Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Chapter 8

Unlawful Entry

If Dear Abby ever needs another secretary, I believe that I am now fully qualified.

Talk about standing by your human. I am the poster boy for that theme song. I am sure my off-camera antics yesterday morning aided Miss Temple in handling the family business that often can be so difficult for her kind. I myself avoid phone calls in favor of a nose-to-nose meeting of the minds.

I do know something about large, untidy families, though. I sympathize with my little doll, being born the only girl kit—and the runt of the litter at that—with four hyperactive bruiser boys for what humans call “siblings.”

I would call those brothers from the apparently savage and freezing stretch of northlands called Minnesota one thing: bozos. It is too bad my Miss Temple was not really born into la famiglia Italiana Fontana.

If anyone in Vegas could possibly fill my boots on protecting my little doll, it is a posse of Fontana brothers. Like me, they offer proper due respect to the females of our respective species.

My Miss Temple is no longer wishing to work as an official private eye, given the dangers she faced in her first run at the profession, but I cannot allow her to trot out alone on her snappy platform heels this noon. Errands for her public relations business are not life threatening, and she returned from her Wynn meeting no worse for wear and ready to serve me dinner.

Me, duty done, I head for the living room couch for the night, stretching luxuriantly on my back. My role as an action hero is tabled for now and I can become the usual domestic sofa spud.

I gaze up at the unique arched white ceiling, which reminds one of sand dunes and makes the daylight seem like reflected water. This is as close as I wish to get to that irksome invention called “beach.” Sand between my toes. Ouch! Sand dulling the polish on my concealed shivs? No thank you! Sand fleas hitching a ride on my shoulder blades just where I cannot reach … never again!

I curve into a comfy kittenish curl, since I am on my own and fancy-free. I twitch the only white feature on my whole black-satin bodysuit; my whiskers. A purr rumbles in my throat and rib cage. I am starting to dream about Topaz, the Oasis Hotel feline mascot, a sleek and nubile black-like-me beauty who—

Crash bang!

My world explodes. I do a double-axle twist. Ripping sounds up the back of the sofa raise the hairs on my spine from my hackles to the tip of my tailbone.

A speeding black bullet hits the sofa cushion beside me and ricochets off.

A few black hairs drift down into my face like falling eyelashes.

By now I have all four on the floor and am in full frontal battle mode. Only then do I realize this entire exercise in adrenaline has been a false alarm.

“Louise,” I admonish the smaller black furry form facing me across the coffee table, a pile of tumbled newsprint between us. “That is no way to interrupt your superior’s beauty sleep.”

“Beauty sleep! My superior! I will give you a beauty sleep with a slap across the kisser.”

My eyes widen. My mistake. I am not looking into the mellow yellow gold eyes of my partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc., but the green peepers that feature one fight-sagged lid and the snaggle-fanged visage of my long-lost and now-found dam, Ma Barker.

Damn.

“This is what you do on your off time?” she demands. “Lie about, you lackluster layabout? You would be a poor excuse of a leader if I ever abdicated from running the police substation clowder.”

“I was taking a well-deserved rest. I only yesterday defended my Miss Temple during an uneasy phone call.”

“No doubt a political solicitation.”

“And you cannot break and enter here in your rowdy, alley cat way, Ma. Miss Temple might assume I am sharpening my shivs on her French doorframes and upholstery. I have always been the perfect indoor gentleman. What is the rush here?”

“Look, Junior. I have not got all day. My gang is waiting for us and it is only hours before the light of day, and that kind of exposure is dangerous. Those alien visitors that drop unidentified flying objects into our innocent midst to trap us and bear us away for medical experimentation are back.

“And this time, they are after not only us, but bigger prey too. We have stumbled on something fishy in the way of murder most mystifying.”

Okay. My ma is a canny street fighter and survivor. Not every single black female of a certain age runs her own street gang. Yet she is of an older generation and has her stubborn misconceptions. I would not go so far as to say she is superstitious. I mean, it is pretty hard for her to avoid black cats crossing her path every which way but loose. Still, she does subscribe to some way-out ideas, like being a PI makes me a lazy lout and alien visitors are interested in a mass abduction of her precious clowder.

“Now, Ma,” I say. “I have told you before that no alien force is coming to take you away, except the SPCA, and you all are in a TNR zone these days.”

“Twilight Zone, I told you so.”

“I am not referring to the spooky TV show. ‘TNR’ stands for Trap, Neuter, Return. The human do-gooders seek to prevent unwanted littering by whisking our street people away to low-cost neutering facilities. It is a good program for those who, unlike myself, are not able to avail themselves of such voluntary choices as vasectomy.”

“Hmph,” says Ma. “The way I hear it, you were captured and whisked away just like the rest of us, only you got dumped on a plastic surgeon rather than a vet. I tell you, what is going on now in town is a vast alien conspiracy.”

Ma sits down to groom her mustache. (This does happen to older females, you know.) Sadly, her coat is terminally raggedy and she just manages to swirl the split ends around in a different pattern.

“It is just Planned Pethood, Ma,” I suggest.

“Do not be an ignorant pup,” she growls.

Now my back hairs are getting themselves in a twist. You do not call Midnight Louie canine, no matter who you are.

“Settle down, Louie.” Her crooked paw pats my side whiskers. “We can have our own opinions about the alien conspiracy to whisk our population away to some hidden and forbidden planet, but you will not be able to deny what the Cat Pack has seen over on Paradise.”

I am somewhat mollified, if not momified. “All right. Show me the way. But first I have to reverse engineer the claw marks you have put into the back of Miss Temple’s sofa.”

“From what I hear of her romantic life, she does not see much of the back of the couch.”

By then I am using a single delicate shiv to restore the disturbed upholstery threads and too busy to take offense. It is true my Miss Temple has been distressingly involved in the mating game of late, and she does not have the handy on and off switch known as “heat” to moderate things.

But I would not be here if it were not for such urges, so who am I to complain?

“Ma!” I have now reached the breached French door. The lock is visibly sprung, and long track marks scar the exterior wood. “You are as bad as that renegade human known, not fondly, as Kitty the Cutter.”

Ma shrugs and emits the short, almost gacking sounds that pass for amusement with her. “Kitty the Cutter—cute nickname. You can call me Cutter for short,” she says with a sharp cuff to my shoulder.

I do not know why Ma is so fearful of alien abduction. If these so-called aliens were advanced enough to traverse space to get to Earth, they would not take her on a bet.