Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

8

Before I went to Big Bubba’s house, I stopped by the Crescent Beach Grocery to get fresh bananas for him. Big Bubba liked his bananas a little greenish, so I got fresh ones every couple of days. He wasn’t so picky about other fruit, but he really hated a mushy banana.

I hurried to the 10 Items or Less lane, where a young man was paying for a single bunch of cilantro. The checker, a pretty young woman with dark curly hair, handed him change.

She said, “Weren’t you in here just a few minutes ago?”

He grinned. “Yeah, my girlfriend sent me to get stuff for a Mexican breakfast. You know, huevos rancheros and salsa. I got parsley instead of cilantro, so she made me come back.”

The checker said, “Oh, yeah, you have to use cilantro for salsa. I had to learn that when I came to this country.”

He said, “Where are you from?”

“I’m from Lima, Peru. Are you from Mexico?”

“No, I’m from Taiwan. We don’t eat huevos rancheros in Taiwan.”

She laughed. “We don’t eat it in Peru, either, but I love it.”

He hurried away with his cilantro and I took his place with my bananas, happily feeling like a grain in the leavening that keeps the world from being tediously dense.

As I drove down the tree-lined lanes to Big Bubba’s house, I kept a sharp eye out for a glimpse of Jaz. But the only person I saw was a suntanned man in a convertible with a kayak in the passenger seat. The man and the kayak looked equally carefree. I waved at the man and he waved back. The kayak just stared straight ahead.

When I removed the night cover from Big Bubba’s cage, he was so happy to see me that he almost fell off his perch.

He hollered, “Did you miss me? Get that man! Go Bucs!”

I laughed, which made him laugh too—a robotic heh heh heh sound—which made me laugh harder, so for a minute we sounded like a crew member of Starship Enterprise entertaining a wily Klingon.

I took him out of his cage and let him run around on the lanai while I cleaned his cage and put out fresh fruit, seed, and water for him. Ecstatic to see sky and treetops and hear his wild cousins calling, he flapped his wings and shouted like a kid at recess. After I had his cage nice and clean, I filled a spray bottle with water and gave Big Bubba a shower on the lanai. Big Bubba loved showers, and he fluttered his feathers so enthusiastically that I ended up almost as wet as he was.

After Big Bubba had run around on the lanai some more to dry, I put him back in his indoor cage. Under ordinary circumstances, since the red tide toxins had abated, I would have put him in his big cage on the lanai. But lanai screens are dead easy to cut, and I was afraid those young thugs might come back and steal him. We don’t usually have to worry about things like that on the key, and I resented having to think about it.

I turned on his TV and left him carefully pulling his feathers back into their zip-locked position, drawing each feather through his beak to oil and smooth it. He was so intent on making himself sleek again that he didn’t even say goodbye.

My cell rang as I was getting in the Bronco. With no preamble, Guidry said, “Where are you?”

I gave him Reba’s address, and he said, “Stay put. I’m in the area.”

Three minutes later, his Blazer pulled up at the curb. Except for a certain pink tinge to his eyes that said he’d also missed some sleep, he looked as calm and collected as always. Natural linen jacket, pale blue open-collared shirt, dark blue slacks, woven leather sandals, no socks. Guidry’s clothes are always wrinkled just enough to say they’re made of fine fabrics woven by indigenous artisans, and he wears them with the casual ease of one who’s never known the touch of chemically created threads.

Conscious of being sweaty, cat hairy, and damp from parrot bathwater, I waited while he pulled a sheet of mug shots from a manila envelope.

He said, “You recognize any of these guys?”

They were all young men, all with various looks of sulky rebellion. Three of them looked like the guys who’d come in Reba’s house looking for Jaz.

I touched their faces. “I can’t swear to it, but I think they’re the ones who came in on me.”

“Okay.” He put the pics back in the envelope.

I said, “Well?”

“One of them is the guy whose prints were on the jar. An eighteen-year-old from L.A. named Paul Vanderson. He and the other two have records going back several years. They’re out on bail right now, charged with killing a sixteen-year-old in a drive-by shooting in L.A. The fingerprint people were able to match Vanderson’s latents to some that were in the house where the homicide occurred here in Sarasota. With that confirmation, they compared latents in the house to the other two names, and they matched too. Good job getting the prints, Dixie.”

I preened a little bit. If I’d had any, I would have pulled some feathers through my beak.

I said, “So what do you do now?”

“We look for them. When we find them, the LAPD will want them first. Their drive-by shooting trial is next month. If they’re convicted of that, they’ll spend the rest of their lives in prison. If they’re not, they’ll still have to stand trial for the homicide here.”

Thinking how close I’d been to human beings capable of such mindless violence made my temperature drop.

Guidry said, “The girl is the first link to them, so that’s where I’ll start. You said the woman’s house where the girl is working is around here?”

“Next street over. I’m going there now.”

“I’ll follow you.”

I got back in the Bronco and moved toward Hetty’s house, acutely aware that Guidry was behind me. I wondered what he thought about seeing me, or if he was thinking of me at all. Probably wasn’t, since he was there as a homicide detective investigating a murder, not because he wanted to see me. I felt like an idiot for even wondering about it, but that didn’t make me stop.

Being somewhat involved with a man was like being in a foreign place, an alien world in which I didn’t speak the language or know the local customs. With Todd, everything had been gradual and easy, moving from friendship to lovers to marriage in an easy arc that felt familiar and right on every level. But that had been before I knew how love can grow so that losing it is an amputation, how forever after you have the phantom other still attached. I had let my anguish go, but I would never be a fully individual self again. Todd would always be a part of me, like my DNA.

Nevertheless, I remained exquisitely conscious of Guidry’s eyes on me, and I was absolutely certain that his feelings about me were as conflicted as mine were about him. He’d had a wife once who’d betrayed him. Perhaps it was difficult for him to trust again. He had a comfortable life as an uncommitted man. Perhaps he wanted to keep it that way.

At Hetty’s driveway, I pulled into it and turned off the motor. Before I got out of the car I ordered myself to put every thought about Guidry out of my mind. We were here to keep Hetty safe and to get information about Jaz, not for me to trip over some maybe romance that was no more substantial than a moonbeam. With my mind firmly made up, I slid out of the Bronco to join Guidry.