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Prologue

Midnight Louie's Dream

The best thing about dreaming is that you do not know you are doing it until you wake up screaming.

I do not exactly wake up screaming, but all four of my limbs are thrashing to beat the band .

. . actually to beat the band of baddies I am fleeing down the endless alleys of dreamland. I can still feel the breath of the hounds from hell that are on my tail.

I lie there on the bed, whiskers still twitching, while l wait for reality to reassemble around me. I wait for the oblong of security light cast through the French door to look less like the shadow of a sneak thief. For the inky blot on the bedroom throw rug to look more like a pair of toppled high heels and less like a chain saw momentarily set down by a serial killer.

Okay, so it was a pretty bad dream.

The pads of my feet are damp with distress. I rub the sleep from my eyes, but still l see alien shapes in the familiar bedroom landscape.

Maybe a familiar shape would reassure my dream-drugged mind, but Miss Temple Barr is in absentia again. What is the use of having a roommate who is off mating in someone else's room?

But I am being selfish. I have left my Miss Temple home alone many a time while I pursued a merry night out on the town, and when the town one lives in is Las Vegas, there are plenty of exciting nights out to be had.

So now that the tables are turned, I have no business complaining.

Like the lady poet said a long, long time ago, a dream is a dream is a dream.

Unless it is a nightmare.

The images return in the slow-motion crawl of dawning recall.

I am back in the eternal alleyway, alone, on the lam.

Those mean streets are lit by aged light bulbs that buzz and crackle, threatening to go nova like a dying star, then darken for good.

The wet streets are patent leather slick and reflect whole constellations of light.

Nine relentless Havana Browns are on my tail, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, fanning out on the liquid asphalt streets.

Is the number nine recurring in my dream like an unlucky card?

I hear dice or teeth rattling down the cul-de-sacs I race past Throw them bones . . . or, better yet, get my own bones moving faster Then l see it. A light in the window.

I leap for one or the other the light or the window or both before I spot the figure also in the window: a masked lady in lavender-brown, dilly dilly.

She extends eight blood-ruby red claws, all wearing shiny fresh Curare Coral nail enamel.

I leap short at the last minute, and fall. . .

. . . into a nettle-patch of flailing Havana Browns, shivs drawn.

Then I wake up, my legs still pumping.

By the pricking of my lamentably non-opposable thumbs, something wicked this way comes.