Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“Yeah. Only I’m not impartial to anything. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

“I have,” Temple said, “and that’s what makes me nervous about this.”

“Stay nervous, then. A little sweat would improve on the Dumpster cologne.”

“I do not sweat. I use a really good deodorant.”

“Couldn’t tell it by me, kid.”

She didn’t have a comeback to that one, so she didn’t try.

Okay. They were here, their knees ready for a rack, inhaling leavings the rats didn’t stick around to protect, and no one else was to be seen. Rafi was an ex-employee. She was about to become an ex-employee. Wow. Together, they didn’t have one leg to stand on for being here.

“I’m actually glad they’ve all left,” she whispered, wishing she could do that too.

“They appeared to have left,” Rafi said.

A bit of overhead parking light caught his profile. It was hunter-intent. Temple realized she’d been allowed along on this outing, like a bird dog, not like a partner. Not that she’d want to be Rafi Nadir’s partner! That was something even C. R. Molina had run screaming from over a decade ago.

Or was it?

“Shhhh! “

Jeez, he could hear her thoughts?

She heard the grinding gears, the squealing breaks, the creaks of a big truck turning into the Maylords lot. A lot of big trucks pulled up to the Maylords loading dock. All day.

Not all night.

Stealing the slightest glance, she saw the usual furniture delivery truck, big and square and bearing the Maylords name on

the side.

What was it doing here now?

The brakes squealed as it backed up to the loading dock, and silenced as it finally stopped.

The night grew quiet again. Nothing more happened with the truck. No door opening and slamming shut, no driver dismounting. Nothing.

Then she did hear something. A faint whine, like a radio that’s on with the volume turned down, so you only sense a presence, not what it is. Not what’s causing the hair to rise at the nape of your neck.

Temple wished for her firearm back.

The almost imperceptible noise increased, in waves, like a gust of wind coming closer at forty miles per hour. The weather forecast tonight had been clear and calm. She’d checked.

Rafi Nadir’s hand closed around her forearm.

Closer. Coming closer.

It was a strange sort of purring sound really, like Louie at the foot of her bed, heard but not yet felt.

The purr became a grumble, became a rumble, became a loud, grating noise and then a coughing sputter.

Temple recognized that mechanical throat-clearing: slowing motorcycle. Slowing motorcycles, plural. A gang.

She gasped, but Rafi’s hand covered her mouth. Not a New Age experience. She forced back her automatic gag-bite reaction. This was the only partner in crime busting she had at the moment.

While she mentally fussed, she heard the snap of metal hitting asphalt, the snick of something-switchblades?-sliding open.

Whoever or whatever they were, they were settling in for a while.

Rafi touched her lips with an icy finger. No! With the cold steel of gun barrel to caution continued silence.

He had it.

Temple did so want to be at home in her own bed, with her knees not jackknifed and the reek in her nose not nauseating her, with Louie. Or Max. Or Matt. Or a NOW magazine. What the hell.

Rafi had scrambled to the other edge of the Dumpster and was peering around the edge. The gun barrel he held up and behind him caught a gleam of light. Temple thought of Darth Vader’s metal-gloved trigger finger.

Temple heard the loading dock’s small side door opening. Grunts. Something heavy hitting concrete. Muffled laughter.

Steps walking back and forth between the loading dock and the slap of something against metal.

She was so busy interpreting the unseen sounds that she was startled when something soft and live and tickling brushed her cheek. On her face.

She blinked and caught a fan of passing hair in her eyelid. It floated like a marabou boa, stung like a diving hornet.

Temple spit out hair. Louie! She’d know that tail anywhere.

“What the hell?” The voice was male and astonished. “Put up your X-actos, boys. Looks like a buzz saw has already been at this stuff. Make that a real big wood chopper. Man, our grass is cooked and our powder blowed. Something’s big-time wrong.

Let’s get outta here.”

No sooner had the mysterious man gathered his troops than the presence that had air-kissed Temple’s cheek rocketed out into the parking lot proper, screaming like a V2 rocket over England during World War II. A whole bombardment of Screaming Mimis poured out of the parked truck back and whistled past her.

She stood despite a hand pulling on her elbow.

The growling sound that had followed the truck into the lot was a mob of motorcycles now mounted again and revving their engines, a whole gleaming circle of them.

“No, not yet!” someone was screaming at her back.

That wasn’t all. A bunch of someones were screaming at her front.

Scruffy-looking men were erupting from the weeds and cactus surrounding the lot. They seemed to be wearing vests with

big letters on them. What was this, a fraternity initiation?

At ground level, Midnight Louie, for it was indeed he, and his cadre of cats were circling the motorcycles like berserk windup toys, howling and hurling themselves claws out at stalled tires and the canvas saddlebags hanging from every machine.

Temple had barely identified the bikes and riders as her Rainbow Coalition Gang when she noticed a vertical Louie dragging his front claws with all his pendant weight through one of the saddlebags. A thin white line leaked through.

Drugs.

Of course. And it had been trucked here inside a Maylords furniture van. Furniture that wasn’t stuffed with down but drugs.

And this gang was here to make the exchange after the stuff had been successfully smuggled in.

The rider whose saddlebags were leaking tried to kick-start his machine, tried to kick Louie off the ripping side of his drugstuffed bag.

Temple ran forward, forgetting she no longer had the gun, or that her pepper spray was too small and too far.

“No!”

The word was bellowed behind her, so like a parent’s howl at a two-year-old about to touch a hot stove that Temple paused to look behind her. She saw Rafi Nadir over her shoulder, her own gun in his hands leveled just beyond her.

Louie was falling onto the black asphalt, but another black blot ran at the compromised saddlebag even as the rider revved

the bike.

The oncoming men on the fringe were tightening like a noose, shouting and aiming.

Temple somehow was trapped in the dark, bloody heart of it, still standing, her ears roaring, looking for Louie.

A bike, the oddball black one amid the screaming colors, came swooping straight at her, veering like an ice skater around the dozen or so cats crisscrossing the parking lot like demented lemmings.

“Drop it!” voices shouted from the fringe. “Drop your weapons. Hit asphalt or we shoot.”

Well, she had no weapon to drop, and before she could hit asphalt the motorcycle hit her. An arm like a stage hook swooped her sideways onto the bike’s spiffy painted gas tank in front of the long leather seat.

She saw a low, dark form leap at its rear saddlebags. The bike shimmied as if skidding on black ice. Temple was pulled halfway over the gas tank. She saw a small black silhouette hit asphalt and roll into the path of another revving motorcycle.

The roar of the competing engines was blasted to bits by the ear-splitting drone from an overhead helicopter drowning all

sound. Its blare of spotlight turned the turmoil below into a silent film overpowered by a flying freight train.