Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Luckily, these boys have very little muscle tone and dumped my carrier with the zippered opening facing away from their cozy little campground. My paws punch the side where the zipper closes, forcing it open an inch or two. Then I lift my whiskered lips in “silent snarl” position and tilt my head so my right fang is bared and ready for action.

It takes a few “casts,” as in fishing, but I am a master koi-snagger. I finally push the fang tip through that nice little hole on every zipper tag. No doubt it is for the ladies to put a gizmo through if they are seeking to do or undo a back zipper solo. Handy dudes are not always handy, you know.

Now I jerk my head up in stages, easing the zipper open bit by bit. Yes, it is tedious work, but the cause of freedom can never be taken for granted.

As my nose lifts higher and higher, the odors of sausage and cigar smoke engage in an almost unendurable duel in my olfactory senses. I crave the one and abhor the other and must also resist a strange urge to sneeze.…

The carrier end finally falls away like a … sausage casing. After a last glance at my captors snoozing off after their stomach-stuffing feats, I spurt into the cavernous space filled with abandoned hulks of factory equipment casting massive shadows.

Your ordinary hostage might be intimidated by the iron bars on the high windows and the small broken-down entrance on the far side of my captors.

However, I have allies—or shills, if you will—everywhere, especially in down-and-dirty presumably empty places and locales.

I climb a shaky tower of empty crates until a bit of daylight shows through the broken chicken-wire backed glass. Once elevated, I hiss softly through the bars an irresistible code word.

Sssausssage. Fresssh Polissssh ssssausssage, kielbasa alive, alive-o.

How sweet it is to have a native secret language. I do not wait for my troops to arrive, but scamper back down to the concrete floor, the crates now crashing and scattering from my uncontrolled weight and pace.

The clatter brings Shifty and Lefty awake. They blink and look up, perhaps searching for Santa. I rocket right toward and under Shifty’s propped-up legs, slashing as I go.

“Arghhh!” As he falls over sideways he reaches for a stabilizing crate, but they are all shaky. I see the comet of a falling lit cigar. “My eye!” he shouts. “It is burning. I am blinded.”

Lefty swipes an arc of cheap beer at his pal’s face, leaving Shifty’s head dripping, one eye closed and the other blinking out beer.

Meanwhile I jump onto a crate and get a sausage round down and rolling toward the entry point just as a flood of cats comes bounding through.

“Rats!” Shifty cries, turning around to see with his one eye. “We are being attacked by rats.”

Shifty has pulled the pocketknife from his pants.

“That is all you have for a shiv?” Lefty demands. “It is not big enough to chop off a rat’s tail and now they are all coming for us.”

I turn and make for the piled crates rimming the space, racing up them in plain sight. If you have both eyes.

“That cursed cat,” Lefty yells. “Get him!”

“Why bother?” Shifty yells back, quite rationally. Now that they have phoned in their threat, my well-being is moot.

“He has stolen our sausages.”

Enraged, Lefty charges toward the decrepit crating even as I dig in my taloned hind claws to dislodge a particularly large one with a great white shark’s jaw-worth of exposed four-inch sixteen-penny nails, all rusted and corroded and sharp as a giant serpent’s business fang.

I kick it right into the oncoming would-be chopper.

He trips on a shattered piece of crating, lifts his arms to protect himself from the handy cat’s version of a spiked Iron Maiden torture device closing on him, screams and flails into embracing the inevitable, and falls over forward right on it.

Meanwhile, Shifty, stumbling madly to escape the “rats,” has knocked himself into a crate, spilling open beer cans and the second cigar, so his pant legs are now catching fire and his upper torso is beer-soaked.

I turn. The chaos is complete. I eye the one untouched item, an island of calm integrity, sadly. My Miss Temple was so proud of her leopard-pattern carrier. Now it is mere salvage.

The locals surround me.

“You are the dude who cried ‘sausage’? What do you want for them?”

“They are all yours, boys and girls. All I need is to be pointed toward a ride to the near northwest side.”

“You are not from around here. Which ward is your turf?”

I doubt these homeless street types have ever shared a sofa with a human, much less a Las Vegas condo. And I do know Chicago is divided into political “wards.”

“My line stems from Ma Barker of the Vegas turf.”

Sagacious whiskery nods all round.

“Yeah, but where do you reside here?” a lean and hungry yellow-stripe Tom asks.

“The Palmer House Hilton Hotel.”

Tommy shoots off his mouth. “You are not a Gold Coast Michigan Avenue swell, fella.”

I nod at the abandoned carrier. “Eye my personal transport and weep. Never mind the ride advice. I will catch my own.”

I stalk out onto the street, looking for the golden glint from a pimpmobile, preferably an Eldorado. That will get me to the nearest high-end lucrative corner for some set-upon hookers eager to help out a fellow street denizen, and then I can catch less glitzy transport. I tell you, lore has it half-right. A fur coat will always win over the ladies … especially if you are a dude in need wearing it.

Vegas teaches a cool cat more ways of the world than Chicago ever thought of.

Chapter 21

Past Tax Due

“Louie,” Temple intoned mournfully.

And stared in a daze at the checkered tablecloth.

They’d all sunk onto the kitchen table chairs as Matt had replayed the message, twice, stopping before the tail part. No one needed to hear that again.

“The airport,” Temple said. “I wasn’t mistaken for a rich witch. It wasn’t an attempted jewel robbery. They were after Louie as a hostage. It’s all my fault. I didn’t think beyond what the security guard thought.”

“Who did?” Matt’s warm hands squeezed her cold fists. “How would these creeps even know Midnight Louie was along?”

“It’s my fault,” Mira said firmly. “It’s just that I was … am … so easily bulled when it comes to Clifford. I’ve wished so much for so long he had never existed, which is a sin, I know, Matt.” Her anxious glance skittered off his concerned expression.

“It’s human, Mom. I wished the same. I was even in a position to end his existence.”

“Matt!”

“It’s not what we think. It’s what we do.”

“Cliff said he’d found you,” Mira answered, confused. “Snickered about it. That made me so angry.”

“No. I tracked him. I found him. He was a petty criminal around Vegas. And when he died, it was a lot worse than anything I could have contemplated doing.”

She put her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to hear anything more about that miserable creature. I never wanted to see him again. And when he came here—”