Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Somehow. Anyway, you say that Molina took Granger into custody. And Raf?”

  “I told him to run, and he did. I don’t understand why you wanted him out of it.”

  Max chuckled bitterly over the phone. “I don’t understand it either, Temple. Were you able to handle him all right?”

  “Fine. He…it was funny, he had this weird pull to stay and be in charge of things, like he was responsible somehow. But he also had this instinct to run. Is he…someone to worry about?”

  “Oh, yes. But not for you, I think. Not for you.”

  “‘Not for you.’ Isn’t that a line from a song? ‘But not for you.’ I can’t quite place it.”

  “Don’t try, darling Temple. I’m just glad you’re safe at home, even if Molina made you get there with Devine.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I always know what’s important to me. Don’t you know you’ve got someone to watch over you?”

  “Another song, another line. You are full of lines, Max Kinsella.”

  “And you are worthy of every one.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Good night, Temple.”

  “Good night, Max.”

  Chapter 53

  Cat Burglar

  “This is the first time I’ve ever literally been a cat burglar,” the first man in black whispered to the second man in black.

  “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this stunt,” the second man in black said, “but I have to admit I’m enjoying it.”

  Their voices came soft and distorted, like the buzzing of insects more than human syllables.

  But they understood each other.

  Like twins, they both wore tiger-striped cat faces that resembled camouflage paint. It was hard to see the human features beneath the feline.

  They crouched together, catlike, in obscuring foliage as dark as the night itself, watching a dappled big cat lying in the moonlight.

  “You’ll have to lose the gloves when you handle him,” the first man warned. “He needs to recognize your scent immediately.”

  “And what are you going to do to handle yours?”

  “Hope he remembers me. Get yours first.”

  The man rose, tall as a Joshua tree it seemed, and approached the fence. He stripped off his black gloves and thrust them through his broad black belt, then held his fingers to the wires and made a scratching noise with his bare fingers against the metal-studded leather of his belt.

  The leopard rose, darted to him, and sniffed his hand. It rubbed its side against the fence as the man bent and began snipping thick wires with the heavy-duty cutter he removed from his boot.

  When he pulled the torn section away, he bent to put a collar almost as big as his belt around the leopard’s neck. “Hello, Osiris,” the odd mechanical voice whispered. “I’ve come to take you home.” A lead clicked onto the collar ring as Osiris stepped through the gaping wires like an obedience-school dog.

  The second man in black edged nearer, cautiously extending his bare hand to Osiris. After the big cat had sniffed his fill, the man straightened and took the wire cutters from his partner in crime.

  “That other cat doesn’t know you,” Osiris’s master warned. “It might be a lot harder to bring along.”

  “That’s why you’ll take Osiris to the van first. I’ll come along after you’ve got him caged again.”

  The man nodded, and led the leopard off into the moonlit desert landscape.

  Max prowled past some other containment areas, evoking a guttural noise from a majestically maned lion.

  His prey was in the next enclosure, and harder than the leopard to spot: black as any shadow. Max tried the same trick of scraping his nails on fabric, but nothing happened. He bent to begin cutting the fence. Though the sound snapped at the night’s quiet no one came. This visit had been timed to avoid the guard’s nightly rounds.

  The snipping sounds did what fingernails didn’t.

  In an instant, Max was face-to-face with a huge black fanged head.

  He froze, still crouched in place. Opened a bare hand and hoped the scent would waft into the massive black nostrils only inches from his own masked nostrils.

  The panther snuffled noisily at his hand, at his hidden face. Max stood as slowly as he could, inch by inch.

  The panther rubbed absently on one stiffening leg. Max stroked his head. He unfastened the huge leather collar and leash he carried coiled around his neck—his cat burglar garb didn’t have the secret pockets that the Cloaked Conjuror’s did. He slipped it as softly as a wish around the beast’s neck, took a deep breath, and was rewarded with a short purr.

  He began walking, and the panther, reacting to previous training, walked with him.

  The sixty yards to the paloverde thicket that concealed the black van seemed the longest of his life. There was not only the panther stalking beside him, who might balk at any moment, but the open desert where he and it made such obvious targets.

  The guard would be coming by here soon, but Max didn’t dare run, or look back.

  They passed as if on parade, man and cat, until the stunted trees, gathered like an inkblot, were close enough to absorb them into their safety and shadow.

  CC stood at the gaping van doors, patting the carpeted floor of a cage. “Up,” his mechanical voice rasped.

  As the panther leaped into the cage, CC swung the door shut and Max closed the van doors as softly as he could.

  It was not softly enough.

  “Hey!” a distant voice objected.

  They scrambled for the front of the van, CC’s cape flying around his figure.

  A powerful flashlight beam caught Max’s mask full on, just before he leaped into the van’s driver’s seat where the keys were still in the ignition.

  The engine growled into life, generating an echo of growls from the enclosures behind them.

  “Stop!” the guard was shouting, his voice vibrating from his sand-pounding pursuit.

  Max gunned the motor, spraying gravel, and drove back into the desert, soon leaving everything behind him but sagebrush.

  Behind his ever-present mask, CC laughed. “This was a kick. I don’t get out much. I’m glad you forced me to come along. But why did you want to take the panther as well? It complicated everything.”

  “It was a performing animal too. It craves more of a life than retirement, no matter how cushy. I figure you can always use a good cat.”

  “But did you ever figure out who took Osiris and why?”

  Max stared into the desert vistas passing through the stabbing spotlights of the van’s headlamps. “The Synth was sending you a message all right. It was a spite crime. You would never have seen Osiris again. They sold the animal to Van Burkleo for a few hundred, no questions asked, expecting it to be dead meat in days.”

  CC growled through his mask, a sound of disgust that was echoed by one of the big cats. “Why wasn’t he?”

  “The Synth didn’t reckon on Van Burkleo’s vanity. I checked up on him and his widow. Van Burkleo was born in July. He was a Leo, astrologically. His wife’s birth name was Linda. She reinvented herself as Leonora after she married him. Like a lot of hunters, Cyrus Van Burkleo identified with his prey; even the women of big-game hunters drip with pricey gold charms of lions and tigers and bears. Then along comes a leopard named Osiris, an unintentional tribute to the mighty hunter’s first name. He probably intended to keep it as a mascot.”

  “That didn’t suit the purpose of the Synth.”

  “No, and I suspect they had an agent here at the ranch to see to that, but Granger charged in and changed everything.”

  “If the big-game people identify with their prey, why kill it?”

  “Some people need to conquer any creatures big enough to kill them. I’ve always thought they’re out to find, track, and silence the fear inside themselves. Or maybe it’s the eternal independence of the Other they’re out to kill. They’re like the worm Ouroboros, swallowing their own mortality.”
>
  “Whew. That’s way too philosophical for me. I’m just glad to get Osiris back.”

  CC looked over his shoulder. “Those two are nosing each other through the bars like a couple of small-town gossips over a fence. They make a handsome pair. I wonder what they’re communicating.”

  “At least they get along. I’m wondering something else: what the guard will make of his glimpse of my face wearing your mask.”

  “Shoot! Do you think I’ll be fingered for this kidnapping?”

  “I doubt he got a good enough look to be sure what he saw, but maybe we’ll start some leopardmen rumors. I’d like to shake up the Synth.”

  “Fine. You do that. I’ll get back to business as usual. Osiris will be happy to get back to his usual digs. We’ll have to rig a separate setup for, for…what should I call the black one?”

  Pulling off the mask, Max smiled and thought of Midnight Louie.

  “Call him Lucky.”

  Tailpiece Midnight Louie Enjoys Being a Pussycat

  There was a time when I dreamed of being a Lord of the Jungle. Or the Plain. Or whatever.

  I pictured myself away from the Big V, this urban Neon Jungle in the desert, and out where the Wildlife commences, where the lion and the wildebeest play. (In the lion’s case, it is probably playing with its food, which is a wildebeest.)

  I contemplated lolling about the veldt under a spreading baobab tree while Midnight Louise prowled docilely off to round up some food on the hoof for my royal appetite.

  My claws, the size of jumbo shrimp, would pulse in and out of their gigantic sheaths.

  A few worshipful cubs would gambol about the edges of my magnificent eight-hundred-pound frame stretched out to its full twelve or thirteen feet. A flick of my powerful aft appendage would drive clouds of flies into retreat, too insignificant and frightened to come to rest upon my handsome hide.

  Oops. My handsome hide.

  Maybe a handsome hide is not a biological advantage in this modern world.

  Now that I have seen the lives of Jungle Lords up close and personal, I understand why they are such an endangered species and why my subcompact version of lordliness is mostly endangered by overbreeding. From what I have seen, Beauty and the Beast are a combination that results in imprisonment and premature death.

  Even those lordly ones with glamor jobs in the show ring or onstage are in danger of being downsized in their old age and thrown into the brutal arena for the amusement of a bunch of feeble humans whose IQ is about the caliber of the firearms they carry.

  Although we pocket-size domestic varieties also suffer neglect and abuse, at least we are too small to make into rugs! And our mugs would look pretty ridiculous on some Great White Hunter’s wall.

  Thank Bast for small favors, of which I guess I am one.

  I will never wish to be King of the Beasts again.

  I have just come to this momentous resolve when my Miss Temple wanders into our bedroom and finds me sprawled catty-corner across the comforter. (Little does she know that I have barely beaten her back to domicile, sweet domicile. Thanks to the hysterical Miss Leonora leaving the Storm door wide open for any footsore souls in need of a discreet ride, Louise and I slipped into the backseat and hid on the floor.)

  I expect to be gently moved aside, but instead she sits on the end of the bed and regards me with what I can only describe as wistful fondness.

  “Oh, Louie.” She sighs. (The dames are always sighing around me, and do not doubt that I take full credit for it.)

  “Apparently,” she begins in a confessional tone—you would think that I was Matt Devine—“apparently I have not been a responsible pet owner.” (She has a pet? News to me. This I must look into. I do not like interlopers.)

  “Apparently I am supposed to keep you safe at home. I should nail shut your bathroom window escape route, and see that you nevermore shall roam.” Here she frowns. “But you roamed all the way out to the Rancho Exotica. And you prevented a panther from being cruelly hunted down and shot. And your presence unmasked a murderer. So you ended up saving, in the long run, lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my. And you have in the short run, and on more than one occasion, saved me. What is a mother to do?”

  (Here she fondly smooths the hair on my brow.)

  “Obviously, Louie, you are not an ordinary cat.”

  This she intones as if it were a revelation.

  “Obviously, you are especially trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and irreverent. Well, maybe not ‘obedient,’ but I would not put that word into a wedding vow anyway. Obviously, dispensations have to be made in your case, and your case alone. Since you are now reproductively responsible, I suppose I will have to let you be about your business, no matter what the world at large will think.

  “The others just do not understand. Rather than you having anything to fear from the world at large, the world at large has much to fear from you. You can take care of creatures great and small, including me. This is your mission, Louie, and I will not stand in your way, despite my puny fears.”

  She bends down and kisses me tenderly on the right ear. Ummmm.

  “Just promise me one thing, big boy. Take care of yourself too.”

  Not to worry, Miss Temple. Is the Dalai Lama Tibetan?

  Okay, she did not say it all exactly like that.

  But it was close enough.

  Carole Nelson Douglas Considers Louie’s Future

  It’s hard to accept that Midnight Louie has actually learned a lesson from his latest case.

  I thought he was far too feline to admit that he had anything left to learn.

  Perhaps the lesson we could all learn is not to envy creatures apparently greater than we are. Often they face greater stresses as well. This goes for people as well cats.

  I should mention that canned hunts are illegal in Nevada, although not in other states, so the Rancho Exotica is a totally fictional enterprise. But a state that boasts Area 51 and legalized prostitution ranches could very well spawn an illegal animal-hunting outfit aiming to satisfy monied clients. Those as appalled as Temple and I by the notion should look up “canned hunts” on the Web to find and support organizations that are working to ban the practice.

  And real-life hunt breakers are more cautious about where, when, and how they disrupt a hunt, usually keeping a safe distance from their armed opponents, such as foiling mass bird shootings by scaring the prey into the air before the hunters are ready to shoot. I’ve researched nineteenth-century hunt parties in England and France for the Irene Adler historical series that I resume writing in September 2001, with Chapel Noir, about another infamous hunter, Jack the Ripper. These aristocratic country-house outings with their aura of upper-class civility destroyed an obscene number of animals: thousands upon thousands of birds and deer in a single day, often hundreds by a single shooter.

  So given the assertion that many big cats who end up on canned-hunt ranches are less able to protect themselves than the average alley cat, it was only appropriate to let a decidedly “unaverage” alley cat take on the bully boys with the guns personally. Louie really dug into his assignment.

  Some readers have fretted that Louie will not be giving (and getting) comeuppance far enough into the future to suit them. I hasten to reassure: Midnight Louie and company are launched on a twenty-seven-entry meganovel, and are less than halfway there.

  That means that unsolved murders from past books and the characters’ ongoing personal quests are all part of an overarching background plotline that will be tied up by the series’ end.

  For those who fear the Z book ending Midnight Louie’s many lives too soon, I can only remind them that Louie appeared in a miniseries of four romances-with-mystery before he launched this mystery-with-relationships sequence, so he’s unlikely to curl up his toes and say die at the drop of an arbitrary letter like Z.

  Read on for a preview of

  Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta

  Ca
role Nelson Douglas

  Available in August 2011 by Tom Doherty Associates

  A Forge Hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-2746-8

  Copyright © 2011 by Carole Nelson Douglas

  1

  Temple Barr, PI

  Temple’s fingers were doing the flamenco across her laptop keyboard, writing an e-mail press release, with Midnight Louie, her twenty-pound black cat, playing his usual role of paperweight beside her, when her phone rang.

  She jumped.

  Midnight Louie growled in alarm and rose up on his forelegs.

  Temple wasn’t the skittish type. You had to have nerves of steel to deal with the emergencies and sudden zigs and zags a freelance public relations person had to control, particularly in Vegas and particularly in these Internet character-assassination days.

  She had a right to be jumpy after that international phone call twelve hours ago from the late great Max Kinsella, missing magician and ex-significant other, back from the presumed dead. He was even now flying back to Vegas on her say so, after he’d encountered into danger, death and memory-melting head trauma in Northern Ireland. She was picking him up at the airport late this afternoon.

  So this phone call could be full of woe.

  Or, since her new and true love and official fiancé, radio counselor Matt Devine, was flying back from Chicago in three days and had family there, he could be calling to report snags, feuds, or winning the Power Ball lottery.

  Either way, she was now a nervous Nellie about the simple act of answering the phone.

  No caller name popped up on the phone screen. Normally, a blank screen meant new business, but just right now Temple was a little shaky on dealing with voices from the Blank Nowhere.

  She picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” Cautiously.