Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

Ah! At last! We get into man-high territory, if the man were on his knees. It strikes me that this tunnel is a recent and inexpert excavation.

Sneezing out a cloud of stone powder, after much circuitous footwork, I finally follow Miss Louise into a large and thankfully finished piece of manmade construction, what is certainly a rarity in Las Vegas, which is built on concrete foundations—a basement.

While I enjoy a coughing break, the kit is pacing ahead of me, twitching her front and rear extremities. By extremities, I am being literal: not legs, but vibrissae and tail. Yes, the rear member whips up more dust for my sensitive sinuses.

Only a few dim work lights, aka classic bare lightbulbs, illuminate our way into what turns out to be a vast space.

Before long we encounter the massive figure of a martini glass. By then I could use one. Miss Louise has leaped atop the toe of a high-heeled sandal that would really ring my Miss Temple’s chimes.

All of these items are made from a giant fretwork of wood and steel or aluminum supporting milky glass tubes in Rube Goldberg–style rat-maze arrangements, i.e., like a really complicated maze for giant rats.

Manx! I would not want to meet the rat large enough to run this junkyard maze, but …

“Hey, Louise! Any one of these big retired neon signs would make a great jungle gym for Ma Barker’s gang behind the police substation. They are just wasted down here.”

“At least they are not fading in the acid rain and sunlight UVs at the neon graveyard topside,” she replies. “But I like your idea. Maybe you can manipulate your red-and-cream roommate to claim one of these mementos when we bring the Neon Nightmare crowd down.”

“Uh, we are bringing a nightclub crowd down?”

“Of course. Not the customers, but the Synth set. No human would find or follow that rat tunnel around the vault to trace the passage from the Crystal Phoenix underground to here.”

Now she tells me! So I have started this crawl by personally enlarging with my body a tunnel made by and for desert rats. Think about it! I look around for some rat on whom to take out my angst, but I find the place as quiet and still as, well, a graveyard.

Meanwhile, Miss Louise has sashayed into the pale spotlight of a work light.

“Remember when Mr. Max as the Phantom Mage hit the nightclub wall upstairs and was carted out of here as DOA?”

“Um, I would hardly forget such a disaster.”

“Remember that I promised to kick major butt around here?”

“Yes, but that is your general modus operandi anyway.”

“General Modus Operandi is about to breach enemy headquarters. Want to tag along, Daddy-o?”

I slink along after my number-one (and only, that I know of) daughter.

In my heart of hearts, I realize that my devotion to my Miss Temple and her affairs (I am not just speaking of Mr. Matt here, but her life-threatening murder investigations) has made me a trifle derelict in pursuing the trail of Mr. Max Kinsella.

This might have been a wee tactical error. He is the primo international undercover cat in our circle of human acquaintances, and it is never wise to underestimate what he might be up to and who might not like it.

Oh, rats!

Thus I find myself tailing a girl to the scene of the crime! I mean, a girl other than my Miss Temple, who is always sensitive to my contributions and appreciative and a pleasure to tail.

The Neon Nightmare, as Miss Louise and I—and Mr. Max before us—have discovered, is designed like a pyramid-shaped wedge of Swiss cheese. It has more hidey-holes than Cab Calloway did. Okay, that is an abstruse reference. I am an abstruse kind of guy. Mr. Cab Calloway, being a musical black cat of the human persuasion back in the Jazz Baby age, was noted for his vocal chorus of “Hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho.” Hidey-hole. Get it?

So “Hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho” is all I can mutter to myself in consolation, as I follow Miss Midnight Louise through a long and winding upward path of hidden hallways and cubbyholes toward the lofty peak of the pyramid, where the conspirators who call themselves the Synth maintain a private club so tony that Sherlock Holmes’s older smarter brother, Mycroft, might feel at home there, save that there are at least two women members we spotted on an earlier occasion.

Every door looks like a jet black wall in this magical maze, and every opening is operated by pressure hinges. Push and release; the hidden latch pops the door ajar.

Those of my breed have no trouble being pushy, and I, at least, being exceptionally big and strong, can leap high enough to select floor designation buttons on even the highest hotel-tower elevators.

On the other hand, such gymnastics need to be accomplished on the sly, without human witnesses. They could cause comment and sudden attempts to capture a trick cat like myself with a camera, if not a strangling grip around the throat.

Luckily, the designers of Synth headquarters played it cute and placed many of their pressure points below the usual human hand level. Of course both Miss Midnight Louise and I remember this ploy. There is a bit of kerfuffle as we nudge shoulders to each command the active role here.

My longer reach wins out but at the cost of a nick in my sensitive sniffer.

“Sorry, Pops,” she hisses. “I did not see your prominent nose in the dark.”

The door has opened without a sound after the initial click, so I stand back to let her enter first.

She gives a surprised purr under her breath, mistaking my holding back for courtesy. Hah! It is only seasoned breakin strategy.

She, being practically anorexic from scarfing up Chef Song’s low-fat, low-cal Asian delicacies at the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, requires a less-ajar door to enter. I, being majestic in size, push in after her, thrusting the door open farther. I immediately whirl to nudge it shut, but delicately, though there is little light to admit from the dark passage.

There! We are once again closeted with the same cast of characters, plus a couple more, whom we had intruded on before Mr. Max’s tragic accident-cum-assassination attempt.

They are not acting the usual calm and smug, though, but riled up like a school of flesh-eating piranhas feasting in a diet spa’s hot tub.

“You incompetents,” a voice with a stagy echoing tone admonishes so passionately, the hair on both Miss Midnight Louise’s and my backs rises as if we had been attacked.

It is the same eerily altered human voice I have heard through the Cloaked Conjuror’s whole-head mask and used by protected witnesses on TV true-crime shows.

“Sparks is dead, and you have no idea how, who, or why,” the man goes on.

“And,” the second newcomer adds in an echoing, possibly female voice, “you have no idea where our ‘investment’ has gone.”

I am not being specific about the description of these Jill-and-Johnny-come-latelies because they wear long, concealing cloaks and, of all things, full-face Darth Vader–type masks!

I nudge Miss Louise in the shoulder, but she is gone. Even with my superior vision, I cannot see her. I give the kit credit for stealth. She has probably established a listening post under somebody’s floor-length dark robe, a delicate operation for one with her longer coat’s tendency to tickle human skin.

“Listen,” the dark lady known as Carmen says.

I have eavesdropped on this dame at Synth Central before, but every time I hear or see this Carmen chick, I get a jolt. That is the same first name the C in C. R. Molina conceals. The unsmiling homicide lieutenant only goes by that moniker when she is undercover, kicking back as the Blue Dahlia nightclub’s blues singer. Not that she has had any time free from kicking ass, including her own, lately.

Or course, there are other Carmens in the world, just as there are other Louies. We are just the most important ones in Vegas. But I digress. The wrong Carmen is still yammering.