She sighed and edged forward. Weirdly, the electrified chandelier was lit. Murky light filtered down through the dusty loops and faceted pendants of glass. It looked like a light fixture snatched from Mephistopheles in Hell.
The chandelier barely illuminated what resembled a stage set in a dark theater. Four standing men surrounding a simple worktable and chairs. Two women sat on the chairs, the most concentrated light from above falling on their pale-haired heads like the spotlights used in Film Noir police interrogation rooms. Temple recognized Electra’s Bird of Paradise design muumuu, fading to pastel in the overhead light, as did her shadow-sunken features. Oh, Lord. The other woman was blonde. Oh no, Diane! Both of them, ex-wives of the dead man who’d dangled above this strange vignette at the top of the stairs only days ago…captives. Of whom? Why? What was happening here?
“I don’t have it, I’ve said that over and over,” Diane was telling the standing people, who must be the extortionists. Temple’s fuzzy focus indentified the silhouettes of the usual suspects, Punch and Judy, a.k.a. Punch Adcock and Katt Zydeco, Leon Nemo, and some other guy as tall and limber as Katt.
“Please let us go.” Diane was whining, pleading now. “I went through every damn thing, paper or property, relating to Jay in Dayton and gave it to my lawyer to forward to the attorney here.” Her blonde head swiveled toward Electra. “Tell them. They know you must have it. Don’t be a hero. They mean to hurt us.”
“I don’t have whatever it is. I don’t have anything from Jay,” Electra said through gritted teeth. “I tore my place apart, looking for your damn paper. I brought anything you might want. It’s all there. Let us go! Let us all go.”
“All go”? Temple thought the usage strange. Only Electra and Diane were on the hot seats. And what “paper” was so valuable?
Then Temple saw that the table held a big box of some sort. Maybe something found in one of the violated storage units below. A few white sheets of paper lay atop it.
“This is a freaking marriage license, lady!” one of the men shouted as he grabbed one paper to shake in Electra’s face. “Between you and the late Dyson. You think we give a damn about your marriage license?”
Leon Nemo’s voice had lost its forced joviality and was all anger and threat.
“No,” Electra answered, “but how would I know what you want? You won’t say what it is, it’s so secret. ‘Just the paper’, you said. Get me the right paper. It’s a license.’ What you’re holding is the only ‘license’ I have, except for four others like it.”
“We don’t want your driver’s license, that’s for sure,” Punch’s deeper bass voice said.
“What ‘four others’ like it?” Katt Zydeco asked. “All marriage licenses?”
Temple barely saw Electra’s shrug. “Yes. Marriage licenses. We can go and get the others. I had four other husbands.”
“You?” Katt’s jeering tone was not flattering.
“Forget jabbering with the old dame,” Nemo said. “She’s holding out on us. Let’s get down to business.” He slammed the palm of his hand against the box. It rattled and shook as Electra shouted, “Don’t!”
It rattled. It was metal. Not as big as the machines downstairs, though.
Punch stuck the box with his fist and it slid a bit across the table. Electra whimpered.
Temple moved closer, unheard, unnoticed, but seeing more clearly. The box sides weren’t solid. It was a metal fence.
Something in it moved. Something shadowy and alive.
A cat.
Temple felt sick. She’d always thought of Midnight Louie as her personal black panther with the street smarts of an undercover cop. His claws could disable a two hundred-pound man with instantly septic, six-inch long slashes that burned like the flames of hell. He’d come to her rescue more than once, smaller and underrated and fiercer than a Belgian Malinois used for K-9 duty. Heck, he’d take out the Malinois and his first cousin the German Shepherd too.
Now he’d been caught somehow, was caged and helpless while her friends were being brutalized by thugs. Temple had never felt the instant blind, unstoppable, defensive maternal rage that could lift cars off children, but she charged forward, immune to any personal danger, screaming, “Get away, you bastards!”
Her charge had the criminal crew turning wide eyes and mouths her way. Electra and Diane half rose from their chairs, their wrists visibly bound, but their shock and hope breaking the bonds of intimidation for an instant. The rope binding Electra’s wrists was loosely tied—the fiends—to the chandelier. As the late Jay Dyson probably had been. Only that rope had been taut and around his neck, not securing his wrists.
The only sound for a few seconds was the weak slap of Temple’s slipper soles on the wooden floor. Without her customary high heels, she sounded no more dangerous than a performing seal.
The captive cat in the cage produced another unearthly yowl. Louie used a spine-tingling Big Cat yowl when he attacked, but this cry ranged higher and higher into an ear-splitting banshee shriek.
The cat’s eyes glared red in dimness. With its back hooped, tail straight up, and hair standing on end, it looked like it had been electrified by lightning, an iconic black “Halloween cat”. Except it resembled a photographic reverse of a Halloween cat, for it was white, like a ghost.
The scene and sound were so unearthly three men and three women around the table were all frozen, as if posed. Everyone’s eyes watched the cat and the cage. Everyone’s hands but hers were clapped to their ears.
Temple wondered what exactly she was going to do when she reached them all, hit Nemo with her tote bag and kick Punch and Katt in the shins with her floppy slippers?
The caged cat howled again.
Temple could only stop her insane charge by throwing her arms around Electra on the nearest chair, pulling her down to the stability of the floor, both of them falling backwards, away from the scary down-slide of steps to the first floor. Diane crawled on her knees to join them.
Another noise, like the power tools Temple had seen in the basement grinding away added to the cacophony. The double wooden doors at the building’s front shattered and burst open. Every eye focused there. Something big crashed through the opening in a blaze of light.
Temple made out the front grille of a car jerking up and down as the tires climbed the first few steps, the vehicle’s body shaking and its bouncing, blinding headlights pinning everyone where they stood, or had fallen.
Its front wheels crashed through the steps a third of the way up.
Temple saw the driver’s side door fanning open and a silhouette stepping out even as the motor died.
She sensed a silhouette, a shadow evading the gathering at the top of the stairs, sliding past her and slipping down the long dark hall behind her as she struggled to rise and help Electra up.
Below, a moving narrow black crack started between the headlights and snaked below the left headlight on the car’s nose. The blot of black reared up and up in the figure of a hunched demon from a horror movie, an image projected and magnified by the light behind it, stretched up as a huge distorted shadow climbing the stairs. An image that resolved into the figure of a giant Halloween cat about to cast them all in shadow.
“What the hell?” Nemo yelled.
The caged cat shrieked again. “Punch, shut up that cat.”
“Shoot the cat in the cage, boss?” Punch asked. “Those headlights. I can’t focus—”
“Give me the gun,” Katt said.
“Karma!” Electra wailed, gripping Temple’s shoulders. “Karma.”
Temple could only think they needed to call on more than fate.
But apparently it was effective.
She sensed or saw something in the absolute dark behind the invading car, like heat rising and distorting the air, a sort of visual storm surge along the floor that was dividing around the stalled car as the blurred mass and motion came racing toward the top of the stairs, multiplying into individuals as it neared.
Tem
ple thought of the rats leaving Hamlin, but these were cats. A wind of cats, a tsunami of fur and claws and nerve-chilling howls swept up from the front stairs below. The first at the head of the pack to come into focus was black, but it wasn’t Louie. It was a true scary Halloween cat from Hell with a raggedly coat and a mauled ear and one eye half shut.
It leaped straight for the table and the others came washing over everything behind it.
Washing like water or a strong wind, yes. Temple felt a chilling shiver of something cold passing through her even as running cats bumped her legs and arms as they leaped to the table and then up and over the shoulders and heads of Leon Nemo, Katt Zydeco, and Punch Adcock.
The chandelier above swung slowly like a possessed hangman’s noose, its weak light flickering.
Temple looked up, horrified. She saw every thick crystal branch was occupied, ornamented, by cats. Black cats, white cats, gray cats, yellow cats, brown-striped tabby cats, calico cats, no doubt T.S. Eliot rum tum tugger cats, maybe even the Cheshire Cat.
And then all these cats with claws out dropped down like bats upon the flailing hands and shrugging shoulders and confused faces of Leon Nemo, Katt Zydeco, and Punch Adcock as they joined in the blurred flow of…entities down the long dark hall presumably to the back stairs and out into the warm Las Vegas night.
“What’s going on with the air-conditioning?” Nemo demanded, frowning and batting away invisible webs. “Who let in that mangy pack of cats and spooked them?”
Temple realized then that nobody had seen the huge confluence of cats she had, but had certainly felt it.
“Get that guy,” Nemo ordered, pointing.
Temple looked down the stairs and definitely saw, not a fading-away figure and not an oncoming mystical cat, but an energized man charging the stairs like a Navy SEAL. He leaped over the broken planks and his footsteps thundered up the remaining steps. The bill of a gimme cap kept his features shadowed despite the chandelier’s milky light.
He pounced to kick Nemo’s feet right out from under him. Leaning back from Punch’s ham-sized fist, he delivered a roundhouse to the cheekbone that spun the hefty ex-boxer down a couple steps. Katt Zydeco, trying for a karate kick, had her suspended leg twisted and fell face-first to the floor.
The mystified threesome lay grunting, some from tiny fiery surface wounds inflicted by the claw-driven bounds the recent mass exodus of a few feral and many ghostly cats over their epidermis.
Was this Nine Lives moment a hallucination? Temple wondered. Her hallucination? Was she getting psychic as well as punchy?
Then the martial arts guy doffed the ugly cap, and grinned.
“Matt,” Temple said, even more mystified. “How did you end up here?”
Everything in this murky scene was abruptly stage-lit as several twin orbs of bright light breeched the open doors and entered to hover eerily around the stalled white Probe, the black of night behind them. Then the blurred and light-bleached figures swarmed past the beached Probe as they too charged the stairs.
Were the debunked Las Vegas strip UFOs, laid to rest in the recent Area 54 affair, actually real and these newcomers the floating armada’s crews? No. Temple remembered shiny black Tesla sport cars were electric and arrived as silently as gliding alien ships…or certain Vegas “Family” members turned into circling vultures.
Arriving Fontana brothers cooed Italian who-knows-what endearments as they dusted the ladies off, which was a bonus for suffering the night’s terrors, and promised soothing limo rides to police headquarters.
They promised the same rides (without the soothing) as they helped Matt secure Nemo and his downed and dazed underlings. The brothers produced cool, matte-black steel handcuffs that matched the Family Fontana Berettas. They bound the cat-napping crew in uncomfortable, contorted positions on the dusty, gritty floor while Julio speed-dialed Lieutenant C. R. Molina.
Matt pulled Temple, then Electra and Diane, away from the dusty, gritty floor.
Temple grabbed Matt’s hand and said one word. “Louie.”
He turned to the table, then carefully righted and lifted the cage thrown to the floor in the assault.
Inside was…not Louie, but a serene cream-colored, long-haired cat with snow-white paws and a light brown mask that emphasized unearthly blue, blue eyes.
“Karma!” Electra bit her lip, her own eyes luminous with tears. She opened the cage door to stroke the silky fur. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Temple,” Matt said softly, only to her, “I thought I’d lost you. That can never happen again.”
His sentiment was wordlessly echoed by a velvety phantom brush around her ankles. She didn’t need to look down. You-know-who had shown up at last.
So, say…Temple was a modern woman. Modern women deserve modern men. She could safely swoon now, knowing her boys, Matt and Louie, were safe. And knowing she’d take out anyone who’d threaten the life and loves she’d built for herself.
But she didn’t feel like it. Not in the least.
42
Killer Karma
I must say that Karma has mighty potent…well, karma, but it was I who roused the cat clowder, which was the only physical force present. I could see my Miss Temple sensed Karma’s invisible magnification of feline force. She may find her Inner Cat at that.
For once, I watched the action from the fringes.
When things have calmed down, I survey the situation. I showed up late because I had to give a high-five of the Front Four sheathed shivs to Ingram for leading my Miss Temple to the rendezvous while I was herding cats from the clowder to the scene. We all know how hard herding cats can be.
Ingram has headed home. He will be able to slip back into the Thrill ‘n’ Quill unnoticed when Eduardo visits to ensure Miss Maeveleen is undisturbed and closing up shop for the night. For “owners”, people sure are dim about what their cat companions are thinking and doing.
Whatever Karma conjured, it was a first-class special effect befitting the most spiritual cat breed (excepting the Egyptian Mau).
The Sacred Cats of Burma are famed for defending a Tibetan monk when their temple was raided ages ago. Only two of their kind survived in Europe after World War II, one male and one female, luckily or unluckily, depending on one’s interaction with Karma. She is of the revived Western branch of the breed, and mighty snooty about her exclusive line.
She does seem to have a smidge of astral projection talent, I confess. I suspect that Ma’s clowder was enhanced by some such Eastern out-of-body hocus pocus to produce the river of feline vengeance on Karma’s behalf.
As for the cheesy “Cat signal” using the Probe’s headlights to project a twenty-foot-high Halloween cat silhouette like the Batman signal in Gotham, I know the usual suspect for that.
What a drama queen! Females!
I realize Miss Midnight Louise, miffed because I assigned her to follow “dull” Mr. Matt, took advantage of the situation to grab the limelight as well as distract the villains at the top of the stairs. And what about Mr. Matt’s NASCAR performance, huh?
I will still have to have a word with my junior partner when all the dander settles.
Whatever or however, tonight was a fine performance by all felines involved. For me, it was also good preparation for directing the new cat food commercials. Anonymously, of course. I do not need credit. Just control.
Julio is going to explain to Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina that the captives were cut when they evicted resident vagrants and feral cats that had inhabited the abandoned building’s basement.
Good luck with that story. It will not fly any better than the recent UFOs on the Las Vegas strip rumor.
When I show up after the main action, I cannot say I relish my little doll’s saltwater on my relatively skimpy ruff, a poor thing, but my own. She should know by now I am her go-to guy, even when I do not put in a mind-rocking personal appearance.
With Mr. Matt there to hold and shelter and admonish Miss Temple for intemperate risk-taking behavio
r, I feel my role is—gasp—redundant. I am expecting to put up with a lot of that after the imminent nuptials.
It is at times, perhaps, the better part to be an invisible influence, which Karma well knows.
Miss Electra is repeatedly kissing Mr. Matt’s cheek, calling him “my hero”, and assuring him that her old Probe crashed upon her newly acquired stairs is of no account. In fact, both needed replacing and she will now save a bundle in demolition and hauling charges.
He is managing to accept her gratitude while hanging on even tighter to my Miss Temple. She is fretting about what Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina will say. Or ask. Ask her and ask him.
Such sweetness and light gives me a tummy ache, so I withdraw unnoticed back to the fringes. Ma Barker and I sit together in the shadows, watching the mopping-up operations, which consist of patrol officers taking Nemo, Adcock, and Zydeco away.
The third man slipped away down the back stairs, but that being such a classic film noir title, The Third Man, I am okay with letting him go, especially as I know his size, gait, and scent. I will be ready for him next time if he is so foolish as to enter my territory again.
“I am surprised, Grasshopper,” Ma muses, sounding contemplative. If you knew Ma, you would know how out of character contemplative musing is. “I am surprised you were content to merely sound the alarm and sat back to leave matters to your sponsors and my Las Vegas Cat Pack.”
“If I help my clients too much and too often and too openly, they will not take pride in their own prowess. They will not believe they have such a thing. There are times when a guy-guy must step aside and let events happen for themselves. It is not about claiming credit, it is about the outcome.”
Ma nods her scruffy head. Being a feral female is a tough—and usually not a long—life. Ma has held our gang together for longer than most, but it has taken a toll on her health and looks. Not her attitude, though.
“What do you make of that bit of folderol-spouting fluff? Karma Chameleon or whatever, some fancy purebred hokey name? She insisted on telling me I had used up eight-and-a-half of my lives and should think about retiring while I can.”
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 29
