“Tails high and toes never still enough to smash,” I hiss into one of his half-size ears as we head toward a mob of milling feet in tennies and sandals and flip-flops, all hot and sweaty.
We are heading north, passing the Paris hotel with its half-size Eiffel Tower opposite the Bellagio.
“Look, look, Mr. Midnight!” Punky goes up on tiptoes to snag a claw in my collar, “The Paris hotel’s balloon is so pretty, and across from it the famous Bellagio fountains are starting to light up.”
“Yeah, yeah, the fountains are one of the last free sidewalk spectaculars left on the Strip, my boy. You want to stay well back or your toes could be a canapé. Listen, I am on a quest. I do not need interruptions.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know what a quest is? A quest is a place you have to go and a, a—”
“You need a bathroom really bad and there is no sand close by?”
“Not really, no.”
“Yes, yes. Have to go. These fountains are very helpful for tinkling.”
I sigh. I cannot leave the pipsqueak unattended here and I have to go…keep on walking.
“Look, look, Mr. Midnight. There is a man in the fountain.”
“Crazy drunk. They will wade in sometimes.”
“He is a really big man.”
Now that the lights are flashing on and the water is plashing and splashing, one of the programmed songs starts.
“Vi-va Las Ve-ay-e-gas.”
I have already turned to march on, and would have preferred some Souza as walking music.
“Looky, looky!” Punky shrills, about as loud as a cricket, his needle-sharp nails pricking me on the hindquarters.
I turn with a hiss and a snarl. You have to keep these over-caffeinated young ones in their places.
And in the fountain spray I see Punky’s “really big man”.
Elvis in a white jumpsuit, jewels of all the colors of the rainbow sparkling on his belt. And collar. Hey, Elvis wore really big collars. You would think Orion had come down from the sky. Way better than Ophiuchus.
“You see that man?” I ask.
“Oh, yes.”
I nod. I suspect the wizards who program these spectaculars can superimpose any image they want on pulsing water and light. A really great marketing tool to broadcast the singers of the current song likenesses. Still, it is not such a bad thing to see the King when one is on a quest. And the kit may have some ESP to make Karma’s blue eyes green with jealousy.
“Okay, Punky. We are getting close to my goal. I can use a loyal Page.”
“Page? Some of those are in the big blue carts that do not have good things to eat in them.”
“Not the kind of pages that people recycle. A Page is a youngster who serves a Knight of the Realm…an apprentice.”
“All-righty, Mr. Midnight!” He tries to high five me and misses my mitt entirely with his mini-me version.
“Okay. Here we go. On to Mount Doom.”
“Ooh, this sounds scary.”
The kit is right. Despite the distracting and bright sights and sounds, we are treading into the heart of darkness.
The first sign is the beginning of a distant, low thrum far beneath foot and paw, an inner-earth engine warming up, consuming heat to make motion.
Punky suddenly worms his way under my midsection. None of that mama stuff!
“What is that big monster purring, Mr. Midnight? Is it the Sphinx or Leo the Lion statues coming to life?” He looks around and up into a forest of hairy human legs blending into a ceiling of crowded-together Bermuda shorts hems.
“This way, follow me,” I order.
Soon we have tickled ourselves into the first row of watchers at a roped-off barrier.
“That was hot work, Mr. Midnight.” Punky is breathless, but still with me.
“We are facing the second last, free, spectacular attraction in Lost Vegas, son.”
“Oh, my.” He eyes the dark, humped barrier ahead of us. “Is it that very big fish I hear about in bedtime stories, a whale?”
I have no time to explain that a whale is not a fish, nor a fish story. I nudge him under a baby stroller so no one will step on him.
“Stay here and do not move unless an excited tourist tries to foxtrot over your toes. Watch toward the right, and, no matter what happens, stay where I can see you. That is your trial assignment.”
Punky curls into what might pass at a casual glance for an orange tennis ball.
I look up into the impenetrable black sky above the two wings of the lighted hotel high above us. The Mirage is emblazoned in huge cursive letters on each wing.
“And if I do not come back—”
“Oh, no, Mr. Midnight!”
“Tell them that I competed my quest.”
No worries about being seen haunt me as I slink down the long hairy-legged front line. The whale of a hump Punky spotted is an artificial but fully “live” flame-spewing volcano sitting in a huge lagoon of water. The volcano will erupt in moments, but first the drumbeats introducing the explosive musical score expand into an ominous rumble joined by tribal chants.
The ground trembles beneath feet human and feline. Fireballs on all levels shoot into the air high above the volcano’s cauldron. The rocks in the lagoon pulse with red-hot lava, whisker-scorching close.
I could leap from stone to stone to the volcano top in a twinkle when the heat is off. Now, onlookers are feeling the glow even behind the safety rope line, their rapt faces reddened by the pyrotechnics exploding everywhere, even in the plunging waterfalls pelting the lagoon with lava and ash.
I must reach the cleansing sear of the very lip of the volcano. Moving quickly to keep my pads from burning by a wrong step, I climb the rocky incline of ultra-realistic faux rock, rather like Vegas itself.
I am high enough now to be a black moving silhouette against a fiery red curtain of shooting flames. The lagoon waters below are steaming into a smoky mist.
“Oh!” an onlooker shouts. “Something alive is on the volcano.”
“Something alive. Look!” becomes a chorus.
I have climbed high enough. Now I need to leap twenty feet up to the top while programmed flumes of fire shoot twelve feet into the night air. Here is where I leave the over-heated lava rocks and bound onto the nearest trunk in the cluster of palm trees.
The trunk’s ragged, dense network of stiff fibers rejects the first clutch of my shivs, and I slide down, down before I finally get a good hold.
“It is a cat,” someone shouts. “Call the SPCA.”
Too late now, folks. Computer programming is computer programming. I ratchet my way up so my back is almost level with the volcano sides where the palm tree trunk curves lower.
The graceful fronds sway above me like hula dancers’ skirts. How peaceful. How disturbing. I have hit the moment of truth. I will have to release my bridging palm trunk, twist myself right side up, and manage to land on the only surface that is not erupting with fire and ashes like a hot plate popping corn.
I pause to hear a last onlooker wail, then absolute silence as they realize I may be making Midnight Louie’s last leap.
Well, not by name. Although I am sure I will be identified by the loathsome white bow tie, if we both are not burned to cinders first. In some sense, I face a Viking warrior funeral, ruined by a frivolous bit of outdated twenty-first century wearing apparel. Oh, the horror.
In the silence I hear a piercing kitten shriek.
“You can do it, Mr. Midnight! You can do it!”
I give my spine a half-axel skater’s twist while releasing my shivs.
Falling water and fire blur past my gaze.
My bones thump with a four-point landing on fake volcanic rock.
Do I hear cheers?
Not done yet.
I claw my way to the edge of the cauldron and gaze into real fire. I work a sensitive mitt pad under the breakaway collar. Break-away for my safety, of course, so that is why I am clinging to a place where I can make a suicidal
leap into a pet cemetery for one. Me.
I jerk my neck back, simultaneously push my front mitt forward, and the white bow-tie collar snaps like a slingshot. I watch a small white-and-black dot falling into ashen gray and sparking red flame, and then into nothingness. My work is done here.
No wonder men hate to wear ties.
The End.
(for now)
Afterword
Of Collars and Katzenklaviers
“Come gather around, cats and kits from all Las Vegas clowders.”
I stand on an elevated rock to survey an impressive convocation of cats making a black and white, red and orange, and yellow and gray patchwork on the beige desert landscape west of Las Vegas. The sight resembles a giant calico cat reclining.
My audience is scattered, having to avoid settling their posteriors down on a member of the dominant desert species in this location, all varieties of thorny cactus. Still, we share certain spiked defensive attributes of our own, both the animal and the vegetable.
I have lowered my voice an octave and raised my high notes a trifle to reach the crowd of Vegas cat packs or gangs or clowders, to be technical.
“First,” I say, “I must credit my faithful researcher and Internet magician, Miss Temple Barr, for whose nuptials some of you ‘gangsters’ turned into ‘songsters’.”
Shrieks and howls rise from each group as I call out their clowder colors.
“From the West side, the Jet-Blacks.
“From the East, the Koi-fighters.
“From the North, the White Blizzard.
“From the South, the Kudzu Nation.”
“We came together, my friends, to plot a daring foray and provide a discordant distraction to foil armed robbers at a wedding. We were successful, but we must also think back to a horrible time in our breeds’ past.
“A cat may look at a queen, people say.
“They were speaking of human queens, like Queen Elizabeth of England, queens who sit upright on a throne and wear heavy glittering headdresses and remind me of Bast the cat goddess from ancient Egypt in her temple statue. Both human Queen Elizabeths have lived long and prospered in separate centuries.
“And then there is the fact that cat fancy breeders today call Mama cats “queens”. How right they are.”
Shaken paws and encouraging yowls.
“And that the veterinarians’ device to keep a cat or dog from licking wounds and stitches is called an ‘Elizabethan collar’ from the stiff lace collars in Queen Elizabeth the First’s sixteenth-century court.
“And there is the collar I wore to play the part of a human Ring Bearer at the ceremony where so many of you performed.”
Now the growls and mewls are discontented. No cat likes a collar of any kind.
“Thankfully, it is employed more often with dogs (who would lick a cactus if they could), rather than our superior breed.”
A huge vibrating purr shakes the sands under me.
I gauge my audience’s mood and move on quickly. (Full disclosure: I have, on occasion, for commercial and publicity purposes, donned some odd bits of human attire.) “Now that we have had a history and wearing apparel lessons,” I tell my eager audience, “I will proceed to a less glorious, but no less cruel fashion long gone (thank Bast!). All of you know and have heard at your fathers’ and great-aunts’ whiskers, of that fiendish invention…The Katzenklavier.”
Angry growls make low thunder throughout the gathered hordes.
“Some may think I refer to the dreaded days of the witch hunts, during which cats of my color were burned along with our cherished human companions. For five hundred years, my friends!”
A hundred tigers seem to roar back at me.
“That is right. Our people—a loving, peace-loving population—was demonized and almost destroyed for being the color of ‘evil’ and the mythical ‘Devil’ humans hate and fear, black like me.”
I raise a mitt with the shivs curled into my pads.
The answering roar makes me flatten my ears to my skull.
“Torture,” howls the multitude.
Whew. Rabble-rousing is hard work.
“Now to these humans, who were so handy at torturing their own. Sometime in the 1500s they tired of their own limited antics and looked for entertainment toward tormenting their fellow creatures.
“I will not go into all the hideous sins of those days, some of which persist today, as this is a family audience, and I hear many kits squalling among you.
“A popular diversion, especially for bored royalty and, apparently, Germans, was playing the klavier. The word meant ‘keyboard’ in German, and it resembled the piano we see everywhere in Las Vegas on billboards and signs and on stage.”
Heads nod in the dark, their reflective irises winking gold and green. A pervasive Hmmm indicates their rapt attention.
“So someone put cats selected for the tone of their mews into boxes with their heads and tails sticking out. Then they attached the boxes to a piano keyboard so that when a key was hit, a sharp spike speared the appropriate cat’s tail to produce a full-bodied meow.”
“And that is not all. Three hundred years later, in 1803, the German who invented the word ‘Psychiatry’ (could have used one, I think), prescribed that chronic daydreamers—who probably would be described as ‘catatonic’ today—should hear a fugue played on a cat organ “so that the ill person cannot miss the expression on their faces, and the play of these animals—must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.’”
The patchwork in the moonlight shivers like one moving mass as yowls and screams and shrieks of sympathy and rage ascended to the small cold stars in the night sky.
When rage had exhausted itself, a mass sigh seemed to drift over the desert floor before every cat assembled went silent.
“Now,” I say, “you saw that I reassembled this heinous ‘cat organ’. Only here and now you were not confined or injured, but brave volunteers willing to surprise and bring down evil men.”
I take a breath. Not all these feral cats have had the experience of seeing a piano keyboard or understanding the sequence of the centuries. Not many had begun life as a library cat as I had when very young and impressionable. But cats do not survive as ferals without being curious and clever and they certainly can channel each other’s emotions.
“In conclusion,” I say, “I salute your unique and amazing voices of varying range and timbre, and how you scared the evil humans out of their skins and into very long jail sentences. And for moving as quietly as church mice to arrive and depart and, especially, for not snacking on church mice on the job.
“Go forth as proudly as a pride of lions, and the appetizers are on me.”
Tailpiece
Midnight Louie Sums up
I so hate doing math, even though I have many more toes to do it on than most people.
Sixteen toes and sixteen shivs, which is the number four squared, which is fifteen more razors on my person than “Big Bad Leroy Brown” had in his shoe. No wonder I am such a successful, and respected, private investigator. They do not call one variety of cactus “Cat Claw” for nothing.
Yet, no matter how tough a guy is there are some things he cannot say, or change.
I have come to a sad parting. My days as an “alphacat”, as depicted in this sequence of twenty-eight mystery novels, are over.
Be warned, though. I am still an Alpha Cat in capital letters, and have not hung up my snap-brim fedora for good. That is a metaphor, folks. It means I still do not like wearing human hats unless very well paid. And it looks like I will be with my new TV commercial contract.
I have had quite a time shepherding my human crew on their way to a reasonably happy ending, or a dead end, in the case of the bad and the murderous. And they say cats are hard to herd.
I am expecting to see all of my friends and acquaintances around Las Vegas in the future, as you may do if you pay a visit to Chez Louie again.
Farewells should be sh
ort, but sweet.
I am short, but not sweet.
And that is one thing that will never change.
Very Best Fishes,
Midnight Louie, Esq.
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Tailpiece
Carole Nelson Douglas on Getting There
and Back Again
Well, who thought we’d all live this long?
This is the 28th and final title in Midnight Louie’s alphabet mystery series.
Back in 1994, after writing the first two Midnight Louie mysteries, I knew I could not abandon this charming, swaggering, politically incorrect big guy of a stray cat.
So I committed to an “alphabet” title series that would eventually expand to 28 titles. What a rash leap of faith. There was no guarantee that publishers or sales would keep the series (or me) going that long, twenty-four years.
The thick and thin of the publishing industry is legendary, but Louie and I are both stubborn survivors, and I knew that Louie had “legs”. And, thanks to the support of readers expressing love and support from the days of notes and letters to thousands of emails, we made it through.
I “met” Midnight Louie in a newspaper feature I wrote in 1973 about a homeless black motel cat a woman flew two thousand miles home to rescue. The lodgers called him Midnight Louie and he lived off the motel’s expensive koi fish and the kindness of strangers. A trip from the fish pond to the pound’s Death Row was imminent. As a newspaper reporter, I was intrigued when the woman wrote a three-inch-long Classified ad that cost $30 to give him to the “right” home for a dollar. I defied journalistic custom to let him tell his story in his own words.
Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28) Page 30