Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple wished she had a cool long black coat and could do that Matrix air-walking thing. Max might be able to manage it, or look like he did.

  She, however, remained annoyingly earthbound, not to mention short.

  Still, she fished for the canister of pepper spray in her tote bag. Like it would penetrate motorcycle helmets. Temple stared at her useless self-protection device like a guy who actually needed an Internet spam offering to expand his member. This four-inch spray can of liquid red-hots wasn’t going to do a thing to repel helmeted Technicolor gay Nazi bikers!

  She desperately delved in her tote bag again. She took it with her everywhere and stuffed everything into it from press kits to the results of lightning raids on the Quik-Stop store.

  Had she bought giant thumbtacks, perchance? A staple gun? A . . . her hand closed on another cold canister. A really big metal canister. Hairspray? How would that stop the boys in Harley Hopping Mad? Although, given their bike color preferences, maybe only Lady Clairol would know for sure.

  Temple let her eyes leave them long enough to inspect the fat new aerosol can in hand. Ah. Spray cooking oil in extra-virgin olive.

  She didn’t think even extra virgins would distract this crew.

  Still. She aimed, fired, and doused the asphalt with a skinny oil slick, rather like the trail of an inebriated snail weaving all around herself.

  If at first you don’t succeed . . . she sprayed and turned, making herself the center of a darker ring, like a target.

  Oh, great.

  At least the can gave off this snakelike hissssss as she sprayed. Don’t tread on me, or my blue suede shoes.

  The circling motors gunned. The sinister riders tilted even more to turn more, closing Temple in a noose of heat and noise that tightened on her with every circuit.

  And then . . . they hit her upscale faux-Crisco moat and started skidding. Rubber screamed and smoked. Expensive leather boots (even the pink pair!) dragged on the asphalt, making sparks as metal toetips and cleats hit bottom. Bikes tilted almost horizontal to the ground.

  Temple felt like a beekeeper in the center of a madly buzzing hive, wearing a protective suit of . . . salad dressing.

  One by one the villainous-looking bikes lurched horizontally and spun out.

  Temple watched with satisfaction, ready to dodge any spinning Harley heading her way. That’ll teach ’em to mess with a domestic goddess-in-training!

  But the bikers were at bay now. They milled around beyond Temple’s enchanted olive-oil slick, engines growling and stuttering.

  “Stay out of Maylords,” a couple yelled, sounding ridiculous. They could hardly keep their bikes upright.

  “Stay out of my way,” she yelled back. “Feng shui rules! You guys are not earth-friendly. Your chi is tossed salad.”

  One biker, the self-announced Peter Rabid on the black number tattooed with silver decals so elaborate she couldn’t read what they said, gunned the motor until his bike reared up on its back wheels to charge.

  It drove right at her, like a bull. Like a bullfighter, Temple jumped to the side.

  The ring of politically correct emollient didn’t stop this one. It raced across the oil-darkened asphalt.

  Temple jumped as far away as she could. Her eyes squeezed shut at the inevitable and imminent impact.

  Splaaat-thud!

  The sound was TV-familiar. A bottle thwacking into something?

  Through slitted eyes Temple saw the horizontal cycle sliding along the asphalt, leaving a dark trail of black body paint.

  She winced, imagining Max’s streamlined Hesketh Vampire cycle coming to a such a scraping end. Except that Matt used it now. Sometimes.

  Brakes screeched behind her. Was someone else trying to make her into parking-lot roadkill?

  Who and why?

  She spun around. A long, long, long limo, black as midnight, glided toward her.

  One rear door was open, and out of it peeked the shiny black barrel of a semiautomatic pistol.

  She turned back to see that the downed motorcycle had a blown-out front tire. Shot out. Its rideless master vaulted onto a seat behind the rider of the circling Elvis model.

  The whole gang roared into an escaping pack and scattered down the side streets, finally dwindling like their engine roar.

  Temple eyed the limo’s protruding gun barrel with suspicion: she was crouching kitten, hidden panther. Her trigger finger itched to depress the canned heat in her hand. Limos didn’t like oil slicks either.

  But the vehicle stopped before one front tire tread crossed the gunk. The back door swung fully open.

  Fontana brothers came pouring out like passengers in a clown-car-cum-hearse: one tall, dapper, dark-haired brother after another and another and another.

  Nicky Fontana, founder of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, had a surfeit of siblings, all male. Some might even say a mob of mama’s boys. With Ermenegildo Zegna suits and Beretta accessories. Temple had worked with Nicky for a long time. She and the nine other Fontana brothers were more than passing acquaintances, though Temple had never been able to tell the junior Adonises apart. They were buff, they were bachelors, and they were beautiful. What more did a girl need to know?

  She had memorized their names, though, if not what faces went with them: Aldo, Emilio, Giuseppe, Rico, Ernesto, Julio, Armando, Eduardo, and Ralph.

  “How’d you get here?” she asked. “How’d you . . . all . . . get here?”

  “Chunk-a-Cheez called the cops, on whom we eavesdrop sometimes,” said one she thought was Aldo. He made a face. “These fast-food joints nowadays have no guts. They reported a redhead holding off a motorcycle gang with a can of canola oil.”

  “It’s extra-virgin olive oil.”

  Aldos lifted one skeptical eyebrow a centimeter. “If you say so, Miss Temple. Anyway, we knew right away it was you. Slick idea.”

  “Thanks. And how’d you get a Gangsters limo here so fast that you beat the police?” Temple asked.

  “This Gangsters limo happened to be cruising by and we, ah, thumbed . . . a ride.”

  Aldo pantomimed his thumb cocking a gun, although even Temple knew a Beretta was a double-actioned semiautomatic weapon that didn’t require cocking. Still, point taken.

  “In fact,” said Emilio, who she recognized by his discreet ear stud (“Earring is for Emilio,” she remembered drumming into her consciousness once), stepping back to hold the door open, “you’d better accept a ride from us, unless you like explaining yourself to the police. Surely carrying concealed extra-virgin olive oil is illegal somewhere.”

  “Not in any Italian restaurant I know.” Temple ducked into the limo’s cool, dark interior. Vivaldi thundered joyously from the stereo system. “My car,” she protested unheard.

  “Relax and let us waft you to safety in the manner to which you should become accustomed,” one of them said.

  All around her the Fontana boys gathered, an ice-cream-suited flock of hunky young guys wearing Brut aftershave and an air of well-tailored . . . well . . . muscle. She felt like a mafia prom princess escorted by a carload of gangland Prince Charmings with Crest-Strip white teeth. Until now (maybe the black limo had done it), Temple had never realized just how potent an aura of mob surrounded them.

  Oh, the shark, dear, is your dinner date. Barracudas, beware! Whatta way to go, though! Much better than the average squad car with strawberry-scented freshener for aftershave.

  “So,” asked . . . Rico, casually sniffing the scentless white carnation in his lapel, “why’d a weird biker gang target our Miss Temple for becoming a spot on the asphalt behind such a low-grade eatery?”

  “That is for sure,” said Emilio gallantly. “She deserves to be attacked behind the Bellagio at least.”

  “And how did she happen to be carrying that lethal can of extra-virgin olive oil?”

  “Hush, Julio,” said another she knew as Ralph by the tiny ponytail at his nape. “Perhaps Miss Temple does not wish to make public the contents of her purse
.”

  Temple quailed to imagine Lt. C. R. Molina probing this intimate area.

  Obviously the brothers were musing aloud so she could answer their questions, although they were much too polite to ask her right out.

  “I was reaching for my canister of pepper spray, and that’s what came out of my tote bag,” she said. “I’d been to the store Friday and a few necessities didn’t fit in my grocery bags.”

  “Of course not.” Aldo eyed the lumpy tote bag crouching at their sleek Italian leather toe-tips like a snarl-ridden Lhasa apso.

  “What was the extra-virgin olive oil for?” a possible Ernesto asked. (Or was earring for Ernesto?)

  “My salads, of course.”

  “Perhaps you had better locate your actual pepper spray,” Julio urged. “You might mistake it for something to apply to a pizza later. It is always a good idea to dispense weapons to more accessible locations on your person.”

  “Such as where?” Temple asked a bit testily. “I rarely wear slacks, so can’t use my ankle or the center of my back. I don’t wear a blazer, so have no handy pockets.”

  “That is true,” Ralph said gravely. “There is not much of you to conceal anything on.”

  “And I am not going to run around all the time, like Lieutenant Molina, in a navy pantsuit that an ex-nun wouldn’t be caught dead doing social work in!”

  “Lieutenant Molina.”

  The name, once mentioned, occasioned serious nods among the gathered Fontanas.

  “We are sure,” said one, “that she is familiar with all the usual places of concealment, not to mention our . . . um, personnel folders in the police department.”

  “You have personnel folders at headquarters?”

  “Our personnel, their folders,” Aldo said.

  Next to her, Ralph hissed two ugly words in her ear. “Rap sheets.”

  Oh, galloping gangsters! The Fontana brothers weren’t just Nicky’s uniformly colorful brothers. They weren’t just well-tailored figureheads who hung out at the Crystal Phoenix, they were the real megillah. The actual remnants of Las Vegas’s good old wise-guy days. They might even be . . . dangerous.

  Temple smiled. “I’ll holster my olive oil, boys, if you’ll break out whatever’s behind that burlwood door. After all I’ve been through, I could use a Mountain Dew.”

  Two brothers slapped palms above her head, perhaps the equivalent of a mob welcoming ceremony.

  “I told you,” one crowed to the other. “Redheads rock!”

  Mumm’s the Word

  The Fontana boys didn’t oblige Temple with a Mountain Dew.

  She probably didn’t need the extra caffeine at the moment anyway.

  Instead they uncorked some Mumm’s Champagne that foamed into a host of flutes hidden behind one of the burlwood doors.

  Funny, but her hands shook a little. The Brit bubbly burbled over her glass lip onto the limo’s carpeting.

  “Oh! I don’t know why I’m so clumsy!”

  “It’s the rough ride,” Julio crooned consolingly. (Was his middle name Iglesias?)

  Temple frowned. “This limo is as smooth as a cloud.”

  “No doubt your dainty little hands are fatigued from hanging onto that big olive oil spray can for so long,” Ernesto sans earring suggested suggestively.

  “Extra-virgin olive oil,” Aldo corrected.

  “Will you get off the sexual state of my cooking oil!” Temple was shocked that her temper had frayed so easily. It wasn’t like her.

  Ralph tilted the glass toward her lips. “Chugalug this A-one English bubbly and you’ll feel steadier. It takes a lot of energy to hold off a flock of Hell’s Angels.”

  “They weren’t Hell’s Angels! They were a lot weirder, if not any less mean. Why were they after me?”

  “We don’t know,” Guiseppe said. “But we’ll find out.”

  “We’ll also get you a new can of”—Ralph glanced at his brothers—“that Julia Child stuff.”

  The limo lurched gently as it took the long slow swing into the Circle Ritz parking lot.

  The boys picked up her tote bag, and her, practically. They eased them both out of the limo’s cocooned shadow into the bright Las Vegas sun.

  Temple blinked, her sunglass case buried in her tote bag.

  “My car,” she remembered. “My keys.”

  A red roadster (like Nancy Drew’s?) roared up the short incline into the parking lot. Eduardo stepped out, looming over the Miata like Paul Bunyan (if the legendary Minnesota woodsman had lost a lot of weight, seen a world-class hair stylist, wore thousand-dollar suits, and had a Beretta instead of a giant blue ox as a sidekick).

  “Your keys are right here, Miss Temple,” he said with a courtly bow, dropping them into the bottomless Black Hole of her tote bag.

  “Thanks.”

  She looked at the half-circle of dark-favored men in light-colored suits, like guardian angels from a Damon Runyon-Frank Capra movie. And not really men, really something infectious and boyish about them, despite their hunky good looks.

  They were trying to distract her from what had been a pretty scary attack.

  Emilio had grabbed the Champagne bottle and her glass from the car. “We’ll see you in. Get you settled.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Armando, who had thus far not spoken. Or was it Armando?

  Funny. None of their mouths had moved.

  She looked where they were looking. Behind her.

  Oh. Matt. Looking utterly unlike a Fontana brother, except for being buff and a bachelor, but looking as annoyingly overprotective as they did. But sweet, really. Huh?

  Just how much of that Champagne had she “chugalugged” on the ride home?

  Anyway, somebody had her by the arm and someone took her tote bag off the other arm.

  Temple accepted the Champagne bottle that was thrust into her maternal care, but refused the glass.

  “Who’s this guy?” Aldo asked. Fontana brothers relinquished nothing easily, even their good manners.

  “My neighbor,” Temple said. “It’s all right. He’s a priest,” she added airily.

  Fontana jaws dropped in unison. They stood paralyzed. On the one hand, they were reluctant to surrender Dorothy. On the other, to a priest . . . well.

  “Ex-priest,” Matt said over her head. “And current neighbor. I take care of her in the daytime. It’s all right. I’ll get her settled safely. I’m a black belt in karate.”

  Temple tried not to look shocked. The Fontana brothers didn’t bother to disguise it.

  “He’s giving me lessons,” she explained.

  They looked even more shocked.

  “In self-defense. Hai-ya! See?” She almost dropped the Champagne bottle.

  Someone pulled her away, toward the building.

  “I’m all right,” she told Matt. “I’m just a little tiddly. They plied me with Champagne in the limo after I fought off the Rocky Mountain Horror Show biker gang with a spray can of extra-virgin olive oil. It was all very innocent.”

  “The Rocky Horror Show biker gang was innocent?”

  “No, the Champagne plying afterward. They thought I was shaken up. Not the Champagne. Me. They’re not as . . . er, organized as they look. We go way back. They’re Nicky Fontana’s brothers. You know, he and Van own the Crystal Phoenix, which I work for. I’m the brothers’ sort of . . . mascot, like Shirley MacLaine and the Rat Pack in ’60s Las Vegas.” She finally looked at him instead of the wavering ground. “Oops! That apparently isn’t as reassuring as I meant it to be.”

  “Come on, Shirley—Temple or MacLaine, or Shirley, Justice, and Mercy, or whoever you are this week—you can tipple all you like in your own place.”

  Matt guided her into the elevator and punched the button for the second floor.

  “Lucky you happened to be around,” she said, leaning against one varnished wooden side of the small, vintage elevator as it creaked upward. An elevator made for two. Or three. Or four. Or more. Wasn’t that some old song lyric? Oh. “Just Me an
d My Gal.” And the we-will-have-a-family. What was in that Fontana brothers’ Champagne? Or Gangsters Champagne, really. It came with the car.

  “I was waiting for you,” Matt said. It seemed a long time before she really noticed his comment, and the silence, afterward.

  “It could have been a long wait.”

  “I don’t have much to do all afternoon. The advantage of a midnight job. I get to look after you in the daytime.”

  “I don’t need looking after. Yes, there was an incident, but I was taking care of it, very innovatively, I don’t mind saying. I would be fine if I hadn’t asked the Fontanas to explore what was behind all those damn burlwood doors in the Gangsters limos. I wanted a Mountain Dew.”

  Matt hefted the condensation-dewed Champagne bottle from her arms. “I see Mountain Dew has a whole new marketing future. Where are your door keys?”

  “In the absolute bottom of my tote bag, where the helpful Fontana brother dropped them. It’s not his fault. They’re all bachelors and they don’t know a thing about women’s purses.”

  “I’m with them,” Matt said. Grumbled. Putting the Champagne bottle on the carpet and digging in her tote bag.

  “At least you won’t break a nail,” she observed.

  “As a bachelor who doesn’t know a thing about women’s purses, I bet I and the Fontana brothers are pretty much clueless on the extreme trauma of that kind of event, too.”

  “Well, it hurts like hell if it pulls back against the quick too much and it takes ages to grow out.”

  “Here.” He flourished the keys. “I’d say, cut ’em short, but then I may be missing something I wouldn’t want to.”

  Temple wondered if she was hearing the implication she thought she was hearing. Mumm’s was definitely not the word for her.

  Matt opened her door. “I’d better get the Champagne, and you, settled down. I think you’ve both been shaken up too much and are a little too bubbly.”

  “It’s very scary to be almost mowed down by motorcycles that look like they’ve escaped from Disney’s Fantasia. We have a right to ‘bubble.’ ”

  “Right.” Matt took the heavy bottle and put it in her refrigerator. “You’re way too involved in the Maylords crimes. You’re a PR woman, not a PI. I know Danny’s a pal, but you can’t solve everybody’s troubles. It’s not safe.”