Cat Breaking Free

11

Dulcie seldom hung around Molena Point PD, spying and picking up intelligence, without Joe Grey by her side. Sitting with Kit on the dispatcher's counter, with cops milling all around them, she tried her best not to look interested in the pictures of the fire. The four officers who had just returned from the high school smelled nose-itchingly of smoke. Their faces and hands were smeared black, their uniforms torn and wet.

Dulcie did not want to appear to be reading their reports; but she could hardly look away. A schoolroom had been deliberately set afire, as well as some trash cans under the wooden grandstand. Kit kept crowding her, staring so intently at the pictures that Dulcie could not distract her. This kit did not know the meaning of finesse. As much as Kit hung around the station, as many cases as she'd helped to solve, some spectacularly, the little tortoiseshell still was impetuous to the point of alarm. Terrified that any minute Kit would forget herself and blurt out some burning question, Dulcie hissed softly at her and pressed a paw on her paw.

But only when, glancing up through the glass door, they saw Dallas Garza approaching across the parking lot, did Kit back off and curl up as if for a nap, tucking her nose under her tail. Dulcie washed her own hind paw, then feigned great interest when a rookie dropped a wadded-up gum wrapper on the floor; she made a show of creeping along the counter peering down, lashing her tail.

Dallas Garza swung in through the heavy glass door looking sour and angry. He said very little but double-timed on down the hall, followed silently by the officers around the desk and half a dozen who came in behind him. They turned into the coffee room-cum-squad room. The cats waited a moment, then leaped down, wandered along behind them, and crouched outside the door. The room smelled of overcooked coffee.

"Store window was already broken when the call came in," Garza said. "Security alarm disabled. They were in and out before the first car arrived. Cameron's in the hospital, shot in the leg. Lucky as hell it missed the bone. She should be out in a few days." Jane Cameron had been on the force only a few months. She had come down from San Jose PD where she'd graduated from the police academy. "She didn't want to fire her weapon in that neighborhood. Guy doubled back on her. His first shot took her down, hit her twice before she fired and killed him," Garza said. "She's feeling more mental pain than pain from the leg wound." It was doubly hard for a rookie to live with having killed someone. There would be a routine investigation, which would surely amount to nothing.

Dulcie was just glad that Cameron was alive. The tall, soft-spoken blonde always had a smile and a pet for a visiting cat. The cats listened with switching tails as Garza described the action.

"Besides the man Cameron killed, we have one arrest and the make on two cars." He glanced at Officer McFarland.

"McFarland pursued a black Ford Neon, no lights, forced it into an alley against the brick wall of The Patio restaurant. Car took out three feet of wall. McFarland might never have spotted it-but the license plate flat fell off."

McFarland grinned. "Bounced and rattled like a barrelful of tin cans." McFarland was a young, fresh-faced cop with soft brown hair that, when freed from his cap, immediately fell over his forehead. "Puny little guy. Fought me like a nut case, bit me twice. Flailed around until I shoved my gun in his ribs. Little twerp, Latino. Dark eyes, dark complexion. Long bleached hair and a nose ring. Made me want to lead him along like a ringed bull. We're towing the car in.

"We ran the plates," McFarland said. "Stolen off a '99 Cadillac DeVille, West L.A. address. There was ID on him, driver's license, couple of credit cards. Likely turn up fake."

Detective Garza read off the jewelry store inventory of stolen items, which the store's efficient assistant had prepared for him. "She'll have pictures of some of the pieces by morning."

Dulcie was wondering why the elderly owner of the jewelry store hadn't shown up after the break-in, when Garza said, "Sam Marineau's visiting his daughter in Tacoma, be gone a week. Left Nancy Huffman in charge, she's over there now, with Davis." Juana Davis was the department's other detective, a solid, no-nonsense Latina with a quiet, reassuring way that could quickly calm an upset victim. She and Nancy Huffman must both have arrived just after Dulcie and Kit and Joe raced away from the demolished store. Garza unfolded Nancy's inventory and began to read, listing the items. Their value added up to a sum large enough to keep every village cat in caviar through the next century. Garza said, "We've contacted all departments in the Western states." The wonders of electronics, of the department's ability to contact all those offices within seconds, still impressed Dulcie, as did so many of the accomplishments of human civilization.

She expected that if the insurance company offered a sizeable reward, the fence might cooperate, too. Maybe give them a line on the crooks. When the cats heard Captain Harper come in the front door, they vanished from the hall, slipping into the first darkened office.

Harper stopped to speak to the dispatcher, then passed their shadowed door, heading for the squad room. His shoes and pant legs reeked of smoke and wet ashes. They crept out behind him to crouch, again, outside the door.

Harper stopped just inside to pour himself a cup of coffee, then moved to the front to face his men. His thin, tanned face was drawn into long, angry lines. "It was arson," he said. "Payson and Brown picked up oily rags, two empty gas cans.

"One classroom trashed and set afire. The amount of smoke and flame, I thought at first the whole school was burning. Books pulled from the shelves, desks overturned, stuff pulled out of cupboards. The other fires were on the grounds. Two in trash barrels near bushes and trees-we got them before they spread. Fire on the football field under the stands, in trash bins. Another few minutes, those wooden stands would have gone up, as well as the pine trees in the greenbelt, and then the buildings.

"Williams Construction is boarding up the burned classroom." He looked around the room. "We have no arrests. Fire alarms were deactivated. They were in and out before the neighbors heard anything or anyone saw flames. Crowley? That's your patrol."

Officer Crowley's square, jowled face reddened. One big bony hand came up, then rested again on his lap; his broad shoulders seemed to hunch lower. "We were south of the village on a drunk and disorderly when the call came. We'd just left the high school. Ten minutes. Didn't see or hear a thing. Maybe they were waiting, hiding in there? And when we pulled out, they cut loose? There were no trash cans turned over, trash cans were standing in a row outside the maintenance room, the lids on. Maintenance door was padlocked, I got out and checked. Nothing under the grandstand, we swept our lights in like always.

"We always circle the classrooms. That room they set afire, it backs on the parking lot. We look in those windows, shine a light in. Looked in there tonight, room was tidy as an old maid's bedroom. Nothing, no one. They had it all worked out, had to. Went to work the minute we pulled out." Crowley looked at Harper. "You think the high school was a diversion?"

"It's possible," Harper said. "But that makes a good number of players, a big coordinated group. Whatever the story, we've got egg on our faces." He gave the men a sour smile. "One dead perp. Make on two cars that got away. Two arrests." But in the chief's long, thin face, there was a spark of satisfaction, too. "Lab is lifting prints, collecting clothing particles. Let's see what we get."

Dulcie wanted badly to hear Harper and Garza interrogate the prisoner. But she thought maybe they wouldn't do that until they had a make on the prints, a little ammunition to nail him in his lies, to turn his untruths back on him. If they got a make on the prints, if the guy had a driver's license or a prison record. He might just have come into the country; if he were illegal, he might have no identification at all.

The thought of arson made the tabby shiver. Fire, to a small animal, was a horrifying thing, more terrible even than to a human. An animal had no way to fight a fire. An ordinary beast had no concept of the sophisticated technology to control and subdue killing flames. All an animal could do was run, driven by panic. When Dulcie thought about the millions of animals and people killed and injured in deliberately set fires, it seemed to her that arson-as well as rape and murder and child molestation-deserved the most severe and ultimate punishment.

But Dulcie was a cat. Her concepts of right and wrong were clear and precise. A cat's code of justice had no use for the subtle and nuanced, not when it came to deliberately destroyed and crippled lives. To a cat, hunting and killing to be able to eat, or to teach one's kittens what they must learn, those matters were necessary to survival. But maiming and killing to see others suffer, that hunger stemmed from a pure dark evil for which Dulcie had no smallest shred of sympathy.

As the officers rose, Dulcie and Kit galloped up the hall to mew stridently at Mabel, dragging her out from behind her electronic domain again.

"You cats are mighty demanding tonight! Bad as lawyers, snapping your fingers and expecting me to jump!" But the hefty blonde was grinning as she opened the front door and obligingly set them free, into the night.

Trotting away waving their tails, Dulcie and Kit heard Mabel rattle the door behind them making sure it was locked. Glancing back, Dulcie felt a warm spot for Mabel. For some minutes, the stocky blond dispatcher stood inside the glass, watching them with as tender a look as that of a mother sending her children out to play.

But then, hurrying away in the chill wind, Dulcie let her thoughts return to Joe.

She'd put the thought aside, but she knew something was very wrong at home. Why else would Clyde call the station looking for his cat? He'd never before done such a thing. What had Clyde said to Mabel that had jerked Joe away so fast, his ears down and his stub tail tucked under? A deep chill filled Dulcie. Was it Rube? The old dog hadn't been well, not for a long time. She shivered suddenly, and a heavy sadness filled her. But on she went, following Kit. Slipping past the jewelry store that was now being boarded up, they watched two carpenters nail plywood over the broken window and broken glass door. Dulcie watched Kit sniffing along the sidewalk and around the carpenters' feet, her ears sharply forward, her body suddenly tense.

"What?" Dulcie whispered.

Kit turned to Dulcie, phleming and hissing. "Cats. Other cats," she said quietly.

"So? There are cats all over the village. What cats? What is the matter?" Of course there were cats-housecats, shop cats, even an occasional tourist's cat on a leash like a confused stand-in for a toy poodle. "What is it, Kit?"

Kit looked at her strangely.

"What?" Dulcie repeated.

"I… I don't know," Kit said uncertainly. She nudged against Dulcie, quiet and still. "It's gone now," she said. "Now all I can smell is raw plywood." Lashing her fluffy tail, she leaped away across the empty street, and into the jasmine vine that led up to her own terrace.

Suddenly Kit wanted her warm bed, she wanted her own human family and safety.

Dulcie heard her race across the terrace above and into the apartment. What had Kit smelled back there? What kind of cat would so upset her? She didn't know whether she should follow Kit or go to Joe.

But if something bad had happened to Rube, Joe and Clyde would be comforting each other. Maybe this was a time just for family.

Slowly and sadly, certain in her little cat soul about what had happened, she made her way up the jasmine vine, to the Greenlaws' terrace. She wished Wilma were home, out of the hospital.

Lucinda had left a light on for them. Dulcie heard, from the bedroom, the old lady's slow, even breathing and Pedric's faint snores. The Greenlaws were, after all, in their eighties; and it had been a busy night.

She found Kit in the kitchen, lapping up a lovely custard. Kit had, in a rare fit of generosity, left Dulcie's custard untouched. Kit looked up with custard smeared on her whiskers, and yawned; both cats yawned.

Dulcie ate her custard slowly, thinking about Joe and about Rube; then she curled up on the couch, watching Kit trot away to the bedroom. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow morning early I'll find out what happened to Rube. Though I really don't want to know.

Tomorrow! Oh, tomorrow Wilma will be home. And at once, her spirits lifted. No matter that Wilma had said the operation was routine and simple, she had been very worried. No operation was without pain and without risk. Dulcie wanted Wilma home again, home and safe.

She guessed she wanted, too, to be spoiled a little; to snuggle close at night as they shared the pages of a favorite book. The two of them would be up at Charlie's tomorrow night, and Charlie would spoil them both just as she would spoil Kit. At Charlie's house, Kit would tell more of her tales for Charlie to write down, and Wilma could be cosseted and cared for even if she said she didn't need that. In Dulcie's opinion, a little spoiling never hurt anyone. Ask a cat, spoiling was what made the rest of life worthwhile.

And maybe tomorrow Charlie would tell them what had happened on the pack trip. Tell them what she had left out of her story, over dinner at Lupe's Playa-what she had not told everyone else, about the dead cyclist. Tell them what had caused the nervous twitch of her hands under the table, and her evasive glance. Maybe tomorrow, after Captain Harper had gone off to work, they would learn Charlie's secret.