Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

I am not exactly shopping bag material, but I snag a bit of ribbon from a package another tourist is toting and push my head through it. The man who was glared at looks down, ready to pass on the courtesy. There I sit as tame as a toy poodle, a collar of fuchsia ribbon adding luster to the muscled dignity of my neck.

His lip pulls back as if to snarl, but he would look silly behaving so doggishly toward a pet pussycat, so he clears his throat instead.

The laden ladies debark on floor six and so do we.

Louise has wriggled out of the bag as the women were fighting their way forward to the doors, so we both dart around the corner to take cover in the refreshment bay next to the elevators, where the ice machine is gurgling as if it was terminally ill. I imagine all ice machines in Vegas must be ready to give up the ghost from overuse.

When the coast is clear (okay, there is no coast anywhere near Las Vegas; this is just an expression we hard-boiled dudes like to use), Louise and I loft to the wooden railing of the balcony overlooking the neon sky now three floors or so below us.

We would gasp if we could. Even from here we can see the CRIME SCENE Do NOT CROSS tape twined above a particularly purple patch of neon below. The lurid yellow with its black lettering does not look in the least like the jewel-tone spirit of neon lighting. No sirree, bobcat!

“Hmmm,” Miss Louise observes, and she is not purring. “I detect a certain reflective quality from below. I say it only looks like a fragile web of neon tubing. I say there’s a solid surface down there. What else would they affix that crime scene tape to?”

With that she flips over the edge, digging her built-in pitons into the wooden rail-cap. Dangling, she winks. “See you down below, Pop.” And the chit lets go.

I nearly swallow my canines.

And then I nearly barf them back up when I see she has made a perfect four-point landing on the wooden railing a floor below.

She repeats the maneuver and is yet another floor below me.

Well! I cannot allow a mere junior partner to out-acrobat me! Even if I outweigh her two times over.

Not for me those agile twists and turns. I shut my eyes and jump. Luckily, I land on the railing below. It is a perfect four-point landing: my set of two front shivs and my two front teeth. I am hanging by a pair of canines, so there is nothing to do but let go and repeat the trick a floor lower.

So we both get to the railing that overlooks the neon ceiling, only my teeth hurt and Louise’s do not. At least I will not have to pay for braces for her. Ouch!

“Pretty awesome with the ivories,” Louise says, sounding sincere.

I grin knowingly, not being able to talk yet.

However, I do see from this nearer perch that something indeed covers the dreadful neon sky below: call it Plexiglas, or Lucite, or just plain plastic, it is tough, so low-profile it is virtually invisible, and highly supportive. Kind of like the way I am with my Miss Temple.

I take one last leap, on faith, and do a belly flop onto a floor of see-through plastic. Louise lands beside me and rolls away from any too-solid impact.

I grit what is left of my teeth.

But she is not concerned with how we got here. She is sniffing around like a prime-time news-show bloodhound. “Mania by Armani,” she diagnoses.

‘What is that? A rock group or a terrorist cadre?”

“Very expensive perfume. Very Rodeo Drive.”

I am not about to descend to a name-dropping contest with the likes of Midnight Louise, who hangs out at the Crystal Phoenix and is up on the latest fashion victim trends, so I rely on my sterling sense of deduction to get back in the game.

“Costly scents only confirm that the call girl was high dollar.”

Louise wrinkles her shiny black nose. She could use some powdering, but far be it from me to tell her. Right now she is wrinkling it as she squints up into the light-spangled actual ceiling high above.

“Star-gazing?” I ask.

“I am wondering who might be accustomed to hanging out up there and have seen something.”

“Nobody who would talk to us,” I point out.

“Maybe not.” She begins to sniff the area inside the crime-scene tape, which I think is a rather silly gesture.

“It must have irritated the cops to have a body found in thin air,” I say. “None of the normal procedure would quite work.”

She is still sniffing and I confess I feel a certain embarrassment, as it is such a doggish occupation. I have always relied on using my noggin, as opposed to my nose. But I cannot deny that an occasional whiff has helped me figure out a modus operandi now and again.

“Leather,” Miss Louise pronounces, lifting her petite nose as if to wrinkle it like an elephant’s gross proboscis. “Shoes, belt, or handbag, no doubt.”

Since she is vacuuming the area I feel obliged to put my face to the transparent floor as well. Well, well. I spot some spider-web shatters in the clear Plexiglas and point them out to Louise.

She gets excited and runs around like the Maltese proboscis, Nose E. the drug-and bomb-sniffing dog I have worked with, reluctantly, before. “Good work! The shattering matches the exact position of the body. The police may not have left any convenient tape to outline the corpse’s location, but we have an impression, no matter how cloudy.”

I take the long view Miss Louise suggests and observe that it indeed etches a ghostlike swastika image of a human form into the transparent surface.

“Wait, Louise! Stop that disgusting sniffing and do not move. This stuff would not shatter. This looks like a glass ceiling, a thick, industrial-strength glass ceiling, but it must be extra-strength plastic. It is inset into panels and with all those flatfoots walking around up here, a weakened framework could give at any moment from a weight as dainty as a butterfly.”

Louise’s eyes grow as big as the twenty-four-karat-gold charger plates they use in the upscale restaurants. “How are we going to get off of here?” she wonders quite logically.

Luckily, I have had a close encounter with a bunch of neon before. These touchy gas-filled tubes need maintenance like flowers need rain. There has got to be an access tunnel somewhere.

Besides. We are in Eye in the Sky territory. Despite the apparent transparency of the neon ceiling, surveillance cameras must be filming away somewhere.

Surveillance cameras! That is who—or what, rather—would talk to us, if we can just find command central. First things first.

“I suggest,” I tell Miss Louise, “that you crawl on your belly like a snake. Fast!”

She melts into the supine position with gratifying speed. I only remember to assume it myself after a few seconds of smirking. The fact is I have already spotted our exit, which is disguised as a mirrored lozenge on the surrounding rim of wall.

So we elbow-crawl like soldiers carrying rifles under an iron curtain to the perimeter. (That is how we talk in the army.) I run my shivs over the mirror frame until it snaps ajar. “Devious,” Louise comments.

I cannot be sure if she is referring to the mechanism or me, but I will take the credit.

I usher her through with a gentlemanly gesture and follow fast upon my own good manners.

We are in a tunnel, but it is of ample size, at least for Miss Louise, who slithers through to the other side like a black feather boa animated by a Slinky. I have to do a little more grunt work to maneuver my masculine frame through, but we both tumble out into another world.

“Awesome!” Louise comments in the patois of her unimaginative generation.

I have seen it all before. The high-tech hardware, the Mondrian wallpaper of small TV screens showing bird’s-eye views of the gaming tables below. There is a guy in a dark uniform seated before this banquet of visual eye-dropping, his head jerking slightly from scanning screen after screen so he resembles a robot.