Cat In An Alien X-Ray

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.