Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

She remembered Max and burrowed under the dark of the covers and wept for an hour. She remembered Matt and wept for another hour. She was an equal opportunity wuss.

Until she realized Kit was knocking tentatively on her door, promising coffee, and she knew she had a life-changing decision to make PDQ and a disintegrating status quo to deal with ASAP and a job to do at twelve o’clock high. STAT.

Cat in the Hat

Is my work cut out for me!

I have not been in such an early morning downpour since my mama done left me by a drainage ditch when she was swept away by one of Las Vegas’s tsunami rainstorms. She would not have left by her own druthers, of course. But these gully washers sweep druthers away like dreams.

So there I was, a kit with my ears still wet and getting wetter by the instant. My littermates were leaves in the watery wind. My sire at that time was just a whisper on the desert dust devil.

It was survival of the fittest and I was not very fit at that young age.

My Miss Temple reminds me of my abandoned younger self, and for a moment I could cry cat tears with her. Save that cat tears have never changed anything but the saline composition of my eye fluid.

So.

I could shake the sheets and some sense into my Miss Temple. Like tomorrow is another day and there is always another fine dude in the offing. But she would not listen in her present state, and I cannot blame her. We dudes are sometimes more than somewhat dense.

However, it is clear to me that what she most needs at the moment is not moonlight and roses and regret, but someone steady to untangle the many webs being woven at the New Millennium.

And I have the claws to do it!

I shimmy-shimmy off the zebra-print comforter. I have personally never taken much comfort in stripes of any sort, including tiger. We solid guys are the ones to rely on: solid black cats and . . . black panthers.

Faster than you can hitch a ride on a roller coaster, I am inside the New Millennium and rousting the resident Big Cats in their cages.

They blink and growl and hiss loud enough to fill the sails of a nice little ketch. Where, they ask, is Miss Louise?

While I am tongue-tied—for Louise is holding down the fort at the Crystal Phoenix—I feel an airy feminine presence brush by my side. Feline, of course.

The Big Boys growl in tandem, which—let me tell you—is ear inspiring. Also deafening.

“This is not the valiant daughter of Louie the First,” they thunder.

I see Squeaker’s narrow tall tremble slightly.

“ You are that sssspolled houssssecat, Hyasssscinth,” they add hiss to growl.

Well, I am about to be outa there, seeing as one of their mitts would make a giant Freddy Kreuger–like razor-nailed glove, AWOL from Elm Street and in my own back yard. But Squeaker weaves back and forth, tail high and tickling their baseball-mitt-size noses.

“You big dummies,” she begins.

I cringe.

“You cannot tell a lilac-point Siamese from a chocolate-point one! Have you ever heard of Siamese fighting fish? You cannot keep two in a bowl, for one will eat the other.”

“Eat?” Lucky asks. “I am not into rampant indiscriminate carnivorosity. I am on a strict health regime. I do not eat what I do not know.”

“How unfortunate,” Squeaker says, “for your social circle.”

Kahlúa tries to clear things up. “We do not eat our trainers.”

As with dames of all species, explanation is a fatal move. I feel forced to put my body between hers and the Big Cats.

“Give the little lady a break, boys,” I urge. “She is new not only to show biz, but the crime beat. Have you two seen anything suspicious?”

“Everything is suspicious to us,” Lucky says. “We work for a masked man, and we see workmen crawling around up here where only bats and tree frogs should hang out.”

“And then there is the woman,” Kahlúa said.

“Shangri-La?”

“Shangri-La-ti-dah,” Lucky growls. “She has no time for leopards, but dotes on that skinny, snooty housecat of hers. No offense,” he adds in a polite aside to Squeaker.

“At least she is small, as humans go,” Kahlúa adds. “Our master has no business risking his neck up here, as he is so large and slow, like a lion.”

“And his mask emulating the look of our kind impairs his vision,” says Lucky.

“Which is weak and human to begin with.” Kahlúa looks out toward the performance area, his vertical pupils instantly adjusting to the change of focus and light, making his point. “One wrong step on those suspended platforms out there and any one of us could come crashing down.”

I sense their sincere worry for their master. Now that I hear them discuss it, I realize how dangerous a show this is for the Cloaked Conjuror and his Big Cats. What it offers is a showcase for the lithe Shangri-La and Hyacinth. And the lithe Shangri-La has been involved in criminal shenanigans before this. I wonder how she talked her new partner, CC, into doing this stunt. The New Millennium sure wouldn’t want their major attraction executing a swan dive from sixty feet up.

Could the Cloaked Conjuror be blinded by love, or lust?

“She is always telling him what to do,” Kahlúa says with disdain. “We are a better-known attraction in Vegas, and Lucky and I do not do more than demur with a friendly growl now and then.”

“Really? Shangri-La rules this roost then.”

Lucky sniffs and lifts his upper lip to bare truly awesome fangs. It is an expression of total disgust among our kind.

“I could not sleep the other night and I heard them arguing. Well, I heard her arguing, her voice is high and harsh. Our master’s voice rumbles deep like a purr. He never says boo back to her.”

“The other night?” My ears perk up. “When was it?”

Lucky rubs his huge black nose with an even huger black mitt. These guys are big . “Three, four nights ago?”

“The night before the police came?”

“Yeah. Maybe so, now that I think of it.” Lucky yawns. “I have a bit of insomnia.”

“After what they tried to do to you, I can bet you do,” says Kahlúa. “If Miss Louise had not taken things in hand you would not be here and your new name would not be ‘Lucky’.”

“Hey,” I say, “that was my case, fellas. I had something to do with Lucky’s rescue too.”

Lucky was purring, so loudly the boys apparently did not hear me. “That Louise, she is a plucky little thing for someone who could be an appetizer for us.”

“We would not snack on one of our own species,” Kahlúa says quickly.

“Unless we were starving,” Lucky agrees.

I back away, just in case the meat truck has been a little slow today.

They have forgotten me anyway. Apparently, they only have eyes for Louise.

I am chewing over what I have learned, anyway, and find it pretty disturbing stuff.

There is a very good chance that Shangri-La was the last person to see the late Art Deckle alive, that she wasn’t arguing with CC but with Deckle, and that she helped him dive off the platform to his death.

Accursed

“Well, don’t you look like something the wet cat dragged in?”

Randy Wordsworth did a double-take to examine Temple’s expression. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news about this accursed exhibition.”

“Don’t call it that. ‘Accursed’ is the kind of word that takes on a life of its own if the media get ahold of it.”

“Maybe you will call it that too when I tell you what the higher-ups learned from the police and told me, confidentially.”

“And you’ll tell me?”

“They don’t know what to do with it and I have a feeling you might.”

While Temple mulled that over, she studied the assembling skeleton of the exhibition spaces. Worker ants in white coveralls climbed an elliptical yet narrowing structure, reminding her of slaves laboring on Cheop’s Great Pyramid in Egypt.