Shirley Murphy - Cat Seeing Double

"Come on, Kit. I'm going to the hospital."

The kit's eyes widened.

"Taking Cora Lee some party food."

Kit scooted down at once, so eagerly that she nearly fell backward into Wilma's arms. The cats knew the kit had been worried about the Creole woman. The two of them were fast friends. Though Cora Lee had no notion of the little cat's true nature, the kit was special to her. This last spring, they had spent six weeks onstage together charming their audiences. No actress and her protege can star together bringing down the house every night without forming an indestructible bond.

Carrying the kit on her shoulder, Wilma headed away through the crowd. "I have a shopping bag in me car that should hide you, should get you into her room." Reaching her car, she turned so they could both look back, watching the bride and groom dancing the first dance in the westbound lane of Ocean, the tall, handsome couple laughing as their shoes scuffed on the rough asphalt.

"They are happy," Wilma whispered. "Safe, Kit, thanks to you. Thanks to their guardian angel, they are safe and happy. Very, very happy."

The kit smiled, and snuggled closer. How strange life was, how strange and amazing. She never knew, one moment to the next, what new wonder would fill the world around her, dazzling and challenging her-and sometimes terrifying her.

The inside of the car smelled deliciously of the party food that Wilma was taking to Cora Lee. But as the kit settled down on the front seat beside her friend, extravagantly purring, neither she nor Wilma imagined that the day's events would not be the last ugliness to twist this weekend awry and leave its ugly mark.

Descending the great eucalyptus tree, Dulcie and Joe Grey backed precariously down the slick bark below the branch line, slipping, dropping the last six feet, and headed directly across the street to the long buffet tables set up in front of the village shops.

At the center table where bottles of champagne were being popped, Max and Charlie stood cutting the cake, exchanging bites, smearing white icing across each other's faces as the occasion was duly recorded by a dozen flashing cameras. The cats glanced at each other, purring. A gentleness filled the crowd, a gentleness in people's voices and in their slower movements, an extra kindliness washing over the village, born of the near-disaster.

They saw Ryan and Dallas coming up the street, returning from the station where Ryan must have had a look at the young bomber. As she joined Charlie at a small table, Dallas stood conferring with Harper, then headed away toward the church to oversee the bomb team. And Harper himself headed quickly for the station, leaving Charlie to the first of the endless separations and delays that would accompany her life married to a cop. The cats trotted near them, to listen, settling down on the sidewalk between some potted geraniums.

Ryan sat down, touching Charlie's hand. "You look pale."

"I'm fine. Was it the same boy?"

"Same kid. Dallas knows him; he's Curtis Farger."

"Son of the guy Max and Dallas busted?" Charlie said. "He's supposed to be down the coast with his mother. Maybe she's not too reliable."

The trial of Curtis's father had ended just three weeks before. Gerrard Farger was doing six years on the manufacture of an illegal substance, and two years each on three counts of possession. The meth lab he'd put together had been in the woods below Molena Point, a shed behind a two-room cabin, the property roped off now with warning signs, and stinking so powerfully of drugs that it would likely have to be destroyed. Though the chemicals and lab equipment had been removed, the walls and floor and every fiber of the building still exuded fumes as lethal as cyanide.

"I had a look at him through the one-way mirror," Ryan said. "When I was sure it was the same kid, Dallas took me on in. Kid looked at me like he'd never seen me. I told him I'd cleaned up my truck, found the cracker crumbs and Hershey wrappers in my tarp."

"I'm missing a beat, here."

Ryan laughed. "I didn't know what had happened in my truck, only that someone had been in it. That had to be on my way down from San Andreas, or that night after I got home. But then when I saw the kid… well, it fit. I asked him if he'd hitched a ride down from the mountains. He just stared at me. When I pushed him, he said, 'What of it, bitch? I don't weigh nothin'. How much gas could it take?'"

Ryan shook her head. "Not a bit like the nice, polite, innocent kid he let me think he was, hanging around the Jakes job."

"You're sure it's the same boy?"

"The same. Same straight black hair, with a cowlick-big swirl on the left side. Same big bones, square-cut dirty nails. Same coal-black eyes and straight brows with those little scraggly hairs." Ryan gave Charlie a wry smile. "He was so eager and polite when he and his two friends showed up around the trailer.

"And just now in jail, underneath his hateful stare and rude mouth, I think the kid was scared."

"He should be scared," Charlie said. "He's in major trouble."

"Dallas called Curtis's mother. She said the boy wasn't there right then, that he'd gone to a movie. A ten-year-old boy going to a movie alone, at this time of night? Dallas asked her what movie. She didn't know, said she'd forgotten what the kid told her. Said whatever was playing in town. That there was only one theater, and one screen. Said she guessed he'd be home by midnight." Ryan shook her head. "A ten-year-old kid running the streets at midnight. Dallas plans to go down in the morning, have a talk with her."

Charlie nodded. "If that old man is Gerrard Farger's father-Curtis's grandfather… They've had a warrant out for him. Max and Dallas were sure the two ran the lab together, but when they busted Farger the old man was gone, not a trace. Now, if there's a connection to San Andreas, that's a whole new track to follow. We may not make it to Alaska."

"I'm sorry."

Charlie shook her head. "Whatever Max decides is okay. We can take the cruise later. That old man needs to be stopped. At the time of the drug raid, the second bedroom in the Farger cabin had been cleaned out, where he might have bunked with the boy. Nothing but a bare cot against the wall and an old mattress on the floor, and the kid's clothes. Juvenile officer picked those up after the bust, when he took me kid down to his mother. Not a sign of the old man, and during the trial Gerrard wouldn't say a word to incriminate his father."

Ryan shrugged. "Nothing like family loyalty. Were they part of a bigger operation?"

"Max doesn't think so. More of a family business," Charlie said wryly. "Farger apparently thought he could run a small operation without alerting the cops or the cartel."

Ryan laughed. "Sooner or later the cartel would have known about it-would have destroyed the lab or taken it over, made Farger knuckle under and follow their orders." Both young women were very aware of the powerful Mexican drug cartel that operated in the Bay Area. "He's lucky Max made the bust, he's safer in jail. Was he farming marijuana too?"

"DEA is investigating," Charlie said. The cartel used its meth profits to bankroll marijuana operations across the state-a behemoth of criminal activity as dark and invasive, in the view of law enforcement, as if the black death were creeping across California destroying families and taking lives. In the national forests and other remote areas, the marijuana patches were guarded by gunmen who shot to kill, so intent on protecting their crops that a deer hunter or a hiker venturing into the wrong area might never be heard from again.

And the toxic waste from meth labs was dumped down storm drains so it went into the sea, or was poured into streams so it got into the water supply, or was poured on the ground where it could stay for years poisoning fields and killing wildlife. Whoever said doing meth didn't hurt anyone but the user didn't have a clue.