Cat Breaking Free (6 page)

Had kids set the fire? Students? That would be a first for this village. But he guessed every town had its troublemakers. Watching the red stain in the sky, he couldn't decide whether to take off up the hills to see what was happening, or seek out the mysterious events occurring somewhere on the dim village streets.

The decision took care of itself, quite suddenly.

The tomcat was crouched to leap away, when a figure appeared from the shadows in the neighbors' dark yard, a black-clad figure slipping swiftly through the bushes and around the far side of the house.

Sailing across to the neighbors' roof, Joe stood with his paws in the gutter peering down as the figure moved silently along the drive toward the back, heading for Chichi's door.

As much as he disliked Chichi Barbi, he didn't want to see something ugly happen to her. There she was, watching TV at the front of the house, and had likely heard nothing. Above the raucous canned laughter, what could she hear? The woman was a sitting duck in there.

Slipping along the edge of the roof to follow the intruder, the tomcat had to laugh. Black leggings, black sweatshirt, black hood pulled up, and even black gloves, a character straight out of a cheap movie.

But that didn't make him any less dangerous. Joe
watched him slip up the steps into the shadows beside the door. In a moment the door opened, the figure slipped inside, the door closed softly, then all was still.

Trotting across the roof again to the front of the house, Joe hung out over the gutter looking down through the front window.

Chichi's sharp silhouette hadn't moved; she appeared totally entranced by the insipid sitcom. Backing up and kneading his claws on the shingles, he trotted away to the pine tree between the houses. Leaping onto its trunk, clinging, he backed down to where he could jump into the little lemon tree—slashing his paws again on its wicked thorns. Why the hell did lemon trees have thorns! No cat could avoid them.

Looking into the dark room, trying to spot the intruder, he saw nothing at first but shadows. Nothing moved until…Yes. There. Black within black, slipping stealthily along beside the dresser. For a brief moment, Joe Grey was uncertain what to do. Shout at Chichi through the window to warn her? And jeopardize his own neck? Or wait, bide his time, try to see what the burglar would take, or what he was up to?

If this was only theft, and not the precursor of an attack on Chichi herself, his instinct was to stay put, to watch, and let this come down as it would. Tonight every cop was busy, the intruder had to know that. Joe thought he'd better play it by ear, maybe go for the evidence. With every cop in the department either up at the fire or chasing unseen miscreants through the dark streets, it was, indeed, a hard call.

C
rouched among the thin, brittle branches, his nose
tickling with the sharp smell of lemons, Joe stared in through the dark window watching the housebreaker's stealthy movements. In the inky-black room, he could make out very little even with his superior night vision. But suddenly he was blinded. Light blazed on, right in his eyes. Backing away, nearly falling, his every nerve jumping with shock, he was caught in the brilliance like a deer in a speeder's headlights.

Hunching down, trying to hide his white parts, he had no real cover. Light pooled in through the skinny branches and scruffy leaves. In its glare he couldn't see the intruder's face, the hood was pulled nearly together. Black might be melodramatic, but it was effective. There was a bulge in the intruder's right pocket. A weapon? Skinny guy, even in the oversized black sweatshirt. Opening the dresser drawers, real bold now. What was he looking for? Something in particular, or just any valuables he could find, money, credit cards,
jewelry? Or was he putting something in the drawers? He seemed very casual and unhurried.

Either the lock on this back door had been easy to breach, a credit card lock, or the guy was mighty fast with the lock picks. Or had Chichi left it unlocked? Had she forgotten to lock it? Or did this person have a key?

Maybe the new owners hadn't changed the locks, some people just didn't think of those things. Or had Chichi given someone a key? From the front of the house, Joe could still hear dialogue and canned laughter. The way the burglar was bundled in the dark sweatshirt, it was hard to tell whether this was a man or a woman—until suddenly his quarry flipped back the hood, unzipped the sweatshirt, and tossed it on a chair—and Joe gulped back a yowl of surprise.

Chichi. It was Chichi. She smiled lazily, fluffed her frazzled blond hair, and ran her hand down her slim waist, pulling down her tight black T-shirt, showing plenty of cleavage. What was she doing sneaking into her own house under cover of darkness, sliding silently into the darkened room?

And who was out there in the living room watching the tube? Did she have company? Why hadn't he seen someone before? Those two guys who came to see her, neither acted like he was living here. Suspicions formed in Joe's mind faster than he could process them; but they added up to nothing. Zilch.

As Chichi pulled off the tight black jeans and slipped into a red satin robe, he wanted to race around to the front window and have a closer look at that one-person audience. Maybe he could peer under the blind. But he wanted, more, to stay where he was clinging to the skinny branch. He watched her slip a black cloth
bag from the pocket of the sweatshirt where it lay on the chair; and she stood looking around the room. It seemed like the kind of waterproof silk bag that expensive raincoats come folded into, for easy travel.

Kneeling, she opened the bottom dresser drawer and reached up underneath, making Joe want to laugh out loud. If she was hiding something, that was the first place a cop—or a burglar—would look.

But then Chichi seemed to realize this, too. She rose, clutching the bag, and stood considering the mattress—another laughable choice. Go ahead, Joe thought, twitching a whisker. The moment you leave, lady, or go to take a shower, I'll be in there slashing through the mattress, and out again with the loot…

But what loot? What did she have in the bag? And could he even get into the place?

Well, hell, he'd never seen a house he couldn't break into.

Kneeling, Chichi slipped the bag between the two mattresses. She didn't shove it very deep, she didn't slit the mattress ticking. Good show, Joe thought, itching to get his paws under there, get his claws into that black silk. For a long moment, she just knelt there. Then, almost as if she'd read his mind, she pulled the bag out again and set it on the bed, as if she meant to hide it somewhere more secure, harder to discover.

But maybe, Joe thought, he wouldn't have to retrieve it. Maybe he'd
know
what she'd hidden, as soon as he found out what had happened in the village. Chichi's stealthy arrival home while the sirens were still shrieking, plus the unanswered puzzle of who was watching TV, had to add up to trouble.

The thin branch was cutting into his belly, and its
thorns had stuck his hind paw so deeply he could smell his own blood. Hurt like hell to back away when, within the bright room, Chichi turned suddenly and approached the window.

She stood looking out, her eyes on a level with his own, which were slitted closed, his white parts hidden in an uncomfortable crouch. Did the bedroom light pick him out like a possum on a leafless branch?

But so what? What difference? So there was a cat in the tree, a neighborhood cat. Clyde Damen's cat, harassing the sleeping birds, maybe snatching baby birds from their nests.

She didn't remain long at the window, but bent down to root around in a suitcase that lay open on a chair beside the dresser. Hadn't she unpacked? She'd been there two weeks. That spoke of a transient, fly-by-night attitude that made Joe smile with satisfaction at his own astute character assessment.

But when she drew from the suitcase a long, sharp-looking bread knife, and looked up directly through the glass, he swallowed back a yelp of surprise and nearly fell out of the tree. Backing away into the tiniest twiggy branches, he lacerated two more paws and bent the limbs so far that he swung and wobbled wildly before he righted himself, nonchalantly licked a paw as if he hadn't seen anything frightening but had just lost his balance, and crept back to a safer perch. Maybe, with the inside light reflecting against the glass, she had only seen her own reflection.

But why the knife? What made her pick it up and peer out so intently?

And what, in the next instant, made her draw the shade?

Maybe she'd heard something, the soft hush of his scrabbling among the brittle branches; maybe that was all. There was no reason for her, even if she'd seen him, to feel threatened. By a cat? Why would she?

Annoyed at his own cowardice, Joe dropped from the lemon tree and sped for the front of the house. Rearing up with his paws on the sill, he peered through beneath the shade, stretching and tilting his head, his nose pressed against the cold glass.

Studying the dim room in the TV's flickering light, Joe laughed softly. Little Chichi had some artistic flair, some talent as a sculptor.

Maybe she had worked in department store window display, or maybe on stage sets. Or maybe she was simply talented. She had created a very lifelike silhouette using a mop and several other common household items.

The mop formed the body; it was one of those old-fashioned mops with twisted rags on a stick; these were the woman's tresses, tangled like Chichi's blond coiffure. The figure wore a blue sweat suit, artfully padded out in just the right places. The head itself was made of wadded and pasted newspapers. A small table lamp behind the figure gave off the weak glow that helped, with the flicker of the TV, to silhouette her against the shade. The creative dummy was, at the moment, being treated to an old rerun of
Lassie,
a series Joe found particularly disgusting.

It was one thing to see animal stories that were obviously imaginary takeoffs, like
Alice in Wonderland
, or the Narnia series, or
The Lion King
. Children knew this was make-believe, and they loved it. It was quite another matter to subject children to animal tales that
purported to present impossible animal behavior as real life. The things Lassie understood and did were not at all how dogs really acted or thought, and yet the series wasn't presented as fantasy. The result, in Joe's opinion, was generations of children who hadn't a clue how to train and deal with their new Christmas puppies or kittens, and generations of parents who were just as ignorant.

When Joe compared those tawdry stories to the very real and wonderful feats of well-trained police and drug dogs, and of herding and search-and-rescue dogs, Lassie's idiocy came off as dangerously and foolishly misleading. No wonder children grew up knowing nothing about the animals with whom they shared the earth.

Clyde would once have said he was grossly opinionated. But Clyde's views on the subject had undergone some serious changes, and were now pretty much the same as Joe's own. As for Joe and Dulcie and Kit's situation, the cats themselves understood that
they
were far beyond the pale. That no sensible adult could easily believe that a cat could talk, and for this they were eternally grateful.

Continuing to admire Chichi's display-window handiwork, he wondered if this figure had been here before Clyde went off to dinner. Clyde and Ryan must have walked right by it, passing this window as they headed for Lupe's Playa. Clyde, seeing what he thought was Chichi in there, should have wondered at seeing her so shortly afterward walking into Lupe's.

But maybe not. It was only a few blocks. Or maybe she'd had this figure all set up within the darkened
room, had watched through the front window until Clyde and Ryan left the house walking up toward the village, and then had turned on the lamp and TV, and had slipped out of the house to follow them.

But why? To establish an alibi to her whereabouts, tonight? But dinner was a long time before whatever came down in the village. How could her appearance at Lupe's afford her a tight alibi?

Maybe she'd wanted to get friendly with the Molena Point cops, make nice to Harper and Garza. She'd tried hard enough to get herself invited to join them. To gain their goodwill, while at the same time establishing an alibi. Fat chance, with cops. Anyway, that really didn't wash. How would she know Clyde was having dinner with Max and Dallas?

Unless Clyde had told her? Quite possible. She often came knocking; maybe earlier this evening he'd used dinner as an excuse to get rid of her. Or maybe, seeing Ryan arrive and the two of them go off, Chichi took a chance and followed?

Whatever, they'd all left the restaurant long before the sirens started. She'd had plenty of time to take care of whatever business involved the little black bag.

Filled with questions, he considered waiting until her lights went out and she was in bed asleep, then find a way inside; try to wriggle under the mattress without waking her.

Right. And end up backed into a corner by that businesslike bread knife.

But again, he was only a cat. She shouldn't be overly alarmed by his presence; when she saw him in the yard or on his own porch, she looked at him with
distaste, but not with fear; she didn't go pale and back away as a real ailurophobe would be likely to do, exhibiting shortness of breath and possible heart palpitations. A person like that, you really couldn't con them with purrs, with face rubs against a stockinged ankle. And long ago, in San Francisco, she'd played up to him big-time.

Now, probably the worst Chichi would do if she found him in her room would be fling open the back door and chase him out into the night.

Right. With the bread knife.

Dulcie would say his plan was more than stupid, she'd call him totally insane, say he'd abandoned the last shred of his previously astute feline mind. Maybe he'd wait until tomorrow, take the sensible route, lay low until Chichi walked into the village early, as she often did, carrying her big canvas tote.

Leaving Chichi's front window, scorching up the pine tree to his own roof, he shouldered into his tower and through his cat door, dropped down to Clyde's desk, and went straight to Snowball in the big leather chair.

She was awake, looking small and lonely, just a frightened wisp of white fluff. Charlie had said once that cats, when they were sick or hurt or afraid or grieving, seemed to shrink to half their size, to collapse right in on themselves. Slipping up into the chair beside Snowball, he began to lick her ear and to talk gently to her.

Of the three household cats, Snowball had been the first to get used to his human speech. Her initial shock hadn't lasted long, and then she'd been more fascinated than appalled.

“It's all right, Snowball,” he told her now. “Rube will be all right, he's in good hands now, he's not in pain now.” But even as he said it, Joe shuddered. What did he mean, he'll be fine? What did that mean, in good hands now? What did that mean, not in pain now?

He didn't want to think what those expressions might really mean.

Giving the grieving little cat a gentle wash, he sat with her snuggled close, waiting until she dozed again, tired out with missing Rube. Only then did Joe leave her. Leaping from desk to rafter and through to the roofs, he headed fast for the center of the village, his gaze focused on the reflection of slow-moving car lights and handheld spotlights that now glanced skyward, bouncing against the edges of the roof gutters and flickering along the undersides of the oaks. Cops with spotlights, moving fast and silent.

He approached the scene expecting any second to hear sirens blast; but none did. Just the silent racing lights and the whisper of voices that, from a distance, only a cat could hear; and then, soon, the muted static of police radios turned low. As he neared the scene he could make out more clearly the soft resonance of the cops' voices, the voices of men he knew. There were no sirens, no staccato sounds of men running, no cars taking off with squealing tires; no more shots fired.

But suddenly just below him four patrol cars took off fast in four directions, racing silent and swift along the narrow streets. Joe knew the sound of the big Chevys that Molena Point PD drove, knew their purr as well as he knew his own. Approaching the scene over the shingles, he paused, waiting and watching,
half his mind even now on old Rube, on Clyde and on Snowball.

Clyde would be alarmed when he got home and Snowball wasn't in her bed, when she wasn't anywhere downstairs or in the patio. Eventually he'd look upstairs, where she sometimes went when she was very upset, when the other two household cats took her toys or took all the food. Clyde would find her in the leather chair and would likely take her into bed with him, to comfort her—to comfort each other. Clyde would be feeling low himself, maybe very low, Joe thought forlornly.