Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

She started cursing in Gaelic.

Max’s cool tones and stage projection overrode her. “I may have some serious personal business for a couple days after I get back to Vegas, but then I promise to search for and claim that undelivered IRA cash hoard. Can I go now?” Max asked.

Liam stepped back and spread his hands. “You know where to find us. As we know where to find you.”

Max downed the beer, picked up Garry’s urn, and left.

He paused outside the closed pub door to let the cold sweat shiver down his spine. He’d be interested to see what he did, too.

The last verse of the “The Minstrel Boy”, added by an optimistic American after the Civil War, sounded in his mind has it had on the car CD system, from memory. It seemed written for Sean, for Garry, and even for Kathleen. Surely Ireland had always had its minstrel girls.

The Minstrel Boy will return we pray

When we hear the news we all will cheer it,

The minstrel boy will return one day,

Torn perhaps in body, not in spirit.

Then may he play on his harp in peace,

In a world such as heaven intended,

For all the bitterness of man must cease,

And ev’ry battle must be ended.

41

Face Off

Temple was not going through the building’s front double doors…to end up in the dark with a flashlight, staring up at the huge, dirt-crusted chandelier that had served as a hanging tree for a man she’d seen alive, if only briefly. She remembered seeing Louie sniffing around the rear.

She skittered past the deserted-looking RV that served as an office and around to the back. She found a shabby door with some boards kicked out. Vagrants might have used the basement for shelter. The door to the outside had been caved in at one side.

She leaned against the building to strip off her heels and replace them with the foldable slippers she always carried in her tote bag. In doing so, she found a forgotten asset, the tiny, high-intensity flashlight on her keychain. So she stored the bulky Hardy Boys version in the tote, fished out the petite version and twisted it on. Better to make a smaller target.

The door opened on a small landing between rickety steps going up into the dark and sturdier ones going down. The air felt dry and had no particular smell, unlike damp, moldy Midwestern basements.

She glimpsed the black cat she’d ended up tailing dashing down the battered two-by-eight-board stair with the ease and energy of a creature who can climb a tree with Velcro-strong talons. This was starting to feel very White Rabbit, only with a Black Cat.

And maybe the cat was running with the verve of having been down here before, Temple thought.

“Louie,” Temple called softly, teetering on the first wooden steps to the basement.

If Temple suffered from any one irrational fear, it would be claustrophobia rather than agoraphobia. She’d choose to be the cheese standing alone at the end of the nursery rhyme over the Ritz cracker crammed into a roll inside a wax wrapper and then sealed into a box.

She’d expected the basement to be a wide open space—dark, yes, but empty to its concrete block walls. What a decent Midwestern basement should be.

However the basement’s exposed walls looked carved out of natural sandstone and caliche, a cement-hard soil compacted by the presence of lime. And the space wasn’t as cavernous as she’d expected. Concrete block cubicles lined the outer walls, solid versions of the antique-mall display areas above, only closed in to the ceiling and locked with metal doors.

There must have been—well, count the doors on one side: twenty or so of them. Probably a storage unit for each of the upstairs sales booths in their heyday.

And the floor…it too was hard caliche, but the large central section had wooden floorboards, as if there’d been an interior room of some kind once. The condition screamed “long-abandoned”. Broken-up concrete patches along some parts of the cubicle walls looked ripped up by a jackhammer, as if the Property Brothers crew from HGTV home network had passed through to bust up the old, but never came back to install the new and finish the makeover.

Hmm. She wondered about putting a funky fifties hippie nightclub down here, with poetry readings and candles in wine bottles. A scraping sound outside the flashlight’s small beam made Temple sweep the edges of the area with pinpoints of light. No rats, no snakes. No cat either.

Great. She was hallucinating cats now. At least her soft slippers made her as silent as one.

Or maybe not. Her flashlight picked out a shadowy form. Midnight Louie pawing at a dark corner, nose to the ground, intent.

Cats only do that when there was something only they see, a crawling bug, maybe. Temple shivered. Vegas had lots of those. Scorpions, centipedes. Temple’s toes curled in her slippers to avoid even the thought of stepping on creepy-crawlies.

“Louie! Don’t bite anything that can possibly bite you back. Get away…” But Mr. Curious had to spot, sniff, paw, taste-test anything new that came into the condo, from a magazine to a centipede. And, if he could, take it apart. He could chew the metal off the top of lead pencils and then bat the extracted graphite rod around. She’d have to pursue him to recover the unsafe object.

No fast moves to be made here. The floor was deeply chipped away in places. She could sprain an ankle if she didn’t watch out. She recalled the classic catchphrase from Jaws , “You need a bigger boat.” She was pretty sure a Great White shark wasn’t lurking on land, but she knew she needed her bigger flashlight. And maybe a Fontana brother or two.

“Louie! I’m not going to leave you alone down here. It’s dangerous. Now, git. Go on!” She rushed him with a patter of steps going forward.

He wasn’t fooled. This place was full of smells and nooks and crannies only he could detect and diagnose and dissect. He was like a mad scientist loose in a nasty, decrepit, dangerous playground.

“Louie, no!” she shouted. “Now quit that and get out.” She flicked the flashlight fast toward the back stairs, wishing it was a red LED light no cat could resist, although Louie had gotten bored with an incorporeal toy that disappeared pretty fast.

Oh, boy. At times like these, when she was too committed to back out without going slowly, she wished she had a dog who would come when called.

Temple began to retreat. “Louie,” she implored. She felt her flimsy flat-heel hit a hole and flailed to keep her balance. The tiny metal flashlight slipped out of her hand. Somewhere in the dimness a small metallic clink announced where it had fallen.

“Drat it!” No, that sounded too much like “rat”. She shuffled a couple feet forward until she felt it and bent to retrieve it. Turning, she saw the steps had blackened and so had the door beyond them. Night had truly fallen.

She opened her mouth to call Louie…but heard a distant creak. Maybe from the far stairway. Temple found that sinister. If it had been caused by a footstep, had that stepper paused to listen?

Perhaps a passerby hearing her admonitions to Louie?

Someone who had come from vandalizing the Lovers’ Knot front entrance again?

The unknown person who’d hung Jay Edgar Dyson.

Katt Zydeco, who was really a comics’ super-villainess. Oops . She’d been watching too much Gotham on TV.

No, she was not going to yell or make noise again, not until she was safely out of here.

Something lifted her skirt edge. A mental Eek !