Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Read Online Free PDF Page A

and when and where I please.”
    “Where is your collar, dude?” taunts a once-white semi-long-hair I hesitate to describe as a lady. “No vet tags, Prince Chauncey?”
    “Yeah,” the tiger-stripe adds. “We need an address for where to send the body.”
    “At least I do not live in a road-kill academy.” I glance at the street. “I bet they drag race their lowriders so regular along there that a lot of you end up as poster boys and girls: flat as a face card in a fixed deck.”
    I have hit a nerve, for several sets of green and gold eyes narrow to angry slivers.
    “It is the rugrats like Gimpy,” says Snow Off-white, with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades, “who get creamed.”
    I glance at the kit with the right-angle leg, and conceal a shudder. Poor sod would be better off with that seriously bum limb amputated.
    “It is not so bad,” the dingy yearling pipes up. “The winos and bums feel sorry for me because I cannot forage and see that I get McDonald’s leavings.”
    Jeez, this lot is so low that the homeless humans show them charity. Chalk one up on the pearly gates for the homeless humans. I have always found that the have-nots are better at sharing than the have-it-alls who got plenty to share.
    “What about this day-old fish market behind the grille here?” I say.
    “We stay away,” says Tiger, with a growl. “We think it is a trap. People come and take away the dumb ones that venture inside and cannot get out.”
    “And you never see them again?”
    “We do,” Snow Off-white says, eager to explain. I can always get through to the babes, which may be why Tiger and Tom are breathing down my epiglottis. “But…they are different.”
    “They are…drones,” Tom snarls. “All the fight is out of them. They come back with their ears…and everythng notched and have zero interest in dames and just want to lay around and wait for free food and get fat like you.”
    “I am not fat. I am well built. If your lot was not half-starved, you would see that you are all way too skinny.”
    “That is better than the alternative,” Gimpy bursts out in his high adolescent voice.
    “And what is the alternative?” I ask.
    “Death or domestication.”
    I digest this for a few seconds. It is no use to preach the joys of the domestic lifestyle to those to whom just living for the next day is a real achievement. They regard every human with fear and suspicion, and in almost all cases around here, rightly so.
    Except, that is, for those beneficent bums and bumettes, and the feline birth control brigade responsible for the satellite clinics that litter this junkyard, one of them right at my back.
    I realize, of course, that if this gang gets too rough I can always leap through the open door, grab the glop, and trigger the automatic closing mechanism. I will be caught like a rat in a trap, but I will also be safe from the Wild Bunch.
    Ole Tiger seems to be reading my mind, because his yellow teeth show a Cheshire cheese grin. “Guess you would not mind a ride in a cage, being the domestic sort to start with. You would come back minus your cojones , though.”
    “You do not understand. I have already been rendered free of unpopular potential, such as progeny.”
    Gimpy has been slinking around the side. “He has still got them, boss. He is lying. He is still armed and dangerous to dames.”
    I sigh. “It is too difficult to explain to street types. I have had a fancy operation by a plastic surgeon called a vasectomy, and —”
    “We are not interested in your medical history, you pampered sellout!” Tom spits. “Whatever you have had, what you will not have when you come back from the twenty-four-hour abduction is your hairballs.”
    I gulp. This mission is more dangerous than I thought. If I happen to fall into the hands of these do-gooders, they will have me sliced and diced for real in no time, because a vasectomy is invisible. I will be summarily cut off from my former self just as if I were