Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

these rigged reality shows sick pranksters. Amazing. People protest the increased surveillance touching their lives because of terrorists but love to watch their fellow citizens being eavesdropped on and filmed on the sly and tricked in these cheesy reality shows.”
    “Inhumane nature,” Temple commented sagely.
    The flashlight picked out the black shapes of hidden cameras strung along the corridor like suspended bats in a cave.
    “The technicians must be running up and down these all the time,” she noted. “What keeps a really nasty voyeur from being among them?”
    “Not a thing, bunnie babe. Not one thing. I suppose there’s no hope for it but to go back and guard that Ashleigh broad. Ain’t it amazing how the most irritating one aboard is the most careful to protect herself?”
    “Oh, Miss Ashleigh isn’t the most irritating one here.”
    “You have a better candidate?”
    He obviously had not considered the male contingent. Dexter Manship... Crawford Buchanan... Mr. Hair Guy. Male chauvinism can be blinding.
    They re-emerged smelling of dust and, it turned out, covered in it. (Only Louie seemed to relish the fact. He shook himself dust free in a few seconds, then began licking his coat in the proper direction again.)
    No one much noticed their less-than-triumphal return. The room thronged with cooing girls in pink pajama sets intent on both soothing Savannah and courting her vote.
    Even the Persian girls were now ensconced on the bedspread beside their recumbent mistress, purring away in solace and solidarity.
    “Frightening,” Rafi noted.
    Temple was sure that Midnight Louie concurred, and she was ready to join the both of them.
    “I’m being stalked,” Savannah insisted. “I suspected as much but now that this demon, this evil black ninja, has shown up in my very room, I’m certain of it.”
    The accusation caused all eyes to turn toward the trio returned from their expedition through the looking glass, all black in some sinister way. There was Louie, black as a witch’s familiar from toe to tail to tip of ear. Temple and her ebony Cher hair. Rafi Nadir and his Middle-Eastern looks in black denim. The lion, the witch, and the... Temple glanced at Rafi. No, he did not qualify as a wardrobe. Thank goodness.
    “There’s a hidden passage,” he said, “behind the mirror. Anyone could have come in or out.”
    Savannah sat up, all disheveled blonde hair (her usual style anyway). “My babies were in danger!” She gathered Yvette and Solange close, their eyes slitting in an expression of utter feline distaste mixed with bored sufferance.
    Come to think of it, that exactly matched the expression on Rafi Nadir’s face.
    “Nail it shut,” she ordered.
    “Can’t,” he said. “The mirror covers the entire door.”
    “Well, I can’t possibly move. It would upset the girls. Cats are far more attached to places than to people.”
    Rafi visibly struggled not to say that in her case such a reaction would be justified. While he dawdled, Rome burned. Or at least Savannah’s baser instincts.
    “Then you’ll just have to keep watch all night on this side of the mirror,” she purred.
    Yes, she purred. She had doubtlessly been called upon to purr a line or several in every one of her B and C movies, and probably a few Ds, Temple thought. Or were those cup sizes: before and after augmentation?
    As Rafi looked around in horror at his frilly duty-station-to-be, Savannah took charge. “You can sleep—or catnap rather, for you certainly don’t want to miss another intrusion—on the chaise lounge.”
    He regarded this bejeweled pillow-heaped upholstered torturous curl of feminine furniture as if it were a medieval iron rack.
    “I’ll do whatever it takes to prevent any further incursions,” Rafi said, through his teeth, “but I’ll sleep in the hall right outside the door. Just a scream away. Yours or theirs.”
    He nodded at the languid Persians.
    Savannah pouted but didn’t object. Temple supposed luring any man any nearer at all satisfied her vanity and reduced the fuss and muss of actual intimacy. But Rafi’s resistance to the siren of soft pom surprised Temple.
    Was he possibly tiring of the superfeminine stereotype? Then again, he’d hooked up with Molina years before, so he must have something of a soft spot for hard women.
    Scratch a male chauvinist and find a... masochist secretly in search of a dominatrix? Interesting.
    “Good.” Savannah snuggled down in her many decorative