Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

Krys’s smile was probing, hopeful. “You don’t look so sure.”

He threw lame excuses, flailing to get back in the here and now. “I work midnights. I travel a lot. Hard to keep up friendships.”

“Poor guy. If you’re ever in Chicago on short notice—”

“I’ll let my mother know. That new apartment your idea? Like the job?”

“She needed to escape the family thumb, like me. It’s handy to have a chaperon sometimes, you know?”

He nodded.

“And sometimes not.” Krys nodded toward the end of the room.

His mother and Zeke had intersected on their way back to the table. His mother was obviously asking Zeke a few too many questions.

“Looks like you two will look out for each other.”

“Yeah. It’s cool. She’s not my mother, and she’s not my generation. But in some ways, she’s almost my age. It’s like she didn’t live twenty years of her life. I’m dragging her kicking and screaming back into her twenties.”

Matt smiled. Mira and Zeke were bearing down on them, and Mira was dusting off the shoulders of Zeke’s carefully battered jacket.

Chapter 27

Cousins Under the Skin

A long, long time later, the vehicle jolts its last jolt and comes to a stop.

This hurls us hitchhikers against assorted meat patties, but by then we are not feeling much.

I force myself to my feet (apparently my toes have chilled to the point of numbness) and stumble over to rouse the Yorkies.

“Up and at ’em, bowheads! We need to be lurking near the doors so we can scram when we have to.”

“Scram?” cries Golda’s faint, squeaky voice from behind a leg of lamb. “I can barely stagger.”

“There will not be time enough for me to do another emergency airlift on you two. If we don’t get out fast enough, we will either be smashed in the doors or tossed to the carnivores. Which route of doom you prefer depends on if you like your bones ground up fast or slow.”

They shudder in tandem, making their silky hair shimmy like a go-go dancer’s fringe. But they crawl gamely over the meat mountains and we all huddle behind a side of beef.

“When I say go, just go. Do not look down, do not look back. Just jump and run. Pretend Midnight Louise is on your tail.”

“She is not so bad,” Groucho objects in his best falsetto growl.

“Okay. Pretend…the Medellin cartel is on your tail.” These are drug sniffers in training, after all.

“ We are on their tail,” Golda sniffs grandly.

For pipsqueaks, this pair must have nothing but nerve under that hair.

The latch squeaks and then turns.

Daylight tears a widening rent in the darkness that hides our presence.

The stack of steaks by the opposite door vanishes. We hear thumps and bangs, and men grousing.

“Now,” I say, sticking the tip of a shiv into each little form.

Squealing like mice, the pair squirt out of the door. I am right behind them, but somehow I end up hitting terra firma first—oof!—and they land on me. Double oof.

We do not waste time discussing our exit order, but roll and scramble under the truck’s welcome shadow, much as it stinks of gas and oil.

“Did you hear mice?” one man is asking the other, his work boots still for a moment.

While the other guy tells him he’s crazy and hearing things, we belly-crawl to the truck’s front. It is hard to see much but stretches of sand. I prod Golda out for a few seconds of recon. She reports a shaded area with a roof at three o’clock low.

Gee, that makes me miss my old man, Three O’Clock Louie, who is basking in the sun of Lake Mead while I am directing a raid on the ranch.

“Make for the shade,” I tell the troops, then head off myself like a black bolt of cold lightning.

There is nothing but open ground in the desert, and a frontal assault is the best—heck, the only—approach.

Two gray bolts of lightning speed after me. Those canine shrimps can really move their pins when they have to.

We are reunited again in a dimness that gives us a cloak of invisibility.

“Looks like we made it unnoticed,” Groucho notes, pausing to scratch at a sand flea that has managed to leap aboard despite our velocity. Some species are impervious to every trick and they are usually parasites.

I must agree. The two men are still unloading hunks of meat and any tracks our daring dash across the tundra may have left are being scrubbed away by a constant riffle of desert wind.

I pause to tidy my whiskers and straighten my cravat.

It is a good thing, because a long, low growl behind us that sets the floor beneath us vibrating announces that we do not have company, but that we are company. And maybe even dinner.

Chapter 28

K as in Karrot Stick

The Big Town felt a planet away.

Matt, hauling his down jacket over his arm, unlocked his apartment and breathed in the air-conditioned oxygen with relief.

Weather-clogged traffic, slush, raw winds, rain, bad memories.

Who needed it?

He dumped his duffel bag and the mail from the downstairs mailbox on a living-room cube table. First thing, he went to check his answering machine in the bedroom, his latest purchase before this out-of-town trip.

The next thing he knew, he’d own a cell phone and computer.

Well, he had the money for it now. Seven thousand dollars for a two-day trip, and a chance to get together with his mother. Sometimes life was too generous.

The machine’s red light was blinking, but Matt didn’t have the energy to sit down and take notes, which was what his schedule required nowadays.

Back in the living room, he noticed that one of his pieces of mail had somehow landed on the matching empty cube table.

This was a small padded mailer, exactly like the fateful one in which he had gotten the tape from what would become his on-air home, WCOO, “talk radio with heart.”

He still didn’t have a letter opener. Maybe he needed to get a small desk to sit by the door. Where to buy such a thing? Temple would know. He could call her, ask her.

The thought of contacting Temple always gave him a queasy push-pull in his gut, part guilty pleasure, part pure guilt. No. Be a big boy. He didn’t need a spirit guide for every step of his life, even the small interior-decorating ones.

He fetched a table knife from the kitchen and opened the lone mailer first, out of sentimentality and weird expectation. What life-altering surprise would this one hold? He supposed lottery winners who still bought tickets often felt that way.

An irregular lump deformed this package, but too small to be a cassette. A single die, maybe? Key chain? Some Strip joint gambling promotion?

A small golden object tumbled into his palm. A sculpture? A snake biting its own tail. He recognized the motif. The worm Ouroboros, ancient symbol of eternity; destruction and renewal. A single potent image of the cycle of creation: it begets, weds, impregnates, and slays itself, like nature. Over and over.

In centuries past, worms, snakes, and dragons all intertwined into a quasi-fantastic, quasi-religious symbolism. You had St. George and the dragon. The worm Ouroboros. The serpent in the Garden of Eden. The new religion chasing the tail of established superstition and biting it. He took the object to the French doors. Now he needed—yes, needed!—a magnifying glass. Who did he think he was, Sherlock Holmes? Why be a piker? A whole brass desk set for his yet-unbought new desk: letter opener, magnifying glass, stamp holder…

He squinted at the bantam-size chicken scratchings inside the snake. A K as in karat. But was it a 12-, 14-, or 18-K item? All he could tell was that it was purportedly real gold. And some Greek letters: