Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

41

Face Off

Temple was not going through the building’s front double doors…to end up in the dark with a flashlight, staring up at the huge, dirt-crusted chandelier that had served as a hanging tree for a man she’d seen alive, if only briefly. She remembered seeing Louie sniffing around the rear.

She skittered past the deserted-looking RV that served as an office and around to the back. She found a shabby door with some boards kicked out. Vagrants might have used the basement for shelter. The door to the outside had been caved in at one side.

She leaned against the building to strip off her heels and replace them with the foldable slippers she always carried in her tote bag. In doing so, she found a forgotten asset, the tiny, high-intensity flashlight on her keychain. So she stored the bulky Hardy Boys version in the tote, fished out the petite version and twisted it on. Better to make a smaller target.

The door opened on a small landing between rickety steps going up into the dark and sturdier ones going down. The air felt dry and had no particular smell, unlike damp, moldy Midwestern basements.

She glimpsed the black cat she’d ended up tailing dashing down the battered two-by-eight-board stair with the ease and energy of a creature who can climb a tree with Velcro-strong talons. This was starting to feel very White Rabbit, only with a Black Cat.

And maybe the cat was running with the verve of having been down here before, Temple thought.

“Louie,” Temple called softly, teetering on the first wooden steps to the basement.

If Temple suffered from any one irrational fear, it would be claustrophobia rather than agoraphobia. She’d choose to be the cheese standing alone at the end of the nursery rhyme over the Ritz cracker crammed into a roll inside a wax wrapper and then sealed into a box.

She’d expected the basement to be a wide open space—dark, yes, but empty to its concrete block walls. What a decent Midwestern basement should be.

However the basement’s exposed walls looked carved out of natural sandstone and caliche, a cement-hard soil compacted by the presence of lime. And the space wasn’t as cavernous as she’d expected. Concrete block cubicles lined the outer walls, solid versions of the antique-mall display areas above, only closed in to the ceiling and locked with metal doors.

There must have been—well, count the doors on one side: twenty or so of them. Probably a storage unit for each of the upstairs sales booths in their heyday.

And the floor…it too was hard caliche, but the large central section had wooden floorboards, as if there’d been an interior room of some kind once. The condition screamed “long-abandoned”. Broken-up concrete patches along some parts of the cubicle walls looked ripped up by a jackhammer, as if the Property Brothers crew from HGTV home network had passed through to bust up the old, but never came back to install the new and finish the makeover.

Hmm. She wondered about putting a funky fifties hippie nightclub down here, with poetry readings and candles in wine bottles. A scraping sound outside the flashlight’s small beam made Temple sweep the edges of the area with pinpoints of light. No rats, no snakes. No cat either.

Great. She was hallucinating cats now. At least her soft slippers made her as silent as one.

Or maybe not. Her flashlight picked out a shadowy form. Midnight Louie pawing at a dark corner, nose to the ground, intent.

Cats only do that when there was something only they see, a crawling bug, maybe. Temple shivered. Vegas had lots of those. Scorpions, centipedes. Temple’s toes curled in her slippers to avoid even the thought of stepping on creepy-crawlies.

“Louie! Don’t bite anything that can possibly bite you back. Get away…” But Mr. Curious had to spot, sniff, paw, taste-test anything new that came into the condo, from a magazine to a centipede. And, if he could, take it apart. He could chew the metal off the top of lead pencils and then bat the extracted graphite rod around. She’d have to pursue him to recover the unsafe object.

No fast moves to be made here. The floor was deeply chipped away in places. She could sprain an ankle if she didn’t watch out. She recalled the classic catchphrase from Jaws, “You need a bigger boat.” She was pretty sure a Great White shark wasn’t lurking on land, but she knew she needed her bigger flashlight. And maybe a Fontana brother or two.

“Louie! I’m not going to leave you alone down here. It’s dangerous. Now, git. Go on!” She rushed him with a patter of steps going forward.

He wasn’t fooled. This place was full of smells and nooks and crannies only he could detect and diagnose and dissect. He was like a mad scientist loose in a nasty, decrepit, dangerous playground.

“Louie, no!” she shouted. “Now quit that and get out.” She flicked the flashlight fast toward the back stairs, wishing it was a red LED light no cat could resist, although Louie had gotten bored with an incorporeal toy that disappeared pretty fast.

Oh, boy. At times like these, when she was too committed to back out without going slowly, she wished she had a dog who would come when called.

Temple began to retreat. “Louie,” she implored. She felt her flimsy flat-heel hit a hole and flailed to keep her balance. The tiny metal flashlight slipped out of her hand. Somewhere in the dimness a small metallic clink announced where it had fallen.

“Drat it!” No, that sounded too much like “rat”. She shuffled a couple feet forward until she felt it and bent to retrieve it. Turning, she saw the steps had blackened and so had the door beyond them. Night had truly fallen.

She opened her mouth to call Louie…but heard a distant creak. Maybe from the far stairway. Temple found that sinister. If it had been caused by a footstep, had that stepper paused to listen?

Perhaps a passerby hearing her admonitions to Louie?

Someone who had come from vandalizing the Lovers’ Knot front entrance again?

The unknown person who’d hung Jay Edgar Dyson.

Katt Zydeco, who was really a comics’ super-villainess. Oops. She’d been watching too much Gotham on TV.

No, she was not going to yell or make noise again, not until she was safely out of here.

Something lifted her skirt edge. A mental Eek!

Then she felt a brush of velvet fur behind her knee. Louie! His erect tail was always getting fresh with her legs when she wore a skirt, as he moved back and forth around her ankles.

Great. He could trip her and she’d lie here unfound until global warming would have caused the Pacific to rise and swamp California and the Mojave desert…and a Great White shark would be found flailing in the tide and someone in the boat following would say, “You need a bigger flashlight.”

Temple shook off her imaginative rerun of Jaws.

She took an unsteady step forward. A phantom tail brush saluted her other leg. She moved in hopes she could bend down and capture Louie, but another step brought only another unseen brush on her other leg.

Cats may not be able to see in the dark, but they do much better than a redhead with light-sensitive skin and blue-gray eyes. Temple knew. Carefully keeping her weight on a back foot before she slowly transferred it to a new step forward, she followed Louie’s weaving path ahead of her.

Until her slippered toe stubbed something large and hard, in a totally creepy way. Ouch!

Was there now another abandoned dead body in Electra’s inherited building?

The flashlight revealed a corpse, all right, a dead body of metal with a long narrow nose of shark-like saw-teeth. Why was she seeing sharks when she abhorred the species being demonized on “Shark Week” on cable TV? She recalled a PBS special that showed a sawshark, and then remembered something very insentient, something linked forever in the public mind with the word “massacre”. A chainsaw. What was a chainsaw doing in a basement storage area? And a really nasty scissors-looking tool big enough to have pulled some real sharks’ teeth?

She stepped carefully around the hardware and over the rough floor to examine one of the steel-doored storage units. Someone at some time had wanted to keep something very much under wraps in this building.

The flashlight revealed the door’s big steel combination lock hooked over a thick latch…and showed the lock’s curved neck had been cut through and was barely dangling from the latch. The flashlight beam glinted off the cut marks. They were the bright gleaming silver of new metal, unexposed to air and oxidation. She got out the big flashlight and illuminated the nearest door locks. All either had dangling cut locks, or broken locks lying on the floor below.

This damage was fresh, it was systematic, and the fact that all the doors had been breeched meant that the searcher or searchers had not found what was being sought. Temple parked the big flashlight in her tote bag again and used both hands to pull a door missing the lock entirely open enough to thrust her hand holding the tiny flashlight through.

She jumped. Huge metallic boxes taller than she stood in ranks like soldiers, light glinting off their steel silhouettes. The space seemed occupied by the mechanistic Borg from the Star Trek franchise. The “resistance is futile” aliens.

Temple backed away and was pulling out the big flashlight for a better view when she heard something from far above her, what would be a second story or attic in a house. A faint squeaking noise. Or, a desolate meow? Thumps, footsteps and maybe worse followed. Louie! She had seen Louie, only now he’d apparently gone up the back stairs. Why?

Another meow came from above, this time a puma’s caterwaul, a long fierce growl changing into a wildcat scream, followed by a desperate feminine shriek. Electra! Then a man grunted and cursed.

Temple’s imagination went wild. Following the big flashlight’s broad beam, she backtracked to the stairs, then climbed the two flights of rickety steps to the top floor. Luckily, she weighed little and her flat slippers took her up the steps like a mountain goat.

She finally stepped onto the second story at the back of the building, switching to the tiny flashlight to be less noticeable, pointing it down to the floor, squinting down the hall between the abandoned antique mall cubicles, toward a black knot of figures gathered under the grotesque chandelier maybe two hundred feet away. The guttural buzz of lowered and threatening voices drifted back to her. And one higher, pleading voice. Oh, Electra!

She started forward, crazy, but she couldn’t ignore the danger to Electra and Louie. Besides, reinforcements were coming.

As she walked on silent slipper soles, she detected motion on her left and froze, taking out Hardy Boys flashlight as a weapon. It didn’t look like plastic at first glance.

About halfway to the figures ahead surrounding a light as if circling a campfire, she saw a dark, sitting cat, licking its paw.

Louie, that relaxed?

Then she squinted harder and saw…the dark color was brown, not black This was Ingram! That was what…who…she’d felt grazing her calves and giving her goose bumps as she’d left the Thrill ‘n’ Quill. What would draw an ensconced, only-indoor cat like Ingram this far from home?

Ingram leveled a bored yellow gaze at her and switched to grooming his other paw. What! All she had on her side was this couch potato bookshop pussycat, who had probably only used its claws to work out an errant knot behind its ears?

She sighed and edged forward. Weirdly, the electrified chandelier was lit. Murky light filtered down through the dusty loops and faceted pendants of glass. It looked like a light fixture snatched from Mephistopheles in Hell.

The chandelier barely illuminated what resembled a stage set in a dark theater. Four standing men surrounding a simple worktable and chairs. Two women sat on the chairs, the most concentrated light from above falling on their pale-haired heads like the spotlights used in Film Noir police interrogation rooms. Temple recognized Electra’s Bird of Paradise design muumuu, fading to pastel in the overhead light, as did her shadow-sunken features. Oh, Lord. The other woman was blonde. Oh no, Diane! Both of them, ex-wives of the dead man who’d dangled above this strange vignette at the top of the stairs only days ago…captives. Of whom? Why? What was happening here?

“I don’t have it, I’ve said that over and over,” Diane was telling the standing people, who must be the extortionists. Temple’s fuzzy focus indentified the silhouettes of the usual suspects, Punch and Judy, a.k.a. Punch Adcock and Katt Zydeco, Leon Nemo, and some other guy as tall and limber as Katt.

“Please let us go.” Diane was whining, pleading now. “I went through every damn thing, paper or property, relating to Jay in Dayton and gave it to my lawyer to forward to the attorney here.” Her blonde head swiveled toward Electra. “Tell them. They know you must have it. Don’t be a hero. They mean to hurt us.”

“I don’t have whatever it is. I don’t have anything from Jay,” Electra said through gritted teeth. “I tore my place apart, looking for your damn paper. I brought anything you might want. It’s all there. Let us go! Let us all go.”

“All go”? Temple thought the usage strange. Only Electra and Diane were on the hot seats. And what “paper” was so valuable?

Then Temple saw that the table held a big box of some sort. Maybe something found in one of the violated storage units below. A few white sheets of paper lay atop it.

“This is a freaking marriage license, lady!” one of the men shouted as he grabbed one paper to shake in Electra’s face. “Between you and the late Dyson. You think we give a damn about your marriage license?”

Leon Nemo’s voice had lost its forced joviality and was all anger and threat.

“No,” Electra answered, “but how would I know what you want? You won’t say what it is, it’s so secret. ‘Just the paper’, you said. Get me the right paper. It’s a license.’ What you’re holding is the only ‘license’ I have, except for four others like it.”

“We don’t want your driver’s license, that’s for sure,” Punch’s deeper bass voice said.

“What ‘four others’ like it?” Katt Zydeco asked. “All marriage licenses?”

Temple barely saw Electra’s shrug. “Yes. Marriage licenses. We can go and get the others. I had four other husbands.”

“You?” Katt’s jeering tone was not flattering.

“Forget jabbering with the old dame,” Nemo said. “She’s holding out on us. Let’s get down to business.” He slammed the palm of his hand against the box. It rattled and shook as Electra shouted, “Don’t!”

It rattled. It was metal. Not as big as the machines downstairs, though.

Punch stuck the box with his fist and it slid a bit across the table. Electra whimpered.

Temple moved closer, unheard, unnoticed, but seeing more clearly. The box sides weren’t solid. It was a metal fence.

Something in it moved. Something shadowy and alive.

A cat.

Temple felt sick. She’d always thought of Midnight Louie as her personal black panther with the street smarts of an undercover cop. His claws could disable a two hundred-pound man with instantly septic, six-inch long slashes that burned like the flames of hell. He’d come to her rescue more than once, smaller and underrated and fiercer than a Belgian Malinois used for K-9 duty. Heck, he’d take out the Malinois and his first cousin the German Shepherd too.

Now he’d been caught somehow, was caged and helpless while her friends were being brutalized by thugs. Temple had never felt the instant blind, unstoppable, defensive maternal rage that could lift cars off children, but she charged forward, immune to any personal danger, screaming, “Get away, you bastards!”

Her charge had the criminal crew turning wide eyes and mouths her way. Electra and Diane half rose from their chairs, their wrists visibly bound, but their shock and hope breaking the bonds of intimidation for an instant. The rope binding Electra’s wrists was loosely tied—the fiends—to the chandelier. As the late Jay Dyson probably had been. Only that rope had been taut and around his neck, not securing his wrists.

The only sound for a few seconds was the weak slap of Temple’s slipper soles on the wooden floor. Without her customary high heels, she sounded no more dangerous than a performing seal.

The captive cat in the cage produced another unearthly yowl. Louie used a spine-tingling Big Cat yowl when he attacked, but this cry ranged higher and higher into an ear-splitting banshee shriek.

The cat’s eyes glared red in dimness. With its back hooped, tail straight up, and hair standing on end, it looked like it had been electrified by lightning, an iconic black “Halloween cat”. Except it resembled a photographic reverse of a Halloween cat, for it was white, like a ghost.

The scene and sound were so unearthly three men and three women around the table were all frozen, as if posed. Everyone’s eyes watched the cat and the cage. Everyone’s hands but hers were clapped to their ears.

Temple wondered what exactly she was going to do when she reached them all, hit Nemo with her tote bag and kick Punch and Katt in the shins with her floppy slippers?

The caged cat howled again.

Temple could only stop her insane charge by throwing her arms around Electra on the nearest chair, pulling her down to the stability of the floor, both of them falling backwards, away from the scary down-slide of steps to the first floor. Diane crawled on her knees to join them.

Another noise, like the power tools Temple had seen in the basement grinding away added to the cacophony. The double wooden doors at the building’s front shattered and burst open. Every eye focused there. Something big crashed through the opening in a blaze of light.

Temple made out the front grille of a car jerking up and down as the tires climbed the first few steps, the vehicle’s body shaking and its bouncing, blinding headlights pinning everyone where they stood, or had fallen.

Its front wheels crashed through the steps a third of the way up.

Temple saw the driver’s side door fanning open and a silhouette stepping out even as the motor died.

She sensed a silhouette, a shadow evading the gathering at the top of the stairs, sliding past her and slipping down the long dark hall behind her as she struggled to rise and help Electra up.

Below, a moving narrow black crack started between the headlights and snaked below the left headlight on the car’s nose. The blot of black reared up and up in the figure of a hunched demon from a horror movie, an image projected and magnified by the light behind it, stretched up as a huge distorted shadow climbing the stairs. An image that resolved into the figure of a giant Halloween cat about to cast them all in shadow.

“What the hell?” Nemo yelled.

The caged cat shrieked again. “Punch, shut up that cat.”

“Shoot the cat in the cage, boss?” Punch asked. “Those headlights. I can’t focus—”

“Give me the gun,” Katt said.

“Karma!” Electra wailed, gripping Temple’s shoulders. “Karma.”

Temple could only think they needed to call on more than fate.

But apparently it was effective.

She sensed or saw something in the absolute dark behind the invading car, like heat rising and distorting the air, a sort of visual storm surge along the floor that was dividing around the stalled car as the blurred mass and motion came racing toward the top of the stairs, multiplying into individuals as it neared.

Temple thought of the rats leaving Hamlin, but these were cats. A wind of cats, a tsunami of fur and claws and nerve-chilling howls swept up from the front stairs below. The first at the head of the pack to come into focus was black, but it wasn’t Louie. It was a true scary Halloween cat from Hell with a raggedly coat and a mauled ear and one eye half shut.

It leaped straight for the table and the others came washing over everything behind it.

Washing like water or a strong wind, yes. Temple felt a chilling shiver of something cold passing through her even as running cats bumped her legs and arms as they leaped to the table and then up and over the shoulders and heads of Leon Nemo, Katt Zydeco, and Punch Adcock.

The chandelier above swung slowly like a possessed hangman’s noose, its weak light flickering.

Temple looked up, horrified. She saw every thick crystal branch was occupied, ornamented, by cats. Black cats, white cats, gray cats, yellow cats, brown-striped tabby cats, calico cats, no doubt T.S. Eliot rum tum tugger cats, maybe even the Cheshire Cat.

And then all these cats with claws out dropped down like bats upon the flailing hands and shrugging shoulders and confused faces of Leon Nemo, Katt Zydeco, and Punch Adcock as they joined in the blurred flow of…entities down the long dark hall presumably to the back stairs and out into the warm Las Vegas night.

“What’s going on with the air-conditioning?” Nemo demanded, frowning and batting away invisible webs. “Who let in that mangy pack of cats and spooked them?”

Temple realized then that nobody had seen the huge confluence of cats she had, but had certainly felt it.

“Get that guy,” Nemo ordered, pointing.

Temple looked down the stairs and definitely saw, not a fading-away figure and not an oncoming mystical cat, but an energized man charging the stairs like a Navy SEAL. He leaped over the broken planks and his footsteps thundered up the remaining steps. The bill of a gimme cap kept his features shadowed despite the chandelier’s milky light.

He pounced to kick Nemo’s feet right out from under him. Leaning back from Punch’s ham-sized fist, he delivered a roundhouse to the cheekbone that spun the hefty ex-boxer down a couple steps. Katt Zydeco, trying for a karate kick, had her suspended leg twisted and fell face-first to the floor.

The mystified threesome lay grunting, some from tiny fiery surface wounds inflicted by the claw-driven bounds the recent mass exodus of a few feral and many ghostly cats over their epidermis.

Was this Nine Lives moment a hallucination? Temple wondered. Her hallucination? Was she getting psychic as well as punchy?

Then the martial arts guy doffed the ugly cap, and grinned.

“Matt,” Temple said, even more mystified. “How did you end up here?”

Everything in this murky scene was abruptly stage-lit as several twin orbs of bright light breeched the open doors and entered to hover eerily around the stalled white Probe, the black of night behind them. Then the blurred and light-bleached figures swarmed past the beached Probe as they too charged the stairs.

Were the debunked Las Vegas strip UFOs, laid to rest in the recent Area 54 affair, actually real and these newcomers the floating armada’s crews? No. Temple remembered shiny black Tesla sport cars were electric and arrived as silently as gliding alien ships…or certain Vegas “Family” members turned into circling vultures.

Arriving Fontana brothers cooed Italian who-knows-what endearments as they dusted the ladies off, which was a bonus for suffering the night’s terrors, and promised soothing limo rides to police headquarters.

They promised the same rides (without the soothing) as they helped Matt secure Nemo and his downed and dazed underlings. The brothers produced cool, matte-black steel handcuffs that matched the Family Fontana Berettas. They bound the cat-napping crew in uncomfortable, contorted positions on the dusty, gritty floor while Julio speed-dialed Lieutenant C. R. Molina.

Matt pulled Temple, then Electra and Diane, away from the dusty, gritty floor.

Temple grabbed Matt’s hand and said one word. “Louie.”

He turned to the table, then carefully righted and lifted the cage thrown to the floor in the assault.

Inside was…not Louie, but a serene cream-colored, long-haired cat with snow-white paws and a light brown mask that emphasized unearthly blue, blue eyes.

“Karma!” Electra bit her lip, her own eyes luminous with tears. She opened the cage door to stroke the silky fur. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“Temple,” Matt said softly, only to her, “I thought I’d lost you. That can never happen again.”

His sentiment was wordlessly echoed by a velvety phantom brush around her ankles. She didn’t need to look down. You-know-who had shown up at last.

So, say…Temple was a modern woman. Modern women deserve modern men. She could safely swoon now, knowing her boys, Matt and Louie, were safe. And knowing she’d take out anyone who’d threaten the life and loves she’d built for herself.

But she didn’t feel like it. Not in the least.