Cat In An Alien X-Ray

In the wilds of the Las Vegas Strip, that is seldom true.

So I circle around the body Ma Barker’s gang has found. There is the constant hum of traffic in the distance and the roar of airplanes depositing and whisking away almost forty million people a year at McCarran on the south end of the Strip.

Like most sites hosting incomplete construction projects, here there is only the scritch of the night’s scavengers over the rocks and sand, rats and mice, lizards, and big black bugs.

Occasionally, the distant muffled hoot of folks high on fun or various addictive substances wafts over the empty lot like an emission of hot air.

Managing to entice someone into “discovering” the body is looking hopeless. I pace the long distance to the street, gauging how far I have to lure a so-far-unseen passerby. Fifty yards at least.

If I were Rin Tin Tin or Lassie, or even that feisty little white Westie terror (I mean, of course, terrier) who pimps for Cesar brand dog food, I could howl, bark, and yip for attention. If I were a Westie, I could be seen at least. For once, my native coloring is working against me.

My whiskers are white, but far too few and too fine to make much of a showing.

I slump down on the lumpy ground so like giant sandpaper and gaze up and down the street. My only neighbor is the windowless concrete box of the Cabana Club, a strictly third-class bar and dance floor place covered with lurid murals of cavorting humans done in the colors of yellow, hot pink, bright blue, and lime green that would make a rainbow nauseated.

I stand, sigh, and prepare to hoof down to that man-made music box that expels blasts of loud, discordant music and ever more hilarity-stricken people overcome by way too many rum drinks.

All the people are heading, as much as their stumbling feet can manage it, away from the (supposedly) deserted dark lot and back to the Strip.

I am thinking I will have to slip into the nightclub and perpetrate an act of such mad and bad behavior that Animal Control will have to be called. Then I have only to escape their nets and traps and lead them back to the body.

First, I should be able to slip into the restrooms with so many rowdy and impaired revelers making frequent trips there. A bar of soap is too much to hope for, but there should be a wall dispenser of the liquid stuff.

Probably it is caked over with dried soap tracks and the prints of many human hands. How unsanitary!

I am walking faster, planning my break-in and subsequent shenanigans.