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Prologue

A Higher Calling

I am told that most people would be happy to receive personal advice from on high.

However, I am not most people. I am not even a person.

And right now I am preparing for my annual autumn slump. This, I believe, is a universal condition. When that first October evening turns nippy, something primitive in the cells of every red-blooded critter stops dead for a moment, looks around and turns into a couch potato, or maybe a pumpkin.

Call it a genetic disposition to hibernate. Call it a seasonal disaffective disorder. Call it Ishmael.

Whatever, it is one of nature's most powerful urges, and I did not get the enviable reputation I have as the primo progenitor in this town by ignoring nature's most powerful urges.

It does not matter that my hometown is Las Vegas, where virtually year-round it is hotter than the scales on the back of a skink. Of course, my closest acquaintance with a scale is in the piano bar of the Crystal Phoenix, since I came fresh from the factory with a luxuriant coat of jet-black fur. Still, there is bone and muscle under all this velvet plush, and I am old enough that a chill can creep past my barrier fuzz and into my skeleton. Come September, the nights dwindle down to a precious few degrees, like forty or fifty. Then October, November, and December kick in and it really gets cold when the daylight goes on down time.

So in late October I long to dine diligently, drink deeply and then curl up someplace off the ground, where I bury my nose in my external muffler, flatten my ears to the slap-happy, insomniac uproar of Las Vegas doing business as usual and hope for a long winter's nap. Maybe I will not even blink my peepers ajar until, say, March and the IRS is threatening. (Though I am exempt from personal taxes, and that is another story. )

As far as I am concerned, from this moment on, Miss Temple can deliver meals to my feet.

She can even tent a few newspapers over my head and forget about me until the cobwebs start looking like macrame plant hangers ... and the resident spider is big enough to go to med school.

But then, as I lie there, gently napping, suddenly there comes a twitching, as of someone gently switching a tail a-dust with itching ... powder.

Urgh! How can I describe this unnatural, burrowing feeling that comes stealing over my contented, drowsing form? Like a fly walking tippy-toe over an emery board. Like taking a sitz bath in rock salt or getting a grain of sand between your two hardest-to-reach toes...

Oh, it is awful! One of my eyelids snaps open like a runaway shade letting in a fistful of daylight. I am a peaceful, twilight kind of guy. Why else would they call me Midnight Louie?

And right now I am all a-pant for shorter days and longer nights. That way my serial naps can stretch out into one long snooze. But it is not to be, not with the kind of neighbors up with which I have to put.

And I do mean up. I can feel the intangible itching powder drifting down two floors from directly above me. My left ear does the Jerk. Then my right. A buzzing as of something nasty scuzzing about the edges of my consciousness makes my right leg try to get up and walk...