Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Temple glanced around. Wong and Song had vanished behind their buffet table. The Maylords lay belly down beside her. Nothing much was moving but the sudden sleet of glass and ice and food from the buffet.

She had toured the store before opening, from stem to stern. She’d seen a big light-control panel on some wall … but where?

No one seemed to be moving.

The sounds continued, relentless, obviously from a distance, obviously from a high-powered weapon aimed at the bright

store interior surrounded by windows, spitting like an Uzi into a giant fishbowl.

Wait. The light panel was near the employee lounge, toward the back of the store and the loading dock.

Temple pressed her burning palms into the stone floor and put the soles of her shoes in motion.

Chapter 9

Power Play

Matt hit the deck on instinct.

Cries and muffled sobs echoed all around him, where only moments before conversations and laughter had provided a counter to the Musak pouring over the loudspeaker.

That soft, jazzy beat made a bizarre counterpoint to the punctuation of repeated gunfire now.

Maylords was under siege.

His not to wonder why. His but to do or die … and people could have died already.

He’d been visiting the vignettes, looking for Janice, working his way back to the central entrance.

His cheek rested on salmon-colored plush carpeting. A testered Colonial-style bed loomed above him.

So did the darkness of a Las Vegas night outside the showroom window.

As he watched, the glass shattered like spun sugar. A celadon vase on the nearby dresser blossomed into flying pieces.

One grazed his temple.

Temple. Where was she?

Matt elbow-crawled onto the central path of cool stone and lay there for a moment to listen.

Danny Dove’s commanding cry, “Hit the lights,” struck him with relief. That was the first line of defense. He bet cell phones were hitting 911 all over the store.

He didn’t carry one. Mr. Behind-the-Times. From now on he would, an urban guerrilla armed with technology instead of a personal firearm.

But … where was Temple?

He crawled over the glass-gritty floor, aware that she had last been called to the reception area.

“Stay down, people!” another voice ordered. Deeper and darker than Danny Dove’s, but no less commanding.

Temple took her role as public relations rep responsible for everything running smoothly like some updated quest in the Philip Marlowe school. Matt knew she wouldn’t be taking this attack lying down.

She’d respond to Danny Dove’s call with every theatrical instinct in her soul. She’d be trying to get to the lights, to shut them down, to end this ugly act and make the store into a dark enigma instead of an overlit shooting gallery.

He put his forearm over his eyes, both to see better against the glaring lighting system above the scene and to defray the bits of glass and food that were raining down in an unholy hail on them all.

He crawled past downed couples tangled like fallen mannequins in the vignettes, muttering into cell phones pulled from pockets and purses.

He glimpsed a glint of silver on the move as he neared the central area, low and erratic, but visible to him … and

therefore visible to the shooter.

Matt pushed up into a crouch and went zigzagging through the empty rooms, past prone bodies hopefully only playing

dead and dialing for their lives.

“The employee lounge,” someone bellowed. He recognized Janice’s voice, coming from far across the central space.

Lights. Employee lounge. At the back? He hadn’t seen it in the front, didn’t make sense in the front, and the bit of moving quicksilver had been heading deeper into the store… .

Matt dodged from ottoman to desk legs to bedskirt to decimated buffet table, aware of people lying everywhere.

He skittered like a beetle, edged like a roach.

The occasional gun report shattered something precious, and hopefully, not sentient.

The shots were interspersed with sobs and moans. Who knew how many had been hit?

He could have been still facedown like most of them. Waiting for the nightmare to end. Except … he saw a bigger nightmare. A flash of silver and red suddenly splashed like well-veined shrimp across the entrance atrium.

Matt heard something scream at his heel, and pushed forward. Chips of shattered travertine spit into his calves.

He dove under the looming orange body of the Murano, eyeing the undercarriage, then crawled past and through, working

back into the darker parts of the store. Into the interior shadows, where the light panel lay.

In the distance, he heard the wail of oncoming sirens, still far, far away.

A glimpse of ground-level silver fluttered like a startled dove past a Barcelona chair. Matt lunged after it, hearing a bullet

ping off the chair’s stainless-steel frame.

The bastard was aiming … aiming at movement. At Temple. He was outrunning the bullets, catching up, overtaking. Matt dove for the only moving element ahead of him. And … the lights went out.

Chapter 10

Shrimp Cocktail

Well, this was the night the lights were blazing in Georgia, but they sure went out in Maylords. Here is how it all went down from my point of view. My own personal lowdown, so to speak, which is as low down as you can get. Ankle level, in point of fact.

As soon as the blasts of gunfire turn Maylords into an exploding glass factory, Miss Midnight Louise and I swing into

action.

We streak from the anticipated chow line out back to the firing line up front.

Luckily, we operate well under the line of fire and are able to tiptoe through the broken glass and into the besieged home decor store. Only in America.

We still have to keep under the sofas, being careful to avoid being seen by carpet-hugging humans who are crawling around on our level for once. It is not a pretty sight. I find that I much prefer socializing with various brands of sniffy footwear than ineffective applications of underarm deodorant.

Although, to be fair, these humans are in a state of primal fear.

They are not used to being hunted on the streets of Las Vegas, as Louise and I have been, merely for the simple sin of being homeless.

Nowadays, of course, we have whole buildings to call home. Louise has bagged the elegant Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, where she has taken over my old job as house detective. I hang my unused collar at the retro-funky Circle Ritz apartments and condominium, where I am in permanent residence with my live-in, Miss Temple Barr.

Still, our roles in law enforcement matters are not self-evident. When we boogie around the city on business we are in constant danger of being snagged by Animal Control and treated like disposable nobodies. Makes one almost succumb to wearing a collar, but give one inch and pretty soon Big Brother Vet will be imbedding eavesdropping chips in our brains.

Anyway, before we can thoroughly scout the place, another series of shots riddles the plate glass.

Immediately the downed humans start mewling and whimpering like whipped curs. Louise and I roll our eyes at each other.

With everybody face down, now we can paddy-foot where we please, as long as we avoid using a prone human as an area rug. (Which role reversal, actually, would be kind of fun, but I know what Miss Louise would think of such unprofessional behavior.) We soon make our way to the abandoned entrance area, where tender curls of fallen shrimp strew our path like rose petals carpeting the footsteps of conquering heroes.

Should we help ourselves? I do not mind if we do, for night troops travel on their stomachs. Or so I hear. Of course, we must chew our morsels well, as ground glass is not a seasoning for the weak stomached. However, both Louise and I grew up on Dumpster picnics. We are pretty savvy about avoiding slivers of glass and tin cans, not that anything from a can would be found in a Chef Song buffet.