Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "What's your system?" Hester was asking with narrowed eyes. "I never seen a player run this kind of pattern before. Can't figure it out. You're not hitting the aisle machines that are supposedly looser, to attract the tourists. You're not moving on 'cuz a machine's gone cold. What the heck are you doing?"

  "Losing," Temple said promptly.

  Laughter made Hester's face wrinkle like a paper bag someone's fist had suddenly squeezed shut.

  "Hell, girl! That's not a system. That's nuts." She sobered at once. "Unless you got some deeper strategy."

  "None at all. I don't want to win."

  "Don't want to win? That's not. . . legal in Las Vegas."

  "It's the opposite of positive thinking, don't you see?"

  "Opposite?"

  "Yeah. Kind of like . . . zen and the art of slot machine selection. I don't want to win."

  "And, by not wanting to win, the law of averages works in your favor and you do?"

  "Nope. Not yet. But that's okay. I don't want to win. So I win when I don't, get it?"

  "What happens if you actually do win?"

  "I lose."

  Hester shook her blowsy head.

  "That's crazy. But I guess I said that." She hefted her cardboard bucket, so quarters chimed like a belly dancer in full shimmy. "Guess I won't wish you luck, dearie."

  "Thank you. I appreciate that."

  Shaking her head and her bucket, Hester Polyester resumed her pursuit of the elusive jackpot.

  Temple's sigh was loud enough to make several nearby heads turn, and it was hard to interrupt a slot player. She was tired of inspecting the usual bulbous brass lamps, the predictable swags of pearls, the gleaming Aladdin's lamps and seeing nothing but flashy trash. She prowled the slot machine aisles, eyeing the row of treasure chests along the casino's far wall.

  What she had told Hester Polyester wasn't so wrong. She must not really want to find the shoes for some deep psychological reason. Maybe she felt she didn't deserve the shoes, or good luck. Maybe she was hooked on heels. (That last word could cut two ways, given at least one man in her life.) Maybe she was co-dependent on cool shoes and in denial about even cooler dudes. Maybe she was just a lousy treasure hunter. .. .

  As she passed the second-to-the-last niche, something glittered white and bright, like a snowflake in sunlight. Temple paused. She craned her neck and went up on her toes like a vigilant meerkat again.

  Silver lame fabric bunched into the corners of this display, and something in it sparkled. Star stuff.

  Maybe ... a glitter that went yesteryear's rhinestones one better. Rhinestones had been named for Germany's river Rhine because they were first made there, but today's upscale Austrian crystals--made from real lead crystal rather than mere glass--had fiercer fire.

  Before she thought about it, Temple had dragged a stool from a vacant slot machine and had hopped atop it. Now she was teetering on it. Now she was just high enough to lose sight of the trove's big picture, like a kid climbing for the cookie jar on the top shelf. Her nose nudged the shelf-lip. Drat, she could see the tops of everything, but nothing more.

  Oops. Now her balance was going. Her fingertips curled over the ledge as she felt the stool wobble.

  Temple grabbed for some of the star stuff, which was like catching at clouds. The fabric was airy, fragile, it was barely there ... it was pulling toward her as she wavered on the stool, and all the pirate plunder that rested atop it was oozing like gravid, luxurious lava to the shelf-rim above her head.

  Temple's eyes winced shut, her shoulders hunched, anticipating the forthcoming downpour.

  "Let go!" someone ordered her, and she did. Any port in a storm.

  She felt herself tip off the stool, but someone caught her. After a little kicking and striving, she was standing on her own two Evan Picones on the floor. Her rescuer was no hoop-earred pirate bold. If she were a collector of salt and pepper shakers, she'd pair him with Hester Polyester, but she knew better.

  "Eightball O'Rourke! What are you doing here?"

  "I'm not doing nothing. You're the one who was assaulting the Treasure Island's ceiling. What's up?"

  "That's right! I must have shifted the contents." Temple scrambled backwards, gazing up, until she could see the entire vignette again.

  The treasure, looking more like junk now that it balanced on the brink, had pulled away from the silver-white material, now flat instead of fluffy. No shoe like shapes lurked behind or under it. Slack, it drooped over the trove lip, flashing a single star-shape of silver glitter.

  Eightball was dragging the stool back into place. "Lucky for you security is on a rum break," he grumbled. "Messing with casino decorations is mighty suspicious behavior. You're probably on tape, close up. Let's get out of here before they make you walk the plank."

  Temple did not argue.

  She could barely keep up with Eightball's blue-jeaned and booted legs as he wove through the gaming area. They were soon dodging tourists through the lobby toward the building's main entrance.

  "You still didn't say what you were doing here," Temple said when she caught up to him.

  "Same case," he said shortly. "Only I found my way here on my own."

  Temple could hardly complain, given her uncommon luck. Only two people had noticed her studying the treasure chests: Hester Polyester and Eightball. Neither was fond of hotel security. Maybe there was something to zen gambling, after all.

  They broke into fading daylight through another set of skull-handled doors, reminding Temple that it was past 7:00 p.m. She glimpsed a hillside of quaint architecture and exotic landscaping to her left.

  Before them a wooden walkway thronged with coming-and-going people all the long way to the Strip.

  Something large loomed on her right. She looked up at yet another dinosaur of the new Las Vegas Strip--an eighteenth-century sailing ship, its sails rolled up like window shades, tucked into snug harbor against the towering cliff side of the Treasure Island Hotel. People four-deep crowded the railings on both sides.

  She stopped to gawk.

  "Ain't you seen the show yet?" Eightball asked.

  "You mean the battling pirate ships?"

  "Well, that one there's the pirate. The other one's the Royal Navy, and that comes along later."

  "Who wins?"

  "Wouldn't be fair telling if you ain't seen it yet."

  "Is that why those rope barriers divide the bridge? To keep show-watchers separate from the traffic in and out of the Treasure Island?"

  "What a gumshoe! Exactly."

  "When's the next show?"

  "Anytime between now and forty minutes from now." Eightball edged over to the left wooden railing to gaze down on an expanse of water lapping at the walkway's piers. "Everything's peaceful now, which means they're setting up for the next sail-bashing."

  Temple joined him at the rail, which came up to her collarbones. Across the way, a large bay window framed a glint of cutlery and metal lamps. The diners at table were strictly contemporary, so she was peeking into one of several hotel eateries. But the exterior scene made a course of a far less formal flavor. Cables and barrels littered the landscape. A presumably stuffed parrot roosted on a post. A ship's female figurehead thrust out from a second story, busty enough to give the one on Caesars Palace's Cleopatra's barge an inferiority complex and a yen for a Wonderbra.

  The scene was obviously a pirates' rookerie on some uncharted island.

  Water licked at the bridge's support structures and lapped at the artificial lagoon's faraway edge near the Strip, where more people lined up. The scene, the water, the distant diners instilled peace in a place more noted for haste and hustle.

  Temple lay her forearms on the sun-warmed wood, joining the waiters and watchers.

  "Quite a show," Eightball observed. "Worth the wait."

  "I suppose I'm obligated to see it, being a PR person."

  He nodded.

  The crowd had that air of mass expectancy found in theaters and sports arenas. What a per
fect place to murder someone, Temple thought. One quick stab and away into the mob. No! Her mind was not on murder. No hunks lurked here as victim or perpetrator (unless some manned the ship), and the Treasure Island sat next to the Mirage, far from the Crystal Phoenix.

  Temple noticed that the waves kissing the distant pilings were now administering slaps. Yet there was no wind, only the long slow sunset simmering at their backs.

  "If we're lucky, it'll be twilight by showtime," Eightball said. "Enough light to see by, but more dangerous in the dark."

  Temple shivered as she felt an imaginary breeze and watched its ghost riffle the cool water below, in which the nearby lamp reflection twinkled like a falling star. Fair wind, fiery star. Yes, the water was making waves now, small ones that snapped at the pilings, fell back and grew bigger. Was that possible in an artificial lake with little wind present? True, Las Vegas would try anything for a special effect. Did some eggbeater-like machine lurk beneath the waterline? Creepy!

  Temple suddenly noticed a small wooden boat on the water, two men rowing like mad toward the bridge. Voices from the anchored pirate ship behind her urged them on. The men rowed under the bridge and vanished. Their voices ebbed.

  Eightball was right. The day was dimming. A candle-glow brightened the faraway restaurant window, reflecting from knives and forks that rose and fell like waves. ... The lagoon water was really heaving against the pilings now. How ... and more puzzlingly, why?

  "See there!" Eightball pointed like a lookout.

  Temple stared where directed and saw the diners gazing back at her. Then something moved. To the right. A high black prow nudged into her line of sight, sharp as a dagger shearing the fading sky in two.

  How amazing ... A huge, gliding full-sailed ship edged into view on a toy lagoon. The ruffled waves had been silent emissaries of the unseen yet approaching ship. The silence ended. Music, orchestral and ominous, welled up all around them.

  Voices called behind them again.

  Turning, Temple watched the buccaneers swarm up the rigging, the pirate ship now lit by hidden spotlights like a stage set. Crew called each other to readiness.

  Then British barks of orders boomed from the oncoming ship. Temple switched her attention to the left. And so it went, the Royal Navy ship sliding around the point to furl its sails and take up a firing position, the pirate ship behind them all loud chaos as the surprised buccaneers readied for battle.

  Temple felt as she had at the authors' lunch at the Debbie Reynolds hotel: like a spectator at a tennis game who was seated along the net. Voices bounced back and forth above her head, exchanging volleys of priggish British demands and lusty pirate defiance.

  I'm getting dizzy," she complained to Eightball over the hullabaloo.

  "Worth it," he answered with a grin. "The folks along the Strip get a wider view, but we're right in mid-action."

  "I could use a seat right now." Temple shifted her weight from right to left foot. High heels didn't bother her, unless she was forced to stand in the same place for a long while.

  The British captain was bawling orders to his navvies: open the gun ports. A row of tiny doors in the ship's keel popped ajar. The ship's cannons made their politically incorrect appearance, thrusting out en masse in a phallic salute.

  Instantly a red, booming burst exploded at the gun ports. Whipping around, Temple saw the pirate ship's masts bloom like fireworks, all flame and outward-flying flotsam. A screaming sailor plunged headfirst from crow's nest to deck, checked only a few feet before impact by the rope tied around one ankle. A perfectly timed stunt.

  "Shiver me timbers," Eightball observed with a chuckle.

  "You've seen this before. Who wins?"

  "Who do you want to win?"

  "Well, the pirates were lazy and off-guard--"

  "So you're for the forces of law and order?"

  "But the British are such bloody martinets--"

  Barroom! The martinets fired again on relentless, crystal-clear command. And again.

  On the pirate ship, masts and men tumbled deckward together. The light and heat of the disintegrating ship flickered on Temple's and Eightball's faces. Around them, people hooted in excited disbelief.

  Another round hit the ruined privateer. The former theater flack in Temple cringed to watch a great set smashed to smithereens. Something else plunged to deck on a rigging-top rope, too bulky to be an acrobatic sailor.

  Temple squinted through the smoke, wishing for a spy-glass. Could it be--? Was it possible--? How had she forgotten something so vital? So far she had spied no treasure chest, but now a massive example swung to and fro above the battered deck, its lid agape and its contents glittering.

  She might as well be in China, Temple thought in despair. The chest dangled at least two sailors'

  height from the deck. The ship itself sat ten feet from the bridge's right railing, which was crammed with onlookers and therefore witnesses. The ship was also systematically being shattered down to its skeleton, and who was to say that the treasure chest was not the next target?

  Perhaps the propmaster was to say, because if the special effects folks destroyed the chest for the show, a fresh one would have to replace it at every performance. Propmasters, Temple knew, hate replacing big, complicated props like fully loaded treasure chests.

  So the chest was safe, which meant that it could very well house the prize pumps . . . safely.

  While Temple tried to follow her thread of logic to the gravity-defying act of somehow swinging aboard the pirate ship to rummage in its fallen chest, the British had not been idle.

  An articulate order of "Fire!" came once more.

  This time the order was taken literally. The pirate ship exploded from mast-top to main deck in searing flames. On the structure behind the ship, where the pirates presumably stored their powder in a mighty magazine, the entire wall expelled a massive black cloud haloed with a fiery nimbus. Blast-furnace heat flushed Temple's face as people around her screamed their delight at tasting danger so close. She herself wondered how the attraction dared barbecue its audience. What if something went wrong?

  Meanwhile, pirates were deserting the ship like rats, diving headfirst into the dark waters. Even then their valiant captain exhorted his remaining men to return fire one last time.

  Speaking of rats . . . ugh, what a touch of ghastly realism! One particularly large specimen clung to the treasure chest's drooping lip, back legs churning as its forelegs hung on for dear life. At first she took it for an animated machine, but no robotic tail could thrash so fluidly. Amazing what animal trainers could do these days, Temple marveled. The rat's silhouette was as sharp as etched glass against the fiery magazine wall beyond it, and its frantic struggles made the treasure chest twist on its rope, turning its open maw toward her.

  She could see inside! If she could only really see!

  Temple elbowed, kneed and toed her way through the upward-staring crowd, trying to keep her head (and line of sight) above bald spots and sunvisors. She was soon pressed against the opposite railing, this close to the heat and the hectic activity . . . and to the treasure chest twisting slowly in the wind, with no one paying it any mind.

  Contents, she thought. Something red and sparkly, like rubies ... no, crinkled red cellophane, an old stage trick. Something silver that shone . . . Shoes?

  Drat that rat, it was interfering with her view, with its big black head and its thick black tail. Rats don't have big heads. Nor furry tails. And rats aren't black, are they? Not even trained rats.

  "A cat, " Temple whispered.

  Who did she fear would hear her in that crowd? Eightball was across the way. Only she saw what she saw.

  A black cat.

  The animal continued to claw the trunk as if trying to scramble inside. Finally, its grip loosened and it fell--Temple winced but did not shut her eyes--it fell, pulling the chest contents after it in a tumble of crumpled tinfoil, cellophane, metallic plastic beads and ... no shoes.

  Where was the c
at?

  Temple's gaze raked the deck just in time to see a last craven figure catapult from the rail into the water below.

  "Louie," she whispered. She knew it was Midnight Louie.

  Pitch-black in the ship's shadow, the water still rippled from the recent explosion, but nothing living moved in it. Temple pushed back across the bridge, where she stood and searched the brackish waves for survivors.

  Nothing. Not a sailor, not a ship's cat. Eightball was still raptly staring at the British ship, which suddenly erupted in flames from the pirate ship's last volley.

  "Louie," Temple murmured disconsolately into a sea of triumphant shouts. Nobody liked Captain Spit-and-Polish.

  The British ship began to sink. The captain ordered his crew to swim for it while he remained ramrod-rigid at the splintered mast, clinging to his doomed position as stoutly as the shredded sails clung to the masts. The entire ship slowly slipped down, down, down into the briny deep.

  Is that where Louie was now?

  Temple leaned her head over the railing and watched the British crew thrash toward the bridge.

  When they were almost under it, she shouted, "Is there a cat down there?"

  Two men looked up, treading water.

  "A cat!" she mouthed, hoping they could read lips. She made pathetic little paddling motions with her hands.

  They read her distressed face, looked under the bridge, then shook their sopping heads. Then they swam on to some hidden exit under the bridge.

  Maybe Louie had found it.

  Music swelled around her, but Temple was too worried to heed it. Eightball grabbed her arm.

  "Look. Look there! The ship's rising again."

  Would Louie rise again?

  Temple saw the Royal Navy's mast-tops pricking the water's thin skin and then rising more and more, until the Captain's bare head appeared. There was the bloody prig now, still standing at attention as

  "Rule, Britannia, Britannia Rule the Waves" pounded over the speaker system and his battle-battered ship lifted to ride normally on the waves.

  The crowd, laughing and applauding, thinned into a moving stream of indistinguishable people with pressing places to go, like craps tables. Solemnly, the British ship retreated around the point, to be restored to spanking, white-sailed condition by the next show.