“UFOs.”
“UFOs. So I’m to ‘sell’ an alien slide show?”
“You’re to sell a mystery.”
“That’s a disappointment.” She saw Farnum’s thumb click his creepy black box again and whipped her head around to spot the special effect it created. This second glimpse rang a bell in her cerebellum, or wherever memory cells abided, about an almost ancient local … and mark.
She pinned Farnum with her sternest look. She knew Vegas history better than anyone. “This site. It once hosted a Las Vegas landmark. In fact, Howard Hughes bought it before it opened, and when it was imploded, they used the footage in a movie called Mars Attacks! They called it the Landmark Hotel and it was a tower topped by a flying saucer and it was leveled in 1995. Are you telling me you have a freaking time machine?”
“Oh, no, Miss Barr. That would be an old, clichéd idea with little glamour and appeal.”
Temple gave a relieved sigh. She wouldn’t have to call for the men in white to take him away, after all, and she was sure he wasn’t a Man in Black. He’d never make the height requirement.
“Although time travel is closer than you think,” Farnum said. “What I have—what we have, is the latest in futuristic technology. I’ve created a stealth building that will soon be unveiled for gathering witnesses from the, shall we say, fringe scientific theory community. I have three thousand confirmed attendees driving and flying and possibly walking here at this moment. Also arriving will be media from all the alien-centered cable TV programming.”
“Alien-centered programming” sounded even more sinister to Temple. Was it a fancy name for mind control? Meanwhile, she needed to grasp what was going on.
“When were you going to tell me that the circus was coming to town? Never mind. So they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot and now you’ve erected a ‘stealth’ building on it?”
Farnum nodded soberly. “Night crews have been working on it here for months, not knowing the building goes into hibernation once they leave. First you see it, then you don’t.”
She stared at the dreary unfinished mass of the parking garage. “How was I supposed to market an invisible building? What kind of a convention would anyone hold in an invisible building?”
“You must never underestimate the power of the human imagination when it boldly goes seeking alien life-forms. We have Voyager cruising out beyond the solar system after thirty-five years and now Curiosity scanning Mars. Soon Las Vegas will share in the wealth and debut the hotel-casino Area 54—‘a little more far out than Area 51.’ My motto.” Farnum beamed at her.
“Beam me up, Scotty,” she muttered.
Too bad that was just an expression and there was no way for her to turn into a sparkly silhouette and disappear.
When it came to alien life-forms, Silas T. Farnum was a doozy.
Chapter 8
Unlawful Entry
If Dear Abby ever needs another secretary, I believe that I am now fully qualified.
Talk about standing by your human. I am the poster boy for that theme song. I am sure my off-camera antics yesterday morning aided Miss Temple in handling the family business that often can be so difficult for her kind. I myself avoid phone calls in favor of a nose-to-nose meeting of the minds.
I do know something about large, untidy families, though. I sympathize with my little doll, being born the only girl kit—and the runt of the litter at that—with four hyperactive bruiser boys for what humans call “siblings.”
I would call those brothers from the apparently savage and freezing stretch of northlands called Minnesota one thing: bozos. It is too bad my Miss Temple was not really born into la famiglia Italiana Fontana.
If anyone in Vegas could possibly fill my boots on protecting my little doll, it is a posse of Fontana brothers. Like me, they offer proper due respect to the females of our respective species.
My Miss Temple is no longer wishing to work as an official private eye, given the dangers she faced in her first run at the profession, but I cannot allow her to trot out alone on her snappy platform heels this noon. Errands for her public relations business are not life threatening, and she returned from her Wynn meeting no worse for wear and ready to serve me dinner.
Me, duty done, I head for the living room couch for the night, stretching luxuriantly on my back. My role as an action hero is tabled for now and I can become the usual domestic sofa spud.
I gaze up at the unique arched white ceiling, which reminds one of sand dunes and makes the daylight seem like reflected water. This is as close as I wish to get to that irksome invention called “beach.” Sand between my toes. Ouch! Sand dulling the polish on my concealed shivs? No thank you! Sand fleas hitching a ride on my shoulder blades just where I cannot reach … never again!
I curve into a comfy kittenish curl, since I am on my own and fancy-free. I twitch the only white feature on my whole black-satin bodysuit; my whiskers. A purr rumbles in my throat and rib cage. I am starting to dream about Topaz, the Oasis Hotel feline mascot, a sleek and nubile black-like-me beauty who—
Crash bang!
My world explodes. I do a double-axle twist. Ripping sounds up the back of the sofa raise the hairs on my spine from my hackles to the tip of my tailbone.
A speeding black bullet hits the sofa cushion beside me and ricochets off.
A few black hairs drift down into my face like falling eyelashes.
By now I have all four on the floor and am in full frontal battle mode. Only then do I realize this entire exercise in adrenaline has been a false alarm.
“Louise,” I admonish the smaller black furry form facing me across the coffee table, a pile of tumbled newsprint between us. “That is no way to interrupt your superior’s beauty sleep.”
“Beauty sleep! My superior! I will give you a beauty sleep with a slap across the kisser.”
My eyes widen. My mistake. I am not looking into the mellow yellow gold eyes of my partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc., but the green peepers that feature one fight-sagged lid and the snaggle-fanged visage of my long-lost and now-found dam, Ma Barker.
Damn.
“This is what you do on your off time?” she demands. “Lie about, you lackluster layabout? You would be a poor excuse of a leader if I ever abdicated from running the police substation clowder.”
“I was taking a well-deserved rest. I only yesterday defended my Miss Temple during an uneasy phone call.”
“No doubt a political solicitation.”
“And you cannot break and enter here in your rowdy, alley cat way, Ma. Miss Temple might assume I am sharpening my shivs on her French doorframes and upholstery. I have always been the perfect indoor gentleman. What is the rush here?”
“Look, Junior. I have not got all day. My gang is waiting for us and it is only hours before the light of day, and that kind of exposure is dangerous. Those alien visitors that drop unidentified flying objects into our innocent midst to trap us and bear us away for medical experimentation are back.
“And this time, they are after not only us, but bigger prey too. We have stumbled on something fishy in the way of murder most mystifying.”
Okay. My ma is a canny street fighter and survivor. Not every single black female of a certain age runs her own street gang. Yet she is of an older generation and has her stubborn misconceptions. I would not go so far as to say she is superstitious. I mean, it is pretty hard for her to avoid black cats crossing her path every which way but loose. Still, she does subscribe to some way-out ideas, like being a PI makes me a lazy lout and alien visitors are interested in a mass abduction of her precious clowder.