She jumped. Huge metallic boxes taller than she stood in ranks like soldiers, light glinting off their steel silhouettes. The space seemed occupied by the mechanistic Borg from the Star Trek franchise. The “resistance is futile” aliens.
Temple backed away and was pulling out the big flashlight for a better view when she heard something from far above her, what would be a second story or attic in a house. A faint squeaking noise. Or, a desolate meow? Thumps, footsteps and maybe worse followed. Louie! She had seen Louie, only now he’d apparently gone up the back stairs. Why?
Another meow came from above, this time a puma’s caterwaul, a long fierce growl changing into a wildcat scream, followed by a desperate feminine shriek. Electra! Then a man grunted and cursed.
Temple’s imagination went wild. Following the big flashlight’s broad beam, she backtracked to the stairs, then climbed the two flights of rickety steps to the top floor. Luckily, she weighed little and her flat slippers took her up the steps like a mountain goat.
She finally stepped onto the second story at the back of the building, switching to the tiny flashlight to be less noticeable, pointing it down to the floor, squinting down the hall between the abandoned antique mall cubicles, toward a black knot of figures gathered under the grotesque chandelier maybe two hundred feet away. The guttural buzz of lowered and threatening voices drifted back to her. And one higher, pleading voice. Oh, Electra!
She started forward, crazy, but she couldn’t ignore the danger to Electra and Louie. Besides, reinforcements were coming.
As she walked on silent slipper soles, she detected motion on her left and froze, taking out Hardy Boys flashlight as a weapon. It didn’t look like plastic at first glance.
About halfway to the figures ahead surrounding a light as if circling a campfire, she saw a dark, sitting cat, licking its paw.
Louie, that relaxed?
Then she squinted harder and saw…the dark color was brown, not black This was Ingram! That was what…who…she’d felt grazing her calves and giving her goose bumps as she’d left the Thrill ‘n’ Quill. What would draw an ensconced, only-indoor cat like Ingram this far from home?
Ingram leveled a bored yellow gaze at her and switched to grooming his other paw. What! All she had on her side was this couch potato bookshop pussycat, who had probably only used its claws to work out an errant knot behind its ears?
She sighed and edged forward. Weirdly, the electrified chandelier was lit. Murky light filtered down through the dusty loops and faceted pendants of glass. It looked like a light fixture snatched from Mephistopheles in Hell.
The chandelier barely illuminated what resembled a stage set in a dark theater. Four standing men surrounding a simple worktable and chairs. Two women sat on the chairs, the most concentrated light from above falling on their pale-haired heads like the spotlights used in Film Noir police interrogation rooms. Temple recognized Electra’s Bird of Paradise design muumuu, fading to pastel in the overhead light, as did her shadow-sunken features. Oh, Lord. The other woman was blonde. Oh no, Diane! Both of them, ex-wives of the dead man who’d dangled above this strange vignette at the top of the stairs only days ago…captives. Of whom? Why? What was happening here?
“I don’t have it, I’ve said that over and over,” Diane was telling the standing people, who must be the extortionists. Temple’s fuzzy focus indentified the silhouettes of the usual suspects, Punch and Judy, a.k.a. Punch Adcock and Katt Zydeco, Leon Nemo, and some other guy as tall and limber as Katt.
“Please let us go.” Diane was whining, pleading now. “I went through every damn thing, paper or property, relating to Jay in Dayton and gave it to my lawyer to forward to the attorney here.” Her blonde head swiveled toward Electra. “Tell them. They know you must have it. Don’t be a hero. They mean to hurt us.”
“I don’t have whatever it is. I don’t have anything from Jay,” Electra said through gritted teeth. “I tore my place apart, looking for your damn paper. I brought anything you might want. It’s all there. Let us go! Let us all go.”
“All go”? Temple thought the usage strange. Only Electra and Diane were on the hot seats. And what “paper” was so valuable?
Then Temple saw that the table held a big box of some sort. Maybe something found in one of the violated storage units below. A few white sheets of paper lay atop it.
“This is a freaking marriage license, lady!” one of the men shouted as he grabbed one paper to shake in Electra’s face. “Between you and the late Dyson. You think we give a damn about your marriage license?”
Leon Nemo’s voice had lost its forced joviality and was all anger and threat.
“No,” Electra answered, “but how would I know what you want? You won’t say what it is, it’s so secret. ‘Just the paper’, you said. Get me the right paper. It’s a license.’ What you’re holding is the only ‘license’ I have, except for four others like it.”
“We don’t want your driver’s license, that’s for sure,” Punch’s deeper bass voice said.
“What ‘four others’ like it?” Katt Zydeco asked. “All marriage licenses?”
Temple barely saw Electra’s shrug. “Yes. Marriage licenses. We can go and get the others. I had four other husbands.”
“You?” Katt’s jeering tone was not flattering.
“Forget jabbering with the old dame,” Nemo said. “She’s holding out on us. Let’s get down to business.” He slammed the palm of his hand against the box. It rattled and shook as Electra shouted, “Don’t!”
It rattled. It was metal. Not as big as the machines downstairs, though.
Punch stuck the box with his fist and it slid a bit across the table. Electra whimpered.
Temple moved closer, unheard, unnoticed, but seeing more clearly. The box sides weren’t solid. It was a metal fence.
Something in it moved. Something shadowy and alive.
A cat.
Temple felt sick. She’d always thought of Midnight Louie as her personal black panther with the street smarts of an undercover cop. His claws could disable a two hundred-pound man with instantly septic, six-inch long slashes that burned like the flames of hell. He’d come to her rescue more than once, smaller and underrated and fiercer than a Belgian Malinois used for K-9 duty. Heck, he’d take out the Malinois and his first cousin the German Shepherd too.
Now he’d been caught somehow, was caged and helpless while her friends were being brutalized by thugs. Temple had never felt the instant blind, unstoppable, defensive maternal rage that could lift cars off children, but she charged forward, immune to any personal danger, screaming, “Get away, you bastards!”
Her charge had the criminal crew turning wide eyes and mouths her way. Electra and Diane half rose from their chairs, their wrists visibly bound, but their shock and hope breaking the bonds of intimidation for an instant. The rope binding Electra’s wrists was loosely tied—the fiends—to the chandelier. As the late Jay Dyson probably had been. Only that rope had been taut and around his neck, not securing his wrists.
The only sound for a few seconds was the weak slap of Temple’s slipper soles on the wooden floor. Without her customary high heels, she sounded no more dangerous than a performing seal.
The captive cat in the cage produced another unearthly yowl. Louie used a spine-tingling Big Cat yowl when he attacked, but this cry ranged higher and higher into an ear-splitting banshee shriek.
The cat’s eyes glared red in dimness. With its back hooped, tail straight up, and hair standing on end, it looked like it had been electrified by lightning, an iconic black “Halloween cat”. Except it resembled a photographic reverse of a Halloween cat, for it was white, like a ghost.