Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Although Grizzly Bahr the coroner begins an autopsy with the buzz saw to the brain, the feline way is more delicate. While Ma Barker’s gang hangs back, I walk step by step over the uneven ground until I can, like any intrepid explorer, plant a foot on the foreign territory.

My sensitive pads sense immediately that this guy is as cold as the stone that surrounds him. I lean in to sniff carefully at his sniffer. Not a breath of air stirs my hair-trigger vibrissae. Not a whisker is stirring not even a fine, almost invisible one sprouting from my chinny chin-chin.

“Coroner cuisine,” I diagnose.

“As if we did not know that all by ourselves,” Ma Barker says. “What we need you for is dealing with the proper authorities to get this dead meat off our hunting grounds.”

“Maybe,” I say, “your flock of UFOs and the hovering mother ship will whisk him off before any of us can do anything. Anyway, I do not see your crowd rushing back to this place by dead of night as long as you are drinking the Kool-Aid about alien visitors coming to Las Vegas.”

“Kool-Aid? We would never touch that sticky sweet stuff.”

I do not bother to explain that is a human expression to denote the gullible.

“So you will have to devise a clever way to alert the authorities,” Ma says.

“Maybe. Maybe not. The only thing I am sure of is that ‘murder most mob’ is definitely not alien to Sin City. Could this be a public relations ploy to draw attention to the new mob museums busting out all over town lately?”

“I am shocked.” Ma sits down. “There is nothing that your human friends will not stoop to in order to make a buck, especially off the dead.”

I glance down at the officially undiscovered corpse and have only one comment. “And they say we play with our food.”

Chapter 11

Nightcrawlers

As Max froze in place, becoming an even more noticeable tall black island in the constant flow of people diverting around him, the unlikely suspect was distracted enough to absently edge to the side with the crowds.

Then he glanced up and stopped. “You.”

Now there were two immobile islands in the stream of tourists, who, like lemmings, were all intent on getting somewhere and oblivious of anything around them en route.

“Ditto,” Max said before he played Kerrick, grabbed an arm, and pulled Matt Devine against the nearest marble pillar. “What are you doing at the Goliath at three in the morning?”

Matt jerked his arm away and swatted out the crumples in his khaki poplin sport coat. “You first. I thought you were keeping on the down low. Or is the expression ‘low-down’?”

“A crowd is the best disguise.”

“It apparently didn’t disguise me.”

“You’re being evasive. Does Temple know you’re off leash?”

“Obviously she’d notice.” Matt shrugged to loose the last wrinkled vestige of Max’s urgent interception on his arm. “Temple assigned me the Goliath and Crystal Phoenix casino’s ceiling bodies to investigate. I figure nighttime’s the right time for that. You’re certainly on the prowl, but we’d decided you needed to avoid the hotels where you’re a suspect.”

“Temple decided. She’s a bit bossy, isn’t she? Although it looks cute on her.”

Matt frowned.

“Forget being territorial. I’m seeing someone else now.”