Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (13 page)

If Paco had been home, it would have been a normal end to the day. Except that it wasn’t the end of my day, just an end to Michael’s and Ella’s. In about four hours, Maureen would be here to get me. If I was lucky, Michael would be asleep and never know.

I said, “No word from Paco yet?”

He shook his head, and I could tell from the grim line of his mouth that he didn’t want to talk about it.

Overhead, the sky had gone from blue to a murky violet, and early stars were beginning to wink at us. I looked for a hint of rain clouds, but there weren’t any. At least I wouldn’t have to slog in the rain to leave Maureen’s ransom money.

I stood up and brushed at cat hair and beach sand on my shorts. I said, “Well, I’m going to bed.”

Michael said, “Yeah, me too. You want me to put Ella in your place when I leave tomorrow?”

He would be going back to the firehouse at eight o’clock the next morning. The fact that he’d asked the question meant he didn’t expect Paco to be home when he left.

I said, “If you’d like. Or I can get her when I come home.”

Ella looked back and forth at us like somebody watching a tennis match. We didn’t like to leave Ella alone too long, so she stayed with me when Michael and Paco were gone. But that wasn’t why Michael and I were talking about her. We were doing that to avoid talking about the big gaping hole where Paco should have been. I finally gave them both a smooch and went upstairs for a shower.

After I showered, I stood in my closet and thought about what to wear. A man wouldn’t do that. If a man
planned to take a bag of money to pay off kidnappers, he wouldn’t give a single thought to what he should wear. He’d walk out in the same clothes he wore every day—pants and shirt, shoes, maybe a sweater or jacket. He’s a man, what other choice does he have? Women, on the other hand, have a boatload of choices.

I was going to walk down a dark path where chilly sea breezes would blow at me. Bad people would be watching from somewhere in the darkness, only they would think I was Maureen. If they knew I was me, the person Maureen had run to after they’d specifically told her to keep her mouth shut, they would kill Maureen’s husband. All of which meant I had to dress right or Victor might end up dead.

I decided on a pair of old black jeans that would blend with the night, and topped them with a hooded navy sweatshirt. I put on my usual white Keds. With all the dark stuff, the white Keds stuck out like Minnie Mouse paws, but they’d have to do. When I checked myself in the full-length mirror in my office-closet, the faded seams on the sweatshirt made chalky lines and my knees shined through the holes in my jeans like yellow traffic lights. Without the hooded top, I would have looked like a silly rich woman wearing falsely distressed jeans. With it, I looked like a desperate woman in truly distressed jeans ready to scrounge food from a Dumpster.

Next, I had to choose accessories. For that, I pulled out my gun drawer and got my freshly cleaned and oiled .38. I dropped five rounds in the cylinder, and slid the barrel under the waistband of my holey jeans. Force of habit made me put another five rounds in a speed loader and
stash it in my pocket. Then I went downstairs and got my old department-issued four-C-cell flashlight out of the Bronco. My accessories weren’t terribly chic, but I figured I might need all of them while I skulked around in the dark.

I still had a couple of hours before Maureen came, so I lay down in the hammock on my porch and drifted off to sleep. I woke with my heart pounding from the tail end of a dream in which I was a kid and my mother had left my brother and me alone at night. She’d actually done that several times while our father was on duty at the firehouse and unaware, but Michael and I had never told on her. Kids are loyal to their parents, even when their parents aren’t loyal to them.

My heart was still pounding when the headlights of Maureen’s SUV shot through the darkness. I jumped to my feet, and by the time she pulled to a stop I was already downstairs. I opened the passenger door and crawled in without speaking, then pulled the door shut as quietly as possible. My gun was invisible under my sweatshirt. If Maureen noted the flashlight I carried, she didn’t comment.

As I’d expected, Maureen wore a pink jumpsuit that I was sure had a designer label. She looked alert and oddly excited, the way people do when they’re leaving before dawn for a long cross-country trip. Her car smelled like tobacco smoke.

I said, “Turn around quietly. I don’t want Michael to hear us leave.”

She nodded and did an expert K-turn that took us
down the lane with a minimum of engine noise. Maureen always had been good at backing out of tight places.

We didn’t speak, but sat side by side like passengers on a bus. When we hit Midnight Pass Road, Maureen turned north, driving past the new condo that had replaced the tacky apartment building where she and her mother had lived. Maureen’s mother had been the meanest woman on the planet, hands down, no contest.

I said, “How’s your mother?”

“She got married and moved to Georgia. I don’t see much of her.”

I said, “Hunh.”

I tried to consider Maureen’s mother from the viewpoint of the adult I was and not the teenager I’d been when I knew her. From an adult’s perspective, I decided that being left to raise a daughter by herself might have had a lot to do with her sour disposition.

I said, “Ever see your dad?”

She shrugged. “Just that one time.”

And with those four words, Maureen summed up the real reason I had agreed to do what I was doing. She had expected me to understand her cryptic answer, and I did. For a second we were once more two hurt kids who only admitted pain to each other.

I well remembered the moment Maureen had told me about seeing her father. We’d been hiding behind a sand dune on Turtle Beach, trying to get high on a marijuana cigarette a boy had given me during math class. She said her mother had sent her to the 7-Eleven for a loaf of bread, and her father had been there buying a carton of
cigarettes. She hadn’t seen him since she was about five, but she had recognized him immediately.

Telling it, she’d taken a long drag and squinted her eyes, the way we imagined real users did, and passed the roach to me—we called it a
roach
no matter how long it was.

She said, “He didn’t even know me. I’m his own daughter, and he didn’t know me.”

I sucked on the joint and wiped at moisture in my eyes. With adolescent swagger, I said, “I hope I never see my mother again. If I saw her, I’d turn my back and walk away.”

Tears had spilled down my face as I said it. I had pretended it was the weed making my eyes leak, but the truth had been that if I’d seen my mother again I would have run to her and begged her to forgive me for whatever I’d done to cause her to leave.

The other truth was that Maureen had known how I really felt, but she’d let me pretend to be tough. Nobody ever knows us as well as the friends we had before we got old enough to be good actors.

At Stickney Point, we turned east and went over the bridge to the Tamiami Trail, where we turned south. We rode silently for a while, all my nostalgic memories making me think of how crazy Maureen had been about Harry Henry, and how devastated Harry had been when Maureen married Victor Salazar.

I said, “Mo, do you ever see Harry?”

“No! Of course not! I’m faithful to my husband.” Her voice was too high.

I turned my head and studied her profile. “I wasn’t
implying you weren’t. Harry lives here, you live here, you’re bound to see him every now and then.”

Stiffly, she said, “We live in two different worlds now. I probably wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”

It was true that they lived in different worlds, but the key is small, and I doubted that she never caught a glimpse of him.

Maureen and Victor lived on Casey Key, which is south of Siesta Key. Like God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Casey’s outstretched finger touches the south end of Siesta. Even so, to get to Casey by car you have to drive down the Tamiami Trail for a piece, then turn west and go over a bridge. Casey Key’s bridge doesn’t rise to let boats through like Siesta’s bridge does. Instead, the whole thing swivels to the side. It’s probably one of the last swiveling bridges in the world.

The bridge leads to a narrow strip of land where some of the world’s most famous people have built houses that make Versailles look modest. It’s a miracle the little island hasn’t sunk from the sheer weight of all the brick and marble.

Maureen’s house was at the far south end of the key, built artificially high on trucked-in soil that had been cleverly terraced to give the effect of steepness down to the shoreline. Three stories tall, the house was the color of raspberries. Standing proudly behind a green screen of royal palms, it had lime green shutters. The house and grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-tall raspberry stucco wall. Lime green iron gates in the wall kept out both the uninvited and those whose color scheme clashed.

At the gate, Maureen did something magic and the gate parted like the Red Sea, its two halves silently gliding wide to allow us entry. I refused to ask her by what remote signal she’d made that happen.

The driveway curved around the side of the house to a six-car garage. One of the garage doors was open, and Maureen slid the SUV inside its lighted interior. The garage was paneled. I wasn’t sure, but the paneling looked like teak. Rich people spend money on strange things.

We sat still for a moment and then looked at each other.

Maureen said, “We might as well get this over.”

“Yep.”

While I got out she went to the back of the SUV and hauled out a good-sized pink duff el bag. It wasn’t stuffed so tightly that it didn’t bend in places, but it wasn’t slack, either. She slammed the SUV door and turned toward the path leading down the terraced descent to the beach. The bag was heavy enough to make her list to one side.

I gripped the bulb end of my flashlight and rested its barrel on my right shoulder, law enforcement fashion. If I needed to, I could bring the barrel down on somebody’s head. With my left hand, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt forward and followed her. Not that I was cold, I just wanted to hide from the eyes I imagined watching us.

Before we stepped into an area where we’d be fully visible from the water, Maureen stopped and looked intently into my face. I knew what she was going to say.

“Dixie, they said for me to come alone. If both of us go, they’ll know I’m not alone.” She seemed proud of herself for figuring that out.

I stuck out my left hand. “Just give me the damn bag.”

A million dollars in twenty-dollar bills is surprisingly heavy. The bag clunked against my left leg as I went down the path. On each terraced level, my flashlight illumined a walkway that curved for a few feet to create a serpentine trek around low-growing flowering plants. I had mental images of a crew of landscapers coming in every few weeks to replace things killed by the salt air. I also had mental images of criminals in a boat somewhere out in the darkness watching me through night goggles. With my blond hair covered, I doubted they could tell that I wasn’t Maureen, but I was still careful to keep my face out of the light.

The descent seemed to take forever, but it was probably less than five minutes. At the shore, a long dock stood with its feet in the water. A sliver of lemon peel moon left the sea hidden in darkness, with only occasional glints of starlight reflecting its humped sleep. The only sound was the sea’s rhythmic gasps and my own breath. At the dock, three boats nosed the planks like nursing sea creatures—a forty-footer, a twenty-foot pleasure cruiser, and a run-about. At the far end of the dock, a graceful little gazebo made an incongruously delicate note.

Turning toward the gazebo, I strode past the line of boats with what I hoped was the walk of a rich woman. I kept my gaze straight ahead and tried to breathe normally. At the gazebo, I paused and tilted the flashlight to search the interior before I stepped inside. On the one occasion when I’d been there for lunch with Maureen, tall woven chairs with flaring peacock backs had been arranged around a cane table. Around the perimeter of
the room, bench seats had been topped by bright colored pillows.

The floor was paler than I remembered, probably bleached by salt breeze, but the peacock chairs and table were still there. The chairs had a strangely shabby look, as if they needed attention, and the pillows that had topped the bench seats were probably stored in the benches. From what I remembered of Victor’s iciness, I doubted that he and Maureen had enjoyed many romantic times in the gazebo.

I stepped inside and made a straight line to the cane table. For a second, I couldn’t decide whether to leave the duff el bag in one of the chairs or on top of the table. The voice of reason in my head screamed,
It doesn’t matter! Just put it down!

I set the bag in one of the chairs and turned on my heel. I’ll bet the guards at Buckingham Palace don’t turn any more smartly. For some reason, it seemed important to move crisply so people watching me wouldn’t know how uneasy I was.

Heading back across the dock, I told myself that all the kidnappers wanted was money, and I had given it to them. They would come get it and they would be grateful to me. Well, not grateful maybe, but they’d think kindly of me. Not of me, of course, because they thought I was Maureen. And maybe not kindly, because kidnappers probably don’t have kind thoughts, but they would dismiss me from their minds, which was good. I hoped they were busy dismissing me from their minds right that moment.

I didn’t exactly run, but I definitely crossed the dock in double time and then chugged back up the path as fast
as possible. When I got to the top of the path, I broke into an all-out gallop.

I smelled Maureen’s cigarette before I rounded the corner of the garage. She was standing in a puddle of light from a security lamp, and when I ran toward her, she tossed the cigarette down and ground it under her heel. Ididn’t even slow down, just ran straight to the SUV and got inside. I switched off the flashlight and held it in my lap. My hands were trembling and it felt good to grip something solid.