Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“I must admit that this space just cried for something dramatic to happen in it,” I tell her. “I had a tad of trouble finding a way into the underground tunnel from Gangsters, which is a chichi little venue that could use a dash of Fontana make over magic, so I went back to the Phoenix, and underground there. Worked like a charm, so, all in all, I would be able to give my blessing to this Chunnel of Crime notion. Linking two enterprises in these days when people want more for their money is a good idea,” I pronounce.

“Three,” she says.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Three.”

“Three what?”

“Three venues.”

While I am still blinking like a blind bat at what she is implying, the little minx adds the codicil.

“I did not ‘amble over’ from the Crystal Phoenix,” Midnight Louise explains, with a quick smoothing of what bristles pass for her eyebrows. “I walked, all right, and the route was subterranean and a bit tight at times, but I came from the underbelly of the Neon Nightmare.”

The Neon Nightmare club? Where the cabal of disgruntled magicians known as the Synth keep secret meeting rooms? Where Mr. Max just tragically crashed and maybe died not two months ago?

You could knock me over with a magic wand.

Luckily, Miss Midnight Louise is not packing any, but she cannot smother a huge smirk as she starts grooming spidery cobwebs off of her whiskers.

While I have resigned myself to letting Miss Midnight Louise lead when it comes to exploring the third and most secret underground tunnel in this below-street-level maze, I had not counted on the pathway being so paltry.

“Hurry up, Pops,” Miss Louise is nagging from ahead of me, like Charlie Chan’s number-one son.

Fact is, I cannot!

The passable concrete area around the vault is a glorified rat maze, and the human-fist-size rift at one dark corner of the vault opened up by a small earthquake or construction vibrations is mouse-size to me.

In fact, delicious as my surprise exit from the opening vault door was, I was so low to the ground, the cameras overlooked me and Louise entirely, and I nearly lost my midsection coat from my innards being squeezed through the raw-metal-edged hole.

Now we must retrace our path around the vault exterior. It has been jolted into rubble by the recent tawdry pneumatic drilling on the front door, so it is an even tighter squeeze for any creature other than a snake.

Fine for a sylph like Miss Midnight Louise to wriggle through when she is all of nine pounds soaking wet.

I am a feline of size. I do not “wriggle” like an earthworm; I “bull” my way, like a dozer. (Not the kind that sleeps, I hasten to add.)

So there I am having clods of stone and sand kicked up into my face as I follow the narrow path she has forged.

Ah! At last! We get into man-high territory, if the man were on his knees. It strikes me that this tunnel is a recent and inexpert excavation.

Sneezing out a cloud of stone powder, after much circuitous footwork, I finally follow Miss Louise into a large and thankfully finished piece of manmade construction, what is certainly a rarity in Las Vegas, which is built on concrete foundations—a basement.

While I enjoy a coughing break, the kit is pacing ahead of me, twitching her front and rear extremities. By extremities, I am being literal: not legs, but vibrissae and tail. Yes, the rear member whips up more dust for my sensitive sinuses.

Only a few dim work lights, aka classic bare lightbulbs, illuminate our way into what turns out to be a vast space.

Before long we encounter the massive figure of a martini glass. By then I could use one. Miss Louise has leaped atop the toe of a high-heeled sandal that would really ring my Miss Temple’s chimes.

All of these items are made from a giant fretwork of wood and steel or aluminum supporting milky glass tubes in Rube Goldberg–style rat-maze arrangements, i.e., like a really complicated maze for giant rats.

Manx! I would not want to meet the rat large enough to run this junkyard maze, but …

“Hey, Louise! Any one of these big retired neon signs would make a great jungle gym for Ma Barker’s gang behind the police substation. They are just wasted down here.”

“At least they are not fading in the acid rain and sunlight UVs at the neon graveyard topside,” she replies. “But I like your idea. Maybe you can manipulate your red-and-cream roommate to claim one of these mementos when we bring the Neon Nightmare crowd down.”

“Uh, we are bringing a nightclub crowd down?”

“Of course. Not the customers, but the Synth set. No human would find or follow that rat tunnel around the vault to trace the passage from the Crystal Phoenix underground to here.”

Now she tells me! So I have started this crawl by personally enlarging with my body a tunnel made by and for desert rats. Think about it! I look around for some rat on whom to take out my angst, but I find the place as quiet and still as, well, a graveyard.

Meanwhile, Miss Louise has sashayed into the pale spotlight of a work light.