I am not even taking my usual “muscle,” the spitting-mad Miss Midnight Louise, who is my would-be daughter. I say that there are a lot of black cats in this hip old world (despite wholesale attempts to eliminate our kind since the Dark Ages, no doubt why they call it that), and we cannot all be related. Though even a macho dude like myself must admit that there are times when you cannot beat a seriously enraged dame for effective backup.
The successful operative will stick at nothing to get results.
Still, sometimes it is best not to show up in the company of a girl. She might be mistaken for your mother.
So it nears my namesake hour when I slink solo into a neighborhood where even the pit bulls and housing developers do not go.
This is the north side of town where the abandoned houses and cars are all older than the Nixon administration. “Run-down” would be a high compliment in this area, and run down is what careless intruders usually get.
I pass a few rats the size of Midnight Louise scurrying in the opposite direction.
One stops to hiss in amazement at my presence, and at the fact that I am heading in the direction that he and his cohorts are fleeing like the, er, plague.
I hiss back. His claws scrape the cracked asphalt like dry leaves as he skitters out of sight.
I shrug my coat collar up around my neck to keep the wind from picking all my pockets. It also looks as if I am making a fashion statement instead of just having the hair on the back of my neck at permanent attention.
The effective operative does not wish to look scared into a new hairdo.
Either somebody is fitfully beating on a hollow tin drum…or the trash cans are rocking in the wind. Or somebody is trying to stuff a body in ’em. Or, more likely, pull one out for supper.
I did mention that this was a rough crowd. Of course now you cannot see a soul, not even a rat.
That is how I know I am just where I want to be.
I sit down to survey the place, casually clipping my toenails in the light of the only working streetlight within six blocks.
While sharpening my shivs, I regard a street in ill repair that cuts like a rusty knife through what amounts to one big empty lot.
Islands of trash thrust up from the flat desert landscape here and there. I recognize articles of furniture missing stuffing and upholstery, and large black-green garbage bags big enough and lumpy enough to hold sufficient dead bodies to populate a zombie movie, and maybe a sequel or two. Broken amber-colored empty bottles exhale the sour stench of beer so flat it is looking for a singing teacher.
However, my connoisseur’s sniffer notices something else among the odors of decay: the whiff of fish. Oh, it is not the delicate, scaly scent of freshly caught fish, such as you find at the edge of a koi pond, but the odor of the canned stuff they sell in the stores. Being that my old man was once the mascot on a Pacific Northwest salmon boat, I prefer to catch my own, but it is clear that the pre-caught kind of fish is here to catch something else.
I rise and swagger over to the nearest hummock of trash.
It is not long before I am close enough to notice something familiar jammed in among what is left of somebody’s Tia Evita floral reclining chair. I spot the familiar crosshatching of thin gray metal wires.
Normally such sights give me a chill of apprehension, but tonight I emit a soft purr of satisfaction instead. Everything is as bad as I had hoped it would be.
In not too long a time, I shall be at the mercy of the most fearsome street gang this old town has ever seen.
What I do to keep my Miss Temple out of danger and in arch supports.
Midnight Consultation
Max stretched, pushed Temple’s compilation of dead people aside, and consulted the watch on his right wrist as his long arms folded around her.
“Almost the witching hour. We could tune in Mr. Midnight for a bedtime treat.”
“Listening to a bunch of strangers whine about the personal lives they don’t have? Not me.”
“You’re not a fan?”
Temple yawned pointedly. “Who can stay up that late anymore?”
“You’re right. I should let you get your beauty sleep.”
“Since when have you ever done anything you ‘should’ do? Max, what’s the matter?”
“What isn’t the matter? Listen, Temple. You stood by me like, I don’t know, like the brave little drummer girl, when everyone thought I was a cad and coward and a murderer.”
“Everyone?”
“Well, mostly Molina, but she carries a lot of weight. It’s not fair for me to ask this, but you might have to do it again.”
“Stand up to Molina?”
“Always. I mean, stand by me.”
“What’s happening?”
“I can’t quite tell. Can’t quite say. I don’t know what to think. I know.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s not like me. This is getting too much like Northern Ireland. Foes and friends mixed together in one bloody stew. You start to question friends, you start to sympathize with foes, and the upshot is almost always betrayal and death.”
“Max! You’ve never talked this way before.”
“I’ve never been here, in this precise position before.” His hands touched her shoulders, then his thumbs reached up to caress her cheeks. “You’re sharp. You’re nobody’s fool. You might hear some things about me. Don’t believe them. No matter who they come from. I know. You’ve done it before, but it’ll be worse now. What I’ve found is worse.”
“The Synth?”
“No, nothing that exotic! Something down-home and downtown. Just remember, if I’m suspect, it might be because other people are more suspect.”
“People? Or person? Is it this Nadir guy?”
Temple watched her stab in the dark ricochet off the wary expression in Max’s blue eyes, like a stone skipping across one of her native state’s vaunted ten thousand lakes, never quite connecting with anything, defying gravity, just defying. Everything.
She was close, but still too far away.
“Does it have something to do with Molina?”
“It always has something to do with Molina,” he answered, laughing bitterly. “Try to keep it between us, Temple. Can you?”
“I always have,” she said, no longer certain she could.
DOD: Domesticated or Dead
No sooner I have applied myself to sniffing around the silver mesh than I sense a change in the air.
I do not hear a thing, mind you. Yet the empty space surrounding me has suddenly become not so empty. It cannot be rats. Rats cannot retract their shivs, so they always announce themselves, like Miss Temple in her high heels. Also, rats cannot refrain from chittering when excited, and the gang I expect knows how to keep its lips zipped tighter than a leather bustier on Pamela Anderson.
I flick a nail at the pungent glop of fish before me, then say right out loud, “Sucker bait. One bite and boom! You are in stir.”
I turn to regard my audience. Gack. Imagine a ragtag road show of CATS! with the entire cast recruited from a feline West Side Story.
These dudes are lean, edgy, and ravenous. Their shivs nervously scrape the cracked asphalt. Their whiskers are broken and twitching. I spot one poor sod who was in a rumble with a car. His untended broken leg sticks out at such a bizarre angle he can only walk on his knee. I notice a duke’s mixture of ragged ears — some neatly notched — and crooked tails, not to mention fresh and festering wounds. As for coats, this crowd looks like it has just come from the Ragpickers’ Ball. Exiting through a shredder.
There must be a dozen of them. Three or four start circling me so somebody is always at my back no matter which way I turn.
This is when prior planning pays off. I retreat until I am pressing the nap of my coat flat against one wall of the wire grille. After this gig I will look like I am wearing monotone plaid from the back, but sartorial concerns are the last thing on my mind.
These are not just tough and desperate dudes; this is the original Wild Bunch.
A
big tiger-stripe pushes forward until his fangs are in my face. “You got a lot of nerve coming onto our turf, a downtown dude like you.”
This I already know, so I say nothing.
A marmalade tom with a broken front fang pushes so close I can inhale the Whiskas-lickings on his breath. “Fee, fie, foe, fumbug! I smell human on your lapels. You are a housebroken cat.”
“Not true,” I hiss back. “I do happen to occupy a co-op off the Strip, but I come and go as I please and when and where I please.”
“Where is your collar, dude?” taunts a once-white semi-long-hair I hesitate to describe as a lady. “No vet tags, Prince Chauncey?”
“Yeah,” the tiger-stripe adds. “We need an address for where to send the body.”
“At least I do not live in a road-kill academy.” I glance at the street. “I bet they drag race their lowriders so regular along there that a lot of you end up as poster boys and girls: flat as a face card in a fixed deck.”
I have hit a nerve, for several sets of green and gold eyes narrow to angry slivers.
“It is the rugrats like Gimpy,” says Snow Off-white, with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades, “who get creamed.”
I glance at the kit with the right-angle leg, and conceal a shudder. Poor sod would be better off with that seriously bum limb amputated.
“It is not so bad,” the dingy yearling pipes up. “The winos and bums feel sorry for me because I cannot forage and see that I get McDonald’s leavings.”
Jeez, this lot is so low that the homeless humans show them charity. Chalk one up on the pearly gates for the homeless humans. I have always found that the have-nots are better at sharing than the have-it-alls who got plenty to share.
“What about this day-old fish market behind the grille here?” I say.
“We stay away,” says Tiger, with a growl. “We think it is a trap. People come and take away the dumb ones that venture inside and cannot get out.”
“And you never see them again?”
“We do,” Snow Off-white says, eager to explain. I can always get through to the babes, which may be why Tiger and Tom are breathing down my epiglottis. “But…they are different.”
“They are…drones,” Tom snarls. “All the fight is out of them. They come back with their ears…and everythng notched and have zero interest in dames and just want to lay around and wait for free food and get fat like you.”
“I am not fat. I am well built. If your lot was not half-starved, you would see that you are all way too skinny.”
“That is better than the alternative,” Gimpy bursts out in his high adolescent voice.
“And what is the alternative?” I ask.
“Death or domestication.”
I digest this for a few seconds. It is no use to preach the joys of the domestic lifestyle to those to whom just living for the next day is a real achievement. They regard every human with fear and suspicion, and in almost all cases around here, rightly so.
Except, that is, for those beneficent bums and bumettes, and the feline birth control brigade responsible for the satellite clinics that litter this junkyard, one of them right at my back.
I realize, of course, that if this gang gets too rough I can always leap through the open door, grab the glop, and trigger the automatic closing mechanism. I will be caught like a rat in a trap, but I will also be safe from the Wild Bunch.
Ole Tiger seems to be reading my mind, because his yellow teeth show a Cheshire cheese grin. “Guess you would not mind a ride in a cage, being the domestic sort to start with. You would come back minus your cojones, though.”
“You do not understand. I have already been rendered free of unpopular potential, such as progeny.”
Gimpy has been slinking around the side. “He has still got them, boss. He is lying. He is still armed and dangerous to dames.”
I sigh. “It is too difficult to explain to street types. I have had a fancy operation by a plastic surgeon called a vasectomy, and —”
“We are not interested in your medical history, you pampered sellout!” Tom spits. “Whatever you have had, what you will not have when you come back from the twenty-four-hour abduction is your hairballs.”
I gulp. This mission is more dangerous than I thought. If I happen to fall into the hands of these do-gooders, they will have me sliced and diced for real in no time, because a vasectomy is invisible. I will be summarily cut off from my former self just as if I were a homeless, irresponsible, kitty-littering street dude.
“So,” says Tom with an evil grin, digging his shivs into my shoulder like staples. “Why is a domestic dude like you risking life, limb, and liberty to come hassle us on our territory?”
“I am an investigator,” I begin.
“Narc!” screams Snow Off-white, arching her bony back. “We hardly ever get any nip, just that awful weed that people are always selling on corners around here. We better take care of the narc personally.”
They crowd closer, ugly mugs full of fangs and uglier expressions. I can handle myself in a brawl, but they have me pinned and my only escape is into the clutches of the North Las Vegas Neutering Society.
Shivs as edged as sharks’ teeth are pricking my undercoat in warning. With this crew, one puncture wound, one whiff of blood, and they will go into a fighting frenzy.
I let them push me closer to the open door to eunuchhood. I’d rather take my chances hornswaggling a bunch of humanitarians than beating off a gang of wildcats any day. Where is that twerp Midnight Louise when you need her?
“Wait a minute,” yowls a rough female voice.
A cat who is black like me shoulders through the mob to thrust her jaw in my face like a knuckle sandwich. Midnight Louise this is not.
This is a big-boned, rangy lady with a hacksaw voice. The white scar tracks crisscrossing her mug are not tokens of the plastic surgeon.
“I have been taken away by the aliens with the silver ships,” she says, “and it is not so bad. I was tired of trying to eat for five or six every few months anyway. So if I were you, dude, I’d take the escape hatch. This gang is out for blood. Just being brave enough, and stupid enough, to come here will not save you.”
I stare into her hard and weary green eyes. She stares into my hard and wary green eyes. Suddenly, I feel an embarrassing purr bubbling in my throat. I growl to conceal it, but it is too late.
She lunges at my throat, then twists her head and takes the nape of my neck in her teeth and shakes me until my fangs chatter. A big black mitt boxes my cheek.
“Is that you, Grasshopper?”
“Yeah,” I admit sheepishly. I cannot stand being publicly mauled by overenthusiastic females who are not babes. “Ma. But they call me Louie now. Midnight Louie.”
Well, there is only one thing that cuts it with a gang as down and out as this one: family. They are all so related to each other that if they were people they would be put in jail. In fact, I think a lot of them are a few whiskers shy of a full muzzle, but nobody cares about the family trees of our kind. Our mating tendencies go back to our godlike Egyptian origins. The Egyptians were not too nice to resort to marital alliances with brothers and sisters to keep the royal line going. I believe the term is inbred.
Anyway, by virtue of my long-lost mama being among them and being something of a top cat at that, my bacon is not chopped liver. In fact, they are all my kissing cousins now.
She has taken me aside for a family reunion.
“How did you remember me?” I ask as we settle down on a Naugahyde ottoman that has lost its stuffing until it is shaped like an inner tube. Actually, it is quite comfy. “It is not like you did not have dozens just like me.”
“Oh, Grasshopper, there were none just like you. Naughty from the moment you lost your milk teeth. You were after those poor grasshoppers before your eyes were open. So. You are in business. Did I hear you bragging about a co-op apartment? Not smart with this gang.” She boxes my ear again, as if dislodging mites.
“Actually, it is
a ‘cooperative’ living arrangement I have with this babe who flacks for the Crystal Phoenix.”
“It is a mixed marriage?”
I blink.
“She is human?”
“Um, pretty much so, but she has long red nails. I really love the way they sink into my…ah, we are just roommates, Ma. Purely platonic. My real ladylove is this shaded silver Persian —”
“A foreigner? And what is this ‘shaded silver’ stuff? You mean the chit is gray.”
I roll my eyes. I am not about to explain the sublime and subtle mix of black, white, and gray hairs on the aristocratic form of the Divine Yvette.
“So tell me about your business.”
“It is a one-dude operation. Private-eye stuff. That is why I am here. I am looking into a case involving some Big Cats.”
“You know some Big Cats?” She actually sounds impressed. I am impressed.
“Some.”
“Then why did you not bring one along for backup?”
“These big guys do not just meander out on the streets. There are laws.”
“Well, boy, you are lucky I am part of this colony because your meatballs would have been chili powder in another couple of seconds, and I am getting too old to rumba without activating my rheumatism. So I suggest we go over and ask the boys what you want to know and then you skedaddle.”
“Yes, Ma.” There was never any point in arguing with her. She was the Sultana of Swat when it came to keeping her litters in line. “Uh,” I add as we amble over to the others. “What is your name besides Ma?”
“That is it. Ma. Ma Barker.”
“You are not a dog!”
“No, but I bite like one. Just remember that.”
In a moment I am huddling with the Wild Bunch.
“I am looking for a man,” I begin.
“Why come to us? We have nothing to do with that species if we can help it.”
“I cannot argue with your good taste, but this man has a place where he keeps Big Cats. It is a hideout, see. No human knows where it is. I figure you guys” — Snow Off-white bristles and hisses — “and dolls might have an idea where it is. I know you get around and I figure you have your ears to the ground better than anybody.”
Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Page 3