I race to the talking carp pool as if it were a mirage of the Crystal Phoenix. It must be Louise! A live Louise! Well, it is a head lifting from the desert floor, and not by much.
I am a one-cat emergency technician team. Quickly, I assess the situation with a realistic professional eye. One kit down, pretty flattened. Just a few centimeters off from road kill.
Her eyes are glued shut from sand-dust. Her once coal-black coat is as mouse-colored as a computer accessory. She looks like a radiator brush that has been sent through a corkscrew backward.
Obviously, some good nursing care is needed, but theonly good nurse I know is my Miss Temple and she is miles away.
Looks like it is up to me. We dudes are not good at this TLC stuff.
I grit my teeth, bend down, and begin licking the dust off her eyes and face. Arrphg. Tastes like a gravel pie.
However, I come equipped with a tongue that is the equivalent of number 80 sandpaper. Do not call me Easy Rider, call me Rough Rider.
It is tough going. It strikes me that my task is not unlike licking afterbirth off a newborn kit. That is women’s work!
However, the hardened operative must be prepared to save lives, however necessary, as well as to kick posterior.
Speaking of kicking posterior, at length it becomes necessary for me to lick posterior … it is bad enough when I must do this chore on my own self.
However, in time I have Miss Midnight Louise shining like a new pair of patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Now if she can only make like a pair of shoes and get up and walk. Miracles of that nature not even a professional tongue can achieve.
At least her peepers are open and she is looking around. “What happened?” she asks, like they do on the TV shows.
“Well,” says I, sitting down and aware that my much-tried tongue would rather keep silent. “It looks like Miss Kathleen O’Connor ran off the road and took you with her. Apparently you were in the left saddlebag, which is under the fallen motorbike, so it is a wonder that you survived.”
“Your deductions are accurate only so far,” she retorts. Yes, even half dead, Miss Midnight Louise can dredge up a retort.
“I was in the left saddlebag, as you speculate, but when I sensed some trouble and peeped out, I saw Miss Kathleen ready to take a run at Mr. Max and his vehicle, and the semiautomatic she pulled out from her black leather motorcycle jacket. I decided desperate measures were called for.
So I scrambled out of the saddlebag onto the back of her seat—”
“You rode pillion on a speeding motorcycle?” I demand incredulously.
“I do not know what pillows have to do with it. It was as rough as a roller-coaster ride out on the seat at eighty miles an hour. But I managed to climb her back and rake her neck, thereby disrupting her aim and unfortunately her driving sense, sending her and the motorcycle and myself into an off-the-road soar that ended as you see it.”
I am speechless.
I sit down and manage to dig up enough spit to wet a mitt and sweep it over my worry-wrinkled brow.
I cannot believe it.
According to her testimony, Miss Midnight Louise has single-mittedly brought down Kitty the Cutter.
“Louise,” I say, when I think I can speak. “You are telling me that you stopped Kitty the Cutter from shooting Mr. Max?”
“That was the general idea.”
“Then you … you killed her.”
“No,” she says faintly. “I have never brought down prey that big. Maybe a bulldog or two—”
“I tell you, the dame is dead. Iced. Offed. I had to keep a coyote from eating the remains.”
“The same coyote you did your Karate Kid act on?”
“You saw that?
“Heard it. Thanks for the eyewash, by the way.” In the distance, I hear a car motor approaching. “We have to get you out of here.”
“ ‘We’ is not an operable option.”
“It will have to be.” I regretfully examine my rescue handiwork. “If you cannot walk, I will have to do the sled-dog routine. Too bad I rousted that coyote. He could be useful now.”
“I would never accept assistance from a yellow-bellied dog.”
“Dogs are not so bad once you teach them a few man ners.”
“Going soft in your old age, Daddy-o?”
“Quite the contrary. I am about to give you the rough ride of your life. Now keep still and think of England.”
“Huh? Why would I think of England?”
“I hear it is the thing to do in unthinkable circumstances.” With that I bend down and take the loose skin at the nape of her neck in my strong teeth.
There is only one way to get her off the scene of the crime that will soon be crawling with curious humans. I must make like a mama-cat and move my litter of one.
Chapter 38
… Ghosts
Max watched the ambulance attendants finally bully the loaded stretcher up the incline and toward the waiting open mouth of the vehicle’s rear. Its occupant was slid in as unceremoniously as a corpse slammed into a metal drawer at the local morgue.
In the momentarily lit ambulance interior, Max could see people bending over Kathleen, fussing, hooking, injecting, intent on coaxing life back until all options had been exhausted.
He had once bent over Kathleen. Only once, long ago. The memory seared like acid. What had been a moment of deliriously innocent guilty pleasure had become years of intense regret.
Would that regret finally die with her?
Max hoped so. He’d advised Devine to “get over it,” knowing that it had been impossible for himself. Maybe he could finally take his own advice.
Or find someone to make him take it.
The ambulance raced away screaming, the squad car ahead of it.
The fallen Ninja gleamed in the soft moonlight, elegant as a polished onyx tombstone.
Motorcycles were dangerous toys. Ask the man who had owned one. Helmets or not, admit you rode a motorcycle and your health insurance rates would soar. But Max wished he owned the Hesketh Vampire now, a fast, screaming motorcycle that would take him back to town as if he were mounted on a banshee, able to hear not one thought thanks to the distinctive high-velocity howl that gave the bike its macabre name.
The Maxima would not attract attention. It would purr back to town and move quietly into its preordained stall, like a docile horse. It would move to its imminent destruction, unnoticed, and shrink to a cube of crushed metal and glass and bits of cat-cut leather. It would have no history, leave no trace.
It was not interesting anymore.
When the lights of the Strip made a luminous dome on the black horizon, Max hit the number programmed into his cell phone and designated the drop point, the parking ramp of a major Strip hotel, in the slot marked for hotel executives only. It was always empty and no one questioned that.
Max walked out through the ramp, passing the occasional couple heading for their cars, too self-involved to notice him.
Sometimes it seemed too easy.
He walked the endless way to the Strip, amounting to maybe four city blocks in a town that didn’t sport billion-dollar hotels as big as airports. He caught a cab to within two miles of his house, then walked home like a sneak thief casing the neighborhood, avoiding lights, ‘jumping privacy walls, cutting through unlit backyards, until the last unlit backyard was his own. He entered the house with a key through a hidden door.
Safe at home. Just like a baseball player who’s hit the ball out of the park.
He moved through the large utility room, past the unoccupied maid’s room and bath, into the black-as-pitch kitchen.
Someone turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, a dimmer switch that made no sound and spun up to maximum brightness in one smooth flash.
Max spun around to maximum alertness, never taking a visitor for granted. Who knows. It could have been a ghost. He got one.
“I know I should have waited for you to arrive,” Gandolph said. “I shouldn’t have let myself in either. You might have changed the security measures.”