Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

of disgruntled magicians, and what they hoped to achieve.
    He’d worry about the difficulties of the museum job later. Right now he had more important worries: how to “disappear” for the time required to set up the job without seeming to abandon Temple. Playing relationship Russian roulette with the woman he loved. Again. How many times could he risk that, and not lose?
    His booted feet hit the opposite wall and he caromed off it like a cue ball cleaning up the table. He was flying, like Peter Pan, and it was fun. Thrilling actually. A Never-Never Land of adrenaline and adventure.
    But he sure didn’t want to leave Wendy behind, alone in the family bedroom.



Male Call

    Temple stood on her tiny triangular balcony, one of the perks of living in a round building and having what passed for a “corner” unit.
    She was marking a sure sign of spring: her upstairs neighbor, Matt Devine, doing laps in the pool.
    She watched him cut a swath through the becalmed aquamarine water. She was also regarding a crime scene through the foggy lenses of time. Electra, their landlady, had only recently told Temple of witnessing Matt’s first encounter with their joint bête-noir-to-be, Kathleen O’Connor, at that very poolside months ago.
    Temple could picture that scene right now. Kathleen O’Connor made a very vivid, deceptively attractive ghost: maybe five-foot-five, in pumps, wearing an Irish-green silk pantsuit, and looking like a girl from a ballad. The fall sunlight would have glistened off her black, black hair, her ruby lips, her skin as white as snow. Snow Black.
    As Temple retro-daydreamed, Matt finished whatever number of laps he’d set himself, and pulled himself onto the wooden decking that surrounded the pool.
    Now only Matt remained of the word picture Electra had recently painted, and he was the same: lightly tanned, muscled enough to be fit without making a fetish of it, white swim trunks and teeth, blond hair glinting pure platinum in the sunlight.
    Okay... yum. Good enough to eat alive. Kitty O’Connor had thought so too. Only literally. Luckily, she’d left. Permanently.
    Temple watched him snatch a towel from a lounge chair. White. Both the towel and the vinyl straps of the lounge chair. Temple, single, female, and thirty, ducked out of sight.
    This lurking was pathetic! You’d think she didn’t have a perfectly good beau of her own, also out of sight, unfortunately.
    A long merow drew her back to the living room sofa and was interrupted by an even longer yawn. Midnight Louie was stretching until his toes reached the armrest, where he riffed off a few earnest rips with his front claws.
    “Louie, no!”
    He looked up with a lazy blink of green eyes but his toes stopped doing the Watusi across her upholstery, which was tough but not impervious. That might describe Louie himself, or even Temple as she liked to think of herself. Small but sturdy. Petite but persistent. Spoken for but not blind.
    Meanwhile, Louie was yowling from the couch for more Personal attention. She went over and attended to him, rewarded by a hoarse meow of contentment and a purr loud enough to mimic a light plane engine passing overhead.
    “That’s a good boy,” she told him, scratching his tummy while he twisted and flipped from side to contented side. “You should stay at home for a while and get some first-class petting instead of roaming all over the city and getting into trouble.”
    Only belatedly did Temple realize she could have been advising her often-AWOL significant other, the Mystifying Max Kinsella.
    Like Louie, Max always managed to be there when she really needed him, but the times in between were stretching longer and longer... like Louie on the sofa right now.
    Her doorbell rang. Actually, being a fifties’ vintage doorbell, it didn’t just ring. It chimed. It yodeled. It caroled a multinote phrase.
    She opened the door before it had rung through its sonorous sequence.
    “Oh. Hi.”
    Matt was on her doorstep, towel like a flyboy’s white scarf hung around his neck, no longer dripping as far as she was able to discreetly see, but still all tan and bare. Bare. Oh, my.
    “Electra corralled me for errand duty in the lobby, j Seems you forgot to get your mail yesterday.”
    “Wonder why?” Temple murmured, taking the four or five envelopes he held out. “Something bad in the neighborhood? Like a meltdown at Maylords Fine Furniture? Glad that’s a done deal. Come in.”
    “I might drip.”
    “It’s