Cat Striking Back

32

THE TRUCK HAD backed up to the garage of the remodel, ready to dump its gravel. Joe, Dulcie, and Kit, watching from the tall grass on the hill above, shifted from paw to paw, and every few minutes Joe Grey reared up, scanning the road below. Still there was no sign of Ryan.

The pickup belonging to the two Latino laborers was parked beside Scotty’s pickup, the two men sat in the cab smoking cigarettes, waiting to haul gravel and spread it evenly across the pit. Only Ryan could stop the work, she was the only person the cats could tell, her uncle Scott didn’t know the cats’ secret. Though Joe thought that with his heritage, with that mysterious turn of mind the Scots-Irish seemed to have, the truth might not come as such a shock. But they didn’t need anyone else to know, too many people already shared their secret.

Watching for Ryan, fidgeting nervously, Joe knew he should have gone home, should have woken her before dawn and told her to stop the deliveries, told her what the gravel and cement would be burying.

None of the three cats had been home. After they attacked the killer, they and the feral band had spent the few remaining hours until dawn licking bruises and hurt places on their bodies, licking blood from their cut paws and carefully pulling out small shards of glass with their teeth. Glass that they’d dropped into a little hole and covered over, as they would cover anything vile. As the first light of dawn grayed the sky, most of the ferals had headed home smiling with pleasure at their night’s adventure; Sage’s retribution had been sweet. Only Sage and Tansy had remained with the village cats, Sage wanting to see what would happen next. He and Tansy rested higher up the hill, well hidden among the weeds and grass.

One thing for sure, Joe thought, glancing up at them, that man won’t mess with a cat again. If he didn’t fear cats before, he fears us now.

Down in the yard, Scotty stood in front of the garage talking on his cell phone. With the wind blowing and the big truck’s engine running, the cats couldn’t hear much. It seemed to be a one-sided conversation, as if he was leaving a message, most likely that they were going ahead with the work. It would cost a bundle to keep the gravel truck waiting, and would cost probably far more to delay the cement truck. In the few months Clyde and Ryan had been married, Joe had learned quite a lot about the construction business. These delivery folks charged by the hour, and they charged a lot. Where was Ryan? She’d known the deliveries would be early, she’d said she hoped to be finished by noon.

Joe watched Scotty close his phone, scratch his red beard as if perplexed, and then turn to speak to the driver, a skinny man, and stooped. He had rounded shoulders that made his khaki shirt hang in folds across his chest, and big, protruding ears beneath a striped cap. They watched him step to the cab, and in a moment the truck bed began to tilt up from the front. As it lifted to its maximum height, the gravel slid out with a grating thunder into a pile before the open garage. At once the two Latino laborers began to shovel it into the wheelbarrows to be hauled into the garage and dumped into the pit, further covering the buried victim. The tomcat watched the road impatiently.

Ryan was never late to a job. Soon Joe was not only impatient but getting worried about her, thinking about wrecks and illness, fussing as nervously as his housemates fussed when he didn’t show up at bedtime.

“We could stand in the pit, stand over the grave,” Kit said. “They wouldn’t pour gravel on us.”

Joe snorted. “And Scotty wouldn’t pick us up and throw us out of the garage? And you don’t think that little protest would make him wonder?”

Dulcie glanced back up the hill, watching the tall grass ripple where Tansy and Sage crouched. She was interested to see that Sage, after last night’s fine vindication, still wanted to hang around and see that the body was found. She wondered if he really cared, or if he was, after all, simply too hurt to go home. That worried her, but the good thing was that Ryan would be here soon. If he was badly hurt, she could get him to the vet despite his reluctance.

They could hear the older laborer, Fernando, in the garage, dumping his wheelbarrow load into the pit. He was the shorter of the two, with grizzled gray hair. The two worked one at either side of the gravel pile, so they didn’t get in each other’s way. A mist of gravel dust filled the air around them like thin smoke.

“They’ll have to dig it all out again,” Dulcie said.

“Let’s hope Ryan’s willing,” Joe said. “Sage is the only one who saw him bury the body.”

“She won’t refuse! Ryan knows Sage wouldn’t lie.”

Moving the load of gravel seemed to take forever. Long before the two laborers scraped the last bits of rock from the driveway, the driver had handed Scotty an invoice, gotten back in the cab, and rumbled off down the hill. Still there was no sign of Ryan, and half the deed was done, the body in the pit entombed beneath a thick blanket of crushed rock.

The cats had been waiting for over an hour when Dulcie said, “Looks like they’ll have to dig out a lot more than gravel. Here comes the cement.” They watched the cement truck struggle up the hill, its big, round belly rotating as it churned, mixing its load. Kit said, “I left my paw prints in the neighbors’ fresh cement once. Then I ran.” She smiled. “My prints are still there, maybe they’ll be there forever.” She looked at Joe, her eyes widening. “Can Ryan dig that up again, after it gets hard?”

“With a jackhammer,” Joe said.

The cement truck turned its nose into the street and backed up to the garage. The driver got out, Scotty checked over the order, and they set the chute in place. The cats watched the thick, muddy-looking cement begin to slide down the chute, eased along by the men’s shovels. Soon Scotty disappeared inside the garage; the cats listened to the gritty, wet stroke of shovels, imagining the red-bearded foreman and his helpers distributing the wet concrete like cake batter that would harden into manmade stone.

When the pour was finished, the driver hosed down his chutes and stored them. He carried an invoice in to Scotty, got in his truck, and pulled away. Within the garage, the sound of scraping had changed to a slick slushing. Joe envisioned Scotty floating out the cement with a wide, flat tool on a long handle, working it to a smooth finish. He had seen Ryan do this when she poured Clyde ’s back patio. “Come on,” he said, and he headed down the hill into another stand of tall grass where they could see into the garage, but could still see the road.

Inside the garage, the cement was a dark lake, lying even with the old floor. The cats had hardly gotten settled when Ryan’s red truck appeared far down the road, coming around a curve, hurrying up to the job.

Manuel, the younger Latino laborer, carried the float and the shovels out to the yard and began to hose them down. The moment Ryan’s pickup pulled in and parked, before Joe or Dulcie could stop Kit, she was gone, scorching straight to Ryan, leaping up on her as she stepped out of the truck. As Ryan gathered Kit in her arms, Joe crouched to follow, but Dulcie’s gentle claws pulled him back. “Let her go.” The tabby sat down beside him. “Let her do it, she won’t give us away to the men.”

“She’s so…”

“Enthusiastic,” Dulcie said, smiling.

Ryan stood holding Kit, laughing-but then her expression changed to puzzlement. She cuddled Kit across her shoulder, close to her ear, and wandered away from the garage toward the far end of the house where they wouldn’t be heard. The cats watched Kit look all around and then whisper in her ear. Ryan was very still-then she spun around, carrying Kit, and headed for the garage.

Moving inside, she stood looking down at the smoothly finished cement. She stroked Kit, looking at the tortoiseshell then looking back at the concrete, then glancing out to where Scotty was hosing off his boots.

STANDING AT THE edge of the finished floor, Ryan thought about digging it up again, about doing it right now, before it hardened. She could just hear Scotty, whose Scots-Irish temper matched his red hair. What the hell could she tell him? What possible excuse could she give him?

She didn’t imagine Kit was lying, any more than she would think Joe Grey or Dulcie would lie to her. If they said Sage had seen a body buried there, and if they believed Sage, then she had to believe them. This was one moment when her still limited experience with speaking cats strained every fiber of her good sense, one of the moments when she felt she’d fallen into Alice ’s Wonderland. And yet she hadn’t imagined Kit’s frantic revelation, certainly she didn’t imagine the imperious, yellow-eyed gaze Kit had turned on her, demanding and expectant.

But what about Sage? What if Sage had lied, for some unimaginable reason? Sage was wild, his band was feral, he might have very different scruples from the village cats. What if they spent the rest of the day shoveling out the heavy, wet cement, and then hauling out heavy gravel, then moving the drainpipes and digging down into the earth, and found nothing?

She was still debating what to do when Scotty came into the garage behind her. “Nice work,” she said unnecessarily, indicating the cement. “I thought they weren’t coming until ten.”

“They had a last minute cancellation, so they just came on.” He reached to stroke Kit. “What’s Greenlaw’s cat doing up here?”

“Lucinda and Pedric walk up in this neighborhood. I guess she saw the activity and got curious, she’s a nosy little thing.”

Kit narrowed her eyes at Ryan, and her claws tightened a little against Ryan’s shoulder. Ryan grinned, and stroked her, and looked back at the wet cement wishing she had X-ray vision, wishing she could see through the dirt and gravel and concrete, see what was down there.

“What?” Scotty said. “What’s wrong?”

“The job looks great,” she repeated. She laid a hand on his arm. “This morning before they dumped the gravel, did you look into the pit?”

“I made sure nothing had fallen in, if that’s what you mean. Saw that no lizard or mouse had gotten trapped down there, made sure the drainpipe connections were tight.”

“And the pit looked the same as last night?”

“The same,” he said shortly, frowning at her.

“Footprints?”

“My boot prints,” he said, scratching his beard, perplexed.

She scanned the worktable, then looked above the washer and dryer hookup to the broken window. “When did that happen?”

Scotty did a double take. “What the hell? How could I miss that? When did that happen?” He stepped to the window to look more closely at the jagged shards of glass, as sharp as skinning knives, sticking out from the wooden frame.

She said, “You were busy pouring and finishing, your mind was on the job.”

“That’s no excuse.” Scotty turned to look around the garage.

“Were the footprints in the pit all yours?”

Scotty was silent, visualizing the bottom of the pit. “They were mine.”

She waited, stroking Kit, feeling Kit’s anxious little heart beating hard against the hollow of her shoulder.

Scotty said, “What’s this about? Who the hell was nosing around here?”

She said, “I had a call this morning that someone broke in last night. That they dragged something heavy into the garage through the side door.”

“The door was locked when I got here, I had to unlock it. A call from who?”

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me. Said he watched a man haul a heavy bundle in, that he looked in through the window, watched him wrestle it down the ladder into the pit. A long, thin bundle wrapped in a blanket. Said he’d unloaded it from the back of a car, that he dumped it in the pit, then pulled the car up the hill, in among those cypress trees. That in a little while he walked back down, went in the garage, put on the boots that were in the cor ner and the overalls-your boots and overalls-picked up a shovel, went down the ladder into the pit where he’d left the bundle, and started digging. Caller said he couldn’t see down into the pit.”

“Why didn’t this guy stop him?”

“Maybe he was scared. I don’t know. A stranger digging in the middle of the night…He said that after about twenty minutes the guy came up out of the pit without the bundle, leaned the shovel against the wall, took off the boots, was taking off the muddy coveralls when he glanced up at the window and saw the caller. Said the guy went white, scared to death, grabbed a hammer and threw it, shattering the glass.”

The two were silent, looking at each other. Scotty scratched his red beard, and then put his arm around his niece. “You’ve come up with some good ones, my girl. This one takes the frosting.” He headed out of the garage and around to the side to look for the hammer. Ryan followed him, still carrying Kit.

At the side of the garage they stood looking at the broken window, at the teeth of jagged glass. On the lumber pile and on the ground, smaller shards of glass glittered in the morning sun. A ray of sunlight caught Scotty’s missing hammer.

When he reached to pick it up, Ryan grabbed his arm, pulling him back. “Fingerprints,” she said.

He was silent, looking at her. “Who the hell called you?”

“I don’t know who. But, with the broken window, and the hammer right here, I don’t think we can ignore it.” She hoped Scotty wouldn’t notice the smudged paw prints all among the glass, or that he would think they’d been there before the window was broken. “I think,” she said, “we need to get that cement out before it sets up. And then we need to call Dallas.”

Scotty glanced out at Fernando and Manuel and shook his head. “You want to tell them? Or shall I?”