“No, not yet!” someone was screaming at her back.
That wasn’t all. A bunch of someones were screaming at her front.
Scruffy-looking men were erupting from the weeds and cactus surrounding the lot. They seemed to be wearing vests with
big letters on them. What was this, a fraternity initiation?
At ground level, Midnight Louie, for it was indeed he, and his cadre of cats were circling the motorcycles like berserk windup toys, howling and hurling themselves claws out at stalled tires and the canvas saddlebags hanging from every machine.
Temple had barely identified the bikes and riders as her Rainbow Coalition Gang when she noticed a vertical Louie dragging his front claws with all his pendant weight through one of the saddlebags. A thin white line leaked through.
Drugs.
Of course. And it had been trucked here inside a Maylords furniture van. Furniture that wasn’t stuffed with down but drugs.
And this gang was here to make the exchange after the stuff had been successfully smuggled in.
The rider whose saddlebags were leaking tried to kick-start his machine, tried to kick Louie off the ripping side of his drugstuffed bag.
Temple ran forward, forgetting she no longer had the gun, or that her pepper spray was too small and too far.
“No!”
The word was bellowed behind her, so like a parent’s howl at a two-year-old about to touch a hot stove that Temple paused to look behind her. She saw Rafi Nadir over her shoulder, her own gun in his hands leveled just beyond her.
Louie was falling onto the black asphalt, but another black blot ran at the compromised saddlebag even as the rider revved
the bike.
The oncoming men on the fringe were tightening like a noose, shouting and aiming.
Temple somehow was trapped in the dark, bloody heart of it, still standing, her ears roaring, looking for Louie.
A bike, the oddball black one amid the screaming colors, came swooping straight at her, veering like an ice skater around the dozen or so cats crisscrossing the parking lot like demented lemmings.
“Drop it!” voices shouted from the fringe. “Drop your weapons. Hit asphalt or we shoot.”
Well, she had no weapon to drop, and before she could hit asphalt the motorcycle hit her. An arm like a stage hook swooped her sideways onto the bike’s spiffy painted gas tank in front of the long leather seat.
She saw a low, dark form leap at its rear saddlebags. The bike shimmied as if skidding on black ice. Temple was pulled halfway over the gas tank. She saw a small black silhouette hit asphalt and roll into the path of another revving motorcycle.
The roar of the competing engines was blasted to bits by the ear-splitting drone from an overhead helicopter drowning all
sound. Its blare of spotlight turned the turmoil below into a silent film overpowered by a flying freight train.
And standing solo in the center of the spotlight, bewildered or maybe just chagrined, was the film’s instant star: Rafi Nadir. He was holding up his bare hands, as something really small and dark hit the pavement between his feet. It was not furry for a change.
Oh, no! Her pristine, hardly used Firearm Lite.
Something spat up asphalt only two feet from her face. A bullet.
Temple shut her eyes. The rider’s body jerked as more bullets kicked up asphalt all around them. Temple was in a maelstrom of heat and noise and vibration, hanging on and hoping to at least take out a Wicked Witch when she finally landed. The bike she was on roared into the desert darkness so near the Strip and all its works, so near the massive fantasy buildings squatting on ancient sands and calling themselves megahotels.
She had glimpsed the biker’s nom de road on the Darth Vader helmet: Gay Blade.
At least, Temple thought, she probably didn’t have to worry about being raped as well as killed.
Just the latter.
Which wasn’t as much of a relief as it should have been.
Chapter 52
Snow-blind
“You jumped the gun.”
I pick myself up, dust myself off, and see that I have made a five-point landing right atop a shiny black firearm that bears a sickening resemblance to one I have seen in my Miss Temple’s possession at the Circle Ritz.
I do not pause to admit the accuracy of Miss Midnight Louise’s observation.
Instead I observe twelve men in LVMPD vests advancing on us both, and the gun. And Rafi Nadir now making like a
starfish flat on the asphalt. I find myself in the grip of an urgent feline need for a luxurious roll on that very asphalt.
While I am making like the overbearing tar scent is catnip, I make sure to writhe and rub and lick any trace of fingerprints from the weapon in question.
By the time the hobnail boots are close enough to kick us, I have spurted away, having ensured Miss Louise’s equally fast
exit by giving her a high five in the face followed up by a low four in the posterior.
Ma Barker and her gang have also engineered a discreet exit, leaving the humans to sort it all out for themselves, which is what they deserve after tonight’s boggled performance on all sides.
One of the humans so being sorted is Mr. Rafi Nadir. That will have high-level repercussions, I bet.
“Are you not worried about your roommate?” Miss Louise asks.
“Not at the moment.”
“She was abducted by a rogue biker.”
“I have a feeling that she can handle him better than I can. I am more concerned that the DEA guys round up all of those
buzzing bikers still trying to breathe free.”
“Then we had better give them a hand.”
So begins a long and lively session of the road game people call “chicken.”
The Barker Gang and Midnight Inc. Investigations take turns playing apparent roadkill, sending biker after biker careening out of control and into the handcuffs of the Vegas police.
When we have wiped up the parking lot of all the evildoers, the only thing that remains untouched is a pale trail of cocaine. (For some reason this human drug of choice always reminds me of flea powder, so I would as soon sniff that line of powder as I would vermin poison.) Sirens wail in the distance as I approach Ma Barker, who has mustered her troops from the sidelines with Gimpy as her aide-de-camp.
“So, Grasshopper:’ she says in a demanding maternal rasp. “All your big talk about relocating the colony in the convenient truck was pretext for using us to rat out a human smuggling operation.”
I hang my head. Actually, it is a little muzzy from all that pavement hitting and not too happy about being upright anyway.
“And when you told us to make ourselves right at home and paw the contents into prime napping conformation, you were actually using us to rake open hidden drug caches. `Scratching Posts Are Us,’ you said. Dig in.““I cannot deny it.”
‘The thieves would have slit the seams anyway and the phony truck would have disappeared with them after the transfer of the goods.”
“Yeah, but I wanted the ‘goods’ in free-falling condition, of use to nobody. It is bad, bad stuff, Ma.”
“Not to mention stuffing. You used us, Grasshopper.”
“Uh . yeah.”
“Fine job. We worked off every dead claw sheath in the colony tonight, and in a good cause too. That dreadful white powder,” she adds, shaking her head. “It is like mainlining eraser dust, but these headstrong humans have no control. I had hoped to leave that behind in our previous territory, Grasshopper. You did not tell me we were moving into snow country here.”
“A fluke,” I say. “We have made the case for the LVMPD, although we will get no credit.”
Ma Barker touches the tip of one shaky mitt in the lethal white trail. “It does not do a thing for me. Why does it make these humans perform such capers, including the risk of trying to smuggle it?”
“To each his-or her-own,” I say. “I wish I was a little bird on the wall of the CAPERS unit when Mr. Rafi Nadir is brought