Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

TWELVE

I woke with a sickening headache, stretched on my back, both hands at my sides. I tried raising my head, but it stayed firmly fixed on the ground. My skin shuddered with sudden fear. Was I dead? Paralyzed? No, I could wiggle my toes, and I could flex my hands.

Slowly, memory came seeping back—for a nanosecond there had been a dull scuffling sound behind me, somebody coming up fast on the pavement, perhaps from behind the guardhouse. Before I’d had time to turn my head, something had hit me. Hard.

Willing my arms to move, I raised my hands and squinted at them. No blood, no mangled fingers. I pulled my knees up and extended my feet toward the sky. I was okay. Nothing was broken. I felt the back of my head and winced. I had a tennis-ball-sized lump, but it wasn’t wet and I didn’t feel any crusty dried blood. Okay, all I had was a concussion. Not my favorite way to end a day, but it wasn’t life-threatening.

I managed to push myself up and sat swaying drunkenly for a few minutes while the surrounding landscape seesawed crazily. The air had a strange acrid smell and seemed oddly thick, as if I could cup it in my hand. I sat for a moment marveling at how it moved in pale gray swirls, ribboning around tree trunks and creeping along the ground.

Then my civilized cortex pulled itself together and shouted down to my old primitive brain, Fool, that’s smoke!

With an audible groan, I fumbled my cell phone open. When the 911 dispatcher answered, I said, “There’s a fire at a house on Midnight Pass Road. I imagine it’s arson. There may be people inside.”

I was almost surprised the dispatcher didn’t recognize my voice and say, “Oh, hi, Dixie! Gee, it’s been a couple of months since we’ve heard from you!”

Instead, he took the house number, told me to stay put, and promised somebody would be there shortly. As I stumbled to the Bronco, I could hear the fire engine’s siren coming from the station at the corner of Midnight Pass and Beach Drive. My brother would be on that truck, and the knowledge that he would soon be risking his life to battle a fire set by an arsonist didn’t do a thing for my headache.

Before the firefighters arrived, I pulled the Bronco out of the way behind the woman’s sedan. Then I laid my cheek on the steering wheel and stayed very still because moving caused waves of nausea and chills. I raised my head when the fire truck careened into the driveway, but it sped by so fast that I couldn’t tell which yellow-suited man was my brother. The truck swung around the areca palm hedge and stopped in front of the row of garages.

Within seconds, a fire marshal’s vehicle and an unmarked county car swung into the driveway and came to a stop behind me. Officers piled out of the cars and ran toward the invisible house.

A fat column of black smoke was rising behind the hedge now, making my eyes and throat burn. I felt the back of my head again. There was definitely a large lump back there, but it wasn’t oozing blood or brain fluid. Turning my head very carefully to keep the shapes of things within their boundaries, I scanned the area around me. The sedan was still there, but where was the woman? Maybe she’d been hit by the same person who’d conked me on the head and was lying dead or unconscious somewhere. The officers from the Fire Department didn’t know about the woman. Boy, would they be surprised when I told them.

A sense of importance gave me a little boost of energy that helped push me out of the car. I would go find the fire marshal and tell him about the woman, which would sort of cancel out my failure to report the dead security guard. When I told him, I would not look at the firemen who were risking their lives to put out the fire, because that was my brother in there and I could not bear to think of what might happen to him. I would simply tell the officers about the woman so they could initiate a search for her. Then I would go home and take a shower. Maybe one of the officers would give me a ride home. Maybe I could even catch a quick nap after my shower and get rid of my headache.

My knees didn’t want to hold themselves straight and my spiky boot heels caused my ankles to wobble, but I managed to shame my legs into walking down the driveway toward the privacy hedge. At the end of the hedge, I leaned against an areca palm frond because I felt very, very tired. Then I felt myself falling and couldn’t do a thing about it.

Next thing I knew, I was on my back again, and Guidry was on his knees beside me.

“Dixie? Dixie? Wake up, Dixie. Come on, baby, wake up.”

A little voice in my head said Baby?

I guess that’s why I threw up. Hearing a man I lusted after call me Baby just naturally brought out my innate ability to show him my grossest side.

He handled it with his usual finesse, which made me feel even klutzier. With a clean white hanky that only Guidry would have, he mopped my face and helped me to his car. I pulled away and pointed toward my Bronco, but he shook his head.

“I’ll have somebody drive your car home. I’m taking you to Sarasota Memorial.”

Ignoring my protests, he stuffed me in the passenger seat and slammed the door. I could still smell the heavy odor of smoke, but I could see firefighters putting away their equipment, so the fire must be out. Guidry got in the driver’s side and carefully backed down the driveway. I hadn’t seen Michael, but all the way to the hospital, I fought back the tears I’d felt when I knew Michael was there suited up to face a fire. I didn’t need a shrink to tell me it had brought back the pain I’d felt after our firefighting father had died.

At the ER, a roomful of people coddling various sprains and cuts and bruises watched as Guidry pulled rank and got me immediately into an examining room. An intern who looked about twelve years old examined me and pronounced me concussed, which I could have told him without the examination.

He said, “Any idea how long you were out?”

“Just a minute or two.” I had no idea at all.

“Any amnesia?”

“No.”

He recommended that I stay overnight in the hospital. When I refused, he didn’t seem surprised.

He said, “Look, a concussion’s not something to fool around with. It’s especially important not to have another one anytime soon. I’m not kidding. A second impact syndrome can cause enough pressure in the brain to kill you.”

“I don’t plan on having another one.”

“Nobody does, but once you’ve had one, you’re four times more susceptible to another. Just be extra careful until this has had time to heal. Wait at least a month before you go skiing or bungee jumping or anything like that.”

The kid actually thought I might leap off a bridge from a bungee. Made me feel about two hundred years old. I signed some papers, acknowledging that I was leaving against medical advice and absolving the hospital of any blame if I died during the night, and wobbled out to where Guidry waited.

The pubescent intern followed me. He said, “Somebody should stay with her tonight. Don’t give her any anti-inflammatory drugs for her headache. They’ll stop the pain in the short run, but in the long run they’ll keep soft tissue from healing and create chronic pain. If her pain persists, bring her back for an MRI. Sometimes a concussion represses vasopressin, so if she experiences frequent urination in the next few weeks, she should see her doctor. It would be best if she didn’t sleep for several hours tonight. If she falls asleep, wake her every thirty minutes and check her pupils. If they contract any more than they already are, bring her back.”

Guidry nodded and shook the kid’s hand, the way men do when they’re signaling each other that their superior male wisdom is ensuring a woman’s safety. For once, I didn’t mind. I just wanted to go home and take a nap.

With one hand on my arm, Guidry steered me out to his car in the cop’s reserved place outside the emergency room doors. I sank into the seat and leaned my aching head back on the headrest and didn’t look up until the car stopped beside my carport. Without saying a word, Guidry swiveled out of the car and trotted around to my door. Tender as a mother, he helped me out and stayed so close behind me as we headed for the stairs to my apartment that I could feel his breath on my neck. When we got to my shuttered French doors, I stopped and groaned.

“The remote’s in my purse. In the Bronco.”

The metal storm shutters started rising anyway, folding into neat little accordion pleats and disappearing into the soffit over the door.

Guidry said, “I got your purse.”

If I’d had all my faculties, I would have given him my grandmother’s lecture about how you never, ever, under any circumstances, stick your paws into a woman’s purse without her permission. But since my faculties seemed to be taking a sabbatical, I was just glad he could get us inside my apartment.

Guidry reached around me and unlocked the French doors, using the keys from my purse—the purse I hadn’t given him permission to open. Then, with one arm around my fuzzy pink shoulders, he ushered me into my living room and steered me toward my grandmother’s sofa with the green flower-printed slipcovers.

I said, “I want to take a shower.”

“Not unless I’m in there with you.”

I tried for indignant, but the most I could muster was a weak pout.

“My mouth is nasty.”

“Okay, we’ll go brush your teeth.”

We?

“Guidry, you aren’t going to the bathroom with me.”

“Honey, you can pee without me, but only with the door unlocked. I know you. You’ll push the limits and end up getting hurt.”

I considered that while I tottered into the bedroom and kicked off my high-heeled boots.

I said, “I’m already hurt.”

“Because you pushed the damn limits. What were you doing at the Kurtz house, anyway?”

Oh, God, I hadn’t told anybody what had happened. In fact, I’d completely forgotten it. The thing about having amnesia is that you don’t remember what you’ve forgotten.

Carefully, I turned around to face him. “Guidry, the woman was there. The woman with the dog.”

His eyes narrowed. “The woman with the dog.”

“Yes! Her car was there, but she was gone. That’s her car parked in front of my Bronco. I was going around her car when somebody hit me.”

“After you called nine-one-one about the fire?”

“No, before. Somebody hit me and knocked me out. I smelled smoke when I came to, and then I called nine-one-one.”

“Dixie, you’re confused. Somebody hit you after the firefighters arrived, not before. The chief thinks the arsonist must have been lurking on the grounds and attacked you because he thought you had spotted him. Did you?”

I shook my head and groaned at the pain the movement caused.

“No, no, I was hit before the firefighters came. When I came to, there was smoke in the air. I called nine-one-one, and then I moved my Bronco so the fire trucks could get past. I was on my way to tell the fire marshal about the woman when I fainted. She may be under the bushes, unconscious.”

“You say her car is still there?”

I nodded and groaned again. God, I had to stop moving my head. “It’s a Ford sedan. It’s the same one she was driving the first time I met her.”

Guidry had pulled out his cell phone and was punching in numbers with his thumb. I left him and started down the hall toward the bathroom.

As I stepped into the bathroom, I heard him behind me speaking to a deputy.

“Check out the plates on the Ford sedan in front of the Bronco. And start a search of the grounds around the house. You’re looking for a woman. Maybe hurt.”

I pushed the door, but Guidry’s foot slid into the opening so it wouldn’t close.

“That’s far enough for modesty. I’ll wait out here, but if I hear any thudding sounds, I’m coming in.”

“Come on, Guidry, I have pet hair and grass and vomit and God knows what on me! Just a quick shower, okay?”

There was a pause on the other side of the door. “I’ll make a deal. You get undressed and cover up with a towel. I’ll turn on the water and help you in the shower. I’ll give you two minutes, and then you turn off the water and I’ll hand you a robe and help you step out.”

I opened my mouth to yell No! Then I remembered the squishy feel of the areca palm frond just before I fainted, and the somber warnings of the adolescent emergency room doctor.

“It’ll take me awhile to get undressed. I’m moving slow.”

“I noticed.”

Peeling off tight leather pants is tricky under the best of circumstances. When it makes you woozy to lean over, it’s a bitch to get them down to your ankles. By the time I’d stripped to my panties, I didn’t have the strength to take the sweater off too.

Gingerly, I leaned over the sink to brush my teeth and splash my face. Leaning made my head feel like it might explode any minute. When I straightened up, the room began to spin, and I had to clutch the edge of the sink until it came to rest. Taking a shower suddenly seemed like climbing Mount Everest.

When I opened the door in my underpants and pink fuzzy sweater, Guidry took one look at me and scooped me into his arms like a daddy picking up a tired two-year-old.

I said, “I’ll just stay dirty for a while.”

“At least you don’t have nasty teeth anymore.”

“I’d like to take a nap now.”

“We’re going to talk awhile first.”

“I need Extra Strength Excedrin for my headache.”

“I have Extra Strength Tylenol, and I’ll make you some coffee.”

His cell rang as he lowered me into the green chair and tucked my grandmother’s afghan around my legs. He answered as he started toward my little cubbyhole kitchen. At my bar, he stopped and grabbed a notepad and pencil.

“Spell the name. And the address? Okay, dust the car for prints and run them through IAFIS. Top priority. Like in the next hour.”

He pronounced IAFIS as if it were one word, but anybody who’s ever been in law enforcement is familiar with the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. IAFIS has a database of close to fifty million subjects in its criminal master file, and its computers hum twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, screening ten-point prints electronically submitted by law enforcement agencies. Not too long ago, it could take weeks to get a positive match to a print. Now they can spit back identifications of ten-point prints—the ones taken of every finger—within two hours if they’re criminal prints and twenty-four hours if they’re civil prints.

Latent prints—the ones lifted at a crime scene—are not so easy to match. They’re analyzed and classified and fed into the network, and then all possible matches are returned. It’s up to the investigators to decide which, if any, most closely resembles the known ten-point print. If the latents are clear and complete, an identification is fairly certain. If they’re fuzzy or incomplete, it can be like making a decision based on tea leaves.

I could hear squawking sounds from the other end of the line. Guidry didn’t look impressed.

“Then you’d better get on it,” he said. “Time is fleeting.”

He hung up, shed his leather jacket, and draped it over the back of my bar stool. Then he moved around my kitchen in search of coffee and cups, his chest looking broad and strong in his black turtleneck.

I leaned my head back and wondered if I had ever heard a normal human being say Time is fleeting before. I decided I hadn’t. Like everything else Guidry did, it had a slightly foreign flavor. At least he hadn’t said it in a foreign language, which he probably spoke several of, including the French he’d once spoken to me when he called me a liar. But he’d said it softly, and not in a mean way.

With my head pounding like a son-of-a-bitch, I sat there quiet as a mouse and wished he would talk French to me again. Not that I would know what he was saying, I just wanted to hear it.

I had dozed off when he jostled my shoulder and set a cup of coffee on the table next to me. He took a seat on the sofa across from me.

“Drink up. The caffeine may help your headache.”

With a start, I said, “I have to call Joe and Maria!”

“Who?”

Struggling to get to my feet, I said, “Joe and Maria. I have to call them and ask them to take care of my pets tomorrow.”

Joe and Maria Molina have a housecleaning service on the key, and a lot of their clients are the same as mine. Our paths cross a lot and we give each other a hand when it’s needed.

Guidry pushed me back in the chair. “You stay put. I’ll bring the phone.”

Right there in front of me, he picked up my shoulder bag—which he’d slung on the sofa—and plunged his hand in it as if he weren’t committing a major offense. Without even a smidgen of embarrassment at having gone in my purse again without my permission, he handed my cell phone to me, sat down on the sofa, and picked up his coffee. I would have glared at him, but it made my head hurt worse to wrinkle my forehead.

Feeling like I should press the button gently since it was so late, I hit the speed-dial for Joe and Maria, and waited dully until Joe’s sleep-addled voice answered.

Without going into detail, I told him I wasn’t going to be able to keep my morning appointments and asked if he and Maria could cover for me.

Joe didn’t even hesitate. “Sure, Dixie. Which houses?”

Leaving out Billy Elliot, I named them one by one while Joe mentally ran down his own list of places where he had keys or entrance codes.

“Okay, okay, okay, no problem. You want us to see to them in the afternoon too?”

I told him I would be okay for the afternoon visits and got off the phone before he woke up enough to ask what was wrong. Then I called Tom Hale, imagining him lying in bed with his new lady love.

When he answered, I said, “Tom, I can’t explain now, but I won’t be there in the morning. Can your friend run with Billy Elliot?”

Groggily, and with a little affronted burr, he said, “I guess so, Dixie.”

“Thanks, Tom. I’ll explain when I see you tomorrow afternoon.”

I didn’t even say goodbye, just closed the phone and laid it on the table, noting as I did that my hand was shaking. Across from me, Guidry’s gray eyes were studying me as if I were a fingerprint.

“Guidry, what about the fire? Was Kurtz hurt?”

“It wasn’t in the house, it was outside. Some kind of chemical fire, I think.”

“In the courtyard?”

“No, behind the house entirely, on the east side.”

That would make it behind Ken Kurtz’s bedroom, behind the gym where Ziggy was.

I said, “Chemicals that could have blown up?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t spoken to the fire marshal yet.”

“Guidry, you told me once that you’d been married. Did you love your wife?”

It’s just amazing the things a person’s mouth will say when they least expect it.

Surprised, Guidry put his cup down and rotated it on the coffee table, looking at the wet circles it was leaving as if they held the answer to my question.

“I loved her when we married, and I didn’t love her when we divorced.”

“Why not?”

A shadow flickered across his face. “We had both changed a lot, taken on different ideas. I didn’t like hers and she didn’t like mine.”

For a moment there was pain in his eyes like a hurt animal’s—raw and astonished.

He took a deep breath. “It all blew up when I found out she was having an affair with my best friend. I hated them both for a while, but I got over it.”

“You forgave them?”

“It wasn’t a matter of forgiveness, I just decided to stop reliving it every day. Every time I remembered it, I felt the same pain and anger all over again. So I let it go. It’s done, over, in the past. If I go around resenting it, I keep it in the present.”

I understood what he meant. That’s why I’ve forgiven the old man who smashed his car into Todd and Christy in the supermarket parking lot and killed them. Forgiveness may be the most self-serving of all emotions because you do it for yourself, not for the one forgiven.

I said, “I’m sorry I asked. It’s none of my business.”

He gave me a keen look. “Maybe it is. You ready to start loving again?”

I leaned my huge head back against the chair and closed my burning eyes. “You sound like Tom Hale.”

“Who?”

“A guy. He says love is a choice people make.”

“Well, you sure as hell can’t love if you choose not to.”

I opened my eyelids a tiny bit and looked at him through the slit. I was tempted to say, How can I help holding dear the memory of my first marriage? but I knew that wasn’t the issue. Nobody expected me to forget Todd.

The issue, plain and simple, was that Guidry was a cop. I didn’t know if I could bear loving another man who left home every day with a chance of being gunned down by some jerk whose judgment had been stolen by fear or greed or drugs. On the other hand, it takes a particular kind of courage to go out every day to do a job that can get you killed, especially when half the population hates or fears you, and I was drawn to that kind of bravery.

But did I choose to love a cop, when there might be another man I could also love?