Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Even as I muse, Miss Midnight Louise can be seen to stop suddenly ahead.

She crouches and freezes.

I trot to catch up to her, but just as I arrive she bounds away.

I am too old to fall for this game!

I bound after her to the section of wall where she has landed.

Alas, by the time I hit the wall, she has bounded on, and I bounce off rough concrete like a Ping-Pong ball. Not the kind of sport I had in mind—me being the thing that is smacked, whacked, and dribbled.

(In fact, a bit of unleashed drool from the impact is now meandering down the hairs of my chinny chin chin.)

I pause to hastily tidy my moustache, shocked to see Miss Midnight Louise shooting along the base of the wall some thirty feet away. Luckily, she stops to start digging frantically, so I am able to come abreast of her.

Will I deliver a verbal thrashing!

Before I can get my growl wound up, I hear heavy footsteps approaching.

“Dig, you old fool!” Miss Midnight Louise admonishes me, when the snit should be on the other mitt. “They will never get the idea unless we ham it up like crazy.”

I agree that humans can be unbelievably dense, but am myself a bit puzzled.

“Dig!” she orders. “Unless you want your roommate to walk right past the entrance to the third tunnel.”

Third tunnel? What are number one and number two … ? No, I am not referring to the coy way people describe the major variations of dog doo-doo and dog dewatering.

We have tunnels from Gangsters and the Phoenix meeting in the middle.

Third tunnel?

I see only a crack in the seam where dirt floor meets plastered wall.

Then a small furry head pokes through.

I need no further invitation to scrape away with all shivs going like a circular saw. No dirty rat is going to move in on my territory, which is anywhere I happen to be.

“Louie!” a familiar oncoming female voice calls in shock behind me.

“Louise,” calls an even more shocked male voice.

“Dig until we bare dirt,” Miss Midnight Louise hisses into my ear hairs until they tickle. “They will not get the picture unless we draw out every last detail.”

“Must be mice,” I hear Macho Mario Fontana say, dismissing our prey.

Mice? My well-placed spitball would handle mice. We are talking bigger game here.

“Is the bigger one our Three O’Clock Louie?” I hear chubby Spuds Lonnigan inquire in a slightly breathless wheeze.

He is a fine one to mistake me for my older, fatter father! That is like the potbellied stove calling the cattle black. Or some such phrase.

I hear a sharp squeal from within the wall and see that Louise has pinned a long, hairless tail with her fanned front shivs.

“Rats,” my brilliant Miss Temple points out. “We will have to fumigate. No way Gangsters can run a restaurant down here until the entire rat population is completely eradicated.”

Murderous little thing, is she not?

That’s my roomie!

I lay a big mitt over Louise’s dainty one and pull back with one powerful jerk, revealing the entire rat. Case closed.

Before I can do a karate chop to the neck, the rat’s racing claws kick something big and dusty out of its hole right into our faces.

We sneeze in tandem, our claws relaxing in one uncontrollable reflex moment.

Rats! Exhibit A is history. We step back, boxing our nostrils and vibrissae free of some pretty well-aged dirt and sand.

My Miss Temple approaches on her hind claws, aka spike heels, and bends to pick up the trash. Humans, even the best of them, are hard to figure sometimes.

It is obvious that Louise and I deserve to be picked up and made much of for our valiant effort to seek, find, and agitate vermin. Not that we would accept such namby-pamby fondling even when well deserved. We are professionals. Just buy us a steak and salmon dinner and call it quits.

Miss Temple unfolds the wad of paper.

“This looks like … a stock certificate.”

“Yeah?” Nicky asks. “That’s worth about a penny these days.”

Miss Van von Rhine stretches out a hand. “Let me see.”

The light is dim, but long, tall Pitchblende O’Hara steps up and produces a tiny high-intensity flashlight.

“This and a Swiss Army knife are always in my jeans,” he explains.

Miss Van von Rhine quirks a smile at her confident spouse.

“You’d be wrong, Nicky. This isn’t as old as it looks, and it looks less like a stock certificate and more like a bearer bond.”

“Bearer bond?” Miss Temple asks. “Is that worth anything?”

“Ten thou,” Mr. Nicky says, taking it to stretch the crumpled paper smooth, “to anyone who holds it in his hand.”

“Or hers,” Van says, taking custody.

Girls can be so possessive.

Love Connection

It was early evening by the time Temple returned to her Circle Ritz condo. She was still a having a brain attack that made her stomach turn cartwheels. What an amazing turn of events! What a PR break, if she handled it right.

She had to slow down and think. She had to call Matt.