Cat in a White Tie and Tails by Carole Nelson Douglas

Author:Carole Nelson Douglas [Douglas, Carole Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 32

Bad Mews

Naturally, I have used my incisive incisors to spring the zipper on my new low-end carrier. The less time spent in Miss Krys’s truly ucky idea of a cat carrier from hell, the better.

By the time Mr. Max drives his exceedingly boring rented minivan into the Circle Ritz parking lot, I am free, black, and pushing twenty-one pounds of muscular male physique out of the first opening vehicle door. (My layabout lifestyle in the Windy City has added a tad of avoirdupois around my middle, but that is a French condition and cannot help but be an attractive addition.)

I make a four-point landing on the still-warm asphalt of my native soil: the mean streets of the country’s loudest and liveliest entertainment jungle, and inhale the hot, heavy air.

Aaah. Tar so melt-in-your-mouth sizzling, it could trap a brontosaurus; pad-searing sand; and egg-frying-hot concrete. I am back in civilization! Not for me dank, deserted warehouses down mean streets so dark, not a ray of ultraviolet neon can penetrate those Bastless byways.

Not for me petty thugs who cannot even make an effective and grammatical threatening phone call.

Here in Vegas, style rules. And I am just strutting my stuff toward the parking lot fringes when I come up nose to nose with one of the city’s least famous fixtures.

“Huh,” I say. I do not want to admit that I have hit a wall of pretty impenetrable fur and chutzpah. I am the expert at that. “Louise!” I cry.

I was about to make a pilgrimage to the Crystal Phoenix, but she pops out of the large oleander bushes ringing the Circle Ritz parking lot as though to pounce upon me.

“Where have you been?” I inquire.

“If you wish to sit your unprotected rear down on the sizzling hot asphalt, I can remain in the shade and regale you with a long and winding journey through Vegas hot spots more noted for sin than fever.”

Aaah. I have bounded onto the cooling dirt and sand surrounding the oleanders.

“How was Chicago?” she asks.

“All right. There is a lot less street-level action and entertainment value there. I could get all my exercise jumping up to hit elevator buttons in the high-twenties and up.”

“Home is the hunter, home from the five-star hotels and the lure of hot studio lights,” Miss Midnight Louise observes. “At least you managed to keep your two fragile human charges in one piece.”

“Them? Fragile? Yeah, they were facing family matters more incestuous than Ma Barker’s clan, aka clowder, but, Louise, you have no idea how imperiled I was in life and limb and carrier in Chicago.”

“Where is that leopard-spot carrier fit for a reality TV Chihuahua, by the way?”

“I left it as a headstone for a couple of Chicago gangsters.”

Miss Midnight Louise’s airy whiskers lift above her censorious features. (This censorious features stuff means she has a scowl on her puss that would sour a Green Appletini. Not to mention a decent dude who has only been doing his guard duty out of town.)

“Were they

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