Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

I quote, of course, from the immortal Who the Dickins. To which I say, baloney! There is one thing for certain that “it” indeed is... the biggest gamble of my career.

No, let me be utterly honest. It is the biggest gamble of my life. Perhaps I should say lives, though I cannot be sure how many of these I still possess, having never been one to keep count.

I can count days and hours, however. Where I am now, the sun does not shine, but the people provide a convenient reckoning of the passing hours by coming and going in eight-hour shifts around the clock, just as they do in the hotels and casinos and jails.

This is no hotel or casino, but that does not mean a guy cannot gamble his life away here in a very few hours.

It is dark now, which would be comforting were it not for the insistent whines of those loudmouth losers in the adjoining cell block. What a bunch of lily-livered squealers. I have never had much time for dogs.

Yes, you have apprehended correctly. Midnight Louie is in stir. Not only that, my cage is located on Death Row. Oh, it is not so labeled, but I am not born yesterday.

I have much time now to meditate on my past life, or lives, and my many sins of commission and omission. I am outside the Sirocco Inn when Gino Scarletti buys it—not the inn, the farm, otherwise known as six feet of dirt, downward. But the cops never hear a peep from me;

I am still light on my tootsies even if I acquired some pinchworthy inches lately, and I rabbit that one.

Did I ever mention how I single-handedly saved the Crystal Phoenix from utter destruction at the hands of a mob of crazed killers? No? Good.

I am also the silent type—it does not pay to know too much in this town, as I say before and will again. Mostly I mull how my last life now hangs by the fragile thread of a certain little doll's ardent regard. I am not the first dude whose well-being depended on some dame, and, frankly, the record is not good.

Some may wonder how a savvy sort like myself has landed in such a pickle. It is—like the foregoing Dickins's Tail of Two Kitties—a long, sad story, and no consolation to know that Baker and Taylor lounge not five ceils away, together still, but not for long.

How it all comes down is like this.