Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (45 page)

I move down for so long that I feel the cool dank air rising to meet me.

So does the scent of the alien weasels I scented in the closet, and the faintest sniff of calla lily.

I recall that the lily is the chosen human symbol of death.

Poor Louise. Snatched in her prime, preprime, really, and interred here in this forgotten cellar, with only weasels for pall-bearers.
If
they bothered to bury her.

I am smitten by remorse. Or is that smited? Smoted?

Anyway, I realize with a pang that had I not been distracted by human concerns and my Miss Temple’s safety, I would have been here sooner and perhaps could have prevented this tragedy.

While the feral folk wait without, I tunnel deeper within, afraid that our quest will have only one certain and sad ending. Ma Barker will not meet her only maybe grandkit. I will be partnerless again.
Hmmm
. The Crystal Phoenix will once again need a new house detective. Chef Song will lose a toadie!

I am nearly choking with loss (and dust) when I touch the cold stone of bottom.

I tiptoe around the rough-hewn stones. The scents have boiled down into an unappetizing stew.

Death leers from unseen corners.

I stumble over a sudden depression in the floor, wrestle with a metal tray until it is dislodged, fall a rib-bruising distance, and find the stingers of a dozen scorpions puncturing my poor hide.

I am done for! Dropped like Indiana Jones into a pit of vipers and vermin, with no way out.

“Get off me, you big oxymoron!”

Only one person — pardon me, individual — would berate me so subtly.

“Louise! You are alive!”

“Not by much, after you landed on me. How did you manage to remove the grating?”

“What grating?”

“As I thought. Dumb luck. Quick, I can climb to the top on you and then…well, I do not know if I can pull you out, so I will go to deal with the muscle upstairs and come back for you later.”

“Wait a minute. I can climb out on
you
, and then pull you out.”

“You would crush me, Popsicle. It is better I crush you.”

“Maybe we can both make it out,” I suggest, hurling upward until my front shivs catch on a stone rim.

Oooh! That stings.

So do Midnight Louise’s shivs as she ratchets up my spine to the cellar floor in a twinkle, just like old St. Nick up the chimney.
Nick
is right! Ow.

“You are not going to leave your old man just hanging here by his nails?”

Something comes hurtling down.

“There is a board. I will scout the stair to make sure your lumbering down here did not awaken all the dogs of war in the house.”

Dogs? I thought they were outside.

I manage to scramble up the board, failing to avoid every rusty nail in the dark. If I do not die of tetanus it will be a miracle.

I run and limp my way back up the stairs, running into a furry wall at the top.

“You were a prisoner?” I whisper.

“It suited me to let them think so.”

Un-huh. Likely story. “Who are ‘they’?”

“Your lady friend Hyacinth and her cronies.”

“She is not…a lady. Or a friend. Besides, our main goal is to leave here safely.”

“My main goal is to eat Siamese tonight.”

“Louise, there is more going on than your petty attempts at revenge. I have a whole cat colony waiting outside to back us up, not to mention the Big Cats.”

Louise is unmoved. I can feel that by the punishing twitch of her unconvinced tail.

“And your grandmother is waiting to meet you.”

“My granddam?”

The family tree will get them every time.

“That is right. I, uh, ran across her again tonight during my investigation.”

“You mean you ran and she found you. So where did you dig up the ferals?”

“Your grandmama is their head honcho.”

“No kitting!”

“I swear.”

“Well, I guess I could wait to make mincemeat of Hyacinth until another day. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and there is nothing colder than dead.”

“I will hear about your adventures later. Meanwhile, I have restored our old route into the place, which someone had carefully closed.”

“Then let us blow this Bastille.”

Bastille? For a moment I think Midnight Louise is referring to the dread Bastet, but the moment passes. One does not wish to invoke Bastet, even inadvertently, unless one wishes to deal with the goddess of cats since the days of ancient Egypt. My tip is: one does not want to deal with Bastet. Ever.

Once I have convinced Midnight Louise that family ties are more important than suicide missions, we rocket up the stairs.

As we pass through the broken-into door, though, my super-sleuth senses go into red-alert. I crush my curled shivs into Louise’s shoulder.

She would squeal protest, but I slap a spare mitt over her face. “Shhh! We are not alone.”

The kitchen is less dark than the cellar, but not by much.

It takes a few moments for our cellar-dampened senses to reassert themselves, but I can tell by the way Midnight Louise stiffens next to me that she too is taking the measure of the several unseen foes surrounding us.

Among the alien scents, I detect the ineffable perfume of the lady known as Hyacinth.

Midnight Louise turns her head to me, though her eyes remained focused on the smothering dark.

“If we close our eyes for an instant, and run, they will lose track of us,” she breathes into my ear.

It is a good stratagem. I nod so she can feel my vibrissae give assent, then shut my eyes and call the fury of Bastet down upon all our enemies.

Then I run.

I hear the soft pound of pads beside me…and behind me…and ahead of me on an angle.

The thump of meeting bodies erupts into an Etna of scalding hot fury and tufts of soft underfur floating like ash against my nose and pads.

Then I am galloping through the house, following a path of sheer memory and the glint of night lights on the suits of armor.

Something pounds along beside me up the hall stairs.

I head-butt the wall in the dark, eager to find the heat register exit.

Finally my muzzle pushes out and finds air instead of plaster and wallpaper.

I wiggle through, Louise on my tail.

Behind us the dislodged grating scrapes, and scrapes again and again, as a torrent of pursuers pours through the aperture.

I hear claws scrabbling on aluminum pipe.

Either Louise has surged ahead of me, or the rats are deserting the house to avoid the panting, slavering tide of unknown creatures that is on our trail.

It is too dark and confusing to worry about whether Louise is ahead or behind. I must boost myself into the confining vent pipe, then wriggle through it as if my life depended on it. Which it does.

Popping out into the night air gives me no rest. I hurtle down the thorny hedge to the grounds below, my own ingrown thorns out and snagging wherever they can to break what is more of a free-fall than a downward climb. Uh…never mind.

Something plunges earthward beside me. In the artificial night light of Las Vegas, I am happy to see that Miss Louise has managed to keep up with me. Or down, depending on how you look at it.

Once we hit terra firma, we leap up. A long sweep of lawn stretches between us and our hidden allies.

The whimpering and growling coming from the rock-park midway between the house and the gate tells me that the Rottweilers (whimpering) have been cowed by the Big Cats (growling).

However, even the best-laid plans of the trained operative can go awry, and my current awry comes plummeting down behind us: a ninja brigade of Havana browns as fresh from Cuba as a fine cigar.

Anyone who has not tangled with the breed known as Havana brown is unaware of the Bruce Lees of catdom. They are all muscle and silent, stalking pads. They wear their hair in a battle-ready buzz-cut and do not waste time on hollow boasts or warning howls.

So they are on us like tobacco-spit shadows, dark and almost liquid of motion.

I box one away, and then another. Beside me, Midnight Louise is similarly occupied.

We manage to work our way a few feet toward where our compadres await, but the Havana browns keep on coming, and those we knock down roll over and leap up again.

I do not know about Louise, but I am trying to head for a sheltered garden construction with vine-twined pillars and a latticed roof dripping hibiscus.

We will have more of an advantage against these numbers there than on open ground.

It is slow progress when you have to pause to repel another onrushing Havana brown every time you take one down for the count.

I am panting like a bellows as we near the edge of our island of safety.

“I have these three, Pop,” Louise hisses between pants. “You hide on the porch while you catch your breath.”

“It is not a porch! It is a pergola. And my breath has not run anywhere I cannot chase it down and get it back.”

After this speech, I do indeed seem to be out of steam.

Louise does some fancy footwork to come alongside of me. There are still about eight Havana browns circling tighter and tighter, their vibrissae lifted in mutual snarls, their canine fangs in doglike evidence.

I would say that it looks black for us, except that they are brown.

And before I could say that, we are suddenly attacked from above.

I see a huge tarantula spider — ten times the size of the big road-runners you glimpse in the desert — all fuzzy brown legs in a noxious cluster as it swings down from the roof above on an invisible rope of spider-silk.

Even Midnight Louise cannot keep a ladylike “Eeek!” from escaping her lips as the creature swings past us and to the ground.

I have been doing a rapid count and realize that I have only toted up five legs on the monster. It is handicapped! Spiders are supposed to sport eight legs.

Still, I shudder at its beady red eyes glimmering from the center of its bloated, pale body, at the dark furry legs churning as it rights itself and reveals….

“Why, Miss Hyacinth, I believe.” I am happy to see that while paralyzed with fright I managed to get my breath back.

Now I get it. When the evil Hyacinth leaped down her dark, dangling legs and tail looked like icky unshaven spider gams. Such is the coloring of the Siamese breed, dark at the extremities, light at the core. I wonder if there is any hope that this pattern might pertain to Hyacinth herself. I am immediately disabused of any such notion.

“Back off,” she hisses at the gathered Havana browns. “I will handle these intruders myself.”

She draws herself up until her back is an arch and prances at us sideways, her narrow face a mask of hatred and death.

Something slaps me in the solar plexus — Miss Midnight Louise’s right rear foot in a karate kick.

I rock over, gasping for my recovered breath, which is again AWOL.

“Outa my way, dude,” Miss Louise spits. “If this is the hussy that locked me up in the Marquis de Sade’s basement apartment, I need to have words with her.”

“Louise.” I can barely speak yet, and watch with horror as the two circle like prizefighters within an outer ring of Havana browns.

“Louise.”

Well, no one is listening but me, of course.

Hyacinth goes up on her toes, up on her razor-honed shivs that glint gangrene-green.

“Her nails,” I pant.

“I plan to nail her.”

“No. C-curare.”

It is too late, they abruptly stop circling and dash toward each other with ear-splitting battle cries. Black and cream and lavender-brown are a blur in the moonlight. Fur floats like feathers to the ground.

Then they are separate again, heads lowered beneath their sharp shoulder blades, glaring, circling, stalking.

“Louise.” I do not expect her to take her gaze off her opponent to so much as glance over her shoulder. But she must listen. “Her nails are painted with curare. You cannot let one pierce you.”

“Now you tell me,” Louise snarls unjustly. I have been trying to tell her all along. “No problem. This chick will not have nails to paint when I am through with her.”

Brave words, but how can one engage in a duel to the death without suffering a single scratch?

Although my kind, and even humankind, have always recognized that the death duel of two individuals must be left up to them, for the first time in my life I consider interfering with this untouchable ritual.

Louise did not know her opponent had a secret weapon. Although no one would thank me for it, especially Midnight Louise, I could jump Hyacinth from behind and pin her down. Unfortunately, I doubt Louise would take advantage of my self-sacrifice and run. So I would end up paralyzed spider meat for nothing.

While I am figuring out how to save Midnight Louise without her or me losing face, I notice, speaking of faces, that the Havana browns have turned a beiger shade of brown. Say…milk chocolate.

They are retreating, their ring growing wider and sparser.

I decide that my dilemma must have put a fearsome expression on my face, then decide to look over my shoulder.

It is a sight to uncurl the hair on a curly-coated Rex. Even I momentarily consider a craven retreat.

They come stalking up on us like Old West gunfighters: Osiris and Mr. Lucky and at their head Ma Barker.

The Big Cats place one deliberate foot in front of the other. Each pace covers two feet of ground.

“That is our cub,” Mr. Lucky growls with a sound like they use in movies to represent demons talking.

Even the evil Hyacinth pauses, her spiked hair wilting a bit.

Midnight Louise has not paid a moment’s heed to any of the action around her. The minute Hyacinth backs off, she is on her like a black tornado, feet whirring, fur flying from her shivs.

Hyacinth screams with fury and pain, twists like a pretzel, and rockets across the lawn to the house, driving the craven wave of Havana browns ahead of her.

Midnight Louise sits licking fiercely at her chest ruff, surrounded by tufts of cream fur.

I rush over. “Did she nick you? If we get you to a vet fast enough, and if I can figure out a way to tell Miss Temple you are a victim of curare poisoning — which I will, somehow — we can get you an antidote. If they have antidotes to curare in Las Vegas.”