Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“This is worse than our recent trek across half of Lake Mead,” he starts complaining. “I did not want to leave my old hangout even when my humans pulled up ‘steaks.’ I hid out until they gave up coming back out and trying to lure me away with the daily special.”

“You are a stubborn old cuss.”

“I am not going to give up my independence. Besides, during the last days they converted to an all free-range, organically grown menu. Those chickens must have had leg muscles the size of ostriches’. And, as far as I know, vegetables are only good for encouraging five-year-old human kits to run away from home. I had never been offered so much dry, twiggy, dirt-dusted chow in my life. Now you are dragging me across a concrete desert. With no food or water in sight. You are a cruel cat, my son.”

I cannot claim that shade and watering holes exactly dot the city landscape if you are not near a major hotel. Sure, I know Three O’Clock has not got much stamina and has already been sore-footedly tried today. For once, I am completely perplexed. Where to park the old man until I can reunite him with his geezer gang?

I need to find someplace soon.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas sun is boiling high above us in a clear blue sky, soaking into our pure black coats, making our pink tongues roll out like red carpets and our tenderized pads to crack and burn like well-done strip steaks.

Manx! Even my ability to come up with similes has shifted into survival overdrive. I cannot believe that shepherding only one elder could be so taxing.

I am glad that … oh! Of course.

Obviously my brain has been fried on Lake Mead, along with the rest of Three O’Clock Louie’s lost and lamented cuisine.

“Come on, Daddy-o,” I urge with a growl. “I have just the retirement pad for you. Only a few hundred more steps.”

Argh, matey. Yo-ho-ho, and a cache of cement booties.

Frankly, my feet feel like they have been cast in hot concrete and my legs worn down to the bare bones by the time I herd Three O’Clock through a stand of oleander bushes into a de-lovely clearing dominated by my favorite fast-food restaurant, a big brown Dumpster.

“Have you taken me in a circle, Grasshopper?” Three O’Clock asks out of the side of his mouth. Who would have thought the old man had so much sarcasm in him?

“This looks like the abandoned restaurant you just rescued me from. Only I do not get a lake view.”

“Such as it was,” I point out. “I do not believe your vision was keen enough to enjoy the distantly sparkling ripples.”

“My eyes are a durn, er, sight better than yours, lad. Who spotted those pathetic bird bones sticking up out of the lake-bottom sand?”

“Who moved mountains to get them discovered by human movers and shakers?”

“Humans are a cruel breed,” he says, shaking his grizzled head. “They toy with their kill. I have heard that all my life, but until I saw the pathetic pair of leg bones sticking out of the concrete ball like plant supports in an empty flowerpot … The poor victim was poured into his fatal cement footwear while still alive, you know. Vicious breed, humans. And you lead me into the heart of their darkness here in Sin City.”

I sigh. “We are speaking old-time gangsters, or someone modern who was trying to emulate them. I am sure my friend the coroner, Grizzly Bahr, is even now dating and dissecting the whole gruesome mess down to the DNA.”

“They have an ursine coroner here? That is open-minded. I am impressed.”

I sigh again. My old man is not the only one who has chewed through a dictionary or two in his day.

“The name Grizzly is a nickname, Daddy-o. His surname is spelled B-a-h-r. No genuine bears work for the Las Vegas forensics department.”

“Bahr, eh? Related to your cross-species lady friend? The one you sleep with?”

“You have been living with professional bachelors too long out at Lake Mead. You should be so lucky to have a human fan who has a lakeside recreation area named after her, although I think it was just a weird coincidence.”

“I see another weird coincidence,” the old guy says, jabbing me in the ribs with a jovial mitt of half-unfurled claws. “Who is that hot babe I see sniffing along the Dumpster edge?”

Can it be? Has Ma Barker, his old inamorata and my old mama, edged into sight just at this convenient moment? Manx! The sire’s eyes must be broken if he considers her a “hot babe,” although I will take any happenstance luck I can right now.

I look where he is leering.

Horrors! Double horrors.

What is Miss Midnight Louise, my detecting partner and stridently proclaimed daughter—therefore the old guy’s granddaughter, no less—doing here?

I was hoping to arrange a meet between Three O’Clock and Ma Barker and gang. Not between the Senile and the Nubile.

“She is fixed,” I hiss in his somewhat battered ear.

“I do not care who she is fixed up with, I am tossing my whiskers into the ring for that chick.”

What a cluck!

“She is also kin,” I add, emphasizing my point with a cuff of shivs to the jaw.

“These things are hard to trace among a nomadic kind.”