny. I stop. Carmen gets paid in cash. She has no Social Security number. You could mess up my friends at the Blue Dahlia a little, but I could mess you up a whole lot more. And Carmen could fall off the planet. Officialdom would never notice.”

  “I would. Notice. I’d never do that, burn Carmen. She’s a class act. I oughta know. Acts, that is.”

  “Then … what do you want?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Just to get the cards on the table.”

  Molina stared at the tiny circle of plastic cocktail table holding their Art Moderne drink glasses. “What cards? What table?”

  “This one. Here. Now. Call it a social occasion with overtones of business.”

  She finally got it. “You think this is a date?”

  “Yeah. I thought you knew.”

  Her jaw would have dropped for the second time that night, figuratively anyway, if she’d allowed it to. She looked away and found an irritatingly famous face in every direction. Holographic portraits imbued the place’s few interior walls, both hung on and burned into the wall. The Ghost Bar was a highly desirable destination in Las Vegas, and Dirty Larry had gotten them first-row seats.

  A frivolous woman would have been impressed.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve,” she told him, not happy.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He grinned and knocked back a big swallow of Burning Bush. Maybe the name was also a political statement.

  The line for the elevator when they left a few minutes later was even longer, snaking through the casino. Lustful eyes followed them, envying their leaving a place most of them would never get into this night or even by four A.M. the next morning when the Ghost Bar closed.

  Dirty Larry had just shrugged when she beat him to the credit card draw and slapped her Visa down on the tiny table. Thirty bucks plus a high-rise tip for a view through Go Ask Alice’s rabbit hole and a little atmosphere. That was the New Vegas, converted from cheap everything to entice gamblers to overpriced everything to entice tourists.

  The parking lot was jammed but well lit.

  “So you have pull with the pit bosses,” Molina noted. “In which persona?”

  “Just as me.”

  “Who is?”

  “Just plain Larry Paddock.”

  “I like Dirty Larry better.”

  “Figured you might.”

  He followed her to her car. “Where are you parked?” she asked finally.

  He waved in a vaguely distant direction.

  “I’ll drop you at your car,” she offered. Insisted.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You’re sure it’s safe out here with you bare-faced?”

  “Should be. People look but they don’t really see. That’s always been my edge.”

  “You sound like a magician.”

  “Not a bad comparison, but you sound like you don’t much care for magicians.”

  She leaned against the still tepid side of her Toyota. It took a load off her feet but also made their heights equal for a moment. She topped him by an inch or more.

  “So what do we have here—?”

  “Sergeant Paddock.”

  “Sergeant Paddock.”

  “We have a homicide lieutenant with a secret undercover role and a not very healthy interest in a drug-bust suspect, and we have a narc with a yen to play Joe Citizen for a while.”

  “Why play that role with me?”

  “Because I like your style.”

  “I don’t have one. Just a job.”

  “Right. That’s the style I like.”

  “And you want?”

  “Maybe I can help you with that Nadir guy. He was clean on this Maylords bust but something’s wrong with him.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  He grinned again. “That’s my girl.”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since anybody’s had the nerve to call me that?”

  “Too long?”

  She jingled her key ring and let out a disgusted sigh. “I don’t ‘date’ inside the department.”

  “No. You don’t date, period.”

  “It’s mandatory?”

  “No, but it might be fun.”

  “I outrank you.”

  “I’m a free agent. I make daily life and death decisions commanders don’t face. Rank doesn’t intimidate me.”

  She straightened. “I’m taller than you are.”

  “Rock climbing’s my hobby when I want to relax.”

  “I’m older than you are.”

  “Now how did you know that, Lieutenant?”

  “I checked your record. I routinely do that on any members of the force I have dealings with for the first time.”

  “Ditto. Except I checked you out after that deal went down at the Dahlia. You shouldn’t have tried to rip off my file on Nadir. It got me interested again.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you’ve got more secrets than going Blue Velvet every now and again at a local club. I find homicide lieutenants with secrets irresistible.”

  “Dangerous too, I bet.”

  “Hope so.”

  “And this is how you ask for a date?”

  “Hope so.”

  Molina eyed the PG-model of Dirty Larry. He still had the sloppy posture of a guy guy, but his hair was almost buzz cut and his angular, currently genial features went down smooth with a cocky charm that probably stood him well in undercover work. He looked like an ex-pilot, civilized but a little bit warped in some wild-blue-yonder way. Not her type at all. But then it’d been so long, she didn’t know what her type was anymore.

  “You want to drag me out to some trendy hot spot again?” she asked.

  “You’re a dynamite singer but you’re an even tougher audience. Not drag. Accompany. And not so trendy. Dinner.”

  She opened the unlocked driver’s door and nodded for him to go around to the passenger side. A concession, but a small one.

  “We don’t have a thing in common,” she warned him as he got in the aging car over the grumble of its engine.

  “Except police work.”

  “A negative.”

  “We both have to play roles every day to survive.”

  She didn’t comment on that because she was too busy backing out without being crushed by one of the many Hummers scattered through the lot. Or because she was too uneasy about answering that assumption.

  “West side of the lot.
Black Wrangler.” He push-buttoned down the window and braced an elbow on it, showing none of the unease most men did when they weren’t driving, and a woman was.

  One positive point to Dirty Larry.

  “I’ve got two kids,” he told the open air. “Shared custody with the ex-wife in—of all places, divorce central—Reno.”

  “Divorced ex-cop. Just the worst.”

  “You are too.”

  “I never married, but you know that.”

  He didn’t deny it. “Smart.” Nodding, looking out the window. “Saved yourself a lot of grief. Was it a cop?”

  She declined to comment, instead slowing the car. “Here we are.”

  “All right.” He got out, then leaned his angular yet boyish face through the window. “Thursday night dinner, say seven. Civvies. My treat. No ghosts. I’ll pick you up at home.”

  “You’re nosy as well as nervy, you know that?”

  “Yeah. My best qualities. What can you lose?”

  She didn’t answer that but pulled away as he hit the remote open for his car.

  Molina did a quick postmortem. Nancy Reagan had been right. She should have just said no.

  Why hadn’t she? Because she needed to figure his angle, and because he did indeed know too much about her. And because some of damned Max Kinsella’s taunts when they were tussling in the strip club parking lot had gotten under her skin and were still festering there, like a splinter you can only get out through some deep digging with a sharp needle.

  Finding out Dirty Larry’s game might refute the magician’s nasty insinuations that night. Like how she was too uptight for a real life, for a real man. A sense of shame still lingered from that flat-out physical encounter, a confrontation she’d lost for winning. Even though she’d finally won, had him down and cuffed, she had to wonder if he’d let her. Never arm wrestle a snake.

  And he’d escaped the cuffs later in her car, anyway, when events announced over the police radio made his arrest clearly unnecessary. Thanks to his slippery magician tricks, he’d left her cuffed to her own steering wheel. Molina’s mind winced away from recalling her struggle to reach the handcuff key he had left by the passenger door. Good thing she had long arms. She was still hoping the long arm of the law would reel in Kinsella one day. Hers, God willing.

  But she enjoyed impudence if it was genial, like Larry’s. He was refreshingly upfront, unlike most of the people—men—she’d dealt with lately. So far.

  Chapter 3

  Swinging for It

  Max stared down through the glass window into the lightning lit pit eighty feet below. It resembled a medieval vision of hell but it was just the mosh-pit madness at the nightclub.

  In the name of a good night’s work, Max leaped down into that mélange of writhing bodies and flashing lights and pounding music almost every day now.

  When you’re a double agent with two physical personas, you’re in constant danger of meeting yourself coming and going. Rather like having two portrayers of James Bond in the same movie.

  As the cloaked and masked Phantom Mage, Max walked on air and juggled fireworks at the dark apex of the nightclub called Neon Nightmare.

  As himself—the Mystifying Max, stage magician on hiatus—he’d crashed the hidden offices, spy galleries, and rooms beyond the noise and the neon of the club’s public spaces. Private rooms were strung along hidden tunnels through the pyramid-shaped building for the use of Neon Nightmare’s secret owners, a consortium of magicians.

  Max as himself—bare-faced, clad in matte black civvies—was due to make another in-person appearance before the claque, the cabal, the clique of disgruntled old-school magicians called the Synth.

  From the outside, Neon Nightmare was a dark mountain of architectural pyramid topped by the pyrotechnical display of a neon horse at the apex. Inside, it was designed like its ancient Egyptian role models. Once you were past the central open core where the bar and dance floor dominated, hidden paths led to unexpected chambers. If dead pharaohs didn’t await, career-dead magicians did, brooding over the wrongs of a world that now favored the naked revelation of magical illusions over the ancient tradition that cloaked stage magic in the mystic.

  Max found his way to the center of the Synth’s secret world, an eternally stuffy Colonial club room, where the stout and storied sat and smoked and sipped and relived old triumphs.

  He pushed the pressure point that turned black, unrelieved wall into a featureless door, then moved into a room that glowed the deep claret of a full wineglass. Crimson carpet, black leather, and ruby-stemmed glassware … it was like an Edward Gorey illustration, elegantly Edwardian and etched in black, white, and gray, except for the telling blood-red accents.

  “Max! We were just talking about you.”

  That would do for the opening salvo in a war of words. Having been “just talked about” made one the outsider in an instant. The inconstant lover. The philandering husband. The betrayer.

  “Where have you been?” the dramatic-looking woman he had nicknamed Carmen demanded before he could answer.

  “Certainly not onstage,” said the mentalist named Czarina Catharina. She wore the caftan and turban that hid an aging woman’s thinning hair and thickening waist. “No professional demands keeping you away. No excuses,” she added coyly.

  He shrugged and slipped into an oxblood-red leather chair, happy to fold his telltale six-foot-four height into lounging level. “I have matters to attend to anyway,” he said.

  “Matters?” Carmen’s question was sharp.

  “Financial.”

  “Ah.” The portly old gentleman by the bar cart who’d performed as Cosimo Sparks smiled tightly. “He now performs illusions with numbers, in private.”

  “You must have made an obscene amount of money,” Carmen speculated, her husky voice softening with lust, whether for love or money it was hard to tell, but Max’s dough would be on the filthy lucre.

  “Money isn’t everything. And the stock market.” Max sighed, spreading his fingers so eloquently that the assembled magicians stared at them as if seeing money melting away.

  It had melted away too when he’d poured it into global counterterrorism actions after 9/11. Not into any specific government’s efforts, but into the same shadowy, idealistic nonpartisan group that he and his mentor Gandolph had supported for years.

  “You know what we are,” Sparks said.

  “I think I do. Does anyone ever fully know another?”

  “Exactly. But we need to really know you.”

  “Aren’t I enough of an open book for my fellow, and sister, magicians? You all know that I got caught in ‘a situation’ the night my performing contract closed at the Goliath. I was unfortunately seen too close to a couple of thugs attempting to rob the casino, who inexplicably shot each other. It was flee or face charges. And so my career came to a dramatic end.”

  The bitter twist to his mouth on the last sentence was particularly effective, and truly felt. Honesty was always the best disguise among enemies.

  “Your career was ruined,” Czarina agreed. “But new ones beckon.”

  “Oh?”

  “Join us.”

  “I thought I had.”

  Sparks answered for Czarina this time. “You’ve been tolerated, man, but remain unproven.”

  “We require a trifling … initiation ritual,” the older woman put in.

  “I found you in this rats’ maze, didn’t I?”

  Sparks shook his head. Not enough. “We require more than fine discernment. We require risk.”

  “You’re talking to me about risk?”

  “Granted. But perhaps you’ve grown complacent behind your anonymity.”

  “Perhaps. I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “We’re not. We’re betting on you living up to, and surpassing, our highest expectations. Once you complete your assignment.”

  Max chuckled. It wasn’t a reassuring sound. “I haven’t had an ‘assignment’ since high school.”

  “We ar
e Ph.D. level,” Carmen noted languidly from her corner. Her working name was Serendipity and he supposed he’d better get used to it. She went by Serena among friends. “We require absolute loyalty, dazzling ability, and, oddly enough for magicians, transcendent honesty. To the Synth, anyway.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The Czar Alexander Scepter.” The slightly British accent of Cosimo Sparks slapped the words onto the table like a gauntlet.

  Max snorted, delicately. “The centerpiece of the forthcoming White Russian exhibit at the New Millennium? You’re joking.”

  “No,” Czarina said. “We want you to get it for us.”

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “But you could be, an exquisite one,” she coaxed him. “We don’t care about the value of the piece. We care about the value of the act of taking it. You can return it, if you like.”

  “Or keep it.”

  “Or sell it and share the wealth with us, which would be a nice gesture.”

  Max fanned his fingers to produce a feathered bird of paradise, a faux one. No awkward droppings. “Magicians appreciate the nice gesture.” He presented the bird to the Czarina.

  “Then you’ll do it?” she asked.

  “I’ll do it if I study the situation and decide it’s do-able.”

  “We should warn you,” Sparks said in his fuddy-duddy way. “None of us has come up with a foolproof method.”

  “I’m your court of last resort?”

  “You’re our pledge, Mr. Kinsella. If you can’t cut our initiation rite, you’ll have to take our hazing.”

  The threat was unmistakable.

  “I don’t take anything,” he warned back, “except what I want to. So I’ll leave now and examine the situation at the New Millennium that has stymied you all.” He stood to go.

  “Just a minute.”

  He paused, looking impatient. “Do you want this trinket, or not?”

  “We want your undivided attention.”

  “Have you seen the new act here at Neon Nightmare?” Serena, lying back on the room’s sole sofa in a gown out of a Sarah Bernhardt portrait, practically purred the question.