Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“Beer is water here. I need a road.” She sat up to eye a snake of paved darkness twisting up the Alps, and sighed. “I need a reason to say I’m stranded. I’ll probably have to trek back a gallon of unneeded petrol.”

She stood, shaking out her chic suit. She looked like someone stranded. “I’ll get you out of those casts. You think you can put weight on your legs again?”

“I’ll have to.”

“You Americans. Always what must be done. Never what is pleasant to be done.”

He thought on that parting remark long after the hip-high grasses and knee-high flowers had swallowed her pink-suited figure.

Here, he was truly helpless, his body anchored by the means of its recovery. Yet his mind soared like the distant clouds. He rubbed his left inner elbow. He still smelled the acrid rubbing alcohol scent, felt the ting of the hypodermic needle tip tasting his vein, as a serpent smells, with the bitter end of its toxic tongue.

Death rode on that thin, hollow steel reed; he knew it. His death.

This woman had interrupted that, and by duplicitous means had wafted him away from the clinic, from his would-be killer and also from the only man he trusted.

That made her the only woman he trusted.

That made trust a necessity rather than an option.

He knew this Max person he was didn’t like necessity as a partner.

He inhaled the heady scent of mountain wildflowers. Their only escape route had been on foot. For now, he was helpless and, rid of the leg casts, might be more helpless still. Yet his mind was working, weighing. His mind wouldn’t let him sink into complacency.

Complacency. “The refuge of the inferior mind.”

That motto rang true, like history. He’d been warned against complacency. Over and over again.

Twilight was falling on the valley below before she returned.

“Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” she asked.

“I didn’t think. That’s the advantage of being an invalid.”

“I deliberately stopped us by this haymow. It’ll be as cozy as an inn. But, first—”

She knelt in the long grass, the action releasing the scent of crushed wildflowers as he lay back on his elbows.

“They had a saw.”

He viewed the sturdy, ragged edge of a small, hand-size hacksaw and winced.

“I’ve only time to do one cast before the light fades. You were due to have them removed two days from now anyway. Think you can bear an early exodus?”

Her language was quaint, laughable. Exodus. “Saw away. If you hit skin, you’ll know.”

Still, he steeled himself, feeling the hard-edged plaster rocking back and forth as she sawed. She knew where the seam lay, and attacked the cast on his right leg top and bottom, then pulled, then sawed . . . finally the cast opened like an almond shell. Two halves, clean. The setting sun made the revealed white skin of a man’s leg glow in its angled rays. The dying light revealed a horrifying degree of muscle waste in a mere six weeks.

“Ye gods,” he murmured, “it’s so pink and puckered and ghastly.”

There was a silence.

“My leg,” he said firmly.

Come Into My Parlor

The siren screams of police and emergency vehicles racing to the Sapphire Slipper continued into early afternoon.

A number of Vegas cabs and private SUVs that were driving up hastily turned around. Inside the Sapphire Slipper, the resident courtesans had a new client to lavish exclusive attention on.

“That was the bravest thing I ever saw,” Babette said, stroking Midnight Louie’s fevered brow.

At least his tongue was very warm anyway.

“He’s so cute!” purred Kiki, Lili, and Niki, tickling his tummy.

“Look at these nails!” Angela and Heather intoned together. “Shredded. And his pads are bleeding.”

They looked with accusing fury at Lieutenant C. R. Molina, Detective Alch, and Coroner Grizzly Bahr.

“I will tend him immediately, my dears.” Coroner Bahr hovered over Louie’s lush nurses. “Some styptics and gauze bandages should set the little guy right. And then I’ll see to you ladies.”

“What about the D.B.?” Molina asked.

“In a minute. This, uh, Good Samaritan needs tending.”

Temple shook her head at Louie’s moment in the spotlight. She was sitting on a blue sofa with Matt down on one knee, attending her kicked ankle.

“It’s swelling already, and bruised,” he decided. “You’ll need to elevate that.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Molina said. “You’ve already proposed, from what I hear. You may pick up the bride-to-be and put her down on the long sofa in the bar area. There’s an interrogation going on there that you may be useful for. Coroner, I really think you have more pressing matters upstairs. I sent the crime scene crew up first. Leave the alley cat for the vet.”

Soon all have dispersed but the Sapphire Slipper nursing unit. Louie deserted his cooing chorus of ladies, squirming until they were forced to let him down to limp after the exodus to the bar.

Matt had been focused on Temple from the moment the limo stopped. He’d taken her out of the front seat, spotted her scraped ankle at once, and picked her up, so this was her second stint of bridal carting.