Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (26 page)

She crossed the threshold and stopped, stupefied. It wasn't what she saw. It was who.

Savannah Ashleigh. White-faced, straw-haired, and
shaking, wearing a filmy mauve peignoir set off the cover
of a 1970s paperback Gothic romance, the kind with the big house with a light in the window behind the fleeing figure of a nightgown-clad woman.

Rafi Nadir. Clad in durable black denim jeans and a heavy cotton turtleneck shirt alarmingly like a Kmart version of Max's garment of choice. Puzzled, angry, and uneasy.

Midnight Louie, his fur punked up into damp spikes
and his tongue hanging sideways between his bared
white fangs.

Savannah's purebred Persians, one silver, one gold,
and both with their coats messed up as if by a whirlwind, still snarling and spitting, mostly to themselves.

“
What on earth happened here?" Temple asked, raising
her voice into Xoe Chloe's more hyper range. This would put the Xoe Chloe makeover to the acid test. Both Savannah and Rafi were acquainted with Temple though they'd never expect to see her here, in this guise.

“That's what I want to know," Nadir said, still staring accusingly at Savannah. "I turn on the light and get onehysterical female and three pretty raggedy cats, all ready to chew my ass."

“
I glimpsed him," Savannah shrieked like a wind-up
doll that, having been set for one mode, can't escape it. "He wore black."

“
I'm your bodyguard," Rafi said. "I just got here. I came when I heard the caterwauling. Are you saying
some guy in black came in here and attacked you?"

“In black like you, yes."

“Bodyguards wear black. Especially at night. It's use
ful if people don't notice us. I came as soon as I could.
Did you maybe glimpse the cat? He's all in black.”

That directed Temple's attention to Midnight Louie. Again. He was sure dogging her footsteps on this one.

Savannah's eyes dilated even more. "That cat!!! That
devil! He's been the ruination of Yvette and now he's
come to get me. That's Midnight Louie, I know it!”

Rafi's dark eyes narrowed as he assessed Savannah. "You superstitious about cats? Is that it? Ma'am?”

The address of respect had been added way too late.

“Just that one. I'm sure that's the one that ruined my darling Yvette and he's here to ruin me.”

Temple actually felt a twinge of pity for the woman.
Obviously something had occurred to frighten her, and
she was all alone in this suite, unlike Temple and Mariah.
Temple suspected that Louie had come running, just like her and Rafi. Temple had tried to ignore Louie's skulking
presence around the place but now she understood it.
He'd always been sweet on the luscious Yvette, who now sat shaking and licking her pretty little front paws by turns.

Time for Temple's new persona to sink or swim. This was Zoe's second run-in with Rafi. Brash Xoe Chloe's extreme looks and attitude would either fool these two close-up. Or not.

“
Hey, lady!" Temple kept her naturally foggy voice
high and a bit nasal. "This is just a black stray cat. Chill. I
don't know who this 'Louie' is. Your bookie? But this ole cat here is just some innocent stray. I mean, could those big green eyes lie?”

Here Xoe Chloe turned to eye Rafi Nadir up and down much more thoroughly than Temple would ever do. His eyes were in no way green.

“And this man can't have been here earlier," she decreed. "Look! Those cats have lost a lot of nail sheaths engaging someone in this room tonight." A few pearly
scythes still glinted from the navy carpeting. "Some
would have clung to that denim and cotton-knit and
showed up like dandruff on all that black. Someone else walked out of here dripping nail sheaths. But not your
bodyguard. Look again! There's another one by the door."

“
Oh." Savannah looked from Rafi to the carpet to the
door, but not at Xoe. She pressed a hand to her bony chest
and sank into seated posture on the end of her bed. "Then I did see someone in black. Just not this man."

“
Maybe." Nadir bent to the rug, glanced at Temple with no great favor, then followed the trail of nail sheaths to the
door. Opening it, he encountered a herd of pink-shirt-clad
contestants, looking like agitated sorority sisters.

He quickly shut the door. "What happened?" he asked Savannah, his voice brusque with urgency. "How exactly were you attacked?"

“It was dark. I heard the door open. When I got up,
someone or something pushed me back onto the bed.
Then there was this shrieking, like bats or banshees or something."

“
Cats," Xoe said. "It sounded like a cat fight from forty
feet down the hall."

“
My cats were fighting
something big,"
Savannah in
sisted, pushing herself upright on the bed. "I glimpsed a
man's figure, just as the lights went on. And off again.
And on again.”

Rafi rubbed his forehead. "I came in and hit the lights.”

“
No. No, he must have been gone by then. You had to have passed him in the hall."

“I didn't. Nothing to run into, not even a current of disturbed air. Nobody went out of here.”

Temple swaggered to the door in Xoe's motorcycle
boot gait, which is hard to do in bunny slippers.

From Rafi Nadir's expression, he'd come to the same conclusion as Savannah.

“Hey." Xoe Chloe blew a kiss at her own bizarre reflection. Totally not-Temple. "You got a full-length mirror here. Next to the door. How'd you rate?"

“
Yes." Savannah was pleased by her observation.
"That's part of my contract wherever I appear. A full-
length mirror installed next to the room door. So I can check myself just before I leave. So many women end up dragging toilet paper on their shoes or with hitched-up skirts or worse from not checking their full-length reflection in a mirror before they leave a hotel room."

“
You're saying—?" Nadir pressed Temple/Xoe with
the same weary skepticism his no-longer-significant
other used.

“I'm saying the mirror by the door, in dim light, could confuse a witness. Or a victim."

“
A victim?" Savannah's voice—never sweet, gentle,
and low—rose to new hysterical heights. "I was to be a victim?”

Temple nodded, though she wasn't entirely sure about that. "The cats must have sensed a problem and attacked the man in black in the dark, before the lights went on. Their eyes don't require much light to see."

“The cats." Savannah glanced around. "My little dar- lings! Fighting for their mommy tooth and nail."

“Nails," Temple corrected, pointing out another lost
sheath with the pink felt nose end of her bunny slipper. Nadir frowned and dropped down to the carpet to mark
the spot with an X of tape he'd taken from a dispenser on the spindly-legged desk near the door.

Temple, meanwhile, advanced on the mirror. Midnight Louie was shadowing her ankle like it was his lost love. She hoped that wouldn't give her away. Savannah certainly wasn't praising him as her savior.

But then, unlike Rafi, he wasn't Savannah's bodyguard.
He was Temple's.

She glanced down. In the now overlit room, Louie's
dark pupils were the eye of the needle in his enigmatic green eyes. They were aimed like arrows toward the target of the mirror.

Once in front of it, Temple's fingernails tested the
frame, looking for a mechanism.

Rafi came up behind her, his dark reflection encompassing her pageant-pink one for a moment, like an ugly storm cloud swallowing a remnant of the sunset. Would he recognize her now? Or had her gift for disguise fooled even a suspicious guy like him?

He eyed her for a long while. But it wasn't really her he was looking at, for he then lifted the mirror off its hook as
if it were made of cardboard. As if to prove something.

And revealed...

A paneled wall. A wall paneled in picture frame panels,
rather.

His black work boot pushed at the bottom. The inside of the panel clicked inward, revealing a dark and mysterious passage beyond.

He stepped into the patch of black. "Stay here.”

“Wait a minute, dude. I found this."

“
Drop the dead-end-kid act.”

Temple's heart dropped instead. He'd made her! Then he went on.

“You think you're such a tough twerp. You're a kid. In your nightie. Stay here.”

Temple rammed him from the side and forced her leg through, bunny slipper and all.

“This is nuts! The city is crawling with ballsy little
broads. Stay here and pet the cats or something.”

“I'll raise such a ruckus you'll be the last person on
earth to see inside that passage.”

Rafi, glowering like a World Wrestling Federation personality at intermission, reluctantly stood aside.

“
Ladies first." He didn't, of course, mean either word
of it.

That didn't matter. Neither one of them would be first into the dark.

Midnight Louie hefted his tail into the air at a ninety-degree angle and preceded them into the lightless secret passage beyond.

Temple followed and so did a thin beam of light. She
turned back to see Rafi hoisting a cigar-size flashlight
he'd pulled from his jeans pocket.

The passage was pretty dull. Instead of being dank and vermin ridden, it was dry and dusty. Nothing moved in it
but them. Louie spotted a few snakes to pounce on but
they turned out to be electric cables.

Rafi pointed his narrow light at the seam where ceiling and walls met. More cables, affixed to the support beams by huge staples.

“The man who built this place was a bit paranoid, like Elvis," Temple noted.

“Perfect setup for wiring and surveillance. That's why the producers picked this house. It was wired for everything already. Must be more of these access passages all though the place."

“Perfect system for sick pranksters to use," she noted. Rafi laughed. "Yeah. I'd call the producers of all these rigged reality shows sick pranksters. Amazing. People protest the increased surveillance touching their lives because of terrorists but love to watch their fellow citizens being eavesdropped on and filmed on the sly and tricked in these cheesy reality shows."

“Inhumane nature," Temple commented sagely.

The flashlight picked out the black shapes of hidden
cameras strung along the corridor like suspended bats in
a cave.

“
The technicians must be running up and down these
all the time," she noted. "What keeps a really nasty
voyeur from being among them?"

“Not a thing, bunnie babe. Not one thing. I suppose there's no hope for it but to go back and guard that Ashleigh broad. Ain't it amazing how the most irritating one aboard is the most careful to protect herself?"

“Oh, Miss Ashleigh isn't the most irritating one here.”

“You have a better candidate?”

He obviously had not considered the male contingent.
Dexter Manship . . . Crawford Buchanan . . . Mr. Hair
Guy. Male chauvinism can be blinding.

They re-emerged smelling of dust and, it turned out, covered in it. (Only Louie seemed to relish the fact. He
shook himself dust free in a few seconds, then began
licking his coat in the proper direction again.) No one much noticed their less-than-triumphal return. The room thronged with cooing girls in pink pajama sets intent on both soothing Savannah and courting her vote.

Even the Persian girls were now ensconced on the bedspread beside their recumbent mistress, purring away in solace and solidarity.

“Frightening," Rafi noted.

Temple was sure that Midnight Louie concurred, and she was ready to join the both of them.