Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“Only one? You’re easy.”

“With this problem, why come out to join a mob of people like this, all faces you can’t really see? And you are really skeptical of the UFO fever all around here.”

“Simple. It’s a great laboratory. I practice remembering strangers in the crowd by things beside their faces. Plus, I think they’re all silly for getting caught up in this UFO and ancient-alien stuff. Any aliens who are out there, we definitely don’t want to meet.”

“Even if you don’t have to see their weird alien faces.”

“Especially if I have to remember them by other traits. I mean, who’d want to have a memory of tentacles?”

Chapter 33

Synth You’ve Been Gone

Once Rens—that walking contradiction in genetics, the mini husky Chihuahua—was restored to his person, I begin to think I could safely lock myself back in the Miata with my Miss Temple being none the wiser.

I am about to make myself scarce on the alien flash mob scene, when something familiar flashes across my field of vision and kisser like a chorus girl’s black ostrich fan.

I sneeze, not the suave reaction I hope for during an encounter with a chorus girl. Once my eyes blink open again, I am disappointed to discover the firm’s junior partner has joined the melee.

“Off cadging free lunches again, huh, Pops? This time with the local vermin of a canine nature,” Miss Midnight Louise admonishes me.

If she really were my daughter, as she claims, she would defer to my parental role and let me do the admonishing. Or … maybe not. Miss Midnight Louise does not take correction well at all. She is what they call liberated and I call impertinent to her elders.

“A guy has got to keep his energy up.”

“For what? Naps?”

“Research has shown that the dude who naps lives longer to nap again.” That comment does not quite come out right.

“You were not napping when you did that swan dive off the top of the so-called parking garage. You are drawing the public’s attention to a lot of bodies of late. You could damage Midnight Investigations, Inc.’s reputation.”

“You know I did my earlier body-discovery work for Ma Barker’s clowder.”

“Yes. I am also invited for lunch with them at the police substation from time to time, and get caught up on all the gossip then.”

“You lunch on Big Macs and Red Lobster?”

“And Tastee Crème doughnuts,” she adds in a nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah tone.

“I have never been invited. I am just asked to do the dirty work.”

“Oh, come on. I have dipped into the trash containers at the Circle Ritz. Your Miss Temple is lavishing oysters and shrimp and sirloin beef tips on your Free-to-Be-Feline bowl.”

“Yes, but it all has a certain odor of—” I cannot contain a shudder. “—FTBF.”