Terrier Transgressions

Chapter Three

Less than two miles stretched between Charles’s apartment complex and my rental home, which meant we were in one place almost as soon as we’d left the other.

I opened the door to find Octo-Cat waiting for me with a rapturous look upon his face.

“Finally!” he cried. “I’ve been so thirsty.” His expression quickly changed to outrage, though, when Yo-Yo nosed his way into the house and gave Octo-Cat a big, wet kiss right on the nose.

Charles pulled back on the leash, then lifted the visiting dog into his arms.

Octo-Cat shook with fury as a bead of drool dripped down his face and onto the carpet below. “Why would you do this to me? Haven’t I already been through enough today? First the fly and now a-a-a dog?” he spat out that last word as if it were the foulest curse word he could imagine.

“What’s he saying?” Charles asked with rapt interest.

“He’s mad at me,” I admitted. “And he’s not happy about Yo-Yo being here, either.”

Octo-Cat arched his back and hissed. “You can say that again,” he muttered before jumping onto the kitchen table.

“Just give me a minute here,” I whispered to Charles before joining my irate tabby in the kitchen.

Octo-Cat took a giant leap from the table to the counter, then sat with his tail flicking back and forth wildly. “Unbelievable,” he growled without so much as looking at me.

I knew I was in the wrong here, but I also had no other choice but to comply with Charles’s wishes. If anyone else found out about my special ability to talk to cats, I’d lose my job, be made a laughing stock, and possibly have to move away from the only home I’ve ever known to start life over with a clean reputation.

Hopefully Octo-Cat would understand that my hands were tied once I had the chance to explain a bit more. First, though, I needed to find a way to give Charles what he wanted. Once I did, the threat hanging over my head would be eradicated, and Octo-Cat could go back to being mad at me for the usual reasons.

I grabbed a fresh bottle of Evian and a clean china tea cup from the cupboard. The cup came from the set we’d inherited from his late owner Ethel and was used for the sole purpose of offering Octo-Cat his daily libations. After presenting the fresh water to him, I made quick work disposing of the dead fly.

He took one quick lap from the dish, then trotted off to my bedroom without so much as a thank you.

“You’re welcome!” I called after him with a scowl. Jeez, it felt like no one appreciated me today.

“So what now?” Charles asked, bending down to unleash Yo-Yo.

“No, wait,” I cried, but unfortunately it was too late.

The Yorkie immediately darted into my bedroom, barking manically the whole way. A dreadful hiss-growl-meow hybrid reverberated through the house, and a second later Octo-Cat appeared with his tail poofed out so large that it resembled that of a raccoon.

“I hate you!” he screamed, tearing through the house as the dog gave chase.

“Grab him!” I yelled to Charles, who made a leap for the rambunctious animal and missed.

“Hey, Yo-Yo!” I called, racing back toward the kitchen. “Want a treat?”

The Yorkie immediately turned in his tracks and trotted after me, releasing a joyous series of high-pitched barks. I reached into the fridge and grabbed a slice of lunch meat to offer him as a treat just as Charles managed to re-clip the leash to his collar.

“Well, that was an experience,” he said with a weary chuckle.

“I wouldn’t laugh if I were you,” I told him. “It’s going to take forever for my cat to forgive me now.”

Charles stared at me in confusion.

“If he won’t forgive me, then he also won’t help. Don’t you know anything about cats?” I grumbled, despite the fact that I hadn’t really known anything about them myself until a few months prior.

He looked properly chastised as he hung his head and let out a giant sigh. “Sorry. What should we do?”

“We aren’t going to do anything just yet. You are going to take Yo-Yo outside, and I guess I’ll go offer up my firstborn in a last-ditch attempt to get Octo-Cat to talk to me.”

Charles began to smile but quickly retracted it immediately upon seeing the stone-cold serious expression on my face.

“Uh, okay. C’mon, Yo-Yo,” he said, yanking the little dog toward the door.

“Don’t come in until I tell you it’s okay,” I shouted after them.

“It’s never going to be okay,” Octo-Cat hissed, emerging from wherever it was he’d been hiding. “Why would you do that to me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to,” I rushed to explain. “He made me.”

Octo-Cat wagged his tail, which had mostly returned to its normal size. “So you sold me out for a pretty face,” he cried. “I thought we were friends! I thought we were family!”

My heart clenched. Normally I didn’t let his dramatics get to me, but this particular reprimand cut deep. This is what I got for confiding my workplace crush in my cat. He was thankfully getting better at telling humans apart and could accurately guess gender about four times out of five now. Of course, when I needed him to identify a murderer, he was hopeless, but when it came to figuring out my crush? Sure, that was no problem.

“I didn’t want to,” I repeated yet again. “He walked in on us FaceTiming earlier and forced me to help him.”

Octo-Cat scoffed. “So he walked in on you. Lie! Seriously, Angela, how hard is that?”

He rarely used my name, and even more rarely my birth name. Oh, yeah, I was in serious trouble now. Someone would most definitely be waking up to vomit in her shoes tomorrow—and, sadly, that somebody was me.

“Look,” I said, trying to reason with him. “Regardless of whether you would have handled things differently, we’re here now. Charles wants us to talk to that dog to learn about how his owners died so that he can better defend his client who is being wrongfully accused of their murder.”

Octo-Cat nodded but maintained his cold, narrow gaze. He’d been watching a lot of Law & Order reruns lately in an effort to better understand my job, and I was glad to see he’d learned enough to keep up with the legalese required to understand the situation.

“Okay, fine,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “But why didn’t you just talk to the dog yourself? Why did you need to drag me into this circus?”

“Because,” I whined, wishing that he could just take me at my word for once in our lives. “I couldn’t understand Yo-Yo, and I don’t think he could understand me, either.”

“Again, why couldn’t you have lied? For goodness’ sake, Angie, make something up so we can all move on with our lives.”

Well, it was nice to know my cat had no problems with lying to get out of a scrape. My morals were less questionable, however. Also, I’d already tried lying to Charles and it hadn’t worked.

At this point I had seriously begun to worry about the ramifications of my midday work break. How much time had passed? Had Thompson and the other associates returned to the office and realized I was missing yet?

“I am not going to lie to him,” I said, choosing to take the high road. “Especially not about a case. What if his client really is innocent? What if he has to spend the rest of his life in jail because my lie messed up the case? Yeah, no thank you.”

Octo-Cat groaned and rolled his eyes, a new human gesture he’d picked up from me. “So what? You need me to translate because you can’t speak dog?”

“Yes, please.” I clasped my hands in front of me. I wasn’t above begging, and Octo-Cat just so happened to love it when I groveled.

He took on a self-important air, glancing down his nose at me. It made his eyes cross, and I had to fight to suppress a laugh. “You know dogs have a much simpler language than cats. It matches their simple minds. If you understand me, then you should definitely be able to talk to Dum-Dum out there.”

“So you’ll help?” I asked, praying he could see how desperately I needed him.

“Fine, I’ll help” he said with a growl. “But you owe me. Big time.”

I raced to the door to let Charles and Yo-Yo in before my cat could change his mind. “Keep him on the leash this time,” I instructed as they passed back through the threshold into my home. “Better yet, keep him on your lap.”

Charles took a seat on my living room couch with the dog perched on his lap. “What now?” he asked as I took up residence in my arm chair.

“First, promise me that you won’t tell anyone about any of this.”

He bobbed his head in rapid, enthusiastic agreement. “Yes, I promise.”

I nodded, too. “Good. Now remember I don’t even know if this is going to work, but give me a few minutes and we’ll be able to find out.”

Charles fell silent, his eyes fixed squarely on me. It seemed that maybe Octo-Cat frightened him a bit, and that was just fine by me.

I turned to my tabby companion and said, “Would you please ask Yo-Yo what happened to his owners?”

Octo-Cat hopped up onto the coffee table and faced the dog on Charles’s lap before repeating the question.

Yo-Yo gave a happy, little yap and began to pant, which my cat translated as, “He says his owners are the nicest people in the whole world and that the guy he is staying with right now is nice, but he misses his family and wants to go home.”

“He said all that?” It took Octo-Cat at least ten times longer to translate that than it took Yo-Yo to speak it.

“I told you,” Octo-Cat said, taking a quick break to lick at his paw. “Dog language is incredibly simple. What he actually said translates to ‘best, miss,’ but when dealing with dogs you have to add a ridiculous degree of enthusiasm to get a proper sense of what they want to tell you. It’s exhausting, really.”

“What are they saying?” Charles asked.

“Shhh,” Octo-Cat and I both hissed.

Charles slumped back on the couch and watched us with a mix of intrigue and fear.

Turning back to my cat, I requested, “Would you please ask him if he was present when his owners were murdered?”

When Octo-Cat relayed my question, Yo-Yo let out a long, shrill series of screams and clawed at Charles’s lap in a panicked attempt to get away.

“Oh my gosh, what happened?” I cried at the same time Charles asked, “What the heck was that about?”

I looked to Octo-Cat for an explanation.

The cat’s eyes widened as he revealed, “He says his owners aren’t dead, and that pretending they are is a mean and terrible joke to make.”

So much for using Yo-Yo to plan a defense for Charles’s client. It sounded as if the little dog were being murdered himself simply by being asked about their deaths. How could we get any useful information from him if he didn’t even realize they had died?

One thing was for certain: I wasn’t going to be the one to break this poor, sweet doggie’s heart.