Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

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 his 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.