Cat in an Alien X_Ray Read online

  “Las Vegas is not so pure from what I have heard,” she says with a sniff.

  “So did anybody see this phenomenon? I mean somebody with an opposable thumb to punch in 911 on a cell phone.”

  “We go where we will not be seen. You know that is our kind’s best defense, not to be seen. We did not do leaping lion but crouching tiger. We went belly-down to play rock and shadow. The security lights are dim here.”

  “They are indeed rather puny compared to the fireworks of the Strip and Downtown all around,” I note.

  “And anyway, the UFOs drove the men off, leaving behind their burden. We thought it might be traps to transport us to the mother ship, but we were too smart to fall for that trick.”

  “Men? Burden? That could have been … gym bags or something. There must be a twenty-four Hour Fitness club somewhere around here. I know life on the street makes one wary, but this all sounds like nonsense.”

  “Nonsense, all right. I sent Pitch and Blackula to sniff out the leavings after the men had fled. It was no burden, it was just very dead.”

  “Those gym bags can smell like death warmed over, believe me. I have hung out with humans way more than you ferals.”

  “The leaving was also about six feet long and most unfit, with a large pouch like you.”

  “Leave my body type out of this discussion. Let me get this straight. You saw grown men toting a corpse? They dropped it like a sack of potatoes and ran?”

  Usually corpse-toters are not the fleeing type, much less the leaving-in-plain-sight types.

  Maybe Ma and her crew had seen something weird. If I were a vast, hidden conspiracy believer, I might suspect secret government experiments gone rogue from Area 51. As I muse, I can almost hear Twilight Zone music pulsating in my head like annoying audio hail. I am definitely too domesticated, or too addicted to retro television.

  Ma is nattering on. “I stationed the crew to stay here to keep the rats off the evidence. And bag a few for snacks.”

  “Please. I do not do sushi.” I am afraid my palate at least has become totally domesticated. Which makes me wonder how suitable for survival I am these days, should it become necessary.

  “Well,” I say, “while I am willing to bet that these skittish flying tinfoil doughnuts are a scam, the scenario you have just described is genuine Las Vegas legerdemain from days of old, all right. It is a favorite game among the old mobs called ‘bury the body.’ Lead me to the remains. I am not a coroner, but I have played one on TV news cameras now and then.”

  Ma gives me the sssst hiss of reproval and heads to the darkest corner of the property. The scene certainly looks deserted now. The edifice-in-waiting is like the halted construction on a lot of Vegas sites, a skeletal hulk. Any light hitting the dirt around here is referred from distant sources.

  We are talking a dead planet in the midst of one hyperactive, glitzy galaxy.

  Come to think of it, we are talking prime body-dumping ground.

  I start to feel like a Mars rover, churning up dust as I clamber over fallen cement blocks disrupting acres of sand. I will take a long, careful tongue-bath to restore my shiny black suit coat to prime condition.

  The scene is a bit eerie, I think, looking up and seeing only a full moon above, an object not about to make a close encounter with Earth any eon soon. If that supposed mother ship swoops down tonight, I will have to swallow of lot of words as well as all this dust.

  I am glad Ma’s gang is backing me up.

  A feature on the deserted landscape grows bigger by the second. It is too lumpy to be concrete. The meager light brings into focus a legendary feature of the planet Mars: the Mysterious Face.

  Only I spot those facial features dead and on the ground on Paradise Road. They seem more ugly than mysterious, but that is how it often happens when one gets to the bottom of things.

  Although Grizzly Bahr the coroner begins an autopsy with the buzz saw to the brain, the feline way is more delicate. While Ma Barker’s gang hangs back, I walk step by step over the uneven ground until I can, like any intrepid explorer, plant a foot on the foreign territory.

  My sensitive pads sense immediately that this guy is as cold as the stone that surrounds him. I lean in to sniff carefully at his sniffer. Not a breath of air stirs my hair-trigger vibrissae. Not a whisker is stirring not even a fine, almost invisible one sprouting from my chinny chin-chin.

  “Coroner cuisine,” I diagnose.

  “As if we did not know that all by ourselves,” Ma Barker says. “What we need you for is dealing with the proper authorities to get this dead meat off our hunting grounds.”

  “Maybe,” I say, “your flock of UFOs and the hovering mother ship will whisk him off before any of us can do anything. Anyway, I do not see your crowd rushing back to this place by dead of night as long as you are drinking the Kool-Aid about alien visitors coming to Las Vegas.”

  “Kool-Aid? We would never touch that sticky sweet stuff.”

  I do not bother to explain that is a human expression to denote the gullible.

  “So you will have to devise a clever way to alert the authorities,” Ma says.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The only thing I am sure of is that ‘murder most mob’ is definitely not alien to Sin City. Could this be a public relations ploy to draw attention to the new mob museums busting out all over town lately?”

  “I am shocked.” Ma sits down. “There is nothing that your human friends will not stoop to in order to make a buck, especially off the dead.”

  I glance down at the officially undiscovered corpse and have only one comment. “And they say we play with our food.”

  Chapter 11

  Nightcrawlers

  As Max froze in place, becoming an even more noticeable tall black island in the constant flow of people diverting around him, the unlikely suspect was distracted enough to absently edge to the side with the crowds.

  Then he glanced up and stopped. “You.”

  Now there were two immobile islands in the stream of tourists, who, like lemmings, were all intent on getting somewhere and oblivious of anything around them en route.

  “Ditto,” Max said before he played Kerrick, grabbed an arm, and pulled Matt Devine against the nearest marble pillar. “What are you doing at the Goliath at three in the morning?”

  Matt jerked his arm away and swatted out the crumples in his khaki poplin sport coat. “You first. I thought you were keeping on the down low. Or is the expression ‘low-down’?”

  “A crowd is the best disguise.”

  “It apparently didn’t disguise me.”

  “You’re being evasive. Does Temple know you’re off leash?”

  “Obviously she’d notice.” Matt shrugged to loose the last wrinkled vestige of Max’s urgent interception on his arm. “Temple assigned me the Goliath and Crystal Phoenix casino’s ceiling bodies to investigate. I figure nighttime’s the right time for that. You’re certainly on the prowl, but we’d decided you needed to avoid the hotels where you’re a suspect.”

  “Temple decided. She’s a bit bossy, isn’t she? Although it looks cute on her.”

  Matt frowned.

  “Forget being territorial. I’m seeing someone else now.”

  Matt took a few seconds to react. Then he went with incredulous. “You’re nearly killed in a murderous bungee cord malfunction at the Neon Nightmare club, end up in a coma at a Swiss clinic for more than a month, go on the run across Europe, survive a pursuit by both the old IRA and the new IRA, and slink back to Vegas with an AWOL memory. You’ve been back less than two weeks, yet have a new girlfriend?”

  “‘Love interest,’ they say in the movie summaries.” Max grinned. “She’s followed me to Vegas; what can I do? I’ll be happy to introduce you, should the occasion arise. Meanwhile, what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time to interview any of the night shift, do I, getting off the air on WCOO at two A.M.”

  “You might be getting off the air and night shift permanently if th
at daytime talk show gig in Chicago comes through.”

  “Maybe.” Devine moved to brush past Max.

  “Not the done deal Temple makes it out to be?” Max used the challenge in his voice as a rein to stop the guy’s forward motion.

  “Nothing in media’s a done deal,” Devine said over his shoulder.

  “Nothing in life, either.” Now Max had really jerked the cord.

  Devine wheeled to face him. “Look, Kinsella. I get that you have to hang around Vegas until we settle who killed whom and might still do it to one of us, but who loves whom is a ‘done deal,’ and I’m not happy about you showing up again all needy and lame. You mess with Temple, and I’ll kick you to the curb all the way down the Las Vegas Strip.”

  Max normally would mock and bow out of a scene like this. He measured the dark, repressed fury in Matt Devine’s eyes, the bottom-line corrugated steel in his voice.… He was poised like a guard dog ready to rend. Someone far more formidable than Max had jerked his chain.

  Max held up open palms and stepped back. “Better get on with it. The night shift clocks out even in Las Vegas.”

  Well. He watched Matt Devine’s golden-boy head vanish into the ceaselessly milling crowd, reminding him of an angel fallen among the habitués of Hell in a Renaissance painting, all those faces around them masks of lust and greed and terror.

  He’d been ready to consign Temple Barr to the necessary gal pal category, but Devine’s bad boy behavior had him worried about her. He was hair-trigger touchy about something.

  Max needed to get Revienne in the picture, if only to put paid to this broken romantic triangle so they could forget all that “who loves who” stuff tough guy Sam Spade pooh-poohed in The Maltese Falcon and defend themselves from common enemies.

  Meeting Revienne. Why did he think that Temple Barr would not take that well?

  Chapter 12

  Open Arms

  Matt Devine leaned against the lapis lazuli lining the Goliath elevator car behind the jam-packed crowd of passengers. He spread his palms and fingers on the icy stone, and willed himself to let the unaccustomed rage drain out.

  Of all the people to witness him coming here. Damn Max Kinsella! It was his darn fault Matt was stuck in this impasse now. They were all being toyed with by a wildcat who’d cornered a mouse, all their lives at stake. Everything depended on Matt’s ability to break into and mind-meld with a twisted psyche, a serial killer’s sensibility probably.

  He pushed forward as happy drunks made way for him. This was the twentieth floor, from which the tormented call girl who used the name of Vassar had plunged to her death only months before.

  Plunged or was pushed? If her death had been murder, he could be here to see her killer.

  He remembered the route to this room as well as the balcony view down into the dramatic Hyatt-style atrium sparkling like endless levels of heaven, and hell, to the marble lobby floor below.

  The door plaque bore the numbers 2032. He knocked.

  A woman answered.

  She was brunette, beautiful, wearing very little, and she held a foldable straight-edge razor open in her naked palm.

  Chapter 13

  Graveyard Shift

  Why do I always have to find the body? Especially if it is already dead.

  It is not that I have any deep distaste for dead things. I mean, we all have to eat.

  But I do shudder at the human race’s ability to kill purely for pleasure or profit or sometimes just having a bad hair-trigger day.

  Yes, I know my kind are considered cruel and prone to play with their food, but “play” is merely a class in survival of the species, Ma Nature being the imperative sort. In the wild, it is always about mere survival.

  In the wilds of the Las Vegas Strip, that is seldom true.

  So I circle around the body Ma Barker’s gang has found. There is the constant hum of traffic in the distance and the roar of airplanes depositing and whisking away almost forty million people a year at McCarran on the south end of the Strip.

  Like most sites hosting incomplete construction projects, here there is only the scritch of the night’s scavengers over the rocks and sand, rats and mice, lizards, and big black bugs.

  Occasionally, the distant muffled hoot of folks high on fun or various addictive substances wafts over the empty lot like an emission of hot air.

  Managing to entice someone into “discovering” the body is looking hopeless. I pace the long distance to the street, gauging how far I have to lure a so-far-unseen passerby. Fifty yards at least.

  If I were Rin Tin Tin or Lassie, or even that feisty little white Westie terror (I mean, of course, terrier) who pimps for Cesar brand dog food, I could howl, bark, and yip for attention. If I were a Westie, I could be seen at least. For once, my native coloring is working against me.

  My whiskers are white, but far too few and too fine to make much of a showing.

  I slump down on the lumpy ground so like giant sandpaper and gaze up and down the street. My only neighbor is the windowless concrete box of the Cabana Club, a strictly third-class bar and dance floor place covered with lurid murals of cavorting humans done in the colors of yellow, hot pink, bright blue, and lime green that would make a rainbow nauseated.

  I stand, sigh, and prepare to hoof down to that man-made music box that expels blasts of loud, discordant music and ever more hilarity-stricken people overcome by way too many rum drinks.

  All the people are heading, as much as their stumbling feet can manage it, away from the (supposedly) deserted dark lot and back to the Strip.

  I am thinking I will have to slip into the nightclub and perpetrate an act of such mad and bad behavior that Animal Control will have to be called. Then I have only to escape their nets and traps and lead them back to the body.

  First, I should be able to slip into the restrooms with so many rowdy and impaired revelers making frequent trips there. A bar of soap is too much to hope for, but there should be a wall dispenser of the liquid stuff.

  Probably it is caked over with dried soap tracks and the prints of many human hands. How unsanitary!

  I am walking faster, planning my break-in and subsequent shenanigans.

  Once I smear my kisser with soap and some water from the leaky faucet (there is always a leaky faucet or two in these dives), I will chew up a good lather.

  Then, apparently foaming at the mouth, I will return to the teeming, screaming crowd, jump up on the bar, and start knocking over bottles of beer like a champion bowler on a tear.

  My next trick is to elude the would-be heroes in the crowd by climbing anything I can. Then when the Animal Control folks come, I pretend to be cornered and go quietly. Lulled into the usual complacency, the hunters will become the losers.

  I will escape when out in the open again and streak for the abandoned lot next door. There I will evade tranquilizer darts as the posse closes in until they, stumbling over the dead body, finally have more important matters than little me on their minds.

  Just planning the sequence reminds me that there are many junctures where I might be stopped, stomped, and clamped behind bars.

  I sit and contemplate the lonely, dangerous life of the undercover operative. If I am caught and am regarded as rabid, that might be my last trip to the shelter with no witnesses of even an animal nature. It could be bye-bye Free-to-Be-Feline for Midnight Louie … and for what?

  An old dead guy who would probably have kicked off without help sometime soon anyway.

  This is not a case any of my nearest and dearest are at all involved in. I have no stake in this death other than that Ma Barker thinks it our civic duty to alert the authorities. Fine for her to think. She has delegated the job to me! She may have faced off mad dogs and rabid raccoons as the leader of her pack, but she has no idea of the level of danger to be encountered integrating with humans, which are the most dangerous breed of all.

  So. This is it. Midnight Louie plays the sap for no one, not even his own mother. Maybe especially not even hi
s own mother. Am I a grown male or a mouse?

  At that moment an intoxicated and intoxicating feminine giggle does an arpeggio up and down the scale of the human voice.

  I look back to the Cabana Club. A solitary couple has exited, and turned my way. I cannot tell if he is holding up she, or vice versa, but they are entwined in a very friendly way and ambling, albeit shakily, right toward me.

  I do an instant size-up. They are of the same age. She is wearing some dainty little dress and is barefoot, with her left arm dangling her high-heeled sandals over her shoulder. Not good. She is in no shape to pussyfoot over the building site ground.

  He is about her age, early twenties, and wears the usual Las Vegas male tourist outfit: tennis shoes, baggy long shorts, T-shirt. He has now-useless sunglasses pushed atop his head.

  He is putting one foot a bit too close to the other and they progress slowly, murmuring and laughing at their own condition.

  Aha. They are a couple, not just a couple of strangers in the night who met at the Cabana Club. So far, so good. I need a Princess and a Galahad to make this con play.

  They are too self-involved and too happily smashed to notice when they come abreast of me.

  I move to brush the woman’s ankles with a tantalizing swish of my glossy fur coat and supple rear member.

  “Ooooh, honey. What was that, like a breeze on my legs?”

  “No sidewalk grates in Vegas, baby.”

  They stop. Look down with great care.

  I paw some stones against each other like castanets.

  “Oh, look, honey. It is a cat.”

  “A black cat. Those things are unlucky.”

  I lurch toward them, then fall back, picking up my right mitt.

  “Oh, no. It is hurt.”

  “Leave it. It will be all right.”

  I make a feeble objection to that idea.

  “It mewed at me. It needs help.” She leans down and holds out a hand with the shivs covered in neon pictographs.

  I whimper again and stumble once in her direction.