Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

He pushed his feet against the wall again and caught up with the Cloaked Conjuror just as the platform broke and plummeted from his booted feet to the floor below. The crowd roared with fright.

He’d snagged CC by one arm. Their combined weight pulled Max’s bungee cord down, down, down toward the Lexan onion dome that both revealed and guarded the newly installed scepter.

Drop CC and the prize was his.

Instead they fell together like a lead weight, until the top of the spiral staircase leading to the scepter was just below.

Max let CC go. He dropped perhaps four feet.

Max kicked off the onion dome, swinging over the installation.

In an instant, he had seized the scepter and ricocheted from the base of the installation. The piercing whine of an alarm ran up and down the scale as the bungee cord rebounded up to the ceiling, making him a Spider-man about to go comic book splat!

Max caught at the collapsed platform that had been CC’s downfall. His body bruised into it, but his grasp held long enough to slow his rebound.

Then the platform sagged and broke free, falling down into the heart of the screams and scattering audience members below, including Temple.

Max had no time to look back. He bounced off the looming ceiling, slowed, in control again.

The big cats, cowed perhaps as much by the unscripted chaos as Midnight Louie’s fierce stand, had backed away from the treacherous platforms they’d been trained to mount on the music’s cue. If Midnight Louie could intimidate two panthers who outweighed him a hundred-to-one, Max guessed he could pull Shangri-La to safety.

She was using her considerable acrobatic skills to take her weight off the disintegrating platform beneath her feet, which were hampered by arch-deforming ballet toe-shoes. They produced a graceful image for an airborne magician-acrobat, but they were useless for establishing any foothold on a disintegrating web of wooden platforms and elastic bungee cords.

Max sailed down, the scepter in his belt flashing in one of the hidden mirrors above. He glimpsed Shangri-La’s makeup-masked features, her exotic beauty and grace, dismissing her ambiguous role in shady events past and present. Her life and lifeline made her as fragile now as a blown-glass ballerina.

He caught one wrist as she was slipping away. It was sharp and thin, a bundle of razor blades. Every sinew in his arm strained, but he had only to dive low, release her over a safe landing point, then fly up like Peter Pan dropping Wendy back at home.

But CC’s rescue had strained his synapses as well as tendon and bone. He could barely hold on to her. . . . Then a fiery cactus exploded on his back and shoulders.

He heard a martial arts yowl, cat style.

That damn Hyacinth, thinking to protect her mistress, was dooming her instead. Max’s fingers tightened, flinched, then felt skin and bones slipping through his grasp.

They were still thirty feet above the hard marble flooring.

The white butterfly fluttered free below him, spinning and glittering in a graceful, fatal trajectory.

Max, freed from the dead weight, rebounded against the ceiling so fast it took all of his remaining strength to slow the snap, to grab disintegrating platforms on his rebound, to become an unseen spider in a lethal web high above.

The cat slid off his back and fell, a tangle of bungee cords serving as its precarious cradle. It swung there, its shrill voice mimicking the relentless, heartbeat-stirring siren of the alarm.

The canned music hid the sound of whatever impact there had been. The scepter installation site looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.

Below him, people—heads of all colors—gathered, unthinking, around a shining reverse-Rorschach ink-blot pattern of fallen white on the pale floor far below. No one else seemed injured.

Max had no time left to linger, look back, regret. He unsnapped his trusty bungee cord, the only safe one because whoever had sabotaged the magic act had not known about his own arrangements. Then he ditched the boots, cloak, and CC mask, and his spider self slipped from the ceiling handholds and down the narrow escape tunnel he and Gandolph had made.

The Cloaked Conjuror and the big cats had survived to perform another day, thanks to Max—and Midnight Louie—being on the scene. Shangri-La definitely and possibly her cat Hyacinth were among the collateral damage.

“Damn,” Max hissed to himself over and over as he elbow crawled through the passage, its existence now publicly betrayed.

He struggled to keep the invaluable scepter from scraping on the narrowing ductwork. His spectacular theft had turned into a botched heist and a messy, semifailed rescue operation.

A woman lay dead on the exhibition floor. Temple’s assignment as well as his own were both terminally damaged. The Cloaked Conjuror’s show and career were tainted, perhaps beyond redemption, like his own.

He had let down everyone who depended upon him, whether they knew it or not.