Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“Is that all you can do, pray for forgiveness?”

“I’m stationed here to pray daily for the dead, not for myself.”

Max could only look to his current guide, his past mentor.

“And Kathleen O’Connor?” he asked, afraid.

Gandolph must have primed the place’s sister-keeper well. She continued without question of hesitation.

“She was doubly cursed—or blessed—to be here, as they thought at the time. She was both an adopted ‘orphan’ child of a Magdalen laundress and in her turn an ‘incorrigible’ girl resident of this place. The records show they gave her the name Rebecca. She gave up a baby to the orphanage when she was sixteen. How she’d managed such a scandal under lock and key remained a mystery. She ‘escaped’ when she was seventeen.”

Max could understand why.

He wanted to turn and scrabble away screaming at what that short history of one young woman would mean to anyone who encountered her ever after.

Kathleen O’Connor’s body lay buried in a potter’s field in Las Vegas, but surely her unbroken but mangled spirit must haunt this place eternally.

Meow Mix

There is no such thing as an old cat’s home, unless you consider being dropped off at an animal shelter with a murderous overpopulation problem or abandoned on the street to be a nice retirement package.

I am not exactly a kit myself, but Three O’Clock has gotten a lot more creaky about the pins since last I saw him.

“What made you think you could stay at the old restaurant?” I ask him as soon as we are tucked away among the black video-camera cases in the back of the Channel 6 van. “That joint looked closed. Why did the old guys not forcibly take you with them when they decamped?”

“Because I did not want to go and I got ‘lost’ on purpose,” he huffs, trying to get comfy with his chin propped on a case.

We share signature white whiskers, but I notice his black muzzle is surrounded by tiny white hairs. From my own mirror-checks, which I do on the sinktop on my way out the open Circle Ritz bathroom window at every opportunity, I am still matinee-idol black haired from stem to stern, save for the almost undetectable occasional white hair every dude and dame of our color sports.

The old man’s muzzle is starting to look bearded, like Hemingway’s. I only wish he had a superlarge fish to share with a landlubber offspring.

Alas, now Three O’Clock has no sea and no fish to shepherd, with the lake and the lovely golden shoreline carp it used to boast doing a disappearing act.

“Where are you taking me?” he snarls. “I told you I am doing fine on the next-door leavings, and I wanted to watch CSI in action on my turf.”

“Your ‘turf’ is a dried-up wasteland.”

“So is yours.”

“But mine has neon and foot-long submarine sandwiches and Bette Midler.”

A rough stretch has Three O’Clock’s chin seeming to nod agreement. “Bette Midler is all right. You cannot eat neon, and foot-long-anything foodstuffs are more than I care to tangle with at my age.”

This talk of fast food has my mind revving up. What to do with the old folks is the conundrum of the era, especially as the population of old folks is growing by leaps and bounds. Or by creeps and pounds.

I climb a few boxes to curl my shivs around the van’s rear window slit. I see we are getting into serious traffic. Time to bail.

“Come on, Pop,” I urge as I clamber back down. “Time to rock and roll.”

“You young folks still into that racket?”

“You betcha.”

I eye the silver tangle of aluminum tripods stacked behind the driver’s seat. We need to distract our chauffeur just enough to slow down but not enough to crash and burn. It is a delicate operation, and my current partner is none too reliable. Who would think I would actually wish for the presence of Miss Midnight Louise and her nubile climbing skills?

“Okay, Daddy-o. You are going to climb that silver metal tree while I get behind the wheel.”

“There is no way to climb that mess, son. I will just end up in a tangle of clattering pipe.”

“Exactly. Mount Charleston it is not, but you still have built-in pitons and can make quite a mess and commotion of it.”

“I see. You want a distraction.”

“Duh.”

“Why did you not just say so? I was attracting thrown tin cans on the backyard fences while you were just a gleam in my old lady’s eye.”

With that, Three O’Clock rousts his own twenty-pound, leftover-pumped bulk over the camera boxes and leaps like a sumo wrestler for the tripods. Immediately the unseen driver starts muttering and pumping the brakes.

By then I have scaled the vinyl back of his seat and landed in his lap, tail faceup and claws thigh-side down and snapping into place like a staple remover.

The screams are awesome.

I fight to unsnag my valuable shivs as the driver simultaneously slams on the brakes and puts the gear into park, opens the door, and grabs the lapels of my furry ruff.

We hurl outside together into the merciless sunlight as horns bellow and traffic screeches to a stop. The scene causes him to release his grip. I roll under the stopped van, pleased to see Three O’Clock slithering onto the doorjamb edge and then the street.

“Psst!” I say, sticking out a paw to gesture him under the undercarriage.

He slinks into the shadow beside me.

“That guy took some really primo footage of me and thee hamming it up over those Lake Mead bones,” Three O’Clock protests. “Your escape plan has delayed getting our mugs onto the evening news, where they belong.”

“Relax. There will be some exchange of this and that information, then all these hot steel boxes will get rolling again. Meanwhile, you and I can leapfrog from shady spot to shady spot and leave this mess behind.”

“Your ‘shady spots’ could start mowing us down any ‘leap.’ We are not frogs.”

I agree that there is not a lot of “leap” left in Three O’Clock Louie, but I have enough hiss and vinegar for the two of us. I soon prod the old dude out of the street and onto one of my routes to the Circle Ritz.

“This is worse than our recent trek across half of Lake Mead,” he starts complaining. “I did not want to leave my old hangout even when my humans pulled up ‘steaks.’ I hid out until they gave up coming back out and trying to lure me away with the daily special.”

“You are a stubborn old cuss.”

“I am not going to give up my independence. Besides, during the last days they converted to an all free-range, organically grown menu. Those chickens must have had leg muscles the size of ostriches’. And, as far as I know, vegetables are only good for encouraging five-year-old human kits to run away from home. I had never been offered so much dry, twiggy, dirt-dusted chow in my life. Now you are dragging me across a concrete desert. With no food or water in sight. You are a cruel cat, my son.”

I cannot claim that shade and watering holes exactly dot the city landscape if you are not near a major hotel. Sure, I know Three O’Clock has not got much stamina and has already been sore-footedly tried today. For once, I am completely perplexed. Where to park the old man until I can reunite him with his geezer gang?

I need to find someplace soon.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas sun is boiling high above us in a clear blue sky, soaking into our pure black coats, making our pink tongues roll out like red carpets and our tenderized pads to crack and burn like well-done strip steaks.

Manx! Even my ability to come up with similes has shifted into survival overdrive. I cannot believe that shepherding only one elder could be so taxing.

I am glad that … oh! Of course.

Obviously my brain has been fried on Lake Mead, along with the rest of Three O’Clock Louie’s lost and lamented cuisine.