Pet Noir

by Pati Nagle

  Butch started investigating the many items of interest that had hit the deck in our earlier adventure. I headed up toward the top of the cupboards, calling to Leila.

  “Leila? You all right? Answer me baby—”

  “Hey, Leon, what gives?” Devin called from the floor. “Where are the sedonai?”

  “Up here, I think,” I told him. “Don’t let anyone in.”

  “OK.”

  Devin pulled out his security card and started tinkering with the locks, while I leapt up top of the cupboards and made my way toward the ginger jar. Halfway there I found Leila crouched behind an industrial-sized tea caddy. Her eyes were very wide and she was breathing shallowly, staring at the kitchen floor as if expecting a broom to come out of nowhere.

  “You all right?” I asked her.

  She focused on me finally, blinked, then sat up and started to groom. “Leon.”

  “The birds—are they still in the jar?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw them, though I smelled them.”

  She looked like she needed a minute to compose herself, so I slid past her toward the ginger jar. With the lid gone, the birds might well be gone, too. I hoped they had been frightened enough to stay inside.

  A pounding commenced on the outer door. I glanced down at Devin.

  “Better check for other entrances,” I called. “Lock all the doors into the restaurants.”

  “I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, starting through the kitchen. “Jesus, what happened in here?”

  Not bothering to answer, I climbed over a fifty-kilo sack of rice and reached the ginger jar. I sniffed at it and caught a definite whiff of sedonai. My heart started racing.

  I crept up to the jar, slowly, silently. Flattening my ears so they wouldn’t be a tipoff, I cautiously looked over the edge and saw two large black eyes staring back at me.

  “Crap!” I shouted, jumping away.

  “What?” yelled Devin.

  “It isn’t the birds. It’s—oh.”

  I realized that the eyes I’d seen were Hosehead’s. I took another look in the jar. Sure enough, the little creep was in there, or rather his bowless double was. I watched for a few seconds. The thing wasn’t breathing.

  “Dev. Come and get this jar down.”

  He worked his way toward me, cussing as he slipped on spilled wontons. The pounding on the door, which had continued all the while, stopped briefly and a string of vehement Chinese took its place. Then it started up again, louder. It sounded like the cooks were taking turns hurling themselves against the door.

  Devin hauled a chair over and stood on it to get to the counter. He stepped between a basket of bok choy and a bamboo steamer full of spring rolls, and reached for the ginger jar.

  “Careful,” I said. “If I’m right, the birds are in there.”

  He looked in, and nearly fell backward. I made a grab for the jar in case he dropped it, but he got his balance back and threw me a dirty look.

  “This is a dog.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said, hopping down to the counter. “It’s an animatron, I think. Take it out of there.”

  He stepped down and put the jar on the counter, then reached in and removed the Hosehead double. I sniffed at it.

  “This thing reeks of Cygnius sedonai. They must be inside it. Look for a switch.”

  Devin turned it over, turned it every which way. Butch wandered over and jumped on the counter to sit beside me, watching with ears pricked forward. Finally Devin fiddled with a spot behind the dog’s ear.

  Its chest popped open, and the two birds fluttered out. Butch and I pounced on them, even as I yowled, “No claws!”

  “Right, boss,” Butch said, and held his bird down with a gentleness at odds with his massive frame. “It sure smells good, though.”

  “I’ll take that,” Devin said, reaching for Butch’s bird.

  Butch released the tiny thing, which fluttered and twittered, its feathers shimmering. Devin looked around helplessly with the bird in his hand and the dog in the other.

  “I guess a bird in the hand is worth two in the shaggy dog,” I said.

  He turned a look on me that would wither a cat tree. “Just kidding,” I told him. “Open the dog up and stash that one, then I’ll give you this one.”

  He did, and added the second bird before shutting the hatch again. I admit, I had trouble giving it up. Butch was right, they smelled delicious.

  The pounding on the door stopped. Devin looked at me and I knew what he was thinking—Ling-Ling had figured it out and was on the run.

  Devin whipped out his com and connected to central security. Luckily, they shut down all access to the port before Ling-Ling could skip the station. They caught her in her quarters, stuffing cash into her cooler.

  Clever distraction, that cooler, and poor Huey had fallen for it. All the while the real contraband had been inside the fake Hosehead.

  Devin and I discussed it later, after everything had been settled. We sat in his place, Dev having a beer and me digging into a ginger calamari appetizer from Ling-Ling’s, part of an unofficial thank-you from Ling2, who would inherit the business once Ling-Ling was put away.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said to Dev, “is how Ling-Ling got hold of the birds. I mean, she had to be working with somebody inside the aviary. No forced entry, right?”

  Devin paused to pull at his beer. “Right. Did you notice those green eggs with the purple spots in the kitchen?”

  “Yeah. The ones she brought through customs.”

  “She got them through the aviary’s exotics marketing program. Ordered them for her catering business. Perfectly legit, but it was just her cover for getting in to pick up the sedonai. She bribed some poor schmoe to kipe the birds for her.”

  “Schmoe is going down, yes?”

  Devin nodded. “Deep down.”

  I licked the last of the calamari crumbs off my plate and sat up to wash my face. “Well, Dev, I gotta shove off. I’m escorting a lady to dinner.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Anyone I know?”

  “Deputy-Agent Leila, since you ask.”

  The chief had agreed to give Leila and Butch official unofficial deputy status with Gamma Station Security as a result my pleading and finagling. I was proud of them, and had already celebrated with Butch, spending an evening going through the recycle bin back of Molly’s.

  Tonight, though, was going to be something else. Leila was a class act, and I’d arranged a very special entertainment for her. With Devin’s help I had reserved a table in the back at Ling-Ling’s, and ordered a five-course seafood feast.

  “Good luck, tiger,” I heard Devin say softly as I left.

  Leila was waiting for me in the corridor outside Elsa’s place. I didn’t ask how she’d gotten out, and she didn’t offer to enlighten me. For a cat with ordinary thumbs, she was pretty damn clever.

  “You look beautiful,” I said, admiring her glossy coat.

  “Thank you, cher,” she purred as we started toward the lifts. “And I owe you thanks as well for taking the heat off me in that horrid kitchen. That was a gentlemanly thing to do.”

  I could have told her I’d done it for the birds, but I didn’t. It wasn’t entirely true.

  “So, Leon, cher. Where are we going?”

  “I have a place in mind if it’s all right with you. You like Chinese?”

  For a second she froze, and her tail twitched once, sharply. Then she relaxed.

  “Of course, cher. I trust you. You have excellent taste.”

  I smiled, and rubbed against her slightly as we left the lift and strolled through the rotunda filled with soft, evening lighting. I knew this would be the start of a beautiful friendship.

  7. The Firefly Fiasco

  Sometimes you have to look at the underbelly of things to understand the whole picture. That was what I told myself as I followed Butch into the lift.

  We were headed up into the depths of Gamma Station’s warehouse sec
tion. It wasn’t my beat, but the club where we were going—a dive called Pulsar—was the hottest spot on station, thanks to the Firefly. It behooved me, as a member of Security, to check it out. Also, Spats had told me the fried crawfish they served were bitchin’.

  Butch had proposed we give it a try on that point and that alone. He had no interest in Pulsar’s main purpose for existence, which was separating customers from their credit by selling cheap booze for ten times what it was worth. I didn’t have that much interest in it either. Humans and other bipeds have strange tastes, alcohol being one that we cats don’t share. The reason the two-legs allowed themselves to be bilked in this way was simple. Pulsar was an exotic dance club.

  Not only that, but Spats had told me their new act was packing the house with customers who were dropping more than the usual quantity of catfish tails and other tidbits on the floor. Butch’s ears had perked up when I’d told him that.

  He looked over his shoulder at me with anxious green eyes. “Come on, Leon, shake a leg! Show’s going to start any minute!”

  “Sure, Butch,” I said, strolling after him.

  Butch is a great tom, but his sense of time is vague. That’s true of any unmodified quadruped. Sometimes I think my engineering keeps me from truly communing with my own kind.

  I happened to know that the show he was talking about would start at nineteen hundred hours on the dot. Didn’t bother telling Butch we had plenty of time. Besides the fact that he can’t read a clock, I knew he was listening to his stomach more than to me.

  We left the lift at an unfamiliar stop in the middle-gee level, halfway between the hub and Gamma Beta, in the blue zone. I had more weight than in the warehouses, but less than I was accustomed to. Still bounceable but in a heavy sort of way.

  Butch, who didn’t come up here much, had a little trouble getting along at first. His normal stride tended to push him away from the floor, and since there was gravity here there was no 360 carpet. He would scrabble wildly and uselessly until he dropped back down again.

  I showed him how to bounce from side to side on the corridor walls, and he picked it up pretty quickly, after which he had no more trouble. Eighteen pounds of orange cat bouncing down a hallway is an impressive sight.

  The corridors went from gleaming to dingy to downright disgusting the farther we got from the lifts. I could hear excited voices up ahead. Smells of beer and fried crawfish slammed us as we entered the hall where the club was located. Green laser-lights flickered on the ceiling and music thumped through supposedly soundproof walls.

  The club was shoe-horned in between warehouses leased by Galactic Express and Tristar Transit, the two rival shipping companies on Gamma. There had once been a dozen shippers working out of the station, but recent closures and mergers had resulted in these being the only two left. The space Pulsar occupied had been administrative offices for a company that had folded, and had stood empty for a while until Pulsar slithered in.

  Butch plunged into the milling mass of human and humanoid legs outside the club’s entrance. I followed, more out of friendship than expectation of learning much at Pulsar. Besides, I’m game for a scrap of fried protein if it falls my way.

  I’d heard about the show, of course. Devin, my human partner, keeps up on all the scoop around Gamma, and he’d been to see it with the vice boys, who had the job of keeping tabs on places like Pulsar.

  Prostitution wasn’t allowed on station, mostly because inter-species health certifications were a nightmare. There were no regulations against titillation, though. As long as it was strictly look-but-don’t-touch, it was legit. The vice guys had cleared the club a couple of months earlier, and then hustled back to re-certify it when the Firefly had opened last week. Apparently the re-certification had taken several visits.

  I kept my eye on Butch’s fat orange tail as we slipped through the doorway where a hefty multi-limbed bouncer was holding back the overflow. Moonlighting from a shift job at the loading docks, I guessed by the look of him.

  Inside the club the music throbbed even louder. It was pretty painful to the feline ear, in fact, but Butch didn’t seem to notice. He charged on ahead into the shadows.

  Legs, human and otherwise, formed a shifting and dangerous obstacle course beneath tables barely large enough to hold two drinks and a basket of crawfish. Butch darted through them with surprising dexterity. He’s no slouch, even if he is on the portly side. I caught up with him already chomping down on a scatter of spilled crawfish tails, ears erect with delight.

  “Nice find,” I said, curling my tail around my feet so it wouldn’t get stepped on.

  “Have some,” Butch offered politely through a mouthful.

  I helped myself to a bright red tail that had a bit of fried breading still clinging to it, and looked around as I crunched it. The place was already packed, probably beyond the safety limit. I wasn’t going to make a deal about it, though. I was off duty, and this wasn’t my patrol.

  There were dancers on the stage, but they weren’t the sensational Firefly. I confess I was a bit curious to see her, just on an intellectual level. She and I had something in common, after all. We were both genetically modified.

  Besides that, even a cat had to wonder what was drawing all these human and not-quite-human males, not to mention more than a few females. I listened, catching snatches of conversation.

  “—saw her on Tuesday, and couldn’t take my eyes off her—”

  “—sometimes she flashes so fast it’s hard to follow—”

  “—don’t know how she does it!”

  I knew how, and I could have told them, but I kept it to myself. The mystery was part of what they were paying for. Anyway, I don’t talk to the cits. It would interfere with my effectiveness as a covert security operative.

  Having finished my crawfish tail I decided to step out for a breath of air. Leaving Butch to enjoy the rest of his snack, I slipped between the chairs of two members of the species hapernia sapiens, or hoppers as we call them. Their greenish legs had already sprouted stiff, chartreuse hairs that poked sharply up through their slacks, and they hadn’t even had so much as a glimpse at the Firefly.

  Hopper sex was notoriously weird, and evidently painful enough that few other species cared to try it. I pitied any female hopper who might happen to cross the path of these two jokers after the show.

  Or was it the females that spouted thorns along on their legs? I forget these things. Like I said, not my beat.

  Needless to say, the atmosphere in the club was ripe with the sexual tension of several varieties of sentient bipeds. I strolled along the edge of the room, cruising the crowd for any familiar faces. Most were laborers, the sort who worked back here in the cheaper warehouses and whom I only saw when they came down to the rotunda to patronize classier establishments than this, such as Molly’s Bar and Grill and the Gravity Pit. Ling-Ling’s Lightspeed Asian was right out of their league.

  The thought of Ling-Ling’s gave me a pang of longing, and to calm myself I found a relatively clean spot in which to sit down and groom my forepaws. Ling2 could do things with shellfish that made Pulsar’s rough fry-work seem absolutely criminal. Devin often ate at Ling-Ling’s and usually brought me leftovers. I wondered if he would get there today, and decided not. He was working overtime on a disappearance. The whole security team was out doing a dragnet from which I had been excused only because it was likely to blow my cover. So I would probably get kibble at best, pot-luck with Devin’s cold-storage unit at worst.

  I wove my way back toward where I’d left Butch, still scanning the crowd. These guys and gals were the comrades of Devin’s missing person, I realized. He drove a loader on one of the docks, and had gone missing after his shift yesterday. If I had thought of it, I could have asked for more details, not that I could really be much help to Devin. I sure wasn’t about to start interviewing Pulsar’s customers.

  I saw something other than bipedal legs moving under the tables up ahead. I froze, then the white-tipped black tail f
licked again and I relaxed. Slinking forward, I snuck up on the tail, which was protruding between two beefy orange legs that had to belong to a mungo. They’re the dominant species on Epsilon Indi III: humanoid, really big, with orangish skin and no sense of humor. Smell a little like kimchee. Can’t tell the females from the males unless you look very carefully in places they don’t generally show off.

  These mungo legs were too high for the table they were under. In fact, the table was balanced on top of them, supported by the knees of their owner and those of another mungo sitting opposite. Mungos did that a lot in restaurants. Steakmeister had a couple of special extra-high tables just for mungo customers, but in most places they had to make do with human-sized furniture.

  I moved with practiced stealth, although in that environment I could have gone crashing along with tin cans tied to my tail and no one would notice. Reaching the flicking tail, I pounced on it. Spats spun around so abruptly he bounced up, hissing at me as he drifted in air for a second.

  “What the hell oh it’s you.”

  I grinned. “Hi, Spats. How’s tricks?”

  “Not bad.” He coughed, turned his head and spat out a bit of shrimp tail. “Those finny bits always get me.”

  “Maybe you should switch to steak.”

  “Get real. There’re no steak places up around here. This joint only serves burgers, and they make ‘em way too salty.”

  “You should come down and cruise Steakmeister with me and Butch sometime.”

  Spats licked his whiskers. “Uptown guy. Doesn’t like me.”

  “Yes, he does! Come on, he’s here. Come say hi.”

  I led him back toward where I’d left Butch. I had just spotted an orange blob in the shadows beneath the tables when the music in the club got louder and faster. Lights swept the stage, cockroaching the dancers, who scurried off in all directions to disappear into cracks of darkness.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, and equivalents, Pulsar is proud to present the one, the only…Firefly!”

  The music became a low, heavy thumping. The swirling lights subsided until the dim orange glow of the stage’s safety edging was about all that was left. A figure emerged from the back of the stage, slowly swaying as it moved forward.