Cat Pay The Devil

5

T he old man had been home in the village two weeks, staying with his sister-home in the sense that it was where he grew up, not where he chose to live. Mavity didn’t welcome him real warm, but that didn’t bother him none. It was where he needed to be at the moment, and a sight cheaper than these rip-off California motels. And he had to say, the food was tasty. Those four women sure could cook. They refused to do his laundry, though, and that ticked him off big-time.

In Panama he’d had a black woman to do his laundry and make his meals. Everyone down there had a maid. Several if you were rich. All these years he’d had a woman come in to shop and clean, wash and iron and cook supper. There was plenty of cheap labor, black people descended from the Barbadian families that’d been brought in to build the canal during the early years of the last century.

The last century. Christ that made him feel old. Ever since he’d hit Central America as a young man-and that was some years back, he had to say-ever since he was twenty and stepped off that ship in Cristobal the first time, there’d been blacks in the streets, blacks cutting the lush green lawns, cleaning the houses, driving the cabs while talking to you over the back of the seat in Barbadian accents that he’d had trouble understanding back then. Barbadian descendants picking bananas in the interior, too, working alongside lighter-skinned Panamanians.

That Creole woman who lived here with Mavity, though, she was something else. Nothing servantlike about her. Good-looking woman, even if she didn’t seem to have much use for him. None of the four women did. Well, hell, it was free rent, and he wouldn’t be there long.

Just long enough to figure out where Cage’d hid his half of the stash. And figure out why Cage’d been so closemouthed with him all the way back from L.A. to San Francisco. Then silent and sour when Cage took him to the fence in the city, not easy like they used to be. Too long ago, maybe, when they ran together. Or maybe prison’d changed him.

Well, Cage’d got him to a fence, like he’d promised, and he’d got a fair price. Could have waited, but who knew how long till the market went higher, right along with inflation?

The day was nice and hot, and he’d walked down into the village to look at cars, that high-class Beckwith dealership. He thought he better be careful about paying cash in there, though. That friend of Wilma Getz, the one who owned that gray tomcat with the smart mouth, he had the mechanic’s shop there. Didn’t need to be flinging cash around in front of no friend of Wilma Getz, it’d get back to her. Get straight to Mavity, too, the two of them thick as thieves. And all of them thick with the cops. Well, the hell with it. He’d set up a loan, then next month, pay it off. The dealer wouldn’t check on that, and he hated paying interest.

He was just crossing Fourth, looking for a place to have a cup of coffee, when he stopped, staring up at the roofs across the street, and then he stepped back quick, into the shadows of a doorway.

A cat had gone racing over the roofs. A dark-striped tabby, he could swear it was that gray tom’s female. That Getz woman’s cat, another of them special ones, and her damn near as smart-ass as the tom. He didn’t need them cats knowing he was in the village. The longer he kept them out of his hair, the better off he’d be. Take care of business and get out of here. Them cats could muddle up everything.

Well, the tabby was gone now, flying over the roofs in a hell of a hurry-scorching away like a streak, in the direction of the Getz house.

He hadn’t seen anything chasing her, but she was sure as hell stressed about something. And that made Greeley smile. Whatever her problem, the worse the better. Maybe it’d keep her and that Getz woman both busy.

Kit, racing across the rooftops, her paws hitting only the high spots, careened against Dulcie-but the racing tabby spun on her, in sudden temper. “Go back, Kit! Go home! Why didn’t you go with Joe? I don’t want company!” Dulcie felt too shaky and upset for company, felt like she’d fly apart any minute.

Kit wilted, creeping away, and stood forlornly watching Dulcie drop down through the branches of an acacia tree to her own street, then disappear. Joe had been short with her, and now Dulcie, too. What did I do? Why does no one want me?

Kit, of all cats, knew she should understand about sometimes needing to be alone when you were frightened or upset, when you needed to collect your wits. But right now she had wanted, had badly needed, to be close to her friends; she stood on the roof looking away after Dulcie, puzzled and alone. And as evening tucked itself down around the village, Kit sat hurt and lonely for a long time, staring away toward Dulcie’s house, and then toward Molena Point PD where Joe would be nosing into everything on the dispatcher’s desk.

But then she looked, even longer, up at the silent hills where the shadows were fast gathering. Something unseen was pressing at her from up there, pressing and insistent, pressing and pushing, the same something that had held Dulcie, earlier in the afternoon, the same sense of someone listening and watching. It was Willow. The feral calico surely sensed trouble, sensed Dulcie’s distress; Kit felt almost as if Willow reached out her paw, offering whatever help she could give.

The shops of the discount mall finessed Wilma along from one inviting window to the next as skillfully as strippers beckon to their audience-and, once she’d entered, finessed away her cash just as readily. Well, she didn’t shop often.

The day was too hot for Wilma’s taste, but the mall gardens were rich with flowers, the streets clean, and the shops offered discontinued items in all her favorite brands. She told herself she might not shop again for another ten years and that she really did need clothes. She purchased, as Dulcie had suspected, mostly faded, well-fitting jeans in the soft stretch denim she liked, and sweatshirts and T-shirts in her favorite colors-powder blue, yellow, lots of soft tomato red, a shade that was not available every season. She bought sandals, boots, one long flowered skirt and a couple of bouclé sweaters for more dressy occasions. She purchased one indulgence, a silver-and-topaz necklace, with a matching clip for her long gray hair.

And the gifts she found…A soft cashmere throw for Dulcie in pale blue, though Dulcie had throws all over the house. For the tortoiseshell kit, a bright plaid cotton blanket for Kit’s new tree house.

She bought for Joe Grey a new glazed bowl with a gray cat painted on its side and a stainless-steel liner to hold food or water. She didn’t trust ceramic glazes, didn’t know what chemicals they might release to be innocently ingested. The painted cat looked very much like Joe, with its white nose and chest and paws, except that this cat’s tail was long, not docked like Joe’s.

Joe had lost his tail as a half-grown stray, in San Francisco, where Clyde had then been living. A drunk had stepped on his tail and broken it. Clyde had discovered him in a gutter, sick from the infection, and had taken him to a vet, who removed all but the last jaunty stub. Clyde nursed Joe back to health, and the two remained together, soon moving back to Molena Point, where Clyde had grown up. Where, when he was eight years old, Wilma thought, smiling, she was his neighbor and, he said, his first love. She had been in graduate school then.

Using her credit card with abandon, Wilma took packages to her car three times and locked them in the trunk. The ordeal in court had left her feeling unaccustomedly flat, and this spree was definitely making her feel better. Cage was such a manipulator, his big face all soft and smiling, hardly revealing his brutal nature.

Jones had irons in a dozen fires, many of them strange and off-key. He enjoyed scams and angles that few other offenders would bother with, from rigging up fake ATM machines, which he labeled DEPOSITS ONLY, hauling them to a new location in the small hours of the night and switching them for real ones, then collecting the take every day, to several interesting confidence games over the years. In Judge Bailey’s view, society would benefit greatly if Cage Jones spent the rest of his natural life behind bars. Preferably, she thought, without the amenities of telephone and e-mail with which to pursue his scams.

The court’s unusual request that Wilma, retired for ten years, should return to testify along with her partner clearly showed its view of Jones. Cage’s was the last case Wilma and Bennett had worked together before she retired. At that time, they had searched his Molena Point house with a team of DEA agents, turning up enough heroin and stolen cash to net Jones a twelve-year sentence, ten of which he had served before he came up for parole. The parole board, which was now disbanded, had, in Wilma’s view, made a serious error in judgment when they’d turned Jones loose in society.

But that wouldn’t be the first time a parole board had wrung its hands with pity over an undeserving prisoner, ignored the safety of ordinary citizens, and set a felon free to seek out the most vulnerable victims. Such was bureaucracy, Wilma thought, shrugging to herself in the mirror as she tried on a gold silk sheath. The lovely dress was very slimming, not that she needed it; she kept herself in fair shape. And she had no occasion to wear such an elegant dress. But it would look smashing on Charlie. Wilma and her redheaded niece wore the same size, and she knew the cut was right. This, she thought with excitement, was the perfect Christmas present-even if Charlie, like Wilma herself, lived most of the time in jeans, sweatshirts, and boots. A police chief’s wife didn’t have much occasion to dress in fancy clothes, nor did Charlie have the desire to do so. But when Charlie’s new book came out, she might need just such an elegant gown for a gallery opening and book signing. This was Charlie’s first book, which she had both written and illustrated-written with clandestine feline help.

That secret was well kept by the tortoiseshell heroine of the story. Kit and Charlie shared the confidence only with Joe and Dulcie, and their few human friends who knew they were not ordinary cats: Clyde and the Greenlaws and Wilma herself were all privy to the cats’ secret.

After buying the dress for Charlie, Wilma found a lightweight summer blazer for herself to wear over jeans, then decided she was done with shopping. She’d hit the stores she liked best, and the afternoon was waning; the sun was low in the west as she headed for her car.

She clicked the trunk open and fit in the blazer package between the other purchases and her overnight bag; she could not have bought much more, she already felt like she’d made a grand haul. Shutting the trunk, she clicked open the car door, was leaning forward to put the long dress box in the backseat and wondering if she should just check out the two shoe shops she’d missed, when she was grabbed from behind. Big hands jerked her around, bending her arm back painfully and forcing her keys from her fist. Enraged that she’d been caught off guard, she kicked backward, hard, ramming the heel of her shoe down his shin and jamming her elbow into his stomach. He hit her so hard across the neck that she reeled, and saw blackness. In a frantic move she slipped her credit card from her pocket, bent it double, swung around in his grip, and slashed his face with the sharply folded corner. He swore and shoved her in the backseat on top of the dress box. She knew it was Cage before she saw him, but only then did she get a look at him. Cage Jones was grinning coldly at her as he leaned in. He had a rope in his fist.

“Bend over. Put your hands behind you! Now!”

She fought him, tried to kick him in the crotch. His weight was too much on top of her, he was too strong. He jerked the rope so tight around her wrists he probably took the skin off. How the hell did he get out? How did he get out of jail?