The frequent blows pause. “Grasshopper?” a raw voice questions.
I am too aghast to answer, but back off, dodging a finishing swat.
“Ma?” My voice trembles, but not from emotion. I am still mad about those double-paw smackdowns she gave us kits when we did not obey, even if she was right.
“You are already short of wind,” Ma is muttering, as I see her pink tongue in the moonlight, wiping off a bloody claw. “Too many gourmet meals from a can.”
“What is with the head wounds?” I counter. “I could have been an innocent bystander.”
“A crime has been committed here. There are no innocent bystanders.”
I search for a comeback while licking my own wound. Single. She got me only once.
Another voice interrupts. “I am the innocent bystander.”
We both turn to the open balcony door. Framed by moon-silvered white-painted wood, Karma sits as calm as a show cat on a photographer’s background. Her Serene Highness has tucked her white-gloved paws under her soft, long coat like a monk’s hands into his sleeves. Not a hair on her pale head is mussed, and by night her heavenly blue eyes are mere sapphire rings around her enlarged black pupils.
I am struck dumb.
But, then, Karma would say I had been born that way.
The Sacred Cat of Burma seems to radiate light, and in that glow I see Ma Barker clearly, her scruffy, raccoon-ravaged, rusty-black best coat, her half-mast left eye and moth-eaten ear edges, her scarred muzzle.
That is what one gets for nine years of running the biggest, toughest feral cat clowder in Vegas. She is one awesome dame.
“Sorry, Ma,” I mutter under my tongue as I smooth a ruffled jet-black front spat. “I did not expect to see you here. Must be major clowder business to bring you from the police substation.”
Karma emits an almost inaudible spurt of purring, always happy to hear me eat crow. Or that abominable health food, Free-to-Be Feline, Miss Temple lavishes on me. Luckily, the clowder loves the stuff and I see they get all they can eat. I am quite the philanthropist when it suits me.
“This is most convenient, Louie,” Ma says, settling into her bony haunches like a granny into a rocking chair.
I am sure that she would like grandkits from my superior line of her younger genes, but Miss Midnight Louise, if she is my daughter, is “fixed” and proud of it. And I suffered a certain neutering procedure, not usual, that disabled my ability to reproduce, but left all my working parts intact, known among people as a vasectomy. (For graphic details on how I managed to get what I call “a license to thrill” for life, you will have to consult an earlier volume of my adventures, Cat in a Flamingo Fedora. Yes, there was a flamingo-pink fedora involved that I momentarily was forced to wear. Every freedom has its price.)
“So why are you here at the Circle Ritz penthouse, Ma?” I inquire casually, working a torn sheath off a rear toenail.
“Karma called.”
“She has a cell phone? You do too?”
“Do not be silly. You know she is the best psychic hotline in Las Vegas.”
I turn a suspicious green peeper on Miss Serenity. “So what is the message, sweetheart?” I ask in my best Bogart.
“It is all too intuitive and revolving around celestial spheres for the likes of you, Louie,” Karma says. “That is why I called on your more sensitive mother.”
Ma Barker? Sensitive? She would have half of my second-most valuable member if I called her that.
Ma modestly tucks her chin into her ratty neck ruff. “I do think I am sensitive to certain vibes, such as danger and evil-doing.”
Well, sure, that is her job. One does not need an advanced degree in Psych 101 to know that.
She leaps to the balcony rail and down the palm tree to the parking lot with practiced ease as I follow.
I escort Ma to the oleander bushes that ring the Circle Ritz parking lot. “I agree that something wicked this way comes.”
“What is ‘this way comes’? Did I not teach you proper grammar? It is ‘comes this way’.”
“Seriously, Ma. What brings you away from the clowder? Do you want to extend your territory, is that it?”
She sits and massages her muzzle with a forepaw. “My territory has been enlarged, Louie. I now see the big picture.”
“How big.”
Her head gestures up to the starry Nevada night sky, which is not very starry because all the lights on the Strip outshine real star power.
“I have been…up there. Higher than high. Higher than a security fence.”
“Up…to the top of the Stratosphere Hotel?”
I did introduce Ma to stairs recently when I had to smuggle her into the rooftop suite of the Crystal Phoenix to consult on a case. That was only twelve stories but one humungous giant step for her.
Think about it. She has been a feral urban cat all her life in a desert city. Why would she have to climb service stairs in a hotel, or even four or five steps, when all those acres had been spreading outward since before Howard Hughes bought them? And she would avoid the hurly burly of the Strip except for ground-level Dumpsters for quick raids.
“So, Ma. You dreamed you went to the stars.” She is getting loopy in her old age.
“Not the stars, son! I would never breathe a word to the gang, but the aliens got me. Their hovering craft landed and sat there camouflaged until I was enticed inside by Free-to-be Feline over Sardines Almandine, and I was whisked up into their alien mother ship.”
“No!” I say, quite sincerely.
“I am sorry, son, but it was your introducing us to that succulent Free-to-Be-Feline that enslaved us.”
“‘Enslaved’ is a harsh word.”
“Oh, one or two clowder mates here and there have been kidnapped before. They return sleepy, having lost interest in, you know, what he’s and she’s do. I assume you know the facts of life by now without me telling you.”
“Ma…! For Bast’s sake.”
“Anyway.” She leans near enough to lick the inside of my ear, which was very pleasant when I was a kit and remains so. I lean away as she resumes her tale. “I have undergone the swift abduction into a suddenly hovering alien vessel, strange bright lights in my eyes, the needle in the naval, the entire alien operation.”
“You do not say.”
“I do. And I have the scar to prove it. And now, well, let us just say that I am not as much in demand among the youthful swinging set as I used to be. There will be no more Midnight Louies,” she adds mournfully.
“Thank Bast!”
She gives me the eyebrow whiskers-raised look of imminent wrath.
“I mean, thank Bast you were returned and remain healthy.”
“Well, my right hip has a hitch in it still…”
“Relatively healthy.”
“And I did get a tummy tuck, which you got from your abduction.”
I remember Ma Barker desiring such an alteration. I suspect it is a natural side effect of the neutering process and not an “extra” thrown in, as in my case.