Cat In A Leopard Spot

A pop like a gun made everyone jerk, but nothing more happened.

Except that one of the dead streetlamps strobed into life again.

Thin blue light painted their faces a sickly color.

“You!” Rafi Nadir’s hand dropped its viselike grip on Reno’s elbow. “The cops sent someone in to get your mug down on paper. They must want you bad for something.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Max said, claiming Reno’s released elbow. “Now I’ll give you one. Call it a night before someone calls the vice squad. Do you want your face on the mug books?”

Nadir’s mouth worked. He was the kind who was always spoiling for a fight. Max was ready, though he didn’t look like it.

Nadir ignored him and addressed Reno. “This guy probably killed your roomie. Some white knight.”

She was staring at Max as if Rafi Nadir didn’t exist.

Before Nadir could get excited about being irrelevant, Max steered Reno to her car, took the fistful of keys from her hand, opened it and watched Nadir as she got in.

“I’ll see you at home,” he said affably.

In the slanted streetlight rays, her face looked hard, but curious. “You’re Vince.”

He shut the door on her, heard the oncoming scrape of shoes and turned to face Nadir, not so affably.

Reno started her car and drove away, leaving the two men plenty of room for…whatever.

“You’re not leaving,” Nadir said. “Not until that girl is long gone. I should call the police.”

“But you won’t.”

“I don’t need backup to deal with you.”

“What’s to deal with. I’m leaving, aren’t I?”

Nadir stared down the street. Reno’s beater was out of sight, out of hearing. He stepped back with an elaborate gesture of permission.

“Go ahead. But you gave me trouble with another stripper, and she ended up dead the next day. If anything happens to this one, it would look bad for you.”

“That works both ways, doesn’t it?”

Nadir stared sharply into Max’s face, puzzled by his calm, unsettled by the implication.

“I don’t ever want to see you at Secrets again,” he said.

“You won’t.”

Max turned and crossed the parking lot to the street beyond, where he had parked the Maxima two blocks away.

At first he listened for Nadir following him. When he was in the dark between streetlights he finally looked for him.

Nothing.

Max was free to move on to the next low point of the evening.

Chapter 24

Chuck Wagon

You would think Miss Midnight Louise was a casino owner showing off a new armored truck.

There we are gathered in the delivery area behind a wholesale grocery establishment far from the shake, rock, rattle and roll of the Strip, our only audience a circle of Dumpsters and our only spotlight the sickle moon-on-the-half-shell, peeking over the rippled edge of a corrugated roofline.

There is just me and Miss Louise. Oh. And the two noses with fungus among us, name of Golda and Groucho.

I cannot believe that I am out here of a chilly March night with my dearly beloved not-daughter, Midnight Louise, and two pieces of dandelion fluff that have been foisted upon me by my erstwhile assistant, Nose E.

“What did you say these two are?” I hiss at Louise as we all hunker down near ground zero, eyeing the object of our expedition.

“Yorkshire terriers.”

“Well, this is not Yorkshire anymore,” I say, inhaling a bit of desert sagebrush on the wind and exhaling it with an untimely sneeze.

“Shhhh!” Louise hisses back at me. “And you say they are noisy.”

I eye our objective: the truck.

It is big, white, and nondescript, in fact a refrigerator on wheels.

Miss Louise is trying to sell this anemic pumpkin on ice as our coach to the palace. Or our buckboard to the ranch.

“Think of it as a chuck wagon,” she urges. “Meals on wheels. You can snack on the way.”

“And freeze our tails off,” I growl. Then I look at Golda and Groucho. I realize that I am not sure if they have tails. “Ears off.” Do they have ears? “Noses off.” I know they have noses. Those I can see, those shiny wet-asphalt blobs dead center under the perky little red bows on their noggins. I think there are matching eyes behind the waterfall of silky gold and gray hair dangling from the bows.

“These two will be frozen Vienna sausages before we even get out of Vegas,” I say. “Noses on ice are worth nothing.”

“The unit is not fully refrigerated. They do not wish to deliver ice cubes, merely keep the fresh meat from spoiling.”

“This is my aim exactly. I wish to keep the fresh meat from spoiling, namely us.”

Midnight Louise shakes her head as if to dislodge a flea in her ear: me.

“Look, Pops. Do not tell me it cannot be done, because I have already done it and anything I can do you can do better.”

“Darn tootin’,” say I before I can think. I am about to head out to the ranch on a chuck wagon with climate control with one setting: chilly.

“And,” Midnight Louise adds with a glance at our two canine partners, “I did not even have earmuffs for my trip to and fro.”