Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

Eightball was right. The day was dimming. A candle-glow brightened the faraway restaurant window, reflecting from knives and forks that rose and fell like waves. ... The lagoon water was really heaving against the pilings now. How ... and more puzzlingly, why?

"See there!" Eightball pointed like a lookout.

Temple stared where directed and saw the diners gazing back at her. Then something moved. To the right. A high black prow nudged into her line of sight, sharp as a dagger shearing the fading sky in two.

How amazing ... A huge, gliding full-sailed ship edged into view on a toy lagoon. The ruffled waves had been silent emissaries of the unseen yet approaching ship. The silence ended. Music, orchestral and ominous, welled up all around them.

Voices called behind them again.

Turning, Temple watched the buccaneers swarm up the rigging, the pirate ship now lit by hidden spotlights like a stage set. Crew called each other to readiness.

Then British barks of orders boomed from the oncoming ship. Temple switched her attention to the left. And so it went, the Royal Navy ship sliding around the point to furl its sails and take up a firing position, the pirate ship behind them all loud chaos as the surprised buccaneers readied for battle.

Temple felt as she had at the authors' lunch at the Debbie Reynolds hotel: like a spectator at a tennis game who was seated along the net. Voices bounced back and forth above her head, exchanging volleys of priggish British demands and lusty pirate defiance.

I'm getting dizzy," she complained to Eightball over the hullabaloo.

"Worth it," he answered with a grin. "The folks along the Strip get a wider view, but we're right in mid-action."

"I could use a seat right now." Temple shifted her weight from right to left foot. High heels didn't bother her, unless she was forced to stand in the same place for a long while.

The British captain was bawling orders to his navvies: open the gun ports. A row of tiny doors in the ship's keel popped ajar. The ship's cannons made their politically incorrect appearance, thrusting out en masse in a phallic salute.

Instantly a red, booming burst exploded at the gun ports. Whipping around, Temple saw the pirate ship's masts bloom like fireworks, all flame and outward-flying flotsam. A screaming sailor plunged headfirst from crow's nest to deck, checked only a few feet before impact by the rope tied around one ankle. A perfectly timed stunt.

"Shiver me timbers," Eightball observed with a chuckle.

"You've seen this before. Who wins?"

"Who do you want to win?"

"Well, the pirates were lazy and off-guard--"

"So you're for the forces of law and order?"

"But the British are such bloody martinets--"

Barroom! The martinets fired again on relentless, crystal-clear command. And again.

On the pirate ship, masts and men tumbled deckward together. The light and heat of the disintegrating ship flickered on Temple's and Eightball's faces. Around them, people hooted in excited disbelief.

Another round hit the ruined privateer. The former theater flack in Temple cringed to watch a great set smashed to smithereens. Something else plunged to deck on a rigging-top rope, too bulky to be an acrobatic sailor.

Temple squinted through the smoke, wishing for a spy-glass. Could it be--? Was it possible--? How had she forgotten something so vital? So far she had spied no treasure chest, but now a massive example swung to and fro above the battered deck, its lid agape and its contents glittering.

She might as well be in China, Temple thought in despair. The chest dangled at least two sailors'

height from the deck. The ship itself sat ten feet from the bridge's right railing, which was crammed with onlookers and therefore witnesses. The ship was also systematically being shattered down to its skeleton, and who was to say that the treasure chest was not the next target?

Perhaps the propmaster was to say, because if the special effects folks destroyed the chest for the show, a fresh one would have to replace it at every performance. Propmasters, Temple knew, hate replacing big, complicated props like fully loaded treasure chests.

So the chest was safe, which meant that it could very well house the prize pumps . . . safely.

While Temple tried to follow her thread of logic to the gravity-defying act of somehow swinging aboard the pirate ship to rummage in its fallen chest, the British had not been idle.

An articulate order of "Fire!" came once more.

This time the order was taken literally. The pirate ship exploded from mast-top to main deck in searing flames. On the structure behind the ship, where the pirates presumably stored their powder in a mighty magazine, the entire wall expelled a massive black cloud haloed with a fiery nimbus. Blast-furnace heat flushed Temple's face as people around her screamed their delight at tasting danger so close. She herself wondered how the attraction dared barbecue its audience. What if something went wrong?

Meanwhile, pirates were deserting the ship like rats, diving headfirst into the dark waters. Even then their valiant captain exhorted his remaining men to return fire one last time.

Speaking of rats . . . ugh, what a touch of ghastly realism! One particularly large specimen clung to the treasure chest's drooping lip, back legs churning as its forelegs hung on for dear life. At first she took it for an animated machine, but no robotic tail could thrash so fluidly. Amazing what animal trainers could do these days, Temple marveled. The rat's silhouette was as sharp as etched glass against the fiery magazine wall beyond it, and its frantic struggles made the treasure chest twist on its rope, turning its open maw toward her.

She could see inside! If she could only really see!

Temple elbowed, kneed and toed her way through the upward-staring crowd, trying to keep her head (and line of sight) above bald spots and sunvisors. She was soon pressed against the opposite railing, this close to the heat and the hectic activity . . . and to the treasure chest twisting slowly in the wind, with no one paying it any mind.

Contents, she thought. Something red and sparkly, like rubies ... no, crinkled red cellophane, an old stage trick. Something silver that shone . . . Shoes?

Drat that rat, it was interfering with her view, with its big black head and its thick black tail. Rats don't have big heads. Nor furry tails. And rats aren't black, are they? Not even trained rats.

"A cat, " Temple whispered.

Who did she fear would hear her in that crowd? Eightball was across the way. Only she saw what she saw.

A black cat.

The animal continued to claw the trunk as if trying to scramble inside. Finally, its grip loosened and it fell--Temple winced but did not shut her eyes--it fell, pulling the chest contents after it in a tumble of crumpled tinfoil, cellophane, metallic plastic beads and ... no shoes.

Where was the cat?

Temple's gaze raked the deck just in time to see a last craven figure catapult from the rail into the water below.

"Louie," she whispered. She knew it was Midnight Louie.

Pitch-black in the ship's shadow, the water still rippled from the recent explosion, but nothing living moved in it. Temple pushed back across the bridge, where she stood and searched the brackish waves for survivors.

Nothing. Not a sailor, not a ship's cat. Eightball was still raptly staring at the British ship, which suddenly erupted in flames from the pirate ship's last volley.

"Louie," Temple murmured disconsolately into a sea of triumphant shouts. Nobody liked Captain Spit-and-Polish.

The British ship began to sink. The captain ordered his crew to swim for it while he remained ramrod-rigid at the splintered mast, clinging to his doomed position as stoutly as the shredded sails clung to the masts. The entire ship slowly slipped down, down, down into the briny deep.