Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

And Miss Midnight Louise lofts through the lowering side window into the moving limo.

Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch . The Rolls is picking up speed. Gherken knows he has been seen. Satin, panting a bit, tumbles inside beside me.

Jump. Punch .

I hear an exterior piercing scream and spot eight shivs clinging to the three inches of window still up. A mighty leap for mankind and also for Ma Barker.

Miss Midnight Louise plants her forepaws on the leather door upholstery, sinks in her shivs, and grabs her granny (maybe; I do not lose my wits even in a life-and-death crisis), by the nape of the neck and throws her into the limo with us.

“I must lower the chauffeur’s window next,” I advise my troops.

Out the open window, I spot Fontana brothers, bearing Berettas, running to pursue us. The Rolls is accelerating to full speed.

Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch .

I am getting the rhythm. The dark glass behind the driver goes down like the evening sun, fast at the end.

The villainous Gherken’s neck is pale and bare and great meat for the three midnight-black, blood-lusting brides of Dracula I have summoned.

Through the clear windshield, I see a white car with a red blinking light on the roof careening toward us, followed by two white vans swerving alternately on two wheels, with a big hairy man behind the wheel of the lead van, grinning like a Hell’s Angel.

The Rolls is gathering real speed. It is the Power Ranger of the Gangsters’ fleet. Reinforcements will be too late once it hits the highway, although a helicopter can pursue it. But a highspeed chase in such a cumbersome vehicle is bound to hurt someone.

I order the attack. “You go, girls!”

Before you know it, Gherken is wearing a fang and claw necklace and screaming his head off, his hands also off the steering wheel, just as the zing of Beretta bullets takes out all four tires on the Rolls.

We Rolls to a lamentedly lumpy stop.

I leap into the front passenger seat, right into Miss Temple’s lap, and plant a big, wet juicy one on her sadly furless little cheek.

“Louie, ow , that scratches! And, watch it, your claws are sharper than broken glass. Louie, are you all right?”

Now I am.

Peace in the Valley

“Asylum?” he asked.

“Alyssum,” her voice answered, laughing. “Sweet alyssum. It’s a flower.”

He was lying on the mountainside, every sinew and joint aching. Somewhere half a mile above was the civilized comfort of the clinic. He was mired like the Cowardly Lion in a field of flowers, his legs weighted by plaster casts.

If he hadn’t been a mountain climber before, he damn sure was now. His chest heaved for air, and his shoulders and arms shook from using the metal crutches as pitons to dig into the tough sod and pull his plaster-weighted legs behind him.

She wafted the small blossom under his nose again. “I need to get to one of these high mountain farmsteads. Ask for food, beer, a saw.”

“Not water?”

“Beer is water here. I need a road.” She sat up to eye a snake of paved darkness twisting up the Alps, and sighed. “I need a reason to say I’m stranded. I’ll probably have to trek back a gallon of unneeded petrol.”

She stood, shaking out her chic suit. She looked like someone stranded. “I’ll get you out of those casts. You think you can put weight on your legs again?”

“I’ll have to.”

“You Americans. Always what must be done. Never what is pleasant to be done.”

He thought on that parting remark long after the hip-high grasses and knee-high flowers had swallowed her pink-suited figure.

Here, he was truly helpless, his body anchored by the means of its recovery. Yet his mind soared like the distant clouds. He rubbed his left inner elbow. He still smelled the acrid rubbing alcohol scent, felt the ting of the hypodermic needle tip tasting his vein, as a serpent smells, with the bitter end of its toxic tongue.

Death rode on that thin, hollow steel reed; he knew it. His death.

This woman had interrupted that, and by duplicitous means had wafted him away from the clinic, from his would-be killer and also from the only man he trusted.

That made her the only woman he trusted.

That made trust a necessity rather than an option.

He knew this Max person he was didn’t like necessity as a partner.

He inhaled the heady scent of mountain wildflowers. Their only escape route had been on foot. For now, he was helpless and, rid of the leg casts, might be more helpless still. Yet his mind was working, weighing. His mind wouldn’t let him sink into complacency.

Complacency. “The refuge of the inferior mind.”

That motto rang true, like history. He’d been warned against complacency. Over and over again.

Twilight was falling on the valley below before she returned.

“Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” she asked.

“I didn’t think. That’s the advantage of being an invalid.”

“I deliberately stopped us by this haymow. It’ll be as cozy as an inn. But, first—”

She knelt in the long grass, the action releasing the scent of crushed wildflowers as he lay back on his elbows.

“They had a saw.”

He viewed the sturdy, ragged edge of a small, hand-size hacksaw and winced.

“I’ve only time to do one cast before the light fades. You were due to have them removed two days from now anyway. Think you can bear an early exodus?”

Her language was quaint, laughable. Exodus . “Saw away. If you hit skin, you’ll know.”

Still, he steeled himself, feeling the hard-edged plaster rocking back and forth as she sawed. She knew where the seam lay, and attacked the cast on his right leg top and bottom, then pulled, then sawed . . . finally the cast opened like an almond shell. Two halves, clean. The setting sun made the revealed white skin of a man’s leg glow in its angled rays. The dying light revealed a horrifying degree of muscle waste in a mere six weeks.

“Ye gods,” he murmured, “it’s so pink and puckered and ghastly.”

There was a silence.

“My leg,” he said firmly.

Come Into My Parlor

The siren screams of police and emergency vehicles racing to the Sapphire Slipper continued into early afternoon.

A number of Vegas cabs and private SUVs that were driving up hastily turned around. Inside the Sapphire Slipper, the resident courtesans had a new client to lavish exclusive attention on.

“That was the bravest thing I ever saw,” Babette said, stroking Midnight Louie’s fevered brow.

At least his tongue was very warm anyway.

“He’s so cute!” purred Kiki, Lili, and Niki, tickling his tummy.

“Look at these nails!” Angela and Heather intoned together. “Shredded. And his pads are bleeding.”

They looked with accusing fury at Lieutenant C. R. Molina, Detective Alch, and Coroner Grizzly Bahr.

“I will tend him immediately, my dears.” Coroner Bahr hovered over Louie’s lush nurses. “Some styptics and gauze bandages should set the little guy right. And then I’ll see to you ladies.”

“What about the D.B.?” Molina asked.

“In a minute. This, uh, Good Samaritan needs tending.”

Temple shook her head at Louie’s moment in the spotlight. She was sitting on a blue sofa with Matt down on one knee, attending her kicked ankle.

“It’s swelling already, and bruised,” he decided. “You’ll need to elevate that.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Molina said. “You’ve already proposed, from what I hear. You may pick up the bride-to-be and put her down on the long sofa in the bar area. There’s an interrogation going on there that you may be useful for. Coroner, I really think you have more pressing matters upstairs. I sent the crime scene crew up first. Leave the alley cat for the vet.”