Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Chapter 13

Graveyard Shift

Why do I always have to find the body? Especially if it is already dead.

It is not that I have any deep distaste for dead things. I mean, we all have to eat.

But I do shudder at the human race’s ability to kill purely for pleasure or profit or sometimes just having a bad hair-trigger day.

Yes, I know my kind are considered cruel and prone to play with their food, but “play” is merely a class in survival of the species, Ma Nature being the imperative sort. In the wild, it is always about mere survival.

In the wilds of the Las Vegas Strip, that is seldom true.

So I circle around the body Ma Barker’s gang has found. There is the constant hum of traffic in the distance and the roar of airplanes depositing and whisking away almost forty million people a year at McCarran on the south end of the Strip.

Like most sites hosting incomplete construction projects, here there is only the scritch of the night’s scavengers over the rocks and sand, rats and mice, lizards, and big black bugs.

Occasionally, the distant muffled hoot of folks high on fun or various addictive substances wafts over the empty lot like an emission of hot air.

Managing to entice someone into “discovering” the body is looking hopeless. I pace the long distance to the street, gauging how far I have to lure a so-far-unseen passerby. Fifty yards at least.

If I were Rin Tin Tin or Lassie, or even that feisty little white Westie terror (I mean, of course, terrier) who pimps for Cesar brand dog food, I could howl, bark, and yip for attention. If I were a Westie, I could be seen at least. For once, my native coloring is working against me.

My whiskers are white, but far too few and too fine to make much of a showing.

I slump down on the lumpy ground so like giant sandpaper and gaze up and down the street. My only neighbor is the windowless concrete box of the Cabana Club, a strictly third-class bar and dance floor place covered with lurid murals of cavorting humans done in the colors of yellow, hot pink, bright blue, and lime green that would make a rainbow nauseated.

I stand, sigh, and prepare to hoof down to that man-made music box that expels blasts of loud, discordant music and ever more hilarity-stricken people overcome by way too many rum drinks.

All the people are heading, as much as their stumbling feet can manage it, away from the (supposedly) deserted dark lot and back to the Strip.

I am thinking I will have to slip into the nightclub and perpetrate an act of such mad and bad behavior that Animal Control will have to be called. Then I have only to escape their nets and traps and lead them back to the body.

First, I should be able to slip into the restrooms with so many rowdy and impaired revelers making frequent trips there. A bar of soap is too much to hope for, but there should be a wall dispenser of the liquid stuff.

Probably it is caked over with dried soap tracks and the prints of many human hands. How unsanitary!

I am walking faster, planning my break-in and subsequent shenanigans.

Once I smear my kisser with soap and some water from the leaky faucet (there is always a leaky faucet or two in these dives), I will chew up a good lather.

Then, apparently foaming at the mouth, I will return to the teeming, screaming crowd, jump up on the bar, and start knocking over bottles of beer like a champion bowler on a tear.

My next trick is to elude the would-be heroes in the crowd by climbing anything I can. Then when the Animal Control folks come, I pretend to be cornered and go quietly. Lulled into the usual complacency, the hunters will become the losers.

I will escape when out in the open again and streak for the abandoned lot next door. There I will evade tranquilizer darts as the posse closes in until they, stumbling over the dead body, finally have more important matters than little me on their minds.

Just planning the sequence reminds me that there are many junctures where I might be stopped, stomped, and clamped behind bars.

I sit and contemplate the lonely, dangerous life of the undercover operative. If I am caught and am regarded as rabid, that might be my last trip to the shelter with no witnesses of even an animal nature. It could be bye-bye Free-to-Be-Feline for Midnight Louie … and for what?

An old dead guy who would probably have kicked off without help sometime soon anyway.

This is not a case any of my nearest and dearest are at all involved in. I have no stake in this death other than that Ma Barker thinks it our civic duty to alert the authorities. Fine for her to think. She has delegated the job to me! She may have faced off mad dogs and rabid raccoons as the leader of her pack, but she has no idea of the level of danger to be encountered integrating with humans, which are the most dangerous breed of all.

So. This is it. Midnight Louie plays the sap for no one, not even his own mother. Maybe especially not even his own mother. Am I a grown male or a mouse?

At that moment an intoxicated and intoxicating feminine giggle does an arpeggio up and down the scale of the human voice.

I look back to the Cabana Club. A solitary couple has exited, and turned my way. I cannot tell if he is holding up she, or vice versa, but they are entwined in a very friendly way and ambling, albeit shakily, right toward me.

I do an instant size-up. They are of the same age. She is wearing some dainty little dress and is barefoot, with her left arm dangling her high-heeled sandals over her shoulder. Not good. She is in no shape to pussyfoot over the building site ground.

He is about her age, early twenties, and wears the usual Las Vegas male tourist outfit: tennis shoes, baggy long shorts, T-shirt. He has now-useless sunglasses pushed atop his head.

He is putting one foot a bit too close to the other and they progress slowly, murmuring and laughing at their own condition.

Aha. They are a couple, not just a couple of strangers in the night who met at the Cabana Club. So far, so good. I need a Princess and a Galahad to make this con play.

They are too self-involved and too happily smashed to notice when they come abreast of me.

I move to brush the woman’s ankles with a tantalizing swish of my glossy fur coat and supple rear member.

“Ooooh, honey. What was that, like a breeze on my legs?”

“No sidewalk grates in Vegas, baby.”

They stop. Look down with great care.

I paw some stones against each other like castanets.

“Oh, look, honey. It is a cat.”

“A black cat. Those things are unlucky.”

I lurch toward them, then fall back, picking up my right mitt.

“Oh, no. It is hurt.”

“Leave it. It will be all right.”

I make a feeble objection to that idea.

“It mewed at me. It needs help.” She leans down and holds out a hand with the shivs covered in neon pictographs.

I whimper again and stumble once in her direction.

“I can get it,” she says. “We can take it to the shelter.”

You can try, lady.

“That ground is awful rough,” he says. “You can’t go there barefoot.”

“Then I’ll put my shoes back on.” She grabs hold of his shoulder and stands on one foot to don the spike-heel sandals one by one.

The dude has to hold her up or she would fall on her face, but he is not looking very happy about my interrupting their canoodling time. Tough. Tonight is your turn to play the good citizen.

“This is crazy,” he tells her. “You will never catch it.”

Right on, brother.

“It is just an old alley cat,” he goes on, sealing his doom.

I sit up and pant laboriously. “Just an old alley cat” indeed, and a lot smarter than a six-mai-tais-to-the-wind young dude. Those rum cocktails will stir-fry your brain.

“Oh, honey.” She teeters onto the sandy soil. “He really needs help.”

I let her get close enough to bend down with hand outstretched; then I hop away on three legs, with a pitiful look over my shoulder.

She plants those thin-soled shoes and trots after me like my own Miss Temple on a rescue mission.

“God,” the guy mutters from the sidewalk, but he has to commit to her quest and rushes after her.

It is like having a fish on the line. You must give them enough play and yet reel them in closer and closer. I am an old koi-catcher from my Crystal Phoenix house-detective days.

I give the silent meow and hobble away. I let her get near enough to almost grab me with one pounce … and spring away. Next time I limp even more.

“Oh, he is hurting himself,” she announces. She has now decided I am a boy. Dames always go for me; Mr. “Old Alley Cat” should never underestimate the competition.

“We are never going to catch that cat,” he grumbles.

You got it, bub.

“He must be at the end of his strength. Look. He is heading for those tumbled cement blocks. He will probably hunker down there for the night.”

Uh … no, but you will.

I settle on my haunches in front of the John Doe and look up at my gracious rescuer with a happy little cry, almost kittenish, although it is hard to make my voice small and wee.

She gives a happy little cry in answer.

“Holy jalapeños, baby. That is a dead guy he is cozying up to.”

“Oh. Do you think he killed him?”

Okay, not so much in the brains area, but her heart is pure.

They are much occupied in operating cell phones and calling 911 and fussing about if the police might question their condition.

“Don’t worry, baby,” is the last thing I hear the guy say. “I hate to say it, but we have been shocked sober.”

“I hope the poor kitty is all right.…”

Poor Kitty is hot-footing his tender pads off this wasteland and getting back to his devoted roommate and their condominium at the Circle Ritz.

I pause before vanishing into the foliage and grounds of the major Strip hotels to see the squad car’s headache rack casting bright colors over the arid scene. Ma Barker was right. This is our town. If something is wrong, we must do what we can to make it right.

But I can tell you one thing. I should get an Oscar nomination for my “poor kitty” act tonight.

* * *

I am all the way home and preparing to shiv the bark off my living staircase into the Circle Ritz—the old leaning palm tree trunk—when someone hisses, “Mission accomplished?” in my ear.

I turn, spitting mad, but I am only facing my almost spitting image and certainly my almost double when it comes to names.

“Midnight Louise, why are you not getting your beauty sleep at the Crystal Phoenix?”

“Ma Barker wanted me to report on your body-revealing efforts.”

“So you were there! And watching. And did not lift a claw sheath to help.”

“That was unnecessary,” she says.

“Quite right. I had the situation firmly in foot.”

“That limping act was … a tad predictable.”

“You try to get people to walk onto a rubble-strewn lot. When they finally came, Louise, I thought the fuzz was going to plant themselves on the site and grow there. And there will never be any credit to Ma Barker’s clowder and me for taking the graveyard shift to keep their precious body preserved in place.”

“If you expect gratitude from the human race at your venerable stage in life, Daddy Dumbest, I have a cat condo in Atlantis to sell you.”

Miss Midnight Louise cranks her head around to regard her fluffy train, which is covered in desert dust and who knows how many sand fleas, and gives it a mighty waft.

I cough in the downdraft, but cannot help bragging a bit. “Does Midnight Investigations, Inc., know how to preserve and reveal a crime scene, or what?”

“With you it is always ‘or what.’ What are you thinking of? Why are we here?”

“Not to answer eternal philosophical questions, for sure, Louise. Why do you think we are here?”

“Me? I am here to go back to Ma and report. You can rejoin your roommate and rest on your laurels, which you assure me you still have.”