Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (11 page)

When Michael and I were little, our grandfather would take us out to the country and let us shoot tin cans off fence posts. He’d preach that guns were dangerous weapons not to be left loaded or lying around. On the way home he’d make us giggle with the old Jimmie Rodgers song our grandmother wouldn’t let him sing in her presence: “If you don’t want to smell my smoke, don’t monkey with my gun.”

I was always a better shot than Michael because he was too physical to enjoy the precision that shooting requires. Good shooters are precise people, like clockmakers or safecrackers. Either because of my grandfather’s training or Jimmie Rodgers’s blue yodel or some genetic trait, I was
one of the best shooters the police academy has ever had. Michael, on the other hand, doesn’t own a gun and thinks armed civilians are ridiculous Clint Eastwood wannabes. I sort of agree with him, except that now I’m also a civilian with a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

My preferred gun is one of my former off-duty guns, a snub-nosed, five-shot, J-frame .38 caliber. It has a stainless steel two-inch barrel and cylinder, and an aluminum alloy frame with an exposed hammer. Its checkered black rubber boot grip is easy to handle and it fits well in my hand. No safety to worry about, no decocking levers to slow me down, no magazines to fail. Only thirteen ounces, it’s a sweet, simple, dependable gun.

I doubt that I’ll ever go back to being a law enforcement officer, and I have no fear of hordes of murderous aliens—either from outer space or other countries—coming to hurt me. But good shooters like to remain good shooters, and my lightweight .38 has a wicked recoil that can ruin my aim if I get sloppy about practicing. I therefore spend some time every week at the handgun shooting range. They all know me there, and the young man who led me to a vacant booth didn’t bother to tell me the rules. He just put up the paper target and left me alone.

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit I don’t practice just to stay a good shot. There’s also something about putting on the eye and ear protectors, spreading my feet, and aiming at a fresh piece of paper with a bull’s-eye painted on it that gives me a feeling of kick-ass Wonder Woman power. I might get the same feeling if I just put on the Wonder Woman costume, but I don’t think so.

I shot with the pistol held in two hands and then in
one, and when I was satisfied that I was still a good shot, I loaded everything up and left the range still feeling like Wonder Woman. I remained Wonder Woman until I remembered that I’d just practiced the art of killing another human being. Because let’s get real, that bull’s-eye target stands for a human heart, and every shooter knows that.

Enjoying target practice with a gun is probably the way people feel if they own profitable stock in health insurance companies that routinely deny lifesaving surgery or medication. It’s better not to dwell on the fact that something that gives us so much pleasure is linked to the increased likelihood of another person’s death.

On the way home, I noticed a couple of men I thought might be Paco—a man with a long beard and ponytail leaning against a
Pelican Press
dispenser, and a teen with a purple mohawk in dark shades, baggy jeans, and a huge shapeless shirt—but it was dumb of me to do that. If Paco’s disguises were the kind I could see through, they wouldn’t be effective, and I knew his were extremely effective.

When I got home, I spent an hour at my desk with client records, then went downstairs to spend time with Michael and Ella. To be strictly honest, I was also drawn by the memory that Michael had made brownies. No matter how grim the world gets, chocolate makes anything more tolerable.

Michael was in his kitchen with several steaming pots on the stove and a look of grim anxiety in the set of his jaw. Ella was perched on her barstool watching him and occasionally licking her lips.

I gave Ella’s furry head a kiss, poured myself a glass of
milk from a carton in the fridge, and got myself a brownie. I sat on a barstool beside Ella and watched Michael. Like Ella, I licked my lips every now and then, but in my case it was for the chocolate and milk. I suspected Ella did it from a sublimated urge to lick Michael. She wouldn’t be the first female to want to do that.

He concentrated on his pots and pans, giving one a furious stir, grabbing a smoking cast-iron skillet’s handle and moving it back and forth like he was trying to shake sense into it, glaring down into a soup pot’s innards as if he thought it was hiding something. I had the feeling he had forgotten that Ella and I were there.

Meekly, I said, “What’re you cooking?”

His head whipped toward me. “Huh? Oh, just some stuff for the freezer. Corn chowder. Roasted poblano peppers, some shrimp and mushrooms to put in the peppers.”

I said, “Hunh.”

I looked down at Ella, who was looking up at me with a pleading expression. I guess she thought one human should be able to communicate with another human better than a cat could. She didn’t understand how hard human-to-human communication is.

I said, “Have you heard from Paco?”

His shoulders hunched, and he increased the speed of the wooden spoon circling in the soup pot. “He never calls when he’s working.”

I knew better than to ask if he had any idea what the job was, or where it was, or how long it would last. But I also knew that something about this job was unusual. Otherwise, Michael wouldn’t be so closed off.

I said, “Paco’s a good cop. He knows what he’s doing.”

“I know that.”

I got up and rinsed my milk glass and put it in the dishwasher. Threw the paper towel I’d used as a napkin into the trash under the sink. It was time to go out on my afternoon calls. Just before midnight, Maureen would come for me, and I would go with her to her house. Then one of us would make the ransom money drop, and I knew which one of us it would be. Just thinking about it made me stop breathing.

Michael gave me a phony smile when I left and Ella tried for a nonchalant wave of her tail, but we were all putting on an act. I told myself that Paco would be home by nightfall, that the money drop would go off without a hitch, and that Maureen’s husband would be back in the bosom of his family by morning. I told myself that the next day Paco would be resting up from whatever he’d done, I would go off to take care of pets, and Michael would go to the firehouse happily bearing a big container of corn chowder.

I just had to make it until the night was dark enough to hide the insane thing I was going to do.

At Tom Hale’s condo, he was in his wheelchair in the living room reading the real estate section of the
Herald-Tribune
. Billy ran to kiss my knees when I let myself in, and Tom raised his head and smiled hello.

He said, “A friend just left me a bag of fresh-picked mamé sapote. They’re in the fridge. Want one?”

Offering a sweaty Floridian a taste of ripe mamé sapote is like offering warm blankets and hot chocolate to somebody just pulled from the icy waters of the Bering Strait.

I gave Tom such an eager “Yes!” that Billy Elliot gave me an injured look. No matter how many legs we have, we all think our needs should come first, and Billy didn’t want to wait for his run.

Tom rolled into the kitchen and got a brown paper bag from his refrigerator while I got two dessert spoons and a sharp knife.

Mamé sapote is a fruit about the size of a soft ball, with a tough leathery skin. The flesh is deep orange in color, with a flavor that’s a combination of chocolate and pumpkin and ice cream and delicate spices not yet discovered.

Tom cut a brown globe in halves and handed me one. We spooned its cold sweetness straight from the rind.

Tom said, “I love this stuff.”

I said, “Todd and I had a mamé sapote tree in our backyard.”

The minute I said it, I wished I hadn’t. Remembering that tree made me remember how thrilled we’d been when it first bore fruit. One night we took the fruit to bed to eat while we watched TV. We didn’t watch TV long. With our lips coated with flesh from the mamé sapote, we fell on each other like bears after honey, inhaling each other’s scent and eating each other’s taste. Christy was conceived that night, and Todd had always said that when she was a grown woman he would tell her that I’d been too turned on by mamé sapote juice to take time to put in my diaphragm. Unless he and Christy are somewhere in heaven together, she will never hear that story.

With an effort, I pulled my memories away from that night so my heart wouldn’t crack in Tom’s kitchen.

Tom said, “I was just reading that a penthouse condo on
Siesta Key sold for seven million dollars. The sellers had to reduce the asking price from eight million because times are so tight right now.”

I said, “My heart bleeds for them.”

Tom waggled his hand. “It’s all relative. To a billionaire, a million is like a hundred to everybody else.”

I tossed my fruit rind in Tom’s kitchen trash and rinsed my spoon. As I put it in his dishwasher, I said, “I know a woman who has a million in cash in her home safe.”

He raised a CPA’s suspicious eyebrow. “Legitimate money?”

“Yeah. Her husband’s an oil trader, whatever that is.”

He grunted, and I went to get Billy Elliot’s leash. Billy had waited long enough.

Billy and I ran around the oval parking lot track like banshees on holiday. When Billy was happy and I was pouring sweat, we rode upstairs in the cool elevator. Tom was at the kitchen table working on papers of some kind. Before I replaced Billy’s leash in the foyer closet, I went to the kitchen. Tom looked over his glasses at me. Probably thought I was going to ask for a second mamé sapote.

I thwacked the end of Billy’s leash against my open palm. “Tom, exactly what does an oil trader do?”

He shoved his glasses up on his nose. “Crude or paper?”

“Crude, I think.”

“Then he sells oil, big tankers full. Say he represents an oil producer in Norway. They notify him that they’ve filled a tanker with oil, and he seeks out a buyer. Maybe the buyer is a refiner in Japan, so he strikes a deal with them and notifies the tanker to sail to Japan. But maybe on the way, a refiner in England wants the oil and is willing
to pay more. So he strikes a deal with Japan to sell the oil to England, and notifies the tanker to change course. He can do that over and over, and every time the oil changes owners, he gets a percentage of whatever the selling price is, plus fees from both the sellers and buyers for handling the sale. Traders spend their days looking for people willing to pay more or sell for less. It’s a lucrative business, but nerve-racking.”

Brilliantly, I said, “Hunh.”

He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “No cash gets exchanged in a business like that. It’s all wire transfers.”

As if it made a difference, I said, “This oil trader I know is from South America.”

“Venezuela is one of the largest oil producers in the world. I think it supplies about a fifth of the world’s crude.”

“Hunh.”

Tom seemed to have run out of things to say about oil trading. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might explain why my unnamed friend with an oil-trading husband had a million dollars in cash in her home safe.

I said, “Well, okay then. I guess I’ll be on my way.”

Tom nodded, his eyes bright with something he wanted to say but was holding back. I gave Billy Elliot a smooch and hotfooted it out of the condo. All the way down in the elevator, I wondered where that money in Maureen’s safe had come from. Even for superwealthy people, a million dollars in emergency cash seemed excessive. It also didn’t seem likely that she and her husband had pulled it out of a bank account to keep close at hand. But if they hadn’t got it from their bank, where had it come from?

For the first time, it hit me that Victor’s wealth might
be from something illicit. All I knew about Victor was what Maureen had told me, and Maureen could have lied. Even more probable, Maureen might not know herself. Or care. She wasn’t the curious type. All she cared about was what Victor’s money bought.

At my Bronco, I got inside and bounced my forehead off the steering wheel a few times.

Out loud, I said, “It’s not illegal to pay off kidnappers. And delivering money to kidnappers won’t make me a criminal, no matter where the money came from.”

But inside my head, a little voice said, “Are you sure about that?”

I wasn’t the least bit sure.

The Buddhists say, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I felt enlightened by my conversation with Tom, but now what?

I started the engine and headed for my next pet client. Before enlightenment, empty litter boxes, walk dogs. After enlightenment, empty litter boxes, walk dogs. I’m a professional. I meet my responsibilities. Even if I’m planning to do something incredibly stupid and possibly illegal, I take care of my pets.

But after I’d taken care of all the cats on my list, and before I headed for Big Bubba’s house, I drove to the village and parked in front of Ethan Crane’s office.

I needed legal advice.

I
f I had a lick of sense, I’d have thrown myself at Ethan Crane the moment I met him. By any woman’s criteria, Ethan is high on the desirability list. He’s honest. He’s sharp. He cares about things that people should care about, like the environment and the community and dogs. Add all that to the fact that he looks like an underwear model and you have one of the world’s best men. Add to that the fact that he and I had a strong attraction from the first moment we met, and you have the world’s most stupid woman, because I kept turning him away. And the worst of it was that I turned him away because I was even more drawn to Guidry, who wasn’t half as direct as Ethan about wanting me. Not even a fourth as direct, as a matter of fact.

The last time I’d seen Ethan, he’d made it clear that the next move was up to me. He’d also made it clear that he wasn’t offering a commitment, but an invitation to explore what we felt for each other and see where it led. I had left vowing to myself that I wouldn’t give him any more
mixed messages. I wouldn’t make any excuses to see him again unless or until I was able to do so without bringing any emotional baggage with me. And yet here I was, baggage and all, coming to him for advice.