Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

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 that 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.