Cat in an Alien X_Ray

Chapter 35

Black Ops

If anybody had told me I would be playing the role of co–cat burglar with my maybe-baby Miss Midnight Louise in order to break into the Metro morgue … well, I would have taken them off at the anklebones, or hocks, depending on the species.

We have interrupted our tour of the outer limits of a low municipal building on the southern fringe of Downtown, where the nightly light show is bright. Here are silence and shadow.

Morgues tend to be sedate sites, and the residents even more so.

Still, this is a morgue in a city teeming with celebrities and paparazzi. Every window is shuttered and locked tight, and the entry door requires checking in and ID. The only “ID” me and Miss Louise could ever have is that brand name of medically approved canned pet food only the terminally ill would deign to touch with a pooper scooper.

The warm Las Vegas night seems to have been put to bed early around this place. I led the perimeter search and now we are sitting by the parking lot door planning our next move.

At least this is one occasion on which the know-it-all Miss Louise has not a clue.

“You admit,” she tells me, “you have never been inside the morgue.”

“But I have often been on very close terms with individuals destined for the morgue.”

She sniffs. “I was closer than you to the current victim under discussion.”

“My dear girl, the dead man—or whatever species, domestic or feral alien—and I fell ten stories together. That betokens a closeness a mere postmortem sniff cannot match.”

“Boots on the ground count more than aerial displays, Daddy-O. I was first to reach the body and the first to detect those ‘unusual cryptic marks’ all the tabloids are making a front-page fuss about. Laughable. Even bad journalism has slipped to the level of fish wrappings.”

“You simply recognized the Cat Pack’s handiwork. That was no leap of brain power. Some commentators have come closer to the truth.”

“Chupacabra tracks!” Louise’s longish jet-black best coat is having an electric static hair attack, she is so outraged. “These dumbskulls are too blind to see the obvious.”

“Look at it their way, Louise. They have already been conditioned to think that the dead guy fell out of the sky or at least a revolving high-rise restaurant-to-be. Who would suspect that an avenging pack of domestic cats would have scratched him up one side and down the other, and his partner-in-crime too, and disarmed them both?”

“The Cat Pack is not composed of domestic cats,” she growls. “We are all feral and semiferal, except for the one indoor lounge lizard of our acquaintance, you. And you are not the boss of us. Ma Barker is.”

“And you are a floating member, as am I. You do your lounge lizarding under a tanning bed by the Crystal Phoenix pool, so that exempts you from true feral status. Whatever the fine points, you all need a link to the ruling human class, and I am the expert at that.”

“You mean the dominant race. Cats rule—dogs just wish they did, and people are fooling themselves.”

“Now is no time to talk politics. I am thinking up a plan to storm this jail of the dead and get a good look at the ancient alien.”

“My testimony is not good enough?”

“I see the big picture, Louise. That is my job. Now, here is the plan. We need to stake out the back entrance and make like we rode in on a Black Maria.”

“A black Maria? What kind of jimsonweed have you been masticating now? You always were of the slacker generation.”

“That is what meat wagons were called back in the day when the classic detectives walked the mean streets.”

“As I recall, we hitched a ride on a meat wagon a while back during one of your so-called self-assigned cases.”

“That was a genuine meat wagon, and that is one place where the mob still operates in Vegas, selling illegal meat.”

“That is not very glamorous. I do not see a revival of the Godfather movies on that subject forthcoming soon.”

“You gotta admit there is a gore quotient.”

“So is there inside. This expedition is not a crabcake walk.”

“It will be.” I say “All we have to do is slip under the next incoming deceased’s gurney and keep pace with it. Morgue attendants have a lot to do at above-the-waist level, which is always a boon to us.”

“But we need to see a body already in the morgue. It will be in a freezer. Those have one-way doors.”

“A trifling detail, Louise. That is why there are two of us. One to dare the frigid freezer and one to keep watch outside, ready to release the other.”

“Who does what?”

“We will see when we get in.”

At that moment, we hear the low peeling sound of a Band-Aid being ripped off. Tires turning onto sandy asphalt. We duck behind the nearest thicket of pampas grass.

Sure enough, a big black van, all its windows blacked out, is grinding our way, its headlights poking nova-sized holes in the night. I feel my eyes switch to built-in infrared night vision mode. No bulky headgear for yours truly.

Las Vegas is one of the few metropolitan areas where we still have a “coroner” as opposed to a “medical examiner.” As far as I can see, dead is dead and one title will do as well as the other to deal with it.

Out of the now-stopped vehicle comes the clatter of a collapsed-for-travel gurney being uncollapsed.

It is a chilling sound. This process smacks of a ritual, and humans and dogs are big on those. Our kind is so much more independent, which implies we need no care, and are likely to retreat on our own to some elephant graveyard to fade away never to be found. Of course, if we are lucky enough to have a human base, we too will benefit from last rites and memorializing.

I am sure my Miss Temple would provide some suitable stately urn if—Bast forbid!—I should ever lick my last flake of koi. Perhaps something classic in lapis lazuli stone, or no—malachite. That is green to match my eyes.

“Old dude!” Louise whacks my whiskers. “It is time to do the limbo under the dead departed’s skateboard. Hustle.”

“That is ‘dear’ departed, Louise.” I manage to get in one last jab, verbal and physical, before we whisk into place and atune our slowest trot to the pace of the gurney. These workers are wasting no time and muffling no noise. I guess their passengers cannot complain of a bumpy ride. I could complain of a distinct odor of decay, but it is not my place.

Momentarily blinded once we hit the fluorescent lights of the receiving area, we are happy to stop with the gurney.

It is hard to describe the condition of the air inside a morgue. Of course, Louise and I are more fitted to detecting undertones and overtones, to analyzing stages of decay, than your usual human.

But there is the dominant whiff of Febreze to overcome. Which, I find, tends to make me want to … sneeze!

Catastrophe!

I feel Louise holding her breath next to me to resist the same overpowering instinct. At least the people are talking.

“Log in and then store it in the decaying-body room. Metro says this guy was not found for a while.”

Louise is shaking her head at me. We both realize the decaying-body room is likely to be colder, less often visited, and a really bad place to get locked in. I mean, our deepest instincts are to prefer fresh kill. Not that we exercise them much these days, each having our own private chef.

I must admit that Louise benefits from the personal attentions of Chef Song and his palette of Asian-infusion menu items at the Crystal Phoenix (the little suck-up) and my Miss Temple, being a working woman, can be a bit cavalier about her menu planning.

We trot under the belly of the beast as its wheels start spinning and peel off when we spot a large stainless steel trash can. Not ideal cover, because it reflects us, but black is a very fine color because it shows up in almost any room you can think of.

We immediately eel around the round trash can into a room of tables surrounded by four lightweight chairs. Hmm. Is this place a morgue or a bridge club?

In fact, I become almost hypnotized by the blaring fluorescent lights and the stainless steel cabinet fronts that stand in a U-shaped row like robotic servers on parade. Snack dispensers. Louise has made a tour from the other side and we meet in the middle.

“Awesome,” she says. “I must admire these people for sustaining such a prodigious appetite in the face of daily death. Although it is all junk calories.”

“Cheetos? That is dairy protein. You know how we like our milk. Pepperoni ’n’ cheddar. That is dairy and protein.”

“Pretzels?” Louise’s tone is withering.

“Ah, salt is the saline solution that is the staff of life, along with, uh, wheat.”

“Gluten.” She glowers. “High-fructose corn syrup.”

“Fiber. Low, er, sodium.”

We have faced off over this bounty we do not have time to break into.

Louise nods as sagaciously as a babe of her type can. “If we can contemplate breaking into the fast-food automat, we can crack any autopsy cabinet in the place. Do you think they will make it easy for us and have drawers?”

“One can only hope, Louise.”

* * *

Of course, identifying one dead dude among so many is a challenge. I somehow think our ancient alien will not be in any old drawer, so we tour the rooms off the main autopsy area.

“Where would Grizzly Bear stash a prime candidate for illegal paparazzi snapshots?” I ask.

Midnight Louise sits down, curls her flurry tail around her neat forefeet and pretends to meditate like Bast. “I would mislabel the most desirable exhibit.”

So. Looking for “ancient alien” on stainless steel drawers as if they were file cabinets is not likely to be successful.

Suddenly, Louise lifts her head. “Idiots!”

People certainly are.

“We have overlooked the obvious,” Louise announces without giving me a hint of what she is referring to.

“Obviously. And that is—?”

“Where do you hide a leaf?” she asks.

“In a forest. Father Brown, the priest-detective I have cited before, figured that out before your one-thousandth great-grandmama was born.”

“Where do you hide an alien being fallen to earth?”

“Under … oddities?” I hazard.

“Under … suspected suicides?”

“It is true that there was not a mark on him, except ours, and no Cat Pack attacks are fatal. Is there a suicides room?”

“There should be, in Las Vegas,” she says.

“Yes, people win, and most people lose, and lose and lose. I believe,” I decree, “I would file him under ‘Anonymous.’”

That is how we locate the one unlabeled room. We sit upon an empty autopsy table—excellent construction, sturdy stainless steel with the look of those modern recto-linear sinks all the best home redos feature these days, almost an old Roman grandeur to them. I feel quite importantly supported by a pedestal, always a flattering position for my breed, from Bast on down.

Together, we leap, and push open a door that takes the force of a human palm in ordinary circumstances.

We are in! And, more important, the door has sprung wide and is not creeping closed again, as in all the best summer slasher movies.

We loft up in tandem to view the sole corpse occupying this unlabeled room. Talk about anonymous.

“He looks perfectly human, almost alive,” Louise comments reverently.

“They did a good job. The broken limbs are straightened to fit the table, the Y-incision in the torso is neatly sewed up, and the cranial sawing looks almost like a hippie headband.”

“A sign of respect and excellent workmanship.”

“He might become a museum exhibit ultimately.”

“Not so good,” Louise says, wrinkling her nose.

“They can freeze-dry him. No odor.”

“It is not that. Observe the faint white lines to the sides of his bronzed torso and legs.”

“Almost like the scars of a wire whip.”

“Or … these.” Louise lifts the spread four shivs of her right mitt.

“Our slashes tend to be a bit ragged.”

“These wounds are healed,” she points out (quite literally, running her fanned ninja knives through the air just above the rib scars). “I would like to see the back.”

“Not possible without human cooperation. This dude must weigh one-eighty. Could this man have contracted the Cat Pack slashes here in Las Vegas and still be from outer space?”

“Possibly. What do you think of him?” she asks.

“He does have an exotic look.”

“More of a human model, say a romance novel cover hero.”

“His hair is oddly slicked down close to his skull for that,” I say. “I have heard my Miss Temple quote Mr. Grizzly Bahr, our esteemed coroner, that faces relax in death so that the features may seem entirely alien.”

Louise pats his cold dead face with one velvet-soft mitt. “Poor mystery man. I have the oddest feeling that I have seen him somewhere, but that is not likely.”

In Las Vegas, the unlikely is always possible.