Cat In An Alien X-Ray

That is why my extended family includes life partners and my so-called parents, Three O’Clock Louie and Ma Barker, along with Ma’s clowder of street gangsters. Miss Midnight Louise, purported daughter, is my partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc., I being the capital I in “Inc.” and Louise being the dot at the end of the “Inc.”

Whatever our social ranking, we all have gathered on the fringe of desert that dips into the city proper on a night when the moon is a pale round mottled marble in the sky.

Coyotes and dogs may howl and bay at the moon.

Human beings may spoon and moon at the moon.

We of the Sacred Breed worshipped in ancient Egypt, however, sit in quiet contemplation.

That is because we have a mystical gene going back to our golden olden days when the cat goddess Bast oversaw the pinnacle of catdom.

So sometimes her call sings through our veins and to the very tips of our vibrissae, “whiskers” (oh-so-sadly human) in the common expression.

We suspend our daily struggles for food, warmth, zebra-pattern comforters, and Free-to-Be-Feline pellets and are drawn to a special spot, rather like ’60s folks to a hootenanny.

Only we remain silent, sober, and soulful.

Our very presence signifies that something momentous is about to happen.

Naturally, I expect to figure out what it is first, because I am the private investigator of the lot and that is my job, to walk these lonely wastelands and restore order and justice.

Did I mention that we are meeting behind the deserted construction area—of which there are many in post–Great Recession Vegas—that sits opposite the Convention Center area?

Word on the street and around the Dumpsters is that something big is going up here, and going down tonight.

The construction is swathed in one of those gigantic plastic sheets that environmental artists like Christo employ to gift-wrap various iconic building and geographical areas, even whole islands.

Fear not. It is merely one of the many stalled construction projects turned abandoned slum by the Great Recession.

So there Ma and me finally stand on the stub-end of Vegas, looking around the shallow, sandy landscape, viewing a scene of ruin out of Hollywood’s latest disaster movie.

I am a simple fellow. I suppose you could consider me a survivalist.