Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 5

If a Body Meet a Body...

I love these vague assignments.

It is fairly simple to sit in a posh penthouse and declaim "the sky is falling" to one and all. It is another thing to go out into the grimy streets and find out where the sky is falling, on whom and how fast.

Of course, here in Las Vegas the sky seldom falls in the physical sense. The desert climate keeps us all high and dry most of the time. That is okay with me. When I lived on the streets, it was nice not have to deal with much rain, sleet and snow. I am not a postman, though I have been known to carry a message now and then.

The last time the Sublime Karma word-whipped me out onto the streets of Las Vegas on errands of a dangerous nature she was just as vague. I think she knows that this gets my goat, and relies upon my instinctive nose for the nefarious to unearth some evildoing, which she then can take credit for predicting. Though there are more things in heaven and earth than most people suspect, I have seen most of them on my travels and they are fairly ordinary evils: poverty, hunger and dirt. And the meanness of one to another, no matter the breed. Oh, and maybe Free-to-be-Feline without dressing.

Like life's little pleasures, evil also most often comes in teaspoon-size servings, though I must admit that I have become hooked on Miss Temple's occasional dollop of murder most foul.

There is nothing like having a mitt in righting the ultimate wrong to feel all is correct with the world.

Murder is an interesting human concept. Among my breed, there is no such thing. There is killing, of course, to eat, and humans do it too, on a grand scale, not one-on-one so much. And they have the edge of weapons and technology. I am a bare-knuckle kind of guy; I only carry the weapons Ma Nature gave me, tooth and nail, just like any predator since Adam had a little lion.

What happened to humans I cannot say, not being an anthropologist, and, given human history, I can see why these people have developed a scientific system that studies how to make apologies for the species' horrific history of mayhem and murder. I believe it is all based on overcompensation for inadequate equipment from the species' infancy.

Have you ever really examined human teeth and nails? Pretty pathetic. Obviously, these were a bunch of weed-eaters from the git-go, destined to stand and chew and watch the clawed and fanged crowd do all the dirty work.

Then they got tired of us saber-toothed tigers getting all the glory (not to mention the gory) and invented fang and claw substitutes. They are ingenious when it comes to inflicting damage, I will say that for them, as thousands of my ancestors found out during the Mid-Evil Ages, when we served as kindling for witch hunts.

That is why I shudder to be afoot and aprowl at this superstitious time in the human calendar of events. Though these are modern times, and humans keep congratulating themselves on "knowing better," they have been doing that for millennia, and apparently still have a few geological eras to go.

Even they have the good grace to fear those of their own kind who hark back to the Bad Old Days with demented fervor and are called Satanists. I got a whiff of these throwbacks when I was investigating crimes against cats at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Poor Peter, one of a pair of convent felines (his pal was called Paul, get it?) was the victim of attempted crucifixion, the same fate almost two thousand years ago of the human for which he was named, which will prove how little the species has advanced in so long a time. Sometimes I have been accused of playing with my food, but I have never resorted to such tortuous strategies.

Hey, I need to keep up my strength to battle wrongdoing and listen to Karma channel the Great Oblivion.

So anyway, I am walking along, looking like an ordinary dude, all the while musing on life, death and the eternal verities, such as what is for supper, when something blows by that stops me in my tracks.

I stare down at a crumpled newsheet of the variety that decent men keep their families from seeing, especially when they are in Las Vegas.

Besides the odious sight of a lot of bare human of both genders--and I hope no little kits are exposed to all this abnormally furless flesh; our kind does not have much to do with anything in this state but eat it, and I always close my eyes when Miss Temple switches from day- to night-wear, as I prefer her well covered-- I spy another bare-faced horror: Mr. Crawford Buchanan, who appears to have had a face-lift by an earthmover.

Still, I can glimpse a smidgen of his all-too-mortal prose and a photograph of a many-gabled and -towered edifice, a veritable Frankenstein's monster of architecture; that is to say, a mansion of many parts hacked together.

I cannot say what comes over me, but I am suddenly shaken by a sense of doom and presentiment that would knock Karma off her high horse. I know where I must go, for it is the place I am least safe: among a flock of humans celebrating Halloween by subjecting themselves to a night of programmed fright, hideous semblances and deviltry. And then they have the nerve to beg for food. Eat, drink and be nasty.

Only the mind of man would create holidays to scare his kind, as well as those of us who have become unwilling symbols of the season because of our ancient history of mass victimization, which sometimes is all too modern. I have said it before and I will say it again: only humans will sentimentalize the things they Mil.

Unless, of course, it is another human.