Shirley Murphy - Cat On The Edge

When still it was stuck, Dulcie pushed him aside. Leaping up, wrapping all four paws around the screwdriver, hanging upside down, she swung hard, lashing her tail, jiggling and bouncing.

The wrench fell with Dulcie under it, she hit the ground hard. She lay still, panting. The wrench lay across her. Joe nosed at her, frightened, until she began to untangle herself.

"You okay?" he said at last.

"I'm fine." She licked at her shoulder. "We'd better find something to wrap the evidence. The police use plastic."

"Or we'd better wipe it clean, if Clyde's prints are on it."

"We don't know what's on it. The killer's prints could be there, too, if he was careless."

They found a newspaper on the porch of the antique shop and removed the plastic bag into which it had been inserted to protect it against damp weather. Within moments they had bagged the evidence.

They left the cellar carrying the heavy package between them, heading north. When a young couple approached them out of the fog, walking slowly with their arms around each other, they ducked into a doorway. When the bleary lights of a car sought them, they crouched over the wrench to hide it.

Several times Joe left Dulcie guarding the plastic bundle as he investigated possible hiding places. But nosing through the mist into niches between walls and into doorways, no place suited him. As they approached the Dixieland music emanating from Donnie's Lounge, he quickened his pace.

A walled patio served as entry to Donnie's neighborhood bar. The little stone paved rectangle was bordered on three sides by wide flower beds planted with marigolds. The flowers' sharp scent tickled the cats' noses.

They laid the murder weapon among a tangle of yellow blooms where the earth was soft, and they dug.

As they loosened each flower, Dulcie laid it aside, careful not to bite through the stem. She thought the flowers might be poison, too. She had seen a list once of plants poisonous to cats, but she didn't remember much of it. Only oleander and, she thought, tomato leaves. Who would want to chew on a tomato vine? Each time the doors to Donnie's swung open, the music burst out, hurting their ears, but with a wildly compelling beat. The surge of jazz was laced heavily with the sharp smell of beer and whiskey. As they dug, Dulcie got that faraway look as if dreaming again, dreaming about a night of barhopping.

When the hole was some eighteen inches deep, they lowered the plastic-wrapped evidence. Dulcie said, "I feel like we're burying a corpse in one of those body bags."

"Should we say a few words over the deceased?"

She grinned. "Say a prayer for the man who killed Beckwhite. I think he's going to need it."

They pushed dirt back on top of the plastic-wrapped wrench, and Dulcie pressed each marigold in carefully, patting earth around its roots just as Wilma would do. "We don't want them to die, someone might investigate."

She resettled the last of the soil, then pawed dry leaves over the earth's wound. When no sign of digging remained, she stepped out of the flower bed, shook her paws, and licked the remaining earth from them. "No sense in leaving pawprints."

They were headed across the small stone patio for the street when the bar door swung open. Light from within hit the stone wall, driving them back down its length into shadow.

At first sight of the two men emerging, they hunched lower, and Joe swallowed back a snarl. Dulcie's fur bristled.

Lee Wark came down the path not five feet from them.

"And that's Jimmie Osborne," Joe breathed. "Why is Osborne out drinking with Beckwhite's killer?"

The men swung past them out the gate, both jingling car keys, and headed north. The cats followed, Dulcie proceeding warily, Joe pushing ahead quick and predatory, coldly hating Wark, and with precious little love for Osborne.

He'd never liked Osborne-the man was a bully and a coward. How many times when Jimmie and Kate were over to the house for supper, had Osborne been coldly rude to Kate.

Joe smiled. It made his night to annoy the man; he considered it a perfect evening when he could harass Osborne, torment him until he turned pale with rage. And with fear.

Now, hurrying through the fog after the two men, both cats grimaced at the smell of the killer. Wark's scent, more distinctive than Osborne's faint aroma, lingered sharply in the damp air. The smell goaded Dulcie, she forgot her earlier fear. Moving along beside Joe, she crouched to a slinking stalk, her ears clutched flat to her head, her tail lashing. Creeping through the fog, she gauged her distance. She considered the angle of thrust needed for a clean leap onto Wark's back, contemplating with delicious anticipation her claws digging in.

The cream-colored cat lay sick and confused, looking out through the wire door of a cage. Her thoughts were fuzzed, her vision blurred. She could make out rows of cages lining the small, square room, wire enclosures stacked three tiers high, marching around three walls. Nothing would stay in focus; no thought wanted to stay in focus. She lay sprawled on the metal cage floor, too weak to try to get up.

She was terribly thirsty. There was no water inside her enclosure, no small metal bowl as she could see in the other cages; she could smell the water, mixed with strong, less appealing smells. She didn't know how she had gotten into a cage; she had a sharp physical memory of Lee Wark throwing her against the concrete, a sharp replay of the pain, of terrible jolt exploding in blackness-then nothing.

She could remember waking before in this cage, waking then dropping back into sleep; her mind was filled with fragments of detached voices and with sounds that would not come together, with the rank medicine smell, and with the sounds of metal instruments against a metal table. She had no idea how long she had been here, no notion of time passing.

She remembered the feel of a plastic tube bound to her front leg, and of its little pin inserted with a sharp prick beneath her skin.

The stink of medicine clung to her fur. Her left foreleg was bandaged. It smelled so sharply of medicine that when she sniffed it she sneezed; the jolt of sneezing hurt her deep inside.

As her vision began to clear, she looked around intently for a way out. The walls behind the cages were made of unpainted concrete block. All but three of the cages were empty. The other tenants were a big brown dog sleeping deeply, four kittens asleep tangled together, and a black-and-white terrier pacing his enclosure dragging a stiff white leg. No, it was a white cast on his front leg.

Her eyes didn't work right, everything was fuzzy. Overhead, one soft light burned, a long fluorescent tube in a white metal fixture. Two other fixtures hung from the ceiling, one at either side, both unlit. The fourth wall of the room was blank except for a window and a metal-clad door, and a water hydrant protruding from the concrete floor.

The lone window was dark with night, but its blackness was rimed with fog, too, with a pale, blowing mist so thick that the window seemed to be underwater. The closed window was shielded from entry, or from escape, by a thick metal grid. As she looked, a flash of light ran striking across the fogged glass, as if from a car passing somewhere beyond; and she could hear the swift hush of tires on wet pavement, then the roar of several cars, fast-moving, as they would be passing on a highway. Her mind was as muzzy as her vision; but it clung to the one distressing fact that she was in an animal cage, that she was locked up in some kind of kennel.

But no, it was a clinic. Dr. Firreti's clinic. She had a vague memory of Firreti's face, round and smooth and sunburned, leaning close to her.