Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Chapter 10

Mother Ship

If there is anything a hip cat about town—particularly if that town is Sin City—loathes to admit, it is that he has anything in common with inferior species, namely canines and Homo sapiens.

Now, Homo sapiens—“saps” for short, in my opinion—is an easy enough breed to manipulate or avoid. Most canines are too herdlike to do more than pity.

However, it is possible, in our pursuit of ultimate felininity, we hip cats may show some symptoms we have in common with one or both inferior species.

That is why my extended family includes life partners and my so-called parents, Three O’Clock Louie and Ma Barker, along with Ma’s clowder of street gangsters. Miss Midnight Louise, purported daughter, is my partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc., I being the capital I in “Inc.” and Louise being the dot at the end of the “Inc.”

Whatever our social ranking, we all have gathered on the fringe of desert that dips into the city proper on a night when the moon is a pale round mottled marble in the sky.

Coyotes and dogs may howl and bay at the moon.

Human beings may spoon and moon at the moon.

We of the Sacred Breed worshipped in ancient Egypt, however, sit in quiet contemplation.

That is because we have a mystical gene going back to our golden olden days when the cat goddess Bast oversaw the pinnacle of catdom.

So sometimes her call sings through our veins and to the very tips of our vibrissae, “whiskers” (oh-so-sadly human) in the common expression.

We suspend our daily struggles for food, warmth, zebra-pattern comforters, and Free-to-Be-Feline pellets and are drawn to a special spot, rather like ’60s folks to a hootenanny.

Only we remain silent, sober, and soulful.

Our very presence signifies that something momentous is about to happen.

Naturally, I expect to figure out what it is first, because I am the private investigator of the lot and that is my job, to walk these lonely wastelands and restore order and justice.

Did I mention that we are meeting behind the deserted construction area—of which there are many in post–Great Recession Vegas—that sits opposite the Convention Center area?

Word on the street and around the Dumpsters is that something big is going up here, and going down tonight.

The construction is swathed in one of those gigantic plastic sheets that environmental artists like Christo employ to gift-wrap various iconic building and geographical areas, even whole islands.

Fear not. It is merely one of the many stalled construction projects turned abandoned slum by the Great Recession.

So there Ma and me finally stand on the stub-end of Vegas, looking around the shallow, sandy landscape, viewing a scene of ruin out of Hollywood’s latest disaster movie.

I am a simple fellow. I suppose you could consider me a survivalist.

I wear built-in camo to blend into shade and shadow. If I cannot find, chase, and catch food, I know how to scout and score OPF. Other People’s Food. I do not want my sovereign liberty to roam curtailed. I kowtow to no civil or religious authority, save She Who Must Be Obeyed, and, fortunately, Bast, the ancient Egyptian cat deity, keeps herself on the down low these days.

In a bow to modern mores (and because it was forced upon me by a vile enemy), I have had Planned Pethood thrust upon me and been rendered responsible to pursue my wildest dreams without fear of unwanted offspring. (If only my wildest dreams would let themselves be caught!) Oh, well, there is always another feline fatale around the corner.

Despite having angled a cushy position with a human roommate, I could revert to wandering wayfarer status in a heartbeat. Or so I like to think, though I would dearly miss the zebra-pattern comforter that makes such an ideal background for my reclining magnificence.

However enterprising I am as a small business owner and pillar of the community, I must admit many others of my breed do not have the luck and wiles I have had and do need a hand and a handout now and again.

This economy has been the pits for every life-form except rich roaches and other lowlifes that take and do not give—who knows?—perhaps alien visitors among them. Bring on more worry and woe!

I eye the blasted site that looks like the moon on a lush day and pick out members of Ma Barker’s clowder hunkered in the shadows of isolated piles of lumber, rebar, coated concrete blocks, and other leftovers of stalled construction.

The Strip itself still glows, shines, sparkles, and glitters, but the backlot behind the façade is showing its age and decrepitude.

“So what is here to draw the gang?” I ask Ma as we crouch behind some burnt-out oleander bushes that died of thirst. Things wilt in Las Vegas if not watered regularly.

“In the dark before the dawn, vermin.”

“I thought you were the darlings of the police substation and dined on fast food.”

“Even they are on a budget. And we need to exercise our survival skills.”

“This close to the Strip?”

“That is where the most deserted areas are now during the economic downturn.”

It is a sad comment when your own mother starts sounding like a stockbroker.

“We arrived around three hours before dawn and were ready to leave in the still-dark. Only we were disturbed at the gathering.”

“By—?”

“Small darting lights that enlarged and faded, flying in formation.”

“Aw, come on, Ma. I am a rational dude. Trust me. The Strip is riddled by gimmicky dancing lights all over the place.”

“This occurred above this deserted place only. But that is not all.”

I sigh and wait.

“There was a mother ship. A huge, hovering flying thing just above the ground that emitted a blinding death ray.”

“A death ray. Holy Flash Gordon, Ma! If you had ever been domesticated and moved indoors to watch movies from all eras on television, you would know that death rays are a corny invention of special effects technicians. FX, the humans call it for short. Special effects. A trick. An illusion. A delusion.

“What you saw was probably some advertising gimmick … maybe helium balloons loosed on an unsuspecting public. Right out in front of the Paris is this huge illuminated balloon and gondola. This stuff is all pure Las Vegas hype.”

“Las Vegas is not so pure from what I have heard,” she says with a sniff.

“So did anybody see this phenomenon? I mean somebody with an opposable thumb to punch in 911 on a cell phone.”

“We go where we will not be seen. You know that is our kind’s best defense, not to be seen. We did not do leaping lion but crouching tiger. We went belly-down to play rock and shadow. The security lights are dim here.”

“They are indeed rather puny compared to the fireworks of the Strip and Downtown all around,” I note.

“And anyway, the UFOs drove the men off, leaving behind their burden. We thought it might be traps to transport us to the mother ship, but we were too smart to fall for that trick.”

“Men? Burden? That could have been … gym bags or something. There must be a twenty-four Hour Fitness club somewhere around here. I know life on the street makes one wary, but this all sounds like nonsense.”

“Nonsense, all right. I sent Pitch and Blackula to sniff out the leavings after the men had fled. It was no burden, it was just very dead.”

“Those gym bags can smell like death warmed over, believe me. I have hung out with humans way more than you ferals.”

“The leaving was also about six feet long and most unfit, with a large pouch like you.”

“Leave my body type out of this discussion. Let me get this straight. You saw grown men toting a corpse? They dropped it like a sack of potatoes and ran?”

Usually corpse-toters are not the fleeing type, much less the leaving-in-plain-sight types.

Maybe Ma and her crew had seen something weird. If I were a vast, hidden conspiracy believer, I might suspect secret government experiments gone rogue from Area 51. As I muse, I can almost hear Twilight Zone music pulsating in my head like annoying audio hail. I am definitely too domesticated, or too addicted to retro television.

Ma is nattering on. “I stationed the crew to stay here to keep the rats off the evidence. And bag a few for snacks.”

“Please. I do not do sushi.” I am afraid my palate at least has become totally domesticated. Which makes me wonder how suitable for survival I am these days, should it become necessary.

“Well,” I say, “while I am willing to bet that these skittish flying tinfoil doughnuts are a scam, the scenario you have just described is genuine Las Vegas legerdemain from days of old, all right. It is a favorite game among the old mobs called ‘bury the body.’ Lead me to the remains. I am not a coroner, but I have played one on TV news cameras now and then.”

Ma gives me the sssst hiss of reproval and heads to the darkest corner of the property. The scene certainly looks deserted now. The edifice-in-waiting is like the halted construction on a lot of Vegas sites, a skeletal hulk. Any light hitting the dirt around here is referred from distant sources.

We are talking a dead planet in the midst of one hyperactive, glitzy galaxy.

Come to think of it, we are talking prime body-dumping ground.

I start to feel like a Mars rover, churning up dust as I clamber over fallen cement blocks disrupting acres of sand. I will take a long, careful tongue-bath to restore my shiny black suit coat to prime condition.

The scene is a bit eerie, I think, looking up and seeing only a full moon above, an object not about to make a close encounter with Earth any eon soon. If that supposed mother ship swoops down tonight, I will have to swallow of lot of words as well as all this dust.

I am glad Ma’s gang is backing me up.

A feature on the deserted landscape grows bigger by the second. It is too lumpy to be concrete. The meager light brings into focus a legendary feature of the planet Mars: the Mysterious Face.

Only I spot those facial features dead and on the ground on Paradise Road. They seem more ugly than mysterious, but that is how it often happens when one gets to the bottom of things.

Although Grizzly Bahr the coroner begins an autopsy with the buzz saw to the brain, the feline way is more delicate. While Ma Barker’s gang hangs back, I walk step by step over the uneven ground until I can, like any intrepid explorer, plant a foot on the foreign territory.

My sensitive pads sense immediately that this guy is as cold as the stone that surrounds him. I lean in to sniff carefully at his sniffer. Not a breath of air stirs my hair-trigger vibrissae. Not a whisker is stirring not even a fine, almost invisible one sprouting from my chinny chin-chin.

“Coroner cuisine,” I diagnose.

“As if we did not know that all by ourselves,” Ma Barker says. “What we need you for is dealing with the proper authorities to get this dead meat off our hunting grounds.”

“Maybe,” I say, “your flock of UFOs and the hovering mother ship will whisk him off before any of us can do anything. Anyway, I do not see your crowd rushing back to this place by dead of night as long as you are drinking the Kool-Aid about alien visitors coming to Las Vegas.”

“Kool-Aid? We would never touch that sticky sweet stuff.”

I do not bother to explain that is a human expression to denote the gullible.

“So you will have to devise a clever way to alert the authorities,” Ma says.

“Maybe. Maybe not. The only thing I am sure of is that ‘murder most mob’ is definitely not alien to Sin City. Could this be a public relations ploy to draw attention to the new mob museums busting out all over town lately?”

“I am shocked.” Ma sits down. “There is nothing that your human friends will not stoop to in order to make a buck, especially off the dead.”

I glance down at the officially undiscovered corpse and have only one comment. “And they say we play with our food.”