Cat In An Alien X-Ray (A Midnight Louie Mystery) - Hardcover

Chapter 1

 
Conduct Unbecoming
I am running ears-back, footpads flat-out down a dark alley.
This is not normally a problem for lithe ninja me. My skintight, full-body black catsuit is next to invisible in dark narrow spaces, and my hidden shivs are primed to scale any porous material I encounter, including the careless wandering person in my way.
The only thing in my way in this alley is a blank brick wall. I make a hard right, striking sparks off concrete with my rear brakes, and splitting enough nails to visit a pedicurist in the morning, were I a metrosexual sort of guy.
Which I decidedly am not.
Another blank and topless wall forces me left, and then right again. I sense my pursuers gaining on me, but I have no idea who—or what—they are. Or where we are. It feels like I have been running like this for blocks.
I spy a bright pinpoint at the end of my tunnel, put my paws to the pavement, and rocket toward it with my patented burst of cheetah-level speed. Midnight Louie is no easy catch.
I crash through the bright light like a circus tiger through a giant paper embroidery hoop.…
Only there is no sawdust to land on, just another inescapable tunnel, this one all spotlights and aurora borealis.
My pupils have slitted needle-thin, but the light is burning so bright, I am blind as I fall through empty air into apparent nothingness, my agile spine spiraling down like a drill bit.
“Louie,” a voice calls, echoes.
Wait! Stop the action. I am being called back from the brink of annihilation by a familiar voice. My Miss Temple needs me. I cannot go splat on an unseen surface. I must fight gravity. My limbs thrash.
Then something from behind grabs me, shakes me, rattles and rolls me.
Never have I been so helpless.
“Louie.”
Wait! The voice is not Miss Temple’s. It is female but from another species speaking through my roommate’s usual whispered little nothings.
Who has the nerve to come between a guy and his girl?
I am shaken more softly, and the light fades into the dark gray of a room without light.
I feel my pumping limbs slow and slacken. Around me are dim familiar forms, the most familiar—and acting like it—is indeed my Miss Temple.
“Louie, you are just dreaming. Nothing is chasing you but the Sandman. Wake up. You’re tattooing my thigh with your thrashing feet.”
She is slipping her hands around my cushy warm midsection to heave it upright, and me with it.
“Sorry, boy, but that stings. You are off the bed for the rest of the night.”
I am ushered to the edge of the zebra-print spread and nudged until I have no choice but to puddle down to the cool wood parquet floor.
What a way to be awakened! Tossed out on my ear, although it is actually my feet that hit solid ground first, thanks to my native athletic ability.
I sit up and wash these exiled ears of the unfriendly decree from my very own roommate, whose bacon and backside I have saved on numerous occasions.
I am surprised to find my shivs still stretching and contracting, as if yet in that state of running for my life. I must admit I keep them highly honed.
They have never run so much as a nylon stocking (although women and particularly my Miss Temple do not much wear such things anymore) in my interaction with the human female population.
And I have never been kicked out of bed before. Is that a blow to a guy’s ego.
And I have never been so sure I was one dead mallard as I was a couple minutes before.
What a nightmare!
I shake my head. I must be slipping. Speaking of that, I decide to slip through the French doors to the small three-sided patio Miss Temple’s condominium offers. Perhaps the cool night air will soothe my ruffled feelings.
I stretch my frame full up to work the lever-style handle with my usual light-shivved touch and fall through to the stone patio beyond, turning to push the door gently shut behind me.
I turn to breathe in night air as warm as cream of potato soup. We are heading into a Vegas summer, when the temperature never goes on vacation, particularly during these global warming times.
The palm fronds fan across a bit of full moon, making a splendid postcard shot. The neighborhood is as quiet as a harried cat could wish. No dogs barking, at the moment. No tires peeling asphalt. At the moment.
I yawn.
And then the hairs along my spine stand up and salute.
Looking up through the palm’s fancy fans, I sense something hovering high above the scene. Some alert intelligence observing all, knowing all.
It is calling my name.
Louie.
My back twitches.
Louie. Come here.
No way.
Rise and climb.
It is not morning, and even if it was, I do not then rise and do anything except stretch and scratch my hard-to-reach places, which are none of anyone’s business.
I stare upward anyway. Perhaps I will spot a lazy fly to take down. I need to restore my Great Black Hunter reputation after undergoing that craven dream sequence.
Yet, all my fly-catching instincts are telling me that something big is up, and not only up, but up there, in the vast Midnight Blue yonder.
Louie, do not fight my influence.
I cannot shake that unspoken “voice” in my head. This is more disturbing than any nightmare.
Or … am I hearing the moon?
That is not such a crazy notion. My kind are creatures of the night. We court and sing by the light of the moon. And hunt. Some writers have fancied that all of us leap up to the moon every night. (I do not know why we would. If it is indeed made of green cheese, it would attract taste bud–challenged rats, not cats. On the other hand, a planet-wide rat-chasing is an excellent fitness routine.)
Louie. Come up.
Manx, that moon is insistent! You would think it is Miss Midnight Louise, my liberated and obviously misbegotten (by somebody else other than me) would-be daughter.
The light dawns. That phrase is a metaphor, not a descriptive fact. A metaphor is a … sort of alias.
I leap to the palm tree trunk and ratchet up its scabrous curving height until I can leap to the frond that brushes the Circle Ritz roof. I slide down its bendable length, using my weight, and leap onto the patio three stories above my Miss Temple’s place, a perfect four-shiv-point landing.
This equally small space puts me face-to-kisser with two round blue moon-shaped orbs, the slightly crossed eyes of Miss Electra Lark’s reclusive, exclusive so-called sacred cat of Burma.
Her name is Karma, and she likes to play with everything from past lives to future predictions.
To add to my annoyance after climbing up to the penthouse level to join Miss Mystic Muse on her Juliet balcony, she does not even invite me in.
“You must stay out here, Louie. Miss Electra Lark has insomnia and just now fell asleep,” she explains. “It was bad enough that I was drawn outside by the moon tides. I had to ease the door shut one toe at a time.”
Insomnia is an inexplicable malady to me. I can fit in a catnap anytime, anywhere, and am about to doze off right here and now from boredom while Karma proceeds to extol the glories of the night sky.
“I know you are at home in the moonlight, Louie, but do you ever look up from your crude expeditions for prey and playmates to contemplate the vast clockwork motions of our universe?”
I am usually too busy looking down to make sure I do not lose my footing on whatever wall I am using for a serenading stage.
“Do you never sense, Louie, the presence of some thing, some entity, far larger than our petty struggles to survive?”
Uh, yeah. Like Animal Control.
And what is this “our” petty struggle to survive? I doubt Karma has ever set one of her sacred white-tipped feet out of the penthouse apartment, other than onto this tiny balcony.
“Do you not think sometimes, Louie…”
The long pause after that sentence is getting to be insulting.
“… that an entire universe of wondrous entities hovers just outside the reach of our hearts and minds?”
And with the defunding of the NASA programs, they can just stay out there hovering undiscovered to their hearts’ content.
“Have you heard of astral projection, Louie?”
Her baby blue gaze leaves the heavens to finally focus again on my lowly self.
“Uh, yeah.” Hey. I am the quintessential dude on the street and the Strip, supposed to be a hip cat up on every new wrinkle in this old town. I need to step up to protect my rep. “I hear that some venues are using holograms of dead superstars like Elvis as tourist attractions. Boogie with Bogey. Get down with James Dean. Mambo with Marilyn.”
“Not holograms, Louie! You have such an impossibly material soul.”
“Holograms are not material. You cannot get more ethereal than being a projected image of yourself.”
“Actually, these crass entertainment technologies do touch on the magic of astral projection. I never need to leave my simple home here at the Circle Ritz—”
Hey! It is a penthouse. And you are the landlady’s prize trust fund baby. I decide to tell her a thing or two for making me sit here to get drenched in mystical mumbo-jumbo.
“I hear Miss Electra Lark,” I say, “has endowed an entire cat shelter to ensure you have ‘most favored nation’ status there should she exit for eternity before you do.”
Karma sighs. Yes. Like a dog. “That is a sweet but useless gesture. I am the result of a thousand reincarnations. My heart will go on.”
Apparently, the ditsy New Age brain too.
Karma is now subtly swaying as a deep purr vibrates her entire body to the ends of the long fine hairs in her ears.
I long to tell her that humans have clever battery-run devices to clear that clutter.
“Before many days are past,” Karma warns in her lowest, most annoying tone of superior knowledge, “you will see signs and portents in the Las Vegas night sky.”
Right, the Treasure Island curbside volcano spitting fake fire far into the dry desert air.
“You will face alien abduction.…”
“That already happened to me in Chicago, where the mob is an entire other species of lame.”
“You will dance with the dead down a ten-story mountain.…”
Manx, is this lady on another plane, probably a discontinued SST! Nobody measures mountains in stories, but in feet.
Karma condescends to slit open one peeper. “That is a metaphor, Louie.”
“Metaphor, mountain, right. All this is really interesting, Karma, but I have some bothersome, buzzing houseflies to catch on the first floor.”
And a few zzzzz’s.
“Duty calls,” I say, braving the tickle of fronds as I leap onto the palm tree trunk and ratchet back down to my quarters.
“You are due for a great fall,” Karma’s fading voice calls as I flee.
I am not worried, although her whines of gloom and doom and my hasty retreat cause me to lose two nail sheaths on the way back down.
How come the mighty Karma did not predict that?

 
Copyright © 2013 by Carole Nelson Douglas