“Go, girl,” I order in the day’s vernacular.
I hardly see her blend into the dark, but one of my problems is now Miss Kitty O’Connor’s problem. She has set all my human friends atremble, but I send her my heartfelt sympathy. Miss Midnight Louise is one fierce tiger to have on your tail, and I ought to know.
All right. I decide on a stroll around the foundation of Neon Nightmare. Above me the mare in question ripples with a blaze of neon…magenta, indigo blue, yellow, red, and purple.
I detect no obvious exits and end up near the main entrance again…just in time to see the figure reminiscent of the Cloaked Conjuror appear in the parking lot with a swirl of cape and a glimpse of white-face.
That hokey Phantom of the Opera getup has never fooled Midnight Louie. I hotfoot it along behind Mr. Max’s striding feet. Rats! Miss Louise is correct. He wears sound-softening shoes with the exquisite redolence only found in Italian leather goods. From Caesar’s sandals to Gucci loafers. So far has Rome fallen. And its vaunted arches.
As I expect, we soon pussyfoot up to a black car parked on a side street.
As Mr. Max swirls aside his theatrical black cloak to enter the driver’s side, I dive into the entrance to the backseat. Thank heaven for black car interiors.
Instantly the engine throbs slightly under my feet. I extend my shivs into carpeting as I prepare for takeoff. I do not expect Mr. Max to linger.
He does not disappoint me. I am hurled forward, then back as the car accelerates smartly, before settling down to cruising speed.
So black is the night, and the car, that I risk peering over the backseat.
Mr. Max is pulling off the mask and loosening his hair with his fingers. He has no more idea that I am hitching a ride on his wagon than that his most bitter enemy had been indulging in Martian-green martinis at the Neon Nightmare bar.
I wonder where he was during that interlude. Wherever it was, he is now in a more distracted mood than I have ever seen him indulge before.
Streetlights cast bright prison bars over our moving vehicle. He drives fast, smooth and sure. I find a thrill catching in my throat, for I am certain that this time I will know what my Miss Temple knows and has not seen fit to share with me: where the Mystifying Max goes to ground. His home turf. The hideaway that even Lieutenant Molina has not been able to find.
What a night!
I am so jubilant I brace my shivs on the backseat’s upright portions to glimpse the streetlights shining above.
I see one particular light pierce the rear window and then slide across the car’s ceiling like a luminous serpent.
I frown. Streetlights flash by at a downward angle.
This was an upward light.
Risking discovery, I ratchet up the backseat upholstery until my ear-flattened head can see out the rear window.
The moon has fallen from the sky, or maybe the horse from Neon Nightmare is on our trail.
A single wild bright eye follows the car.
The Neon Nightmare is a cyclops?
I blink as the expanding ball of light rakes my delicate irises, turning my pupils into spikes.
We are being tailed by a one-eyed monster.
Luckily, considering my kind and my color, I am not superstitious.
I immediately realize our peril.
It is a motorcycle that follows us, and Mr. Max is obviously thinking of other things. In fact, I hear him chuckle to himself. He is daydreaming when a nightmare is on our tail. Tails!
I am along for the ride, after all.
The lone light winks shut.
I cannot see it, but I hear the faint vibration of a growling motor gaining on us.
Our vehicle suddenly slows, then turns. And turns again.
Mr. Max is heading home.
He must head elsewhere.
I leap atop the passenger seat back, howling my warning.
The car swerves as Mr. Max glances in his rear- and side-view mirrors. I see his eyes focused like black laser lights.
The car swerves again, executing a neat 180-degree turn so we are facing in the opposite direction.
Actually, I am facing the rear of the car, for I have been unceremoniously hurled into the foot well of the passenger seat, my shivs stapling nylon carpeting to keep myself from bouncing around a lowly space spiked with odd bits of gravel and scented with asphalt and used gum.
When the car stabilizes, I claw my way to the top of the passenger seat to see. There is nothing behind us but blackness.
I glance into the driver’s seat.
Mr. Max glances at me, but does not seem to really see me.
And then we barrel down the side streets in a zigzag pattern that would make a sidewinder snake dizzy, and suddenly we are shooting onto an entrance ramp to a freeway. Our speed matches the flow of traffic and then increases. And increases.
We weave in and out of lanes, passing every vehicle except, thank Bast, a highway patrol car. I see the single glare of the motorcycle headlight illuminating the car ceiling. Still we speed on. Soon we have slipped the surly bonds of the Nevada posted speed limits and left city and traffic far behind. And still we dodge the single light that clings like static electricity to every move we make.
Finally we screech into another 180-degree turn and immediately Mr. Max hits the gas so we are racing back in the direction from which we just fled, right into the light that has never failed to follow our every maneuver.
There is only one outcome for this showdown. High impact.
I no longer fear our one-eyed pursuer, but I think Mr. Max is trying to lurch me loose from my death grip on his interior upholstery, which is one of my favorite aromatic materials, leather.
Good luck.
It will give before I do.
Chapter 34
…Going to the Devil
Max hit the brakes until they screamed in the desert night like a puma. He turned around in a wide U on the deserted highway and retraced his path.
It had been the ultimate game of “Chicken.”
Maxima and Ninja at full throttle into each other.
Max had never wavered, but he was armored by a car.
Now he brought that car to a full stop and jerked the gears into Park. He hurtled out the passenger door, not bothering to shut it or think about anything but who and why.
Las Vegas was flatter than the proverbial pancake, but the car-motorcycle chase had driven deep into the desert where dry washes veined the landscape like seams in a golfer’s face.
The motorcycle, maneuvering to both dodge and confront a car that had just executed a sudden 180-degree turn, had spun out on the gravel, skittering over the concrete in the restless desert wind.
Max ran to the edge of the arroyo fifty feet from the highway—that’s how far the motorcycle had sailed through the air—and looked down into the darkness.
Nothing to see now, but if the gas tank blew…he pulled out his cell phone, then realized it would leave a trail and snapped it shut again. Better find a pay phone at the nearest gas station, which might be miles away.
He slammed himself into the front seat and drew the door shut like a bank vault behind him.
He had forgotten what, or who, he had glimpsed in the car during the last, few, desperate seconds of maneuvering. The car seemed empty as he raced alone over unlit asphalt, eyes on the faint dotted line of the two-lane highway. The creature, black as a skunk, was gone now. Midnight Louie, believe it or not. Or not. Or had it been a racoon? Something black and masked about the face. He had only glimpsed it as a scrabbling form in the dark.
On the other hand, he had no doubt about the motorcycle rider, who had reacted a split second too slowly to his latest evasive maneuvers. That was the way of war and races: move fast or spin out permanently. He couldn’t be dead sure of that person’s identity, but he had a gut feeling exactly who it was: the elusive easy rider who had creased his scalp with a bullet weeks ago, who had been dogging Matt Devine at the radio station, who had sailed into an unexpe
cted off-road experience.
He doubted that any emergency vehicle he could call to this site could save anything, not even a guilty conscience. Still, he memorized the first highway marker he came to, and pushed the pedal to the floor. The Maxima leaped like a jackrabbit to the charge as he aimed for a faint line of gas-station neon maybe five miles away.
Chapter 35
…Roadrunner
Ouch! There is nothing out here but cat-claw cactus and it is digging directly between my toes on every step.
It was no big decision what to do when Mr. Max played spin-the-bottle with the motorcycle and won, brakes down.
As he bailed out of the car to check on the damage, I bailed out right behind him.
I stare down at the dried-out wash, gazing at one red taillight.
It is not the motorcyclist I fret about. I knew who it was and I am not sorry to see Mr. Max decide to leave, and no doubt find an anonymous phone upon which to report this fatal accident so long overdue. I know how this dude thinks: like I do, were anyone human ever to realize that I do think.
Right now I am thinking that if Miss Kitty O’Connor has truly clawed her last, I am not about to let any tears soak into my best black lace jabot. She was not exactly a friend to me and mine.
However, I have one nagging worry. Let us just say that I have a nagging nagger nowadays. The last thing I did in delegating power this evening was to tell my junior partner to tail Miss Kitty O’Connor. I do not doubt my order was heeded.
Ergo, Miss Midnight Louise was likely on the motorcycle when it made its Evel Knievel leap to fame and future forensics examination.
Well, one cannot have an associate gasping out her last on the sere desert sands. Since nothing I would or could manage to do with a cell phone can offer an iota of good at the accident scene, I hurl myself down the crotchety incline, avoiding cacti all the way.
Such a path is hard on the unprotected pads, let me tell you. I had never expected to be an upside-down pincushion, but it is in that condition in which I finally catapult to the bottom.
My nose tells me my first worry is well placed. Raw gasoline is one of the strongest odors on the planet, and it hangs in a nasal miasma over the crash scene.
One spark and everything in the vicinity is instant barbecue.
So I pause before approaching nearer to observe the scene.
The motorcycle is on its side, a spray of broken-off accessories pluming over the sand. Broken glass sparkles from the moon-glow high above.
The rider lies fifteen feet away, limbs turned at angles even the most agile alley cat could not manage while in a living, breathing condition. The helmet has rolled like an obsidian pumpkin to the foot of a huge Joshua tree cactus a couple yards away.
“Louise,” I call plaintively.
Something in the distance answers me with an arpeggio of yips ending in a howl. Coyotes. I wonder if Mr. Max will return to the accident scene, or if he will only lurk at a distance, as I would, to see the ambulance come and go.
Probably. I pause by the fallen figure’s head. The skin looks dead in the moonlight and snaky threads of black hair cross the forehead and cheek. Some of them, I sniff on closer examination, are tendrils of blood.
I paw delicately at the motionless mouth, my shortest hairs unstirred by any breath or breeze.
It is a still night in the desert, in more ways than one.
I do not hear any feline complaints either.
Nervous as I am, I must approach the fallen vehicle. If Louise had hitchhiked a ride with Kitty the Cutter, she would have needed to do what I have done before: ride in a saddlebag.
One of these handy black-leather pockets faces up at the star-pocked night sky. I examine it with mitt and nose and even tongue. Its exterior buckles are closed. I doubt the dead woman would have overlooked Miss Midnight Louise inside and buckled her in.
Next I bend down and explore the side of the bike crushed against the ground. The scent of oozing cactus juice is even stronger than spilled gasoline at this level.
I find another saddlebag, a twin to the first, crushed flat under the motorcycle’s metal side. I sniff for blood, but can’t overcome the gasoline reek. It is like trying to smell lilies of the valley when gardenias bloom next door.
There is a sudden scrape behind me and the sand shifts under my feet as I leap two feet into the air, execute a 180-turn like Mr. Max’s car, and face the wilderness.
I make out a silhouette cresting the dry wash.
Oh, Great-grandmother Graymalkin! It is a lone coyote.
Now, eating nightly is a serious matter to this breed, which has been hunted to hoped-for extinction by humans and yet still manages to scrounge a living from the few uncivilized acres of desert left to its kind.
Actually, my money is on the coyote in this primal battle, but in these circumstances I cannot afford to let my finer feelings stand in the way of my survival skills.
And a coyote is at least twice my size with teeth at least six times the size of mine.
I know from many street brawls that it is not size but attitude that determines who comes out on top. However, an opponent who is perpetually starving to death and who can only look on one as fresh meat is an extreme case it would be better to avoid than get physical with.
So I prance sideways, my back up and fur fluffed to porcupine fullness.
The coyote tilts his feral head in the universal canine gesture of puzzlement. I am sure that the hint of quills is not welcome to a desert-living breed who must grow up on regular snoutfuls of cactus spines.
Either cowed or simply shocked by my performance, he edges down into the wash a good ten yards away from me and soon is nosing at the recumbent form of the former Kathleen O’Connor.
Much as I would like to tell Miss Temple (could I tell Miss Temple anything) that I had witnessed Kitty the Cutter being eaten by coyotes for the sin of persecuting Mr. Matt and Mr. Max, I cannot allow the death scene and the corpus delecti to be tampered with before the ambulance comes.
“Ah, Mr. Coyote, that is not prey for you. The body is several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from you. It is always bad policy to eat your betters. They tend to retaliate. Not that I speak from personal experience, mind you.”
He does not even lift his head at my whimpered protests, but paws at Miss Kitty’s dead hand. There is no doubt that it is dead, for if it were not, no way would it sit still for playing patty-cakes with a coyote.
Mr. Coyote snuffles disgustingly at the corpse, then lifts his head to sniff the scents emanating from me.
There is no way to turn off my natural perfume, any more than I could deactivate the hypersensitive nostrils on a canine creature.
So it is time to let this bozo get a big whiff of my attitude.
“You do not want to mix it up with me,” I warn him in a low growl. “I am not your usual lost domestic feline. I am big-time muscle in Las Vegas, and I am out here on a case. Mess with me and you will lose a major sense.”
His hackles bristle in response and there we are facing off.
It is in the silence that holds while we bluff each other with our badness that a thin, watery wail pierces the darkness like a cactus needle.
First I think siren, but this time the dog is ahead of me. Its ears prick, its head lifts and off it goes bounding along the meandering trail of the dry wash.
I bound after. Ouch! The ground is littered with Christmas tree needles if a Christmas tree was ever a saguaro cactus. Some are the length of knitting needles!
I limp after, Mr. Coyote being a speedball who can use years of canny desert experience to avoid the prickliest pear plants.
I arrive to see him rubbing his nose in the sand and pawing at it with both front feet.
There is a puddle of shadow on the ground that the moonbeams do not deign to illuminate and every raised hair on my shoulder blades tells me that it is Miss Midnight Louise and that she is dazed or injured, or else she would be standing upright and spitting like a kettle at 4:00
P.M. high tea.
Chapter 36
…Neo-Neon Nightmare
A high, thin keening ripped through the darkness.
Max had run the car off the road, turned off the lights and the engine, and waited.
The siren grew louder and shriller until it sounded like an alley cat in heat. The flashing red and blue lights of the squad car leading the ambulance slowed at a distant mile marker, then spurted ahead.
Max grew impatient when the squad car stopped, a pale blot gleaming like a beached whale carcass on the desert darkness.
“There, you idiots,” he whispered. Trained by both his apparent and his secret vocations to precise observation, his eye had already detected and pinpointed the darker patterns at the bottom of the wash that were a motorcycle and a body.
Soon, though, the officers and ambulance attendants were stumbling alongside the rim of the dry riverbed, their high-power flashlights illuminating mesquite bushes and prickly pears.
Finally the lights danced over the high-gloss sheen of a motorcycle flank. They converged in a clot, one man going back along the highway to direct the ambulance driver forward…for more efficient pickup of the victim, the body.
Everyone was scrambling down the incline now. One of the cops held them back while a pair of EMTs rushed to the blot that was Kathleen’s body. They bent over her, applying tests and remedies. The gurney was half carried, half rolled over the rugged terrain.
Max grunted soft appraisal. The major activity on the scene would obscure any traces he might have left, and with his unmarked soles they would be few.
The tire tracks his car laid on the asphalt as he had spun around wouldn’t erase. Come daylight, when an accident investigation team hit the scene, they’d implicate a car and driver in the outcome. His Maxima was history. He’d leave it at one of the designated drop sites, and walk away. One call, and it would be picked up minutes after he left it. Within hours, it would be in another part of the country getting crushed in an auto graveyard.
Max ran a hand over the passenger’s seat. He’d had this car longer than any for a long while. Temple had ridden in it several times. He’d miss it. Then his palm stroked several superficial slashes in the leather. On the other hand, the hitchhiking critter…Midnight Louie, maybe?…had scarred the upholstery beyond repair anyway.
Cat in a Neon Nightmare Page 21