Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple refrained from mentioning that one of his not-so-crack security men was hinting at a break in the case, and that she was hoping to be there when it broke.

  “I’m thinking that we might be better off anticipating the publicity. You, Ms. Wong, could go on Las Vegas Now! to discuss the transcendental elements of these misfortunes, the power of chi, the life force, and the disharmony of evil acts in all our lives.”

  “If we have to,” Kenny said, standing. “I’d like to go ahead with the week’s events. Carry on. It’s almost over, thank God.”

  He was the CEO. People nodded even if they didn’t look like they believed him. Wong and her contingent swept out. Ainsworth passed right by her chair, looking down his nose at her.

  Kenny Maylord stopped in front of her, shook his head, and said, “I appreciate what you’ve done, but a PR person can’t do much about murder.”

  Temple remained behind in the lonely assemblage of Formica-topped tables and plastic-upholstered chairs, Maylords’s equivalent of the servants’ kitchen and so very unchichi. No good chi here. But maybe, somewhere else in Maylords tonight. Could Rafi Nadir really be her salvation?

  Temple melted down the travertine trail and into the darkest, dimmest vignette she could find to await her date with destiny. Come to think of it, Rafi Nadir was proving to be as loyal and useful as Midnight Louie his own self. Grrrrrr!

  * * *

  It was almost midnight before Rafi showed up.

  Matt was almost on the air.

  Max was . . . hunched over a hot computer . . . or halfway to Ireland in his mind . . . not here.

  Rafi suddenly peeked out from behind the fake wall of a vignette. Nobody noticed him. Temple edged over until she stood on the opposite side of the wall.

  He glanced away. “You got the LVMPD on your hot dial?”

  She nodded.

  “Is she on your instant dial?”

  Temple nodded. “I know her number, all right, but I don’t want to use it except as a last resort.”

  “Ballsy little broad.”

  Temple nodded. “Where and when does this all go down?”

  “Out back. Midnight. You got backup?”

  “Ballsy big dudes.”

  “Really? Not police?”

  “I don’t do police.”

  “Neither do I. Anymore. Are you sure?”

  “No. But the price of not being sure isn’t worth it. This one’s for Danny.”

  He considered. Didn’t like it, but he considered. “For whoever you say.”

  Temple nodded. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Maybe I would. Let’s roll.”

  The back of Maylords after midnight was spooky. Empty. Dark. A loading dock with nothing to load. A parking lot with nothing to park.

  Temple lurked—that was the only word—behind the roll-down garage door, Rafi at her side.

  She held her suspiciously heavy fanny pack in her hand. From it had come a big black beret to cover her betraying red hair.

  She was as black as she could be.

  “What else is in there?” he asked in a whispered rasp.

  “Nothing. My . . . protection.”

  “Shit. Don’t tell me, girl, that you’re not carrying anything more than condoms?”

  “None of your business. And if I am, I’m qualified.”

  “You have a permit for that vague ‘protection’ of yours?”

  “I’ve shot it off a few times at a firing range.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “The few times?”

  “And shooting off at a firing range. This isn’t a firing range. There’ll be real people here. You better give me the gun.”

  She was silent.

  “Or I bail.”

  She gave him the gun. He tucked it in his suitcoat pocket like it was no more dangerous than a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. Or Dou-blemint gun. Gum!

  The sound of a serious engine growled like a Big Cat in the distance. Coming closer.

  Rafi nodded. “Behind the Dumpster. Quick.”

  Sure, she was always eager to Dumpster dive . . .

  Temple crouched behind the huge, dented wall of painted steel. Something on claws scurried away as she and Rafi settled behind the Dumpster.

  Not even the odor of orange peels left over from the blessing ceremony could cover the conjoined reek of dead cigarettes and food.

  “Everybody left,” Temple complained in a whisper after a while.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Won’t they miss you being on duty?”

  “Nah. I was let go yesterday.”

  “Let go!”

  “Yeah. That’s why we’re here.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here?”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, not out back here sitting on my heels inhaling dead shrimp. But you’re not supposed to be here! What good can you do?”

  “You don’t wonder why Maylords would let the hired security go a day early, before the Wong to-do is over and done with?”

  “Oh. They don’t want impartial witnesses.”

  “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.
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  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 wind-up 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 drug-stuffed 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.

  And standing solo in the center of the spotlight, bewildered or maybe just chagrined, was the film’s instant star: Rafi Nadir. He was holding up his bare hands, as something really small and dark hit the pavement between his feet. It was not furry for a change.

  Oh, no! Her pristine, hardly used Firearm Lite.

  Something spat up asphalt only two feet from her face. A bullet.

  Temple shut her eyes. The rider’s body jerked as more bullets kicked up asphalt all around them. Temple was in a maelstrom of heat and noise and vibration, hanging on and hoping to at least take out a Wicked Witch when she finally landed. The bike she was on roared into the desert darkness so near the Strip and all its works, so near the massive fantasy buildings squatting on ancient sands and calling themselves megahotels.

  She had glimpsed the biker’s nom de road on the Darth Vader helmet: Gay Blade.

  At least, Temple thought, she probably didn’t have to worry about being raped as well as killed.

  Just the latter.

  Which wasn’t as much of a relief as it should have been.

  Snow-blind

  “You jumped the gun.”

  I pick myself up, dust myself off, and see that I have made a five-point landing right atop a shiny black firearm that bears a sickening resemblance to one I have seen in my Miss Temple’s possession at the Circle Ritz.

  I do not pause to admit the accuracy of Miss Midnight Louise’s observation.

  Instead I observe twelve men in LVMPD vests advancing on us both, and the gun. And Rafi Nadir now making like a starfish flat on the asphalt. I find myself in the grip of an urgent feline need for a luxurious roll on that very asphalt.

  While I am making like the overbearing tar scent is catnip, I make sure to writhe and rub and lick any trace of fingerprints from the weapon in question.

  By the time the hobnail boots are close enough to kick us, I have spurted away, having ensured Miss Louise’s equally fast exit by giving her a high five in the face followed up by a low four in the posterior.

  Ma Barker and her gang have also engineered a discreet exit, leaving the humans to sort it all out for themselves, which is what they deserve after tonight’s boggled performance on all sides.

  One of the humans so being sorted is Mr. Rafi Nadir.

  That will have high-level repercussions, I bet.

  “Are you not worried about your roommate?” Miss Louise asks.

  “Not at the moment.”

  “She was abducted by a rogue biker.”

  “I have a feeling that she can handle him better than I can. I am more concerned that the DEA guys round up all of those buzzing bikers still trying to breathe free.”

  “Then we had better give them a hand.”

  So begins a long and lively session of the road game people call “chicken.”

  The Barker Gang and Midnight Inc. Investigations take turns playing apparent roadkill, sending biker after biker careening out of control and into the handcuffs of the Vegas police.

  When we have wiped up the parking lot of all the evildoers, the only thing t
hat remains untouched is a pale trail of cocaine. (For some reason this human drug of choice always reminds me of flea powder, so I would as soon sniff that line of powder as I would vermin poison.)

  Sirens wail in the distance as I approach Ma Barker, who has mustered her troops from the sidelines with Gimpy as her aide-decamp.

  “So, Grasshopper,” she says in a demanding maternal rasp. “All your big talk about relocating the colony in the convenient truck was pretext for using us to rat out a human smuggling operation.”

  I hang my head. Actually, it is a little muzzy from all that pavement hitting and not too happy about being upright anyway.

  “And when you told us to make ourselves right at home and paw the contents into prime napping conformation, you were actually using us to rake open hidden drug caches. ‘Scratching Posts Are Us,’ you said. ‘Dig in.’ ”

  “I cannot deny it.”

  “The thieves would have slit the seams anyway and the phony truck would have disappeared with them after the transfer of the goods.”

  “Yeah, but I wanted the ‘goods’ in free-falling condition, of use to nobody. It is bad, bad stuff, Ma.”

  “Not to mention stuffing. You used us, Grasshopper.”

  “Uh . . . yeah.”

  “Fine job. We worked off every dead claw sheath in the colony tonight, and in a good cause too. That dreadful white powder,” she adds, shaking her head. “It is like mainlining eraser dust, but these headstrong humans have no control. I had hoped to leave that behind in our previous territory, Grasshopper. You did not tell me we were moving into snow country here.”

  “A fluke,” I say. “We have made the case for the LVMPD, although we will get no credit.”

  Ma Barker touches the tip of one shaky mitt in the lethal white trail. “It does not do a thing for me. Why does it make these humans perform such capers, including the risk of trying to smuggle it?”

  “To each his—or her—own,” I say. “I wish I was a little bird on the wall of the CAPERS unit when Mr. Rafi Nadir is brought in for questioning.”

  “You wish you were a little bird?” Ma Barker’s disgust comes through loud and clear despite her weakened state. “What are you supposed to be? A parakeet? A canary?”

  “I am not colorful,” I say with great dignity, “and I do not sing for my supper. And were I literally a bird, I would be a big one. A big black one. A raven.”