Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (44 page)

More voices chimed in, sputtering through the static. Action.

She waited for a break and got on. “Molina. What’s going on at Baby Doll’s?”

“Perp down. Victim’s okay. She’s saying it’s the stripper killer.”

Molina hit the brakes so hard her passenger’s forehead tapped the windshield.

She made sure he wasn’t using the distraction to attack her, but he was listening as hard as she was.

“Victim is okay?”

“Yeah. She pepper-sprayed the guy” — Kinsella jerked, and she glared him to stillness — “to kingdom come. He’s out cold yet.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“Some DJ kid for the clubs. Tyler something.”

Molina gave up and pulled the car over to the curb, putting on the emergency blinkers. Tyler. Who’da thunk it? She had a horrifying suspicion who might have.

“And the intended victim? You got a name yet?”

“Tess, from what some people around here said.”

Tess?

“But it turns out it’s really Temple.”

Of course. The awful inevitability of it was almost blinding.

“Yeah,” the radio squawked. “That’s a first name. Temple Barr. Tiny little thing, but she put this guy down flat.”

The radio went silent.

“I think I’ll be going now,” Kinsella said quietly.

She looked over. The handcuffs dangled from one wrist, then the empty one was snapped on her right wrist, the left one jumped from his wrist to snap shut on the steering wheel.

It all happened faster than the blink of an eye, especially an eye controlled by a mind that was busy absorbing vast new vistas on a series of old problems.

“You bastard.” Her tonelessness made the word even uglier. “I ultimately would have had to let you go anyway. This time.”

He opened the door, jumped out, leaned his head back in a sliver of open door.

“I know you would have had to.” Kinsella rubbed his forehead, grinned. “But ultimately it’s more fun this way. You do still have the key somewhere on you, don’t you, Lieutenant?”

He slammed the door shut and vanished…only because she couldn’t move much to see where he had gone.

While she struggled to dig the key one-handed out of her rear paddle holster, fighting the damned seatbelt all the way, the radio buzzed with the happy crosstalk of high adventure and the taunting muted shriek of sirens speeding to the crime scene.

Kinsella had been honest about one thing: a woman in danger.

At least Temple Barr was just dandy, and neither she nor Kinsella would have her damage or death on their conscience.

That would be something in common with Max Kinsella that Carmen Molina absolutely could not bear.

Serial Chills

“I did not raise you,” my mother says, “to leave a lady lying in the street, even if she is human.”

“Look, Ma, you did not raise me, period. It was six weeks and ‘You are on your own, kit.’ Besides, I know my Miss Temple and she is fine, especially after we sang to high heaven to attract attention to her plight. I do not know that Miss Midnight Louise is fine.”

“Usually something ‘stinks’ to high heaven,” Ma says.

“Well, we were not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but it got the job done.”

We are trotting along at the head of a feline brigade, if a brigade can be as motley a crew as this is.

Only my mother’s stern matriarchal influence on the cat colony has permitted this rare outing en masse, so I am best off if I do not irritate the old dear too much.

“So this Midnight Louise is your kit, Grasshopper,” she says.

“We have not had a DNA test,” I grumble, “so I am not about to claim relationship. She was known as Caviar until some humans got the funny idea she looked like me and renamed her Midnight Louise. You know how it is, humans think all us black cats look alike.”

“Hmph. Caviar is a pretty fancy name for a nobody. I do not have any grandkits, that I know of.”

“Thank your lucky whiskers! Young kits today have no respect.”

“They did not in your day either,” says she with a sidelong glance. “This will be good for the colony,” she adds. “To leave the safety of their turf, to venture into the Dead Place. They were getting too complacent with the Fixers leaving them food.”

I can see that my mama is a leader of cats.

“The days of free-range cats are ending,” I say. “It is too dangerous out here and there are plenty of humans to be educated into giving us posh retirement homes off the street.”

“And you would be content to sit inside twenty-four/seven and watch the world through a window?”

“Sure.” Again I get the green sideways stare. “If I were retired. But I am a professional. There are not many PIs of my persuasion — although sometimes I think there is one too many trying to muscle into my territory — but for the average cat, which is everybody else but me, the domestic life is the best bet. Even dear old Dad has left the seafaring life for a sweet berth with some old guys who run a restaurant on Lake Mead. Heck, they even named it after him. What more could you want?”

“So Three O’Clock is nothing but a house cat. I am glad he left me for that calico floozy from the pawn shop.”

I am not about to touch parental history, particularly when it is mine, so I keep trotting and keep it shut.

The pale stucco walls of Los Muertos gleam in the moonlit distance like the white cliffs of Dover. I expect bluebirds any moment, though I have never seen such a mythical beast.

I could use a few helpful Disneyesque birds. They could scout the upper stories and peek in windows and then coming peeping back about what is going on to me.

When we get to the gate I turn to address the mob.

“Okay. Listen up. There are Rottweilers in there and they have a hair-trigger temper…mostly triggered by our kind of hair. We want to get in, and then up on whatever we can climb.

“Also, you will find that a couple of major players also occupy the grounds. They are our kind of folks, but they are not used to seeing us types close up and personal. They might mistake us for an appetizer in the heat of the moment. I know these dudes, but they do not know you. So keep your distance if you want to retain your whiskers and any other vital bodily parts.”

“These are the Big Cats?” asks poor Gimpy, who has managed to keep up with our march despite his desperately disabled leg. “We will see Big Cats?”

“Yes, but do not let them see you first. I need to explain our mission to them. I am hoping that they will keep the Rottweilers…entertained while we approach the house.”

“We will see Rottweilers?” Gimpy asks like a kit who thinks dragons are cool.

“The important thing is that they do not see us, kit,” I tell him. I cast a significant glance at Snow Off-white, who ankles to my side with a minor hiss.

None of this gang is eager to bow to my leadership, but since I know the way, and the Big Cats, they have to.

“Keep an eye on Gimpy when we get in,” I growl sotto voce to her.

“I am not a kit-sitter!
You
keep an eye on him.”

“You ferals need to look out for each other. Cooperate, or kiss your whiskers good-bye. When we get Midnight Louise out of that house of horrors, I will have the Big Cats tell you a little story about what intraspecies cooperation can do.”

“They are not so big.”

“You have not seen them yet.” I cuff her lightly to get her on the right track and turn back to Ma Barker.

“You want to take on the Rottweilers, Ma?”

“You bet.”

“Remember. Lead them to the arrangement of rocks and fountains in the middle of the grounds.”

“They should have park privileges? I would like to lead them off a cliff.”

“There is not much here in the way of cliffs, but if you get them to that place, they will wish they had a cliff to jump off of.”

“And the colony?”

“I would like to deploy them at high points around the house and grounds.”

“And you?”

“I will go in, solo. I am counting on backup when Louise and I escape that place.”

“You expect pursuit.”

“Yup.”

“Worse than Rottweilers?”

“Worse than dogs.”

“Hmmm. You are sure that you do not want me to lead the Rottweilers out into major traffic?”

“I do not want them hurt. They are only ignorant indentured servants of a corrupt administration. I just want them out of the way.”

“Mercy to dogs? You have been off the streets too long, Grasshopper.”

But I think that the old dame will do as I say, instead of as she wishes.

In ten minutes I am past the snoozing snakes, up Sleeping Beauty’s hedge of thorns, and doing the Twist to make Chubby Checker plaid with envy as I slither my way down the aluminum vent pipe.

I hit bottom…and a unexpected impediment.

The way is blocked!

I do not like the feel of this. It is something solid like…wood.

Yuck! It is the head of the dead dummy guy.

Well, I am not Woody Woodpecker so I am momentarily stymied.

Then I tumble. (I am after all, on the ghostly site of a once-proud dryer.)

Aluminum is no different from what they make some food containers out of, and I was busting into garbage cans and aluminum foil and food containers since I was a punk kit.

I manage to get my business end — my powerful hind legs — into position and began rabbiting away at the edges of aluminum surrounding the wooden noggin in my path.

I cannot say that it does not require time, energy, and rhythmic persistence, but in a bit I have managed to kick out a flange of aluminum, a most malleable metal, all around the blockhead.

Then it is merely a matter of drop-kicking the old oaken noggin to Kingdome come. Let us play a little ghostly touch football, Elvis!

The head pops out of my way like a ripe melon meeting a sledgehammer.

I am back in the closet.

But not for long.

The fact that the entry hole has been plugged leads me to believe that Miss Midnight Louise has been forced to admit her route of entry.

This gives me a chill. I do not like to think what it would take to force Miss Midnight Louise to do anything.

On the other hand, her presence here, if discovered, could have led to a search party.

I sniff the closet perimeter, detecting again the odd, musky, decidedly alien feline odor I sensed elsewhere in the house.

Just what does Miss Hyacinth use for henchmen these days?

The thought gives me another chill.

There is a lot about this place that gives me serial chills.

Then again, it could be the air conditioning.

Well, there is nothing like brisk activity to get the blood moving.

I try the door.

It is now locked, of course.

They are beginning to get me mad.

I sniff the perimeter again, hoping this joint is old enough to have an established mouse and rat population. Great chewers, they are.

However, I turn out to be depressingly alone in my incarceration. And I do so like it when the rodent population has done the preliminary excavating for a job.

I do discover, behind some musty satin and velvet capes, a heating register.

This is as good as a twenty-four-karat golden gate.

In no time flat, I have managed to dislodge two loose screws and have the grate askew in its frame. One last loose screw and it is hanging by one corner.

I gyrate through and find myself once again in the upper hallway, deserted by all except the ghosts from
Omen
movies.

This time I do not waste any (time, that is) exploring the ambiance.

I move, fleet and sure, through the cavernous rooms, past the guardian suits of armor, unabashedly sniffing like the lowest dog.

This time I do not turn and head toward the upper regions when I reach the crossroads to the kitchen but continue on the trail of roast beef, the occasional enterprising rodent, the strange feline scents, and a vague whiff of canna lily that can only betoken my darling…cohort.

As I suspected before, the kitchen is a large, old-fashioned affair with a door leading to a…butler’s pantry. And a door leading to…the outside garden. And a door leading to…a dining room the size and solemnity of a private medieval chapel. And a door leading to the…cellar.

Oh, joy.

Last time I went up and found magicians, Big Cats, and Hyacinth.

I will now descend and hopefully find…Midnight Louise.

Of course I must first open the door.

Breaking into a mansion has its drawbacks. Give me a one-room apartment any day.

There is a mitt-wide space under the door.

I stick my mitt into the dark.

When it is not cut off, I use it to nudge and wiggle the door. Sometimes these old doors are as loose as change.

In a couple minutes I hear a welcome click. A loose metal tongue has just given up the ghost.

Or, in this place, a ghost may have just given me entry.

You never know.

I edge through, pull the door shut behind me, thrilled to hear no click of true closure, and descend a flight of stone stairs in the pitch dark.

I am not sure why dark is considered pitch. It does not sing. It does not normally tilt, like stair risers. Anyway, pitch dark is considered blacker than my best formal coat, and so this pathway is.