Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Matt felt a flush. Why? It was the truth.

Max threw up his long, bony hands, always clever, always strong. “That was a low blow. Sorry. I suppose you are a professional mediator of sorts. Mediate this.”

“I won’t use this against you with Temple. Or for me.”

“Use it. I won’t surrender Temple to anyone without the balls to take her.”

Matt felt the old blinding rage he thought he’d buried with his stepfather surging into all his muscles. He stepped forward, balanced for martial arts moves. Max was more expert, he knew, but Matt had the fire in the belly in this case. It would be a long, bloody draw probably.

Max stepped back. “Pax , priest. Us tearing at each other will only hurt Temple more. That’s one thing we’re agreed on; the less damage to Temple the better.”

“Is there anything you can say to defend yourself, to counter Molina’s charges?”

Max had nothing printable to answer.

Free to Good Home

I have pretty much figured out this whole murder-theft ring and given my Miss Temple the credit, or the main ideas, at least.

Now would be a good time for resting on my laurels, and this is exactly what I am doing in my crib at the Circle Ritz when I hear the scrabble of pointed nails, i.e., claws, on the French door–opening mechanism.

I am too worn out from my recent intense cerebral labors, not to mention the late hours I have been keeping, to do more than cock one peeper open. Sure enough, a furry snake slides under the crack in the frame. In a moment, the door pops open as sweetly as if my own supple touch had cracked it.

Much to my surprise . . . not! . . . Miss Midnight Louise ankles in.

“Sawing timbers in the Pacific Northwest, I see,” she says.

“Who, me? Not on your life. I am for saving the forests. What I am doing is resting up my muscles after serving as a counterweight to three females of my acquaintance the other night.”

“Big deal, Daddy-o. All you had to do was throw your weight around, which should come naturally. But that is why I am here.”

“Oh, really. It is not because you wish to check up on the health of the senior member of the team?”

“Oh. We are a ‘team’ now?”

“Well, I mean that we are Midnight Inc. Investigations, which is a firm, and since there are only two members of said firm, I suppose in a loose sense we are a . . . team. But nothing personal.”

She sits and tucks her long, luxuriant black train around her dainty forelegs. Show-off!

“Whatever,” she says in the irritating manner of the younger set. “We still have a problem in the flies at the New Millennium.”

I frown. “The show has been closed down for now, and even the police are through dusting the area with a mouse-hair brush and going over it with a flea comb.”

“That is part of the problem.”

“Tell me.”

“I think you should see for yourself”

“Jeez, Louise! That is a long pad across some pretty hot turf, not to mention the climb at the end. I need to preserve my strength.”

“On Miss Temple Barr’s cushy sofa, of course.”

“So. You want one, find your own sugar daddy.”

“I do not need a keeper, but I admit I am an exception.”

“You admit something. Hmmph . All right. I guess I can go and survey the scene of my latest exercise in crime deduction. Miss Temple has seen that the authorities know all about who was in on what and why and how.”

“Exercise is the key word in all that hot air. You need some. Up and at ‘em, Pop, before I sic Ma Barker’s gang on you.”

This opens my other eye and gets me up on my feet and humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“The gang is here?”

“Right. And your next trick will be letting the residents of this Building That Time Forgot realize they better put some grub and water out for them.”

“I must see my troops.”

“Forget it. No time to say hello, good-bye, you are needed first and foremost at the New Millennium.”

I suppose it was Miss Louise employing the word “needed.” I respond to necessity. I suppose I caved.

She manages to spur me away from the Circle Ritz without looking around to spot and welcome the feral gang. I mean that “spur” literally. Her foreclaws are as sharp as Ginsu knives on a three A.M. infomercial.

Of course, Las Vegas is the second City That Never Sleeps. We dodge traffic and tourists, but in due time trot our way back to the New Millennium. I am about to show her my secret entryway six floors up on the neon solar system, but she taps me on the shoulder— ouch! —and leads me to the service entrance.

Here we are greeted like old friends, or she is.

“Ah,” says a slim dude of Asian appearance dressed all in white like a bride, or more likely, a cook. “The little lady with the Canton palate. And a gentleman friend. Some wonton soup this evening? Oh, you wish to study the menu?”

He admits us both into the kitchen area as if we were gourmands or something. I nearly swoon. I smell duck. Fish. Eel. Eeew . No eel. I do not eat snakes and lizards and other desert delicacies.

Miss Louise mushes me through the fragrant preparation area ringing with the cymbals of copper lids.

Before I know it, we are dodging the usual footwear bazaar in the main casino and edging around the darkened exhibition area to the access ladders and ramps at the back.

“Up again!” I protest, eyeing the climb. “I thought I had made all this moot.”

“Scoot!” she says, with a prickly encouraging pat.

“The place is deserted,” I protest, as I climb the long, dark, and winding road built into the access area for the magic show installation far above.

“ ‘Up’ is your motto,” she replies, prodding from the rear.

I must admit it is more than mere weariness that makes me loath to repeat this journey. A man and woman died on these artificial heights. On these man-made mountains, my Miss Temple lost her Mr. Max to obligations she had no power to overcome.

And I nearly strained everything I had to rescue a feline assassin who probably deserved to kiss concrete as much as her human mistress did. There! I do think that there are villains, and villainesses in the world, and that they should meet their just desserts.

On the other hand, my just desserts are lingering in the kitchens we have just forsaken.

“Onward!” Louise matches gesture to vocal command.

Ouch!

We reach the top, and I am immediately struck by the emptiness of the area. The fallen structures still dangle there unanchored. I almost smell the recent death reeking in my sensitive nostrils. I picture the powerful persona that had commanded these black-painted perches on the edge of nowhere: CC, the Cloaked Conjuror, who had lost a performing partner.

The exhibition would continue but the sky-high magic show was suspended, like Siegfried and Roy, maybe forever.

Shangri-La, mystery woman, no friend of my Miss Temple and her Mr. Max, yet a sublime performer and a cat person. Hyacinth, her familiar, the performing partner who had inadvertently sealed her fate and caused her death. Loyalty carried to a lethal degree. How did she deal with dealing her mistress death when she meant only to preserve? I shuddered to think of being in her skin.

Of being in her skin. Right. Where was it? Now. Exactly. I gaze at Midnight Louise. I must admit the kit has climbed every mountain with me.

“Where is she?” she asks now, echoing my thought.

“Hyacinth?”

I do not know. We saved her from dangling death. We risked our own skins—me, Louise, and Hyacinth’s shelter-rescued body double, the delicate and shy Miss Squeaker, aka S. Q.

“Hyacinth is not to be found?” I both ask and declare. She was a magician’s familiar, an apprentice. She would not simply walk away. But she might . . . vanish!