Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“We are all enforcers here,” Ma snaps back. She eyes me and wrinkles her sparse vibrissae, which are whiskers to veterinarians and others in the know. “So you want to hang around for old times’ sake? I can put you on probation.”

“Probation? I ran a fishing trawler. I was the skipper’s right-hand catch-inspector. Then I retired to Vegas and got a food inspector job with the Glory Hole Gang out at Lake Mead. I should be consigliere here, at least.”

“This is a street gang, Three O’Clock, not some fancy-schmancy operation.”

Ma ambles over to me and Miss Midnight Louise.

“So, Grasshopper. If the old guy stays, I will have to call you disgusting pet names, since the ‘Midnights’ are getting a bit thick around here.”

“I am Louie,” I snarl. “He can be Three O’Clock. Capiche?”

“Whatever, you two can duke it out. Meanwhile, who is going to do the honors?”

“There is any honor around here?”

“I mean introduce your partner to her new grandfather.”

Louise’s baby yellows get moon size. She had not followed the family resemblance to its logical conclusion—her. If she really is my offspring.

Even now she is arching her back and shaking out her shivs to make sure Three O’Clock knows he is not top dog around here.

Dem Old Bones

Temple left the Crystal Phoenix with her head still whirling with empire-building ideas.

Give Nicky Fontana credit: the boy could dream. He was her age, just pushing thirty-one, but CEO of her only permanent contractual client. Van was an amazing executive and executor, but Nicky had the cockeyed vision it took to take Vegas establishments to the next step.

And this time, Temple would be an idea girl from the ground up … or down, if the plans to reimagine the underground spaces were as open-ended as Nicky said.

Underground. Underworld. That was so postmillennial and perfect. Dark, daring, and cooool, man, cooool.

She wanted to tell someone. She wanted to tell Matt. And maybe her Aunt Kit Carson, who—oh, rats—was honeymooning in Europe with her first and post-menopausal husband, Nicky’s eldest brother, Aldo. Sixty is the new forty-five, and so was Aldo. Go, Aunt Kit!

The red Miata wove through the packed Strip traffic like a computerized sewing machine on zigzag. Temple refrained from cell-phoning while driving, but her mind rehearsed what she’d tell Matt when she called him tonight.

Temple’s head was still bursting with wild ideas when she came home to her quiet Circle Ritz condo. She’d been too busy to check with Matt in Chicago earlier. He was used to her calling him because of her erratic freelance schedule.

She plopped down on her soft living-room loveseat, kicked off her Weitzman spikes, and kicked her bare heels into the luxuriant long fibers of her faux-goatskin rug. Then she grabbed the remote just in time to catch the opening of the six o’clock news. Matt was in a two-hour-later time zone, so she had time to chill, shower, and change before calling. More construction defaults and lower tourist numbers still made the news, along with a murder-suicide in Henderson, but the feature story tease was on “cannibal cats.”

Ick!

They even ran a five-second close-up of a poor, starving stray kitty gnawing on some bones.

Temple averted her face, but not before the cat’s color registered.

Black. And big.

The whiskers were an unusual pure white.

As long and straight as kabob skewers. Uh-oh.

Temple programmed her recorder and slipped into the kitchen to pour a glass of red wine. No, white. She might see something startling enough to cause a spill on her off-white couch. Forewarned was forearmed. Or four-armed.

Why would her Midnight Louie be making the evening news munching on bones? He had a perfectly fine full bowl of Free-to-Be-Feline dry, vitamin-packed, politically correct cat food in his kitchen bowl at this very minute. “Full” was the key word.

Oh.

The nightly news had perfected the art of tease. Between every boring roundup they flashed footage of a black feline muzzle and sharp white fangs snapping at the jagged ends of what sure looked like bones. Temple gulped wine.

During commercial breaks, she checked every cat hiding spot in the two-bedroom unit and shouted from the tiny balcony. No Louie anywhere. Had the trespassing cats on the news been taken into custody?

She opened and checked every last kitchen cupboard and refilled her glass with red wine.

The sacred sports and weather sections were coming up. If the cat story didn’t run soon, it would never run. Had she missed it during a commercial break?

An insect brushed her arm. No! Louie’s white whiskers.

He had just lofted over the sofa back to sit beside her. Must have come in the guest-bathroom window she always left ajar.

“Louie! You had me going. Where have you been?”

But his green eyes weren’t turned toward her. They were focused intently on the TV screen. His whiskers twitched as he settled into his haunches.

“Now here’s a gristly tale,” the female half of the anchor team intoned with relish, “better fitting Halloween than spring break. Animal lovers attending the Temple Bar Days annual festival at the Arizona area of Lake Mead called animal control to round up a couple of feral cats scavenging for food dangerously near the lake’s sadly lowered edge and not far from the defunct Three O’Clock Louie’s former lakeside restaurant. The foraging felines eluded capture, but the animal-control people found they had been snacking on a gruesome discovery.”

The camera pulled back to show crime-scene tape circling the littered lake bottom, then zoomed in on an odd formation.

“Yes, witnesses said the object of the cats’ interest appeared to be a pair of snapped off human leg bones mired in rock. Arizona police authorities are mum about the find, but the area is only an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, and the remains have been sent to the city coroner’s facility. Could stray cats have unearthed the remains of some early Vegas crime figure who had been given the concrete booties treatment and dumped in Lake Mead decades ago? Crime historians must be scratching their heads and searching their archives. Meanwhile, the carnivorous kitties made their getaway and are still at large.”

“Carnivorous!” Temple accused her seating partner, then imbibed more wine and reconsidered. “Of course all cats are carnivorous. They said ‘cannibal’ first! That’s all wrong. I am so mortified. I recognized your white whiskers instantly, of course. You are grounded, my lad. No more open window for you.”

Louie yawned.

“I’m going right now to slam it shut. See!”

He rolled over onto his substantial side to flash his fangs as he nibbled at a clawed toe.

Temple did as she had promised and returned triumphant.

“Did you hear that? Shut. Two. Cannibal cats, plural. So who was your accomplice? The other cat?”

Louie remained mum. And way too calm.

Temple sighed. “Three O’Clock Louie. Of course. Why the heck and how did you get way out there? Arizona, for Pete’s sake. I suppose gnawing on human bones can’t be considered cannibal for a cat. Oh.”

She punched the cell phone’s auto-dial to try Matt at his Chicago hotel number. “Our fiancé is going to be so disappointed in you, Louie. Old bones. Criminal bones. Gangster bones. What a news hook. Wonder who it is. Was.

“Bet the Glory Hole guys might have a clue, but who would even remember them to ask? This is a Temple Barr exclusive. Where the heck is Three O’Clock now, huh? You didn’t just leave your compadre to the coyotes and animal control, did you? No, of course not. He’s probably wherever that gang of feral cats that hung around here for a while went. And are you sharing that info with your loyal bed partner? Noooo. Just you wait. You are confined to quarters, mister, but I am going to be out on the town and on this first thing in the morning like a … carnivorous cat.”