Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Right. And your next trick will be letting the residents of this Building That Time Forgot realize they better put some grub and water out for them.”

“I must see my troops.”

“Forget it. No time to say hello, good-bye, you are needed first and foremost at the New Millennium.”

I suppose it was Miss Louise employing the word “needed.” I respond to necessity. I suppose I caved.

She manages to spur me away from the Circle Ritz without looking around to spot and welcome the feral gang. I mean that “spur” literally. Her foreclaws are as sharp as Ginsu knives on a three A.M. infomercial.

Of course, Las Vegas is the second City That Never Sleeps. We dodge traffic and tourists, but in due time trot our way back to the New Millennium. I am about to show her my secret entryway six floors up on the neon solar system, but she taps me on the shoulder—ouch!—and leads me to the service entrance.

Here we are greeted like old friends, or she is.

“Ah,” says a slim dude of Asian appearance dressed all in white like a bride, or more likely, a cook. “The little lady with the Canton palate. And a gentleman friend. Some wonton soup this evening? Oh, you wish to study the menu?”

He admits us both into the kitchen area as if we were gourmands or something. I nearly swoon. I smell duck. Fish. Eel. Eeew. No eel. I do not eat snakes and lizards and other desert delicacies.

Miss Louise mushes me through the fragrant preparation area ringing with the cymbals of copper lids.

Before I know it, we are dodging the usual footwear bazaar in the main casino and edging around the darkened exhibition area to the access ladders and ramps at the back.

“Up again!” I protest, eyeing the climb. “I thought I had made all this moot.”

“Scoot!” she says, with a prickly encouraging pat.

“The place is deserted,” I protest, as I climb the long, dark, and winding road built into the access area for the magic show installation far above.

“ ‘Up’ is your motto,” she replies, prodding from the rear.

I must admit it is more than mere weariness that makes me loath to repeat this journey. A man and woman died on these artificial heights. On these man-made mountains, my Miss Temple lost her Mr. Max to obligations she had no power to overcome.

And I nearly strained everything I had to rescue a feline assassin who probably deserved to kiss concrete as much as her human mistress did. There! I do think that there are villains, and villainesses in the world, and that they should meet their just desserts.

On the other hand, my just desserts are lingering in the kitchens we have just forsaken.

“Onward!” Louise matches gesture to vocal command.

Ouch!

We reach the top, and I am immediately struck by the emptiness of the area. The fallen structures still dangle there unanchored. I almost smell the recent death reeking in my sensitive nostrils. I picture the powerful persona that had commanded these black-painted perches on the edge of nowhere: CC, the Cloaked Conjuror, who had lost a performing partner.

The exhibition would continue but the sky-high magic show was suspended, like Siegfried and Roy, maybe forever.

Shangri-La, mystery woman, no friend of my Miss Temple and her Mr. Max, yet a sublime performer and a cat person. Hyacinth, her familiar, the performing partner who had inadvertently sealed her fate and caused her death. Loyalty carried to a lethal degree. How did she deal with dealing her mistress death when she meant only to preserve? I shuddered to think of being in her skin.

Of being in her skin. Right. Where was it? Now. Exactly. I gaze at Midnight Louise. I must admit the kit has climbed every mountain with me.

“Where is she?” she asks now, echoing my thought.

“Hyacinth?”

I do not know. We saved her from dangling death. We risked our own skins—me, Louise, and Hyacinth’s shelter-rescued body double, the delicate and shy Miss Squeaker, aka S. Q.

“Hyacinth is not to be found?” I both ask and declare. She was a magician’s familiar, an apprentice. She would not simply walk away. But she might . . . vanish!

Midnight Louise does not mince words. (When has she ever?) “She has not been seen since S. Q. and I threw ourselves into her rescue.”

“And moi,” I point out. “I was the counterweight.”

“True. We could not have made it without you.”

Yes!

“But I am not concerned about Miss Hyacinth,” Louise says.

Why not? That is truly disturbing. Where can a pampered show cat like her go?

“Squeaker is missing also.”

Oh. My blood runs cold until it chills out my super-overheated tootsies.

I recall the shy shelter cat known first as “Fontana,” and later as “Squeaker.”

No one recalled her when clearing out the paraphernalia of the abandoned magic show. CC had his Big Cats to remove. Who spoke for the late Shangri-La? Who for her performing partner, Hyacinth, and the lowly body double, Squeaker?

“Hyacinth?” I ask.

“She can take care of herself,” Louise says.

That leaves Squeaker.

“She was shy,” I say. “We need to check all the duct work. Especially that engineered by . . . Mr. Max.”