Several nearby houses looked deserted, except for one four doors down, from which the drumming bass of a rock station drifted. Spanking new Harleys tilted at rest near its weathered side doors. In the distance a dirt bike droned soft and then loud like a circling hornet.
Temple knocked on O’Rourke’s screen door, which was wearing so little forest-green paint she expected it to flake loose at her blows. The door beyond it was solid wood except for a small black diamond of glass high above the knob.
It jerked partway open.
A man stood against the deep shadow within, a slight, wiry fellow with eyes squinting against the daylight. “Yeah?”
“Mr. E. P. O’Rourke?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m interested in discussing an investigative job.”
The eyes looked her up, then down. The door swung open, baring more interior darkness.
Temple swallowed, then opened the rickety screen door. Entering houses in torrid climates was like plumbing the dark secrets of some ancient tomb. Windows were few and kept shaded. The visitor always blinked blindly on the threshold until the eyes adjusted to the abrupt dimness. In the meantime, E. P. O’Rourke could conk her on the head, rummage her tote bag and ravish her body.
Temple discounted her last foolish fear as her vision adjusted. E. P. O’Rourke was as stringy and desert-baked as beef jerky, with a shock of white hair and eyebrows in odd contrast to his seamed bronze skin.
“Come on in,” he said, turning.
Temple followed. Like most desert houses, this one offered a right-angle corkscrew of turning halls and boxy dim little rooms. In five steps she had lost the direction of the front door, which O’Rourke had shoved shut before preceding her into the house.
The air inside was hot and damp. She heard the drone of an old-fashioned water-cooling air-conditioning system—surprisingly efficient but invariably dank.
O’Rourke stopped in a room almost completely occupied by a huge slab of desktop. The surface was bare except for a black billiard ball that had been drilled into a pen rest and a free-form olive-green ashtray dusted with ash residue. No butts. He slipped into a battered leather office chair behind the desk and indicated a seat.
“What brung you here?”
“I read your entry in the phone book.”
“I mean, what problem?”
“First I should ask you your qualifications.”
O’Rourke shrugged. He was wearing a short-sleeved peach polyester shirt and, she thought, jeans and tennis shoes. At least no one would hear him coming, if his joints didn’t crack. Light filtered through the dusty blinds along one high, long window. O’Rourke’s hair was ethereally white in the hazy illumination, and his eyes gleamed baby-blue.
“I been in the merchant marines, but that was before you was born. I knocked around a bit. Been in business in Vegas for a few years. Been around, that’s about it. Now, what can I do for you, girlie?”
“You’re no relation to Chester Royal, I hope?”
“That dead ’un at the convention center? What’s this got to do with that? I don’t mess with homicide cases.”
“Nothing. This is cats.”
“Cats?” He spoke as if she’d named an alien being.
“Pet cats. Two are missing. What is your fee per hour?”
“Pet cats are missing all over the world. Nobody seeks professional help for it. Fifty dollars, plus expenses.”
“There wouldn’t be expenses. It’s a simple... drop.”
“Drop, missy? Where’d you get that lingo?”
“TV.”
“Don’t have one. Hasn’t been anything good on since Sid Caesar.”
“Before my time,” she shot back. “Are you bonded?”
“Are you kidding?” He paused to groom an unruly eyebrow with a forefinger, the way another man might stroke a mustache. She would have sworn he looked mischievous. “My word is my bond.”
“Are you kidding?” She shifted to rise and leave.
“Look. You don’t get a license unless the police say so.”
“You got a license?”
He pointed to the wall beside her, where a cheap black frame defined a document. Temple rose, got out her glasses and took her time deciphering the cursive script in the dim light.
“I don’t know, Mr. O’Rourke,” she said, resuming her seat, “there’s money involved.”
“Eightball,” he said.
“Huh?”
He gestured to the shiny black ball on his desk. “Eightball. It’s what everybody calls me.”
“Isn’t an eight ball supposed to be unlucky?”
“Only if you mess with it too early in the action. If it’s last on the table, the way it’s supposed to be, it’s lucky for the winner. I usually last to the end at whatever I do,” he said, with an emphasis both crisp and salacious.
Temple, surprised, laughed. She would bet that Eightball O’Rourke would be no one to tangle with in a barroom brawl if he had a broken bottle in hand, and as for his endurance in other pursuits, she wasn’t about to challenge it.
“How much money,” he asked genially, “and what’s involved?”
“It’s ransom money.”
“A kidnapping?” He whistled through teeth so white and even that they had to be false. “I don’t usually send folks to the cops, but even if it is only cats—”
“The ransom is five thousand dollars. That may not seem like much for a kidnapping.”
“That’s considerable for cats,” he admitted. “You want I should tail the napper when he picks up the cash?”
“I want you to drop off the cash so that I can tail the catnapper.”
“You got this backward, miss. Tailing’s the hard part. You could drop the cash and know it’s done and let me do the walking. That’s what you use the Yellow Pages for, isn’t it? ‘Let your fingers do the walking’?”
“If you think that’s best. We could meet before the... drop and I’d give you the ransom money then.”
“And give me my money, too. Then. Heck,” he said when she hesitated, “if you aren’t sharp enough to make sure I drop the dough, how were you gonna tail a kidnapper?”
“I was hoping it would be somebody I’d recognize.”
“Don’t they all.”
“How much is this going to cost?”
Eightball O’Rourke eyed the big round schoolhouse clock on the wall. “We talked a half hour here, say another couple hours before and after the drop. Hundred fifty dollars flat unless your napper takes off for the Spectre Mountains and I gotta trail him.”
“It could be a her,” she said.
“Don’t matter. Either sex trails the same.”
“One thing. Is there anything you can do to ensure the safety—and safe return—of the cats?”
“Nope.” Eightball O’Rourke rose and extended a hard, dry palm for a farewell shake. “Not a damn thing.”
15
Hunter on the Prowl
Temple returned to the convention center after five p.m. for the second night in a row. This time she found the office empty and Midnight Louie lounging on her desktop grooming his expansive, jet-black belly.
“Hey, guy. Where you been all day? Enjoying the convention center?”
The cat looked up, impassive, and began taking long licks at his copious chest hair. His feline face had that vaguely withdrawn look that some people interpret as superiority to other beings.
Temple shrugged. Louie had already demonstrated that he had his ways in and out of the mammoth convention center, as well as around it. She wouldn’t even be surprised to find that he had beaten her back to her apartment one evening, and was waiting on the patio outside the French doors, bored as you please.
Louie was abstracted at the moment. He accepted her strokes of greeting with a short “merow” and a narrowed glance. Perhaps he was just tired, as Temple was.
She sat at her desk without bothering to drop the tote bag. A minute to compose herself and then she had to hustle Louie down to the car, red-hot by now after roasting in the peak afternoon sun. Then they’d go home to a chill, refreshing tuna dinner: raw from the can for him, salad for her. Cats left a lot of half-full cans of tuna sitting around going stale. Better that she eat it than that Louie should suffer from refrigerator-mouth tuna, at which he always turned up his jet-black nose.