Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

“Don’t they all.”

“How much is this going to cost?”

Eightball O’Rourke eyed the big round schoolhouse clock on the wall. “We talked a half hour here, say another couple hours before and after the drop. Hundred fifty dollars flat unless your napper takes off for the Spectre Mountains and I gotta trail him.”

“It could be a her,” she said.

“Don’t matter. Either sex trails the same.”

“One thing. Is there anything you can do to ensure the safety—and safe return—of the cats?”

“Nope.” Eightball O’Rourke rose and extended a hard, dry palm for a farewell shake. “Not a damn thing.”

15

Hunter on the Prowl

Temple returnedto the convention center after five p.m. for the second night in a row. This time she found the office empty and Midnight Louie lounging on her desktop grooming his expansive, jet-black belly.

“Hey, guy. Where you been all day? Enjoying the convention center?”

The cat looked up, impassive, and began taking long licks at his copious chest hair. His feline face had that vaguely withdrawn look that some people interpret as superiority to other beings.

Temple shrugged. Louie had already demonstrated that he had his ways in and out of the mammoth convention center, as well as around it. She wouldn’t even be surprised to find that he had beaten her back to her apartment one evening, and was waiting on the patio outside the French doors, bored as you please.

Louie was abstracted at the moment. He accepted her strokes of greeting with a short “merow” and a narrowed glance. Perhaps he was just tired, as Temple was.

She sat at her desk without bothering to drop the tote bag. A minute to compose herself and then she had to hustle Louie down to the car, red-hot by now after roasting in the peak afternoon sun. Then they’d go home to a chill, refreshing tuna dinner: raw from the can for him, salad for her. Cats left a lot of half-full cans of tuna sitting around going stale. Better that she eat it than that Louie should suffer from refrigerator-mouth tuna, at which he always turned up his jet-black nose.

“I’ll eat the lettuce,” she told Louie. “I’ve got to watch my figure even if you don’t.”

Approaching feet echoed down the hall. They stuttered to a pause, then rounded the corner into the office.

“Temple! Thank God you’re still here!” Lorna Fennick cried rapturously.

“What now?”

“Lanyard Hunter wants to talk to you.”

“Haven’t you got that backward?”

“No. After his media interview this afternoon I mentioned that you wanted to speak with him. He immediately asked if you were ‘the cute redhead’ he kept seeing with me. Naturally, I said yes. He said dinner tonight would be fine. I think he likes you.”

“Oh, Lord. That’s all I need. A mashing murderer.”

“Temple, you don’t think—?”

“No, I’m just tired and irritable and surprised. Why’d a famous author want to waste time on me when he could be wined and dined by his publishers and assorted hangers- on?”

“Look, this is Sunday evening. After tomorrow, it’s virtually over. Maybe he’s just attracted to you.”

“Why? I’m not a hospital.”

“That’s below the stethoscope, Temple. Aren’t you PR woman enough to take advantage of an interview you wanted when it drops into your hand like a plum?”

“More like a plumb bob,” she complained. “That’s what I don’t like. Hunter is playing too easy to get.”

“Well, you don’t have to.”

“Okay, what’s the deal?”

“You pick him up here at six-fifteen. Take him wherever you figure is the best setting for prying information out of him.”

“Are you suggesting I use my feminine wiles?”

“I’m suggesting you use your public relations savvy.”

“Okay. I gotta scram this place, then get Louie home and ... sob, freshen up ... to get back here in”—Temple consulted her watch, whose minute and hour hands seemed to have shrunk or stretched to a matching length—“fifty- five minutes.”

At that she fished her car keys from her tote bag, drew the handles over her shoulder and swooped up the lounging Midnight Louie in one uninterrupted motion.

“ ’Bye,” Temple called to Lorna through the key ring between her teeth on the way out. “And thanks. I think.”

Not even Wile E. Coyote can move faster than a PR woman on the run. Crisis is the profession’s middle name. Temple’s aqua Storm darted like a dragonfly through the five p.m. traffic, its glittering sides snaring reflections of a searing red sun melting like strawberry syrup over the chocolate ice-cream peaks of the western mountains.

At the Circle Ritz, Temple sprinted for her apartment, Louie’s legs dangling like furred pendulums from under her arm. The cat was plopped onto the parquet and presented with a fresh mound of tuna before he got his sea legs.

Temple showered before he finished it. She was redressed, remade-up and ready to rush into the torpid evening by the time he’d finished his postprandial ablutions and had settled by the French doors, keeping one sleepy eye cocked on the patio.