Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Chapter 37

  …Death Trip

  “Get away!” I howl at the coyote.

  He interrupts his pawing at the shadow of Midnight Louise to gaze at me, puzzled. Puzzlement is a canine characteristic we felines never descend to.

  “This is not human carrion,” he half whimpers, half growls, “as you warned me away from before. This was a four-foot.”

  I do not know if the word “carrion” or the verb “was” irritates me in Big Cat proportions.

  Either way, I go screeching sideways at him, bouncing on my toes like Bruce Lee on hot coals, my coat hairs all at attention.

  That is enough to back him off two steps. “Take it easy, little guy.”

  And that is another incentive.

  I leap straight up, shivs out, and come down at an angle, extremities thrashing. I nick the nose.

  “Hey!” The bozo buries his injured snout in the sand, his fore-feet pawing at the sting.

  While he is on his knees, I rocket past and kick sand in his eyes.

  “No fair!” he whines.

  While he is still on his knees and now blind, I leap again and land on his back, taking a good toothy grip on his hackles.

  Now he springs straight up.

  “Ow-ow-wow-wow-ow,” he cries.

  He tries to buck me off like he was a bronco and I was an old cowhand, but this galoot has spurs on every limb and I use ’em, digging in. I am going for a very big silver belt buckle here.

  He is turning in tight rabid circles now, and I must admit my own head is getting quite a workout, but I hang on for dear life.

  Suddenly Mr. Coyote comes panting to a dead stop.

  His head hangs so low I am in danger of using it for a ski slope were I not hanging on tooth and nail, literally.

  “If you let go,” he offers. “I will.”

  “There is nothing you have ahold of, except stupidity.”

  “I will go off, leaving you and this cursed spot alone,” he growls between gritted teeth.

  “Sounds like a good idea. If you try to pull anything silly while retreating, I will really get nasty.”

  “Wolf’s honor,” he says, invoking his bigger, stronger brother in absentia.

  “Lion’s honor,” I say, loosening first one shiv, then another.

  Finally I drop off, still on all fours and ready to rumble.

  Mr. Coyote’s appetite has lost its edge, even if my shivs have not. (Nothing better for sharpening than a little raking and clawing.)

  He is backing away, head and tail lowered. “What did you say your name was?” he asks just before he turns tall and runs.

  “Louie,” I answer. “Midnight Louie. And I like my opponents shaken, not stirred.”

  With those words the coyote turns so fast it could eat its tail like a certain worm Ouroboros I have heard discussed around the Circle Ritz…and disappears.

  I do not take long to stand there and congratulate myself.

  An unpleasant task awaits at my unguarded rear: somehow I must conceal Miss Midnight Louise from the oncoming human retrieval team so that she can be interred later among her own kind, with appropriate honors.

  Had I not assigned her instead of me to tail Kitty the Cutter, I would be lying there dead in the dust…sand, rather.

  I begin to understand Mr. Max’s long-held regrets, and even Mr. Matt’s more recent ongoing angst about the lady known as Vassar. We guys have it tough. Because the world relies on us to be in charge (except for some female exceptions, who are in the minority of exceptional females), when something goes wrong we tend to take it too personally. Guyness is a heavy load to carry, but I have just acquitted myself at the peak of it in facing off the coyote.

  Miss Louise would be proud of me, were she still here.

  With this thought I steel myself to turn and face something even worse than a ravenous coyote: my dead partner.

  Before I can add action to thought, I hear a rasp behind me, then another.

  No! More desert scavengers! What are they? Whiptail lizards? Kangaroo rats? Rattlesnakes? I will take them all!

  I whirl around, prepared to battle a legion of creepy crawlies, but find the night still and dark behind me.

  The puddle of shadow is all that remains of Midnight Louise—rather like the dark puddle the Wicked Witch of the West came to in The Wizard of Oz, but the parallel is purely visual. I make no comment on the personality of the late Miss Midnight Louise vis-à-vis the WW of the West—the puddle is still as motionless as an oil slick.

  I approach. A guy has to do something when his partner is killed, but what? I have hounded off the desert dog. I guess I need camouflage first. I spot a lacy tumbleweed blown up against a prickly pear. That is it! It will be light to drag over and will hide ML’s resting place from the prying humans about to descend on this site of tragedy and death.

  At least my former partner took Kitty the Cutter down with her! I grasp the tumbleweed by the thick stem and drag it over. It catches on every cactus needle betwixt its lodging and Miss Louise, I swear.

  At last I lay it carefully across her.

  The desert wind starts to lift it up, up, and away.

  I cast myself on it to hold it down…ouch!

  Again I hear the furtive rasping noise, but there I am spread-eagled on a tumbleweed, trying to keep it from escaping its duty as a makeshift headstone.

  Rasp, rasp. Enough with this rasping! My nerves are irritated already. One more rasp, whatever you are, and I will eat you!

  I have in mind, of course, a desert mouse. I would not eat a desert rat. You never know where they have been.

  And then the earth moves.

  Or, rather, the tumbleweed does.

  Who could imagine it? Midnight Louie thrown by a mere tumbleweed?

  But tossed aside I am, like balsa wood.

  I come up sucking sand and squeezing my eyes shut against a sleet of grit.

  If that coyote is back, I am kitty litter!

  Blind as a kitten I struggle to my feet, game for Round Two.

  The rasping noise I have been hearing has escalated into a spitting sound.

  There are lizards who attack that way, I have heard. Euw! Talk about not fighting fair.

  I bat my eyelashes as if I were the Divine Yvette at home plate (bizarre as that image may be), but still I cannot see past the dark and grit and the, ugh, spit that have sewn my lids shut as if I were on some embalming table.

  Finally, though, I see the tumbleweed heading into the dim distance like the bouncing ball on a set of on-screen lyrics.

  I gaze down at what I presume to be ground and the denuded dead body of my former partner, not to mention my questionable next of kin.

  It is gone!

  Well, it depends if you believe in the dead walking.

  Me, I do not.

  On the other hand, I have seen Elvis, and more to the point, Elvis has seen me and been very cordial.

  I feel and pat my way around the crime scene and find nothing but cactus quills for my pains. And I do mean pains!

  The only conclusion is that the night gust that ran off with the tumbleweed also whisked away the earthly remains of Miss Midnight Louise.

  She was only a slip of a girl, like my Miss Temple, I think maudlinly.

  Nothing much holding her to earth but her determined shivs, and my poor Miss Temple only has them on two, not four feet, and only through artificial implementation.

  I am getting quite choked up, what with the sand and dust and unhappy thoughts of my two female associates.

  I have saved Miss Temple’s skin more than a few times, but in this case I have sent Miss Louise to certain death, as it turned out.

  Whoa is me.

  I stagger back to the human crime scene, my perked ears hearing no sirens yet, hearing nothing but the vast, empty desert and the vast, empty echo of my guilt.

  The motorcycle and rider remain a macabre still life on the wild desert floor, flesh and machine separated by death but complicit in death.
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  Finally my vision has cleared except for an odd blurring.

  Poor Miss Louise. She only did what I had told her to do.

  Why did I not choose to tail Kitty the Cutter? I am always one for the dames anyway.

  Why was it not me whose fresh furry corpse was jostling even now through Joshua trees and saguaros and cat-claw patches?

  Well, I might not be jostling, being somewhat too heavy even for a Kansas-strength tornado to sweep up. Face it, Toto was a wimp as well as a dog. Midnight Louie would not go gently onto the Yellow Brick Road, let me tell you!

  So if I had gone with Kitty the Cutter, I would be alive and kicking, as I have so recently proven, and Miss Louise would be in the safe custody of Mr. Max, who was wise enough to keep clean away from this messy accident/death scene.

  Poor Louise! She was not so bad, even if she was not likely any relation. I bow and shake my head at the vagaries of life, and death.

  A sudden cough to my rear interrupts my sober vigil.

  “Do you mind?” a raspy, faint voice asks.

  I glance first to the still form of Kitty the Cutter. She is not moving.

  I glance second all around me in a 360-degree circle.

  And I see that the puddle has been wafted near the downed motorcycle.

  I approach with caution. As well I should.

  The puddle lifts a spiky head and then lifts a lip to bare sharp, white fangs.

  “First,” it says, croaking, “you send me on a death trip. Then you try to plant a tree on my spine. Then you let a dust devil have its way with me.”

  I race to the talking carp pool as if it were a mirage of the Crystal Phoenix. It must be Louise! A live Louise!

  Well, it is a head lifting from the desert floor, and not by much.

  I am a one-cat emergency technician team. Quickly, I assess the situation with a realistic professional eye. One kit down, pretty flattened. Just a few centimeters off from road kill.

  Her eyes are glued shut from sand-dust. Her once coal-black coat is as mouse-colored as a computer accessory. She looks like a radiator brush that has been sent through a corkscrew backward.

  Obviously, some good nursing care is needed, but the only good nurse I know is my Miss Temple and she is miles away.

  Looks like it is up to me. We dudes are not good at this TLC stuff.

  I grit my teeth, bend down, and begin licking the dust off her eyes and face. Arrphg. Tastes like a gravel pie.

  However, I come equipped with a tongue that is the equivalent of number 80 sandpaper. Do not call me Easy Rider, call me Rough Rider.

  It is tough going. It strikes me that my task is not unlike licking afterbirth off a newborn kit. That is women’s work!

  However, the hardened operative must be prepared to save lives, however necessary, as well as to kick posterior.

  Speaking of kicking posterior, at length it becomes necessary for me to lick posterior…it is bad enough when I must do this chore on my own self.

  However, in time I have Miss Midnight Louise shining like a new pair of patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Now if she can only make like a pair of shoes and get up and walk. Miracles of that nature not even a professional tongue can achieve.

  At least her peepers are open and she is looking around.

  “What happened?” she asks, like they do on the TV shows.

  “Well,” says I, sitting down and aware that my much-tired tongue would rather keep silent. “It looks like Miss Kathleen O’Connor ran off the road and took you with her. Apparently you were in the left saddlebag, which is under the fallen motorbike, so it is a wonder that you survived.”

  “Your deductions are accurate only so far,” she retorts.

  Yes, even half dead, Miss Midnight Louise can dredge up a retort.

  “I was in the left saddlebag, as you speculate, but when I sensed some trouble and peeped out, I saw Miss Kathleen ready to take a run at Mr. Max and his vehicle, and the semiautomatic she pulled out from her black leather motorcycle jacket. I decided desperate measures were called for. So I scrambled out of the saddlebag onto the back of her seat—”

  “You rode pillion on a speeding motorcycle?” I demand incredulously.

  “I do not know what pillows have to do with it. It was as rough as a roller-coaster ride out on the seat at eighty miles an hour. But I managed to climb her back and rake her neck, thereby disrupting her aim and unfortunately her driving sense, sending her and the motorcycle and myself into an off-the-road soar that ended as you see it.”

  I am speechless.

  I sit down and manage to dig up enough spit to wet a mitt and sweep it over my worry-wrinkled brow.

  I cannot believe it.

  According to her testimony, Miss Midnight Louise has single-mittedly brought down Kitty the Cutter.

  “Louise,” I say, when I think I can speak. “You are telling me that you stopped Kitty the Cutter from shooting Mr. Max?”

  “That was the general idea.”

  “Then you…you killed her.”

  “No,” she says faintly. “I have never brought down prey that big. Maybe a bulldog or two—”

  “I tell you, the dame is dead. Iced. Offed. I had to keep a coyote from eating the remains.”

  “The same coyote you did your Karate Kid act on?”

  “You saw that?

  “Heard it. Thanks for the eyewash, by the way.”

  In the distance, I hear a car motor approaching.

  “We have to get you out of here.”

  “ ‘We’ is not an operable option.”

  “It will have to be.” I regretfully examine my rescue handiwork. “If you cannot walk, I will have to do the sled-dog routine. Too bad I rousted that coyote. He could be useful now.”

  “I would never accept assistance from a yellow-bellied dog.”

  “Dogs are not so bad once you teach them a few manners.”

  “Going soft in your old age, Daddy-o?”

  “Quite the contrary. I am about to give you the rough ride of your life. Now keep still and think of England.”

  “Huh? Why would I think of England?”

  “I hear it is the thing to do in unthinkable circumstances.”

  With that I bend down and take the loose skin at the nape of her neck in my strong teeth.

  There is only one way to get her off the scene of the crime that will soon be crawling with curious humans. I must make like a mama-cat and move my litter of one.

  Chapter 38

  …Ghosts

  Max watched the ambulance attendants finally bully the loaded stretcher up the incline and toward the waiting open mouth of the vehicle’s rear. Its occupant was slid in as unceremoniously as a corpse slammed into a metal drawer at the local morgue.

  In the momentarily lit ambulance interior, Max could see people bending over Kathleen, fussing, hooking, injecting, intent on coaxing life back until all options had been exhausted.

  He had once bent over Kathleen. Only once, long ago. The memory seared like acid. What had been a moment of deliriously innocent guilty pleasure had become years of intense regret.

  Would that regret finally die with her?

  Max hoped so. He’d advised Devine to “get over it,” knowing that it had been impossible for himself. Maybe he could finally take his own advice.

  Or find someone to make him take it.

  The ambulance raced away screaming, the squad car ahead of it.

  The fallen Ninja gleamed in the soft moonlight, elegant as a polished onyx tombstone.

  Motorcycles were dangerous toys. Ask the man who had owned one. Helmets or not, admit you rode a motorcycle and your health insurance rates would soar. But Max wished he owned the Hesketh Vampire now, a fast, screaming motorcycle that would take him back to town as if he were mounted on a banshee, able to hear not one thought thanks to the distinctive high-velocity howl that gave the bike its macabre name.

  The Maxima would not attract attention. It would purr back to town and move quietly into its preor
dained stall, like a docile horse. It would move to its imminent destruction, unnoticed, and shrink to a cube of crushed metal and glass and bits of cat-cut leather. It would have no history, leave no trace.

  It was not interesting anymore.

  When the lights of the Strip made a luminous dome on the black horizon, Max hit the number programmed into his cell phone and designated the drop point, the parking ramp of a major Strip hotel, in the slot marked for hotel executives only. It was always empty and no one questioned that.

  Max walked out through the ramp, passing the occasional couple heading for their cars, too self-involved to notice him.

  Sometimes it seemed too easy.

  He walked the endless way to the Strip, amounting to maybe four city blocks in a town that didn’t sport billion-dollar hotels as big as airports. He caught a cab to within two miles of his house, then walked home like a sneak thief casing the neighborhood, avoiding lights, jumping privacy walls, cutting through unlit backyards, until the last unlit backyard was his own. He entered the house with a key through a hidden door.

  Safe at home. Just like a baseball player who’s hit the ball out of the park.

  He moved through the large utility room, past the unoccupied maid’s room and bath, into the black-as-pitch kitchen.

  Someone turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, a dimmer switch that made no sound and spun up to maximum brightness in one smooth flash.

  Max spun around to maximum alertness, never taking a visitor for granted. Who knows. It could have been a ghost. He got one.

  “I know I should have waited for you to arrive,” Gandolph said. “I shouldn’t have let myself in either. You might have changed the security measures.”

  “I thought I had.”

  Gandolph smiled, waggishly. “I managed not to trip any of them. I haven’t lost all my marbles during my…exile. You look terrible, Max. Is this a bad moment for a reunion? What took you so long? Where have you been?”