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Possibly irritated that he hadn't gotten the point the first time, Penny reached up and swatted his arm again, claws out but not digging into shirt or skin.

“Ow! What?” he asked again, but the cat, her message apparently delivered, merely sat there blinking peacefully at nothing in particular, a soft rumbling purr coming from her body.

“See?” Ginny said, unable to resist. “Even Mistress Penny thinks it's a good idea, to help the shelter out.”

“Well, I don't think it's a good idea,” Seth said, even though nobody had asked him. “Whatever it is, if Blondie came up with it, it's trouble.”

Good sandwich or not, that nickname really pissed her off, calling up every “dumb blonde” joke she'd ever been subjected to. “One of these days I'm going to teach you not to call me that, old man.”

He snorted at her threat, then got up and re-piled the dishes on the tray as though Tonica had done it wrong, and started carrying it back toward the kitchen.

“Careful, Seth,” Tonica warned him as the old man walked by. “You're tougher, but she's meaner.”

He snorted again and disappeared through the kitchen doorway.

As though annoyed by their distraction, Penny pushed at Tonica again, and used claws this time, based on his yelp.

“C'mon, Teddy.” She was laughing now. “You don't stand a chance against her.”

“She just wants me to refill the kibble bowl,” he said, scooping the little tabby up and petting her. Penny rested her head against his arm and seemed to loosen all her bones, melting against him.

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. Look, I've got to get back to work, clients wait on no lunch break, and you guys need to open. I'll call later and we can discuss a plan, right?”

“Yeah.” He was reluctant, still, but he'd go along and they both knew it. Curiosity might be a feline trait, but
humans had it, too, in buckets. “Yeah, all right. But if we're doing this, I'm taking lead. You may know more about research, but getting people to admit to possible wrongdoings—or even knowing about wrongdoings—is different from sorting through records. There's more chance of offending someone or pissing them off so much they shut us down, and talking to people is still my strong point, not yours.”

“Absolutely,” she said with a straight face. That had been the hook she'd used to get him on board in the first place; the fact that he now thought it was his own idea meant she'd done her job right. “I'll call our client and let her know we're on the job.”

On that note, she left, putting an extra swing of confidence in her walk. At least until she was on the other side of the door, and walking down the block toward her apartment. Only then did she let some of that confident front fade. She'd known he'd give in. They were alike that much, at least: the idea of something unknown, something hidden, was too tempting to resist. But this was Tonica, and for every way she knew to manipulate him, he knew as many ways to manipulate her, and she thought sometimes they spent more time trying to figure each other out than they did actually conversing. She never knew where he was going to fall during an argument.

Of course, she admitted with a faint smirk, that was also half the fun.

*  *  *

Humans looked down, and they looked side to side, but they rarely if ever looked up. Penny went high, not so much following Georgie's human home as accompanying her, unseen. While the human went into the building where she lived, Penny went up a less direct route, finally leaping down onto the fire escape outside the apartment window just as the front door opened.

Penny waited until the human finished greeting Georgie and went into the smaller room, and then let her paw scrape at the window, once.

Georgie was at the window instantly. “Hi.”

“He agreed,” she said.

“Good!” There was a pause. “To what?”

“Georgie . . .” Penny stopped to think. No, she hadn't told the dog what she had overheard the humans saying in the Busy Place, the night before. Rather than explain, she plowed on as though Georgie had simply forgotten. “A human came to see them yesterday, asked them to look at the shelter. They are going to investigate.”

“Humans know there's something wrong, too? Of course humans would know.”

Penny was less confident in human knowledge, but in this case it seemed they were all on the same scent. “They know something's wrong, but not what.”

“Well, neither do we,” Georgie pointed out. “Yet.” All they knew was that there were people in the shelter when there shouldn't be, and things—noises and smells—that made the residents uncomfortable.

“We need to find out,” Penny said. “We need to talk to the ones in the shelter. Rumor isn't enough; it can get mangled and chewed
along the way.” Georgie couldn't do that; her human didn't let her wander alone. That would be her job, then.

“We can be helpful?” Georgie liked that idea. “We can help save the Old Place, too!”

There was a noise from the other room, and Georgie trotted off to investigate, sticking her head through the doorway. Her curling tail wagged once, shaking her entire backside, and then she came back to the window.

“She's on the phone,” the shar-pei reported. “Talking to someone else. A meeting, tomorrow. About the Old Place.”

“Good.” Humans would do what they did, and she would do what she could, to keep them on the right trail. “You need to make them take you with them, listen to what they say,” Penny said, thinking hard. “And let me know where you go, and when.” Last time she had not been able to put a paw on them for hours at a time, and she hadn't liked that.

Georgie tilted her wrinkled head and widened her eyes in confusion. “How? The things I'm learning with the trainer are good, but how can I tell you we're going somewhere I don't know?”

That was a good question.

Georgie perked up, like she'd just heard someone call her name. “If you let him collar you, put on a leash, maybe you can come, too!”

Penny didn't even dignify that with a response.

“Go with Herself,” she said instead. “Listen to everything they say, and remember it!”

“What are you going to do?”

“Theodore's at the Busy Place tonight,” she said. “I'm going back there.”

With that, Penny put her paw up at the window screen, touching Georgie's nose through the mesh, and then leaped gracefully down the fire escape landings onto the sidewalk. Back on the ground, she paused briefly to groom her tail, her ears cocked to anything happening around her, or if Georgie might call her back for some reason. Then, satisfied everything was as it should be, she headed back downtown to keep an eye on her own human.

They were not going to get in trouble without her, this time.

*  *  *

After confirming with their new client, Ginny called her partner. He didn't answer, of course: Mary's would be open by now, and he didn't answer the phone when he was working.

The recorded message telling her to leave a message beeped at her, and she started talking. “Teddy.” It still felt odd calling him that, when she still mostly thought of him as Tonica. “Hey, it's Ginny. So, I spoke with Nora and she wants us to come in tomorrow morning, meet her at the shelter before it opens. I know you don't do mornings but it was either that or wait a couple of days until you were off shift, or me go on my own, and neither one of those sounded ideal, so suck it up.” She could almost see his expression at that. “So I'll see you tomorrow, ten a.m. sharp, at the shelter?” She paused, and the answering machine beeped to indicate that she was out of time before she could think of what else she wanted to say.

“Damn. They should have a ‘please hold while you gather your thoughts' option on these things.”

Part of her wanted to dive into researching the new job right away, but they really needed to talk to Nora first, to get a better sense of what was going on; blind searches could turn up interesting things, but she wouldn't know if they were useful yet, not without some background info. Besides, she had other things that needed attention now, no matter what new gigs fell into her lap. She was in the final phase of one job, helping a single dad arrange a birthday party for his seven-year-old twins. Not exactly a mental challenge, but a job was a job, and the guy was paying for 100 percent of her skills and time. Normally she was good at ignoring distractions, but today . . . Maybe it was the thought of the dogs in the shelter, at risk because someone got greedy, but she couldn't stop thinking about this job.

“Enough. Focus.”

Silence fell on the apartment save for the soft clicking of the keyboard, Ginny's pen scratching on paper, and the muffled sound of Georgie moving around in the other room. Part of her awareness identified the distinct sounds of dog-nails clicking on hardwood floors, sighs and thumps and the occasional rattle-slurp when Georgie hit the water bowl, or looked for new treats miraculously appearing in her food dish. These were familiar, comforting sounds now, a steady accompaniment while she worked.

After a few hours, Ginny pushed away from the desk, stretching her arms over her head until she heard her back crack properly. She glanced at the display on her computer, and frowned. It was almost five o'clock—she'd gotten her
focus back, and then some, apparently. On the plus side, the birthday party was wrapped up, and her in-box was, at least for the moment, at zero.

“Hey Georgie-girl,” she called. “Do you need to go for a walk?”

The usual happy clatter of claws on the bare floor didn't meet her query. Ginny frowned. Usually Georgie came and slept under her desk while she worked, but the dog hadn't come in with her. Except for poking her head in briefly a while back, in fact, she hadn't seen the dog since she came back from Mary's. That was unusual—it was a decent-sized apartment, but not
that
large.

“Georgie?”

She got up and walked out of the second bedroom she used as an office, into the main living area. Georgie was at the window, her paws up on the sill, looking out intently.

“Are there squirrels on the fire escape again, baby?”

When she walked over to the window, there was nothing on the fire escape except the remains of this summer's failed attempt to grow herbs, and Georgie was looking up at her with those big brown eyes that always made Ginny feel like she was Best Human Ever.

She knelt down and kissed the top of Georgie's square head. The dog's fur felt like peach fuzz, warm and bristly. “Keeping the homestead safe, huh? I love you, puppy-dog.”

A blue-black tongue licked the tip of her nose in reply, and Ginny laughed, hugging the dog. “What did I do without you? Come on, we'll have a walk and get some fresh
air. And tonight we've got training session! You going to be good for Bobby?”

Georgie didn't bark, but she managed a low woof that Ginny took to be agreement.

“Getting you from that shelter was one of the best things I've done in years,” she said, resting her chin on top of Georgie's warm, blunt head. “I won't let them get into trouble now. I promise.”

Georgie woofed again and leaned against her, as though to give either comfort or support.

G
inny had, once upon a
time, stayed out late most nights, and then relied on an alarm clock to wake up. Now, more often than not, she was in bed before midnight and woke up a few minutes before 6 a.m. under the weight of a heavy doggy stare, Georgie's paws perched on the edge of the bed, her brown eyes intent on Ginny's face until the human's eyes opened. Then the stubby, curled tail would start wagging, and a blue-black tongue would wash Ginny's face until, defeated by cute, she was willing to get out of bed and take Georgie for a walk.

That Friday morning was a textbook case of Life, Now.

“All right, all right,” Ginny said, pushing the dog away halfheartedly. “Enough with the tenderizing. I'm awake, I'm getting up, see?” She swung her feet over the side of the bed and hit the floor, trying to decide which need was more pressing: the bathroom, or the coffee machine. The bathroom won.

Georgie had quickly learned that the bathroom was a human-only space—mainly because there wasn't enough room in there for both human and dog. But she was
waiting when Ginny came out, and accompanied her mistress to the kitchen, where caffeine waited.

“Georgie, at ease.”

That was the command Bobby had been working on with them last night. Because of Georgie's protective instincts, and her solid build, the trainer decided that the shar-pei could benefit from a few commands beyond the basics. “At ease” was supposed to keep Georgie from wandering off or getting distracted, without being as imperative a “do not move” command as “stay.”

It all seemed horribly complicated to Ginny, and Georgie hadn't quite gotten it yet, so Ginny kept an eye on her as she went about making breakfast. For the moment, at least, the dog was perfectly content to sit and watch her.

Her cell phone, which she'd left on the counter to charge the night before, was blinking. She had a message. Pouring the coffee one-handed, she tapped the screen to see what was up.

Time-stamped 2:10, the text was from Tonica, confirming the appointment with Nora, and saying he'd swing by to pick her up at 9:45 a.m. Ginny, her brain still not entirely awake, stared at the message and then shrugged. Since his apartment was a couple of towns away, she figured it made sense for him to swing by, and arriving together would make for a more professional appearance. Fifteen minutes should be enough time, barely, to get from here to there in time for a 10 a.m. meeting.