“Apparently I am supposed to keep you safe at home. I should nail shut your bathroom window escape route, and see that you nevermore shall roam.” Here she frowns. “But you roamed all the way out to the Rancho Exotica. And you prevented a panther from being cruelly hunted down and shot. And your presence unmasked a murderer. So you ended up saving, in the long run, lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my. And you have in the short run, and on more than one occasion, saved me. What is a mother to do?”
(Here she fondly smooths the hair on my brow.)
“Obviously, Louie, you are not an ordinary cat.”
This she intones as if it were a revelation.
“Obviously, you are especially trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and irreverent. Well, maybe not ‘obedient,’ but I would not put that word into a wedding vow anyway. Obviously, dispensations have to be made in your case, and your case alone. Since you are now reproductively responsible, I suppose I will have to let you be about your business, no matter what the world at large will think.
“The others just do not understand. Rather than you having anything to fear from the world at large, the world at large has much to fear from you. You can take care of creatures great and small, including me. This is your mission, Louie, and I will not stand in your way, despite my puny fears.”
She bends down and kisses me tenderly on the right ear. Ummmm.
“Just promise me one thing, big boy. Take care of yourself too.”
Not to worry, Miss Temple. Is the Dalai Lama Tibetan?
Okay, she did not say it all exactly like that.
But it was close enough.
Carole Nelson Douglas Considers Louie’s Future
It’s hard to accept that Midnight Louie has actually learned a lesson from his latest case.
I thought he was far too feline to admit that he had anything left to learn.
Perhaps the lesson we could all learn is not to envy creatures apparently greater than we are. Often they face greater stresses as well. This goes for people as well cats.
I should mention that canned hunts are illegal in Nevada, although not in other states, so the Rancho Exotica is a totally fictional enterprise. But a state that boasts Area 51 and legalized prostitution ranches could very well spawn an illegal animal-hunting outfit aiming to satisfy monied clients. Those as appalled as Temple and I by the notion should look up “canned hunts” on the Web to find and support organizations that are working to ban the practice.
And real-life hunt breakers are more cautious about where, when, and how they disrupt a hunt, usually keeping a safe distance from their armed opponents, such as foiling mass bird shootings by scaring the prey into the air before the hunters are ready to shoot. I’ve researched nineteenth-century hunt parties in England and France for the Irene Adler historical series that I resume writing in September 2001, with Chapel Noir, about another infamous hunter, Jack the Ripper. These aristocratic country-house outings with their aura of upper-class civility destroyed an obscene number of animals: thousands upon thousands of birds and deer in a single day, often hundreds by a single shooter.
So given the assertion that many big cats who end up on canned-hunt ranches are less able to protect themselves than the average alley cat, it was only appropriate to let a decidedly “unaverage” alley cat take on the bully boys with the guns personally. Louie really dug into his assignment.
Some readers have fretted that Louie will not be giving (and getting) comeuppance far enough into the future to suit them. I hasten to reassure: Midnight Louie and company are launched on a twenty-seven-entry meganovel, and are less than halfway there.
That means that unsolved murders from past books and the characters’ ongoing personal quests are all part of an overarching background plotline that will be tied up by the series’ end.
For those who fear the Z book ending Midnight Louie’s many lives too soon, I can only remind them that Louie appeared in a miniseries of four romances-with-mystery before he launched this mystery-with-relationships sequence, so he’s unlikely to curl up his toes and say die at the drop of an arbitrary letter like Z.
Read on for a preview of
Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta
Carole Nelson Douglas
Available in August 2011 by Tom Doherty Associates
A Forge Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2746-8
Copyright © 2011 by Carole Nelson Douglas
1
Temple Barr, PI
Temple’s fingers were doing the flamenco across her laptop keyboard, writing an e-mail press release, with Midnight Louie, her twenty-pound black cat, playing his usual role of paperweight beside her, when her phone rang.
She jumped.
Midnight Louie growled in alarm and rose up on his forelegs.
Temple wasn’t the skittish type. You had to have nerves of steel to deal with the emergencies and sudden zigs and zags a freelance public relations person had to control, particularly in Vegas and particularly in these Internet character-assassination days.
She had a right to be jumpy after that international phone call twelve hours ago from the late great Max Kinsella, missing magician and ex-significant other, back from the presumed dead. He was even now flying back to Vegas on her say so, after he’d encountered into danger, death and memory-melting head trauma in Northern Ireland. She was picking him up at the airport late this afternoon.
So this phone call could be full of woe.
Or, since her new and true love and official fiancé, radio counselor Matt Devine, was flying back from Chicago in three days and had family there, he could be calling to report snags, feuds, or winning the Power Ball lottery.
Either way, she was now a nervous Nellie about the simple act of answering the phone.
No caller name popped up on the phone screen. Normally, a blank screen meant new business, but just right now Temple was a little shaky on dealing with voices from the Blank Nowhere.
She picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” Cautiously.
“Temple Barr?”
Relief. A woman was calling. The ghost from her recent past wasn’t calling back. Yet.
“Right,” Temple said.
“Do you mean this is the right Temple Barr?”
“Yes.”
“The Temple Barr?”
“I like to think so.”
By now Louie’s soft, growled warnings were a musical accompaniment. He knew when she was tense or worried.
“I didn’t reach that eatery out on Temple Bar at Lake Mead somehow,” the voice persisted. “It sounds like a kid is whining in the background.”
“No, you’ve reached me, the Temple Barr with two rs.”
The voice, both breathy and chesty, was beginning to sound awfully familiar. “Awful” in the deeply serious sense of the word.
“May I ask who’s calling, please?” Temple said. Her normal voice had a slight, hoarse edge and it was getting raspy with impatience and…dawning horror.
“This is Savannah Ashleigh.” Pause for effect. “The screen star.”
The second sentence was highly debatable. The first was…all too true.