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Robert shrugged, but his hand holding the gun never wavered. “Didn't know, didn't care. I told you, it wasn't about the money. It was a fixed routine. Every time she met with him, I took a little more out. It seemed fair play.”

It was, Ginny had to admit, a logical sort of revenge: if she stopped, so would he. Sick, but logical. She could almost admire the cold-blooded beauty of it.

“And now?” Tonica could have been asking the guy if he wanted another beer. But she saw how his hand was resting on the arm of the sofa; he wasn't anywhere near as cool or calm as his voice sounded, but braced to explode into action if need be. The older man wouldn't stand a chance—except for the gun.

Guns trumped muscle just about every time. Her self-defense teacher had told them that, back in college.

“You going to kill us, Roger?” she asked, trying to keep his attention on her, so if Tonica tried anything, maybe he'd have a few extra seconds to move. “Like you killed Jimmy?”

“I didn't kill him!” Roger seemed to finally register what they were talking about, and looked dismayed at the thought that they could think he'd murder someone. Considering he was holding a gun on them, Ginny wasn't reassured. “I found the gun, on my way in that night. Someone had thrown it in the alley behind the dog run. I picked it up; it wasn't safe to leave there.”

“You just picked up a gun and walked into the shelter? Are you an utter idiot?” Este was beside herself.

“What was I supposed to do, leave it there for anyone to find? And then I saw the light on in my office and all I could think was that someone was in there, poking around in the books—”

“You knew we'd hired someone to do them!”

“I didn't know he worked at three in the morning!”

“What were you even doing there at three in the morning?”

Ginny was pretty sure that the two of them had forgotten anyone else was in the room. Which would be great—she had no problem with two adults working their issues out by screaming at each other, except one of them was still holding that damn gun.

Time to do something about that.

*  *  *

The difference between shooting a guy and surprising him with a gun so he had a heart attack was something for lawyers and judges to figure out, but looking at the way Roger was holding the weapon, Teddy was pretty sure he was telling the truth about the gun not being his. He was also pretty sure that the only way Roger would hit anyone with a bullet would be by accident.

Never mind that an accident would be just as deadly as intent, in the relatively small space of the waiting room. He wished they'd taken Georgie in with them: a man this nervous would probably wet himself if a dog—even a sweet dog—growled at him.

Or maybe not, considering that the guy helped found an animal rescue shelter.

“There's a way out of this that doesn't involve a gun.” Ginny was stepping forward, her hands out to her side, her voice shaky but calm. Teddy wanted to yell at her—what the hell did she think she was doing, you don't irritate a guy with a gun! But he was afraid to say anything, afraid to even breathe, trying to identify all the ways this could possibly—probably—go wrong.

But Roger took a step back, even though he was still aiming the gun at them, and seemed to be listening. Maybe she could talk him down after all.

“Right now, everything's a terrible, tragic accident,” Ginny went on. “Nobody was intentionally hurt.”

Something brushed his ankle, and Teddy twitched instinctively, then looked down, somehow not surprised to see a cat winding her way around his legs. He
was
surprised to recognize Penny. She rested her head against his calf and looked up at him with those pale green eyes, like she was expecting him to do something.

He had just enough time to wonder how the hell she'd gotten here, how she'd found them, when a low growl filled the room, making everyone stop dead. For a moment, he had the crazy thought that Penny had somehow gotten Georgie out of the waiting room, but it didn't sound like Georgie.

It didn't sound like a dog at all.

Across from them, Este had gone ashen, her eyes looking to the left, but her entire body gone very still.

“Nobody move,” Roger said, his voice the kind of calm that made smart people break out in a cold sweat. “Nobody . . . move.”

“That's not a dog,” Ginny said, as the growl sounded again, and this time it was definitely in the room.

T
here was a third low
growl, this one ending with a weird kind of sneezing sound, and Ginny suddenly knew what was in the room with them: a cat. A
big
cat, deep-chested and muscled. She could feel it behind her, pacing along the wall, large, menacing, and nasty. She pictured it as a sabertooth, with glowing red eyes and drool, just waiting to pounce. Even if she'd wanted to jump and run, even if Roger hadn't warned against exactly that, her body would have refused. Instinct froze her, still and silent as a mouse, hoping against hope the beast would choose someone else, or better yet, go
away
.

Someone, she didn't know who, it might even have been her, let out a whimper, barely audible, and like a trigger being pulled, all hell broke loose. The leap was silent, but she could hear it, her nerves screaming at her body to
move move move
. She saw Roger turning, the gun he'd just been pointing at Este dropping lower, then rising to aim it at her—no, behind her—even as the door left ajar by his entry banged open, slamming against the wall with a sound like a gunshot.

“Don't shoot!” Alice cried, panicked. “It's valuable, don't shoot it!”

The noise and the plea were just enough to make Roger hesitate. The cat, however, had no such consideration. Ginny's muscles finally unlocked enough to let her slide to the floor, her only instinct to get out of the way, to be less of a target. Something brushed by her, and the cat's scream was matched by a human cry of pain, not hers, too deep to be hers, was she hurt? Then there was a bellow that could only be Tonica entering the fray, with a woman's voice calling out again, “Don't shoot it don't hurt it!”

And then another scream, this one fainter but no less fierce, and something launched itself over Ginny like an arrow, long and lean and . . . furred?

Ginny rolled over on her side in time to see a smaller cat, housecat-sized, land claws-out on the larger animal, her tail bottled and her ears flat.

“Penny,” Ginny whispered in shock, with no idea of how she could recognize the fierce warrior as the same smooth-coated cat who rubbed against her ankles, but she knew the tabby as easily as she would know Georgie. Fear was a sour taste in her mouth, watching the much smaller animal cling to the larger cat's neck, hissing like some cartoon that wasn't funny at all.

The tabby didn't have a chance; the larger animal shook her off easily, and Penny landed on the floor, hard, and didn't move.

Before the larger cat could recover enough to attack or flee, the vet tech was there, on her knees in what looked
like the stupidest move ever, and stabbed the animal with a hypodermic needle. She stayed there by its side, either batshit crazy or just too exhausted to move. Her eyes were wide, her chest heaving as though she'd been running a sprint. Ginny could relate: she felt like she needed a paper bag to breath into, herself.

The cat—a tawny spotted beast a little larger than Georgie—struggled to get back on its feet, and then collapsed.

Ginny exhaled, coughed as her lungs demanded more air—now!—and was finally able to look around the room, to see what the hell had happened. Roger was down on the ground, on his hands and knees, his shirt ripped and bloody. Tonica was flat on his back, holding his arm to his chest, but she couldn't see any blood. Their chairs were knocked over and scattered across the floor, her chest was heaving as though there weren't enough air in the room, and she could feel bruises starting to form everywhere.

“What. The. Fuck?” Este's voice came from behind the sofa, where she, smarter than the rest of them, had ducked the moment things went to hell.

Ginny stared at the cat—a cougar? No, the markings were all wrong, spotted, and it was too small—and nodded. “Yeah. What she said.”

“That's an ocelot,” Este said, moving around the sofa cautiously now, staring at the cat. “A wildcat. What the
hell
?” The look she turned on the vet tech was venomous, and Ginny instinctively scooted back a few inches until her back was up against the coffee table, its out-of-date magazines and candy jar somehow unmoved by all the action.

The vet tech swallowed nervously, but with the evidence on the floor in front of her, the syringe still in her hands, there wasn't any way she could deny responsibility.

Tonica had managed to sit up, and he nodded briefly to Ginny, to tell her he was all right. In the chaos, Roger had dropped the gun, and Ginny managed to overcome her distaste for the thing long enough to draw it to her, sliding it under the coffee table where nobody could get to it easily.

Penny, apparently unharmed, crawled into Tonica's lap and draped herself over one thigh, calmly grooming her paw with no sign of the hissing weapon she'd been minutes before. The three of them waited there, catching their breath and letting the others unravel what the hell was going on.

“You miserable bitch,” Roger said, and it wasn't clear at first who he was talking to. Then he went down on his knees beside the cat, checking to see if it was still breathing, and the glare he shot the vet tech made it clear. “Este, stop gawping like an idiot, and call the cops.”

“But . . .”

“I don't give a fuck about the bad publicity,” he snarled. “I want this bitch arrested. For animal abuse, if nothing else.”

*  *  *

It seemed that, once you'd had a dead body on your premises, a second call to the cops got quick attention, especially if you mentioned there was a wild, if currently sedated,
animal involved. With the cops came an officer from the Seattle Animal Shelter and, surprisingly, Scott Williams.

It took the cops about thirty seconds to secure the scene, considering that nobody was in any shape to move. “Do we need a paramedic?”

“No, we've got this,” Williams said, and then, realizing that they were talking about the human injuries, flushed.

“We're fine,” Roger said, clearly still angry, brushing off the officer trying to check his wounds. “How is the cat?”

Right after that, Ginny and Tonica were hustled out into the parking lot, where a patrolman took their statements and then seemed to forget about them. Alice was escorted to the first patrol car, her hands fastened behind her back, even though as far as Ginny could tell she hadn't offered any resistance at all. She was crying and glaring at people all at once, which took some doing.

The ocelot was taken out on a stretcher a few minutes after that, Williams carrying one end, the animal control officer at the other, talking into a headset all the while. Este and Roger were nowhere to be seen, presumably still inside, giving their own statements. As owners of the shelter, they'd have some serious explaining to do.

“I wonder if Roger was telling the truth,” Ginny said, still a little dazed from the events. “If Jimmy was poking around in the books, Roger would've known; he'd be the only one who would've known. If he came back from medical leave and saw Jimmy's notes . . . it would make sense to threaten him, maybe even plan to kill him. If he
did have a heart attack because of Roger's actions, does that make it manslaughter?

“I still don't get . . . what the hell was all that? Keeping wild animals in the clinic? Why?” Tonica sounded bewildered, totally not listening to her.

“They're in demand as pets,” Ginny said, switching gears. “I read something about it a while back, or saw some documentary, I don't remember. Mainly by people with more money than brains. At a guess, she was smuggling them in using the shelter as a cover, or maybe just holding them for someone else to sell. The latter, probably.”

“Jesus.” Tonica was starting to focus a little more. “That's illegal, right?”

“Very. I don't know if that cat was an endangered species or not, but . . . at the very least, you're supposed to have a license to handle wild animals, I'm pretty sure.”

“Jesus,” he said again. “I bet the gun was hers. If she was part of a smuggling ring . . . but then, why did it end up in the alley?”

“I don't know. Talk about bad timing . . . If the money hadn't gone missing, and Nora hadn't called us in, nobody would have known, probably.”

“Yeah. We fixed everything, didn't we?” Tonica shook his head. “For the first time in a very long time . . . I need a drink.”

“I need to get Georgie,” Ginny said, more worried about immediate concerns. “Do you think—hey!” and she accosted Williams, who, after helping to load the cat into an emergency vehicle, had come back to stand, staring at the
wall of the clinic as though the faded graffiti would give him answers. “My dog, she's inside, in the dog run.”

“I'll let the cops know,” he said. “I think they're going to close the shelter, at least for a couple of days while they go over the office again, but for now, everyone's staying where they are, so she's fine. Georgie won't get put back in the kennel, I promise.”

Ginny didn't much feel like trusting anyone, but she didn't have a choice, right then. The cops weren't letting anyone back into the building unless they actually worked there.

“It's my fault,” Williams said finally, still standing there.

“What?” Tonica turned to look at him, frowning. “What was?”

“All of this, maybe.” He sighed, raising his hands and then letting them drop again, not looking away from the remains of the graffiti. “I knew something . . . I knew something wasn't right. With Alice. There were supplies missing I couldn't account for, things that didn't feel right. And I knew the shelter wasn't paying her enough, especially for the hours she put in. She was here too often late at night, and the clinic . . .” He shrugged. “You saw the graffiti. We were being hit by a group of . . . extremists, who wanted to shut the spay clinic down. I guess I thought she was part of that, trying to sabotage us from within? It didn't make any sense, but all the pieces were there, and I was trying to put them together. . . .”