Raining Cat Sitters And Dogs

30

A pale sun sat low on the horizon and cast a sickly yellow light through the rain. Instead of making it easier to see, the light acted as a lens that blurred visibility. Since I was in familiar territory, I was able to navigate by known landmarks, but the Hummer in front of me slowed to a crawl at every eastbound lane. Each time, Paulie’s head turned to look down the lane before he gunned the motor and sped off to the next intersection. All those lanes look alike and some of them don’t have street signs, so it wasn’t surprising that he had trouble finding the right one.

Paulie finally turned left toward the bay, and I swung in behind him. The street was typical of the key, winding and heavily wooded on both sides, with wide stretches of space between the houses. It was dark and gloomy under the trees, and my tires hit several low places that sent up sprays of dirty water. Paulie switched on his lights, but I drove without mine. I didn’t want to call attention to myself.

The closer we got to the bay, the more often Paulie slowed the Hummer and hesitated at driveways. I supposed he was searching for an address or for something familiar about a house.

He slowed even more when he came to a stretch where heavy rain had caused power and sewer damage. Several large panel trucks were parked along the curb, and a big orange backhoe was maneuvering into position in the middle of the street. Barriers had been erected in the street to mark a spot for digging, and a group of men in black rain slickers and rain hats stood by to watch the operation. Beyond the backhoe, an FPL truck with a raised cherry picker crane and two men inside the bucket stood beside a streetlight.

As if all the activity surprised him, Paulie came to a complete stop in the street and looked at the workers for a moment before he turned into the driveway of a one-story stucco house. The garage door began rising, and a curtain twitched aside at one of the lighted windows. A girl illuminated by inside lamplight peered out at the workmen in the street. She looked frantic, and her mouth opened as if she was trying to get their attention.

It was Jaz.

Somebody jerked her away, and the curtain closed.

While Paulie waited for the garage door to rise high enough to drive under, I came to a lurching stop at the curb behind a Verizon truck.

The garage door reached its tallest height and Paulie drove inside.

A voice somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind spoke in a flat, unemotional voice: You know what you have to do.

The thing about internal voices is that they call you to action right then. No time to think about it, no time for debates, no time to weigh consequences. Normal people would say what I did next was insane, but normal people have never met themselves face-to-face.

As the garage door began a rattling descent, I opened my car door and ran like hell. The garage door was about four feet from the ground when I got to it, and I swooped under it and duck-walked to the rear of the Hummer.

Paulie was hauling Siesta Grill take-out bags from the Hummer and trying to figure out how to carry all of them in one trip. Stacking them and balancing them taxed his brain, but he finally managed to gather them all in both arms. Without a free arm to keep his low-hanging pants from falling, he had to walk spraddle legged to the back door. He kicked the door to get somebody’s attention, and when the door opened he dropped some of the bags.

The young guy who’d opened the door said, “Fuck, Paulie, you’re spilling stuff!”

Paulie said, “So pick it up! I’m the one doing all the work here!”

He went inside and kicked the door shut, and I crept forward. Half the people I know never lock the inside doors to their garages. With luck, gang members wouldn’t lock theirs either. I pressed an ear against the door and heard muffled male conversation, a couple of shouts, and then silence. I hoped the silence meant they had carried the food into another room.

Gingerly, I tried the doorknob. It turned, and I pushed the door open far enough to look inside. The kitchen was so messy and dirty it would have turned the stomach of an orangutan, but nobody was in it. From what I judged to be the living room, male voices argued over who had ordered what. The voices surprised me. I had expected young voices, but these were deep grown-up voices.

High on adrenaline, I crept forward. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a weapon. I didn’t have an idea of what I was going to do. All I knew was that young men who were members of a street gang had taken Jaz captive, and that she was still alive.

In the living room, a gruff voice said, “Goddam good thing you didn’t bring us more pizza. Or those damn chicken buckets. I didn’t come all this way to eat drive-through crap.”

Several other men made vigorous agreeing noises, all of them apparently fed up with what they’d been eating. But who were they?

I moved faster. With all the noise they were making, plus the dull sound of the rain and the clatter of the backhoe digging up the street, I figured the sound of my Keds moving across the kitchen tile wouldn’t be noticed.

Another man said, “At least one of those punks is good for something. I still don’t know why you brought them.”

A sharp voice said, “How many times do I have to explain it? I brought them to get that girl. If we let her testify, it’ll bring a shitload of trouble on all of us.”

Chilled, I listened to other men point out that the job hadn’t been done yet. As if Jaz were a rabid animal they’d caught in a trap and needed to dispose of, their only point of agreement was that the longer she lived, the more all of them were in jeopardy.

Hugging the wall, I slipped out of the kitchen and into a dining area where a table was heaped with briefcases and laptops. The space formed the foot of an L between the kitchen and living room. Cautiously, I edged to the corner and tilted my head so one eye could peek into the living area.

About a dozen men were in the room, and it was immediately apparent what the pecking order was. Two of them sat on a long sofa with a two-man space between them. They wore expensive slacks and dress shirts. Their shoes were polished and they wore dark socks that didn’t expose any leg. Each had a grandmotherly TV tray set up to hold food and a wineglass. Their food had been transferred from clamshell boxes to real plates, and they had real flatware. Three other similarly dressed and TV-trayed men sat in club chairs.

Other men were younger and dressed as if they were junior executives or midlevel employees. They sat on the floor with their legs stretched out and Styrofoam containers open on their laps. They had cans of beer rather than wine. The youngest, in sloppy jeans and droopy T-shirts, were Paulie and his two bottom-of-the-barrel friends. They were awkwardly serving the men on the sofa and chairs, fearfully making sure they had the dinner they’d ordered, pouring wine in their glasses, offering them extra napkins and salt and pepper from the carry-out bags.

At the far side of the room, a dark, broad-chested man with a curly black beard leaned in a doorway and watched the action. From the respectful way everybody looked at him, even the important guys on the sofa and chairs, I knew he was the most dangerous man in the room. He wore an exquisitely tailored black suit, black silk shirt, and black tie. Jet-black hair curved around his ears, and heavy gold bracelets glinted at his wrists. Even with the house darkened by rain, his eyes were hidden behind slim dark glasses. Everything about the man said he had an obsidian heart as black as his suit.

Realization hit, and my heart struggled against its cage like a panicked bird. The man in the doorway was the big shot Maureen had talked about, the one from Colombia who was here to appoint a North American drug czar, and the men who looked like executives were crime bosses. In a sickeningly rational move, the mob head from L.A. had brought Paulie and his friends to find Jaz and kill her. Without her, there would be no murder trial of his young street dealers, therefore no fallout that could hurt him.

With a take-out bag dangling from one hand, Paulie turned to the man leaning in the doorway. As if he were speaking to a coiled snake, he said, “Uh, sir, where do you want yours?”

Silently, the man crooked a finger at Paulie. Everybody in the room stopped eating to watch Paulie carry the bag to him. Without speaking, the man took the bag, and Paulie hurried away like a cowed dog to take a seat on the floor. At the door, the man extended the bag toward somebody inside the room.

Jaz stepped forward, took the bag from the man, and disappeared from view.

I must have made a movement, because the Colombian swiveled his head toward me. For a long moment we stared at each other, me like a yellow-crested bird, he with his eyes hidden behind those dark glasses.

Thinking that the best defense is a good offense, I stepped forward and let him see all of my reflective yellow glory. I must have been quite a surprise.

I said, “I’ve come for the girl.”

Cursing men leaped to their feet and grabbed for their guns. Dinners spilled, wineglasses fell to the floor, beer cans were kicked over. Behind the man in the doorway, Jaz came to look out at me with pinched terror in her face.

I squared my shoulders and tried to look tough. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, but I thought if I talked fast enough I might be able to convince everybody that it would be a very good idea to let me take Jaz and leave.

I said, “I don’t have anything to do with this meeting, I don’t even know what it’s about. I’ve just come for Jaz. Let her go, and I won’t say anything to anybody.”

There was a long, cold pause, then the man in the doorway crooked a finger at me the same way he’d motioned Paulie to bring him the take-out bag. Jaz began to cry.

Oddly, everything seemed to become more distinct. Colors and scents and sounds were more vivid. I knew they were going to put me in that room with Jaz. I also knew they could not let me live to tell about it. If I ran, I would surely get a bullet in my back, and nobody would hear the shot over the noise in the street. The only good thing about this development was that Jaz would no longer be alone.

With a silent prayer that Michael would not be too devastated by my death, I moved forward. When I was close, the Colombian grabbed Jaz’s wrist, pulled her from the room, and pushed her to me. Expecting him to order us to stand still while they executed us, I took her hand and squeezed it. Whatever happened, we were in this together.

Everything that happened next seemed to happen simultaneously, everything slapped on top of everything else.

First, the Colombian held his hand out straight in front of me in Paco’s signal—his first two fingers making a V like open scissors.

Next, he turned toward the others and spoke in a loud voice. “Everybody freeze! You’re all under arrest.”

By some sleight of hand, a badge had materialized in the hand of the Colombian, except he was really Paco, and he was holding it out so all the men in the room could see it. A gun was in the other, and I knew he had taken it from a soft holster that had been hidden under his jacket. The jacket was now open, and the black holster displayed the word POLICE in big white letters.

In a low voice, he said, “My sister is coming out with the girl. Hold your fire.”

I was so addled at the Colombian drug lord being Paco in disguise that for a second I thought he had cracked up and was talking to himself. Then I realized that in addition to a bulletproof vest under his silk shirt that added bulk to his chest, he was wired. He was speaking to somebody outside the house.

To me, he said, “Go!”

I gripped Jaz’s hand and ran toward the kitchen. With a shrill yelp of fear, she let me pull her through the kitchen to the back door. We burst through the door into the garage and I blindly pawed the wall to hit the button that opened the garage door. When the door began to rise, I pulled Jaz toward it and we ducked under and ran across the boggy yard. At my Bronco, I stuffed her in, pulled myself inside, and gripped the steering wheel with both hands to keep from flying apart.

In the next instant, the backhoe that had been digging a hole in the street came to a stop, and the workmen around it yanked off their slickers and hats to reveal SWAT jackets and helmets. So did the backhoe driver. The cherry picker crane swung around to allow uniformed men inside the bucket to train their rifle sights on the front door. Patrol cars screeched from both directions to barricade the street, and the whap-whap-whap of a helicopter sounded overhead. A slew of men in dark flak jackets and helmets materialized out of nowhere. Every man had initials on his jacket—FBI, DEA, SCSD, SIB, SWAT—and every man carried an assault rifle.

A big voice spoke through a bullhorn. “Come out with your hands up!”

I gripped the steering wheel so hard my shoulders shook. Every man inside that house had a gun. Every man inside that house realized by now that Paco wasn’t a big Colombian drug lord but an undercover cop who had tricked them. They had two choices: to add cop killing to the charges already against them, or to put down their weapons and come out.

Beside me, Jaz was frozen and confused, breathing in short laps like a stressed dog.

The front door opened and men began filing out with their hands above their heads. I waited, stiff as stone, until Paco appeared in the door. He had put away his gun but still had the cloth holster open to show it was marked POLICE. Tensions run high in a situation like that, and I knew he didn’t want any of the law enforcement people to mistake him for somebody else.

Within seconds, every man who’d come out of the house was handcuffed and led to the paneled trucks. The trucks were not plumbers’ trucks or Verizon trucks or FPL trucks after all, but SWAT armored vehicles.

Paco separated himself from the others and slogged through the mist to the Bronco. He had taken off his dark glasses, but he still looked like a gangster. I rolled down my window and he leaned inside and kissed me, his beard prickly against my cheek.

“Go home,” he said.

He gave Jaz a half smile and a thumbs-up, then turned and disappeared into the throng of uniformed lawmen.

I looked at Jaz and saw a new fear on her face. She was afraid of me.

She said, “Is he your brother?”

I said, “It’s a long story, but he was just pretending to be a bad guy. He’s really an undercover cop. You’re safe now. Those guys who were after you are all going to jail. You don’t have to hide anymore.”

Her face crumpled and she dissolved into racking sobs. I gathered her into my arms and held her while she cried, patting her on the back like I once patted Christy.

She said, “He wouldn’t . . . he wouldn’t let them . . . hurt me. They wanted to, and he stopped them.”

I squeezed her closer. “They can’t ever hurt you again.”

Jaz cried while the armored trucks drove off with their loads. She cried while men erected warning barriers around the hole they’d dug in the street. She cried while the truck with the cherry picker crane lumbered off. She cried as if she had barrels of tears that needed shedding.

After a final shudder, she went limp and pulled away.

Dully, she said, “Where do I have to go now?”

“My orders were to take you home.”

In a tiny voice, she said, “I don’t have a home.”

I said, “Well, actually, you do. If you want it, that is. Hetty would like you to live with her.”

The light breaking on her face was like a glorious sunrise.