Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

I stare into malevolent, squinty green eyes and about twenty-two pounds of muscle, fat, and fur soaking wet after a tongue-bath.

Louise’s whipping longhaired tail smashes me in the kisser as she leaps between us.

“Lay off of my aging partner, Moby Mama. He has just had a very tough climb, and we were simply conferring. Get your mind out of the alley it was born in.”

“Dumpster-diving snit,” the tortie hisses right back. “We are all street people in here, except for the Persian castoffs.”

“You got something against Persians?” I demand, that being a personal sore point with me. “They have more moxie in their smallest vibrissa than you have in your whole … um, sumo-wrestling-worthy body.”

Which she is about to throw on me, wholesale. Which I cannot allow, as my daintier daugh … duh … partner would be in the way and possibly smashed.

Maverick flips his tail tip over all our faces, so we are forced to blink.

“Calm down, ladies and gentleman. I run an easy establishment here. No unsheathed weapons or yawning maws on site. Number one, I say so. Number two, you will get one of our dear lady’s visitors coming in to check on the noise, and you know what we all think about them.”

The intense hisses that fill the room remind me of a snake pit. No one here is venomous, thank Bast, but I am facing a sea of unified and viral dislike. We of the cat clan are not loud and obvious in our hatreds, but that makes us all the more dangerous to cross.

A rangy half-year female calico dances into the middle of the kitchen floor, as young ones will.

“Our beloved Pedro went outside and never came back,” she mews. “What do the strangers know about that? Our food trays are empty and our … indoor sandboxes are overflowing. We came inside for shelter, but now—”

“Hush, youngster,” Maverick hisses. “Keep your cries below human-ear level. Our only indoor friend needs us more than we need her now.”

“This is a hostage situation,” Miss Midnight Louise growls in my ear. “These are half-domesticated homeless. Their real caretakers are both out of service—one sick and one dead. And the vultures are circling.”

“Are not they always?” I ask no one in particular.

Something is nagging at me. Besides Miss Midnight Louise and Moby Mama.

“Say, Maverick,” I begin, blowing a confidential question in his spidery-furred ear. These longhairs always make me wish I had an electric-powered nose-hair clipper. Even humans know to keep their ear hairs under control.

“Yeah, Louie?”

I have not given him permission to get past calling me Mr. Midnight, but given that he runs this gang and that my Ma Barker and her police substation posse are far away, I put up with his familiarity.

“What is this about Persians? Frankly, besides you and Miss Midnight Louise, I see few even semi-longhairs in this house.”

Maverick shakes his head. “Sad case. I do my best to run a clean clowder, but females mightily outweigh the males here.”

“Yeah.” I glance at Moby Mama, who has subsided into a Jabba the Hutt–like pile against the kitchen island.

Maverick is still shaking his head, which drifts way too much flea powder into my sensitive sleuthing nostrils. My Miss Temple manages to anoint my shoulder blades monthly with some vermin-dispensing potion that does not contribute to air pollution, although I understand care must be used.

However, I have the luxury of a one-feline household.

“So these supposed Persians?” I prod Maverick with a well-sharpened but friendly shiv. It is more of a brush than a thrust, but only because I have exquisite control when I want to, as the ladies will attest.

“A sorry lot,” Maverick said, shaking his big head. “I can only do so much as a peacemaker. They just do not fit in. How would you like to control a mixed bag of cats in a burlap sack whose Noah’s Ark is sinking? Those two do not have the basic survival skills. Look at them.”

I look around, following his on-the-floor focus.

I spot a pair of beige dust bunnies under the kitchen table, behind the wrought-iron curlicue legs, which form a briar patch of sorts.

I spot Sleeping Beauty in a thorn forest. Two of them, only they are more like Rapunzels who’ve fallen from their tower.

I look into the huge, sorrowful green eyes of the pair of woefully knotted outcasts against the wall and recognize … the Divine Yvette and the Sublime Solange.

Chapter 24

Maxed to Death

“What’s the big surprise in the parking lot you texted me about?” Temple asked as soon as she burst through Matt’s unlocked unit’s door at 11:00 P.M.

They’d gotten back from dinner after ten, both self-conscious after all the talking about Max had left the ghost of his love affair with Temple hanging over them like ectoplasmic halitosis.

Following some discreetly illicit-feeling necking in the hall leading to her door, they’d agreed that Matt needed rest before getting to the radio station at 11:30.

“Especially,” Temple had said sensibly, “with such an unexpected high-pressure week in Chicago to recover from.”

Matt had agreed, uneasily. He still felt crummy about Temple wasting her seduction-worthy dress on a half-baked hallway interlude and had stopped after climbing the stairs to his own place a floor above, thinking about going back down instantly.

Then he noticed someone loitering by the short hall to his door.

“Mister Devine?”

The guy was about twenty-four, dressed in an expensive business suit to pass as at least thirty, his hair lightly gelled into an upward eager beaver do.

Matt nodded slowly. He didn’t look like a thief, more like he was selling something. Door-to-door, at 10:30 P.M.?

“Craig Coppell.” He thrust out a tentative, moist-palmed hand that smelled of … Old Spice? “I’m sorry to disturb your evening, sir, but I’ve been waiting here since six and was instructed not to let a day pass until I gave you this. It was supposed to be here before you got back home.”

He pulled his spongy hand from Matt’s grasp and replaced it with … a set of keys.

“Is this some … sales promotion?” Matt asked, feeling steel prongs poking his palms.

“Promotion? Oh, no, sir, Mister Devine. Maybe for me. Someday. Just look down in the parking lot. With the compliments of Harvey Klinger and Dave Eckstein. Good night, sir, and, whew, sweet dreams.”

The guy was gone before Matt could react. Harvey and Dave sounded familiar, like the Harry and David mail-order catalog of fruit arrangements.…

Duh! Matt turned, but the last echoes of the determined Craig’s running footsteps were wafting up the two stories from the lobby.

If he could forget his new Chicago acquaintances so fast, he guessed he could let go of a formerly presumed-dead guy with a whacked-out memory chip. So, a bit later, he texted Temple to come up to his parlor for a parking-lot surprise.

“What is it, Matt? You’re looking stunned.”

“Like your outfit wouldn’t do it?”

She’d changed into some pink skimpy-topped pajama set with silver chocolate kisses all over them and looked good enough to put over vanilla ice cream and call it a sundae.

He nuzzled the halter straps near her neck, then put an arm around her bare shoulders and marched her to the balcony off the living room. She spotted the new feature of the parking lot below instantly.

“The liquid-silver Jag is yours?”

“Maybe. Call it a perk. Bribe. Whatever.”

“What? Who?”

“The Chicago producers. Can you believe I’d forgotten their names already?”

“No. No more MIA memories around here. How could you forget?”

“It’s all a blur.”

“They must really, really like you. I love the car. While you were ogling it, did you notice that clowder of feral cats hanging around the parking lot? I haven’t seen them recently, and I’m afraid Louie has driven them off, poor things.”