Shirley Murphy - Cat Breaking Free

Coming in the house alone, he turned on some lights and called to Joe. Called the tomcat again and again, until he was certain Joe wasn't home. Hurrying into the laundry, he looked for Snowball. She wasn't in the bunk bed. With an unaccustomed feeling of dread for her, too, he hurried upstairs.

There she was, the little white creature curled up in his study, in the big leather chair. Someone had tucked the woolen throw warm around her.

Ryan wasn't there, there was no note as she would have left on the kitchen table if she'd come in. Only Joe had been here in the house, to fold the throw gently around Snowball like that, and that touched Clyde deeply. Kneeling before the chair, he stroked Snowball and put his face down against her. She looked up at him pitifully. As if she knew very well what had happened. Just ordinary cats, Clyde thought, know a lot more than we suspect of them.

Snowball sniffed his hands for a long time, smelling each finger, then she dropped her head into Clyde's hand. He remained very still, holding her.

It was a long time later that he rose, picking Snowball up, cuddling her in his arms. Carrying her to the desk, he sat down, making the little cat comfortable in the crook of his arm; and he called Ryan.

He told her about Rube. They talked for a long time. Her gentle voice, and her own tears, eased him. When at last he hung up, he felt better.

But he was still lonely, so lonely that he did something he'd never done before. He dialed the dispatcher on the nonemergency number, asking innocently if his cat was there. He told Mabel he'd heard a terrible cat fight, off in that direction, and he just wondered…

Mabel Farthy had cats, she was a sucker for cats. She wouldn't think his call was odd. Everyone knew that Joe often hung out at the station. Harper complained bitterly about cats wandering so casually in and out, but Clyde thought Max was secretly growing fond of Joe. He tried not to think how mad Joe was going to be. The tomcat would give him hell for making this call. Right now he didn't care, he just wanted Joe to come home.

Mabel's raspy voice was amused. "All three cats are here, Clyde. Sitting on the counter eating pastrami on rye."

"With mustard?"

"Of course not. I know cats don't like mustard."

Clyde repeated how much the catfight had alarmed him, and said he hoped Mabel got some of her dinner and didn't go hungry. "You could throw the little beggars out. You don't have to feed them."

Mabel laughed. "You know I'd go hungry to see the satisfied smirks on their furry faces and hear the little freeloaders purr."

On Mabel's counter, lolling between two stacks of reports, Joe heard Clyde's voice on the phone, and went rigid. They were talking about cats, about him, and he was wild with anger. Clyde had called about him. But the next minute his anger vanished, and he knew.

Rube. This was about Rube.

Clyde wouldn't have called if this were good news. Joe's stomach felt like it had dropped to the cellar, he was cold all over and lost, felt sick all the way to his paws.

He was about to take off for home when Officer Blake came in. The tall, thin officer tossed a handful of Polaroids on the desk, color shots of the fire at the high school. Slipping closer again, between Dulcie and Kit, Joe stared at candid studies of smoke and flame licking up a building, and of the burned interior of a classroom. It was the kind of mess you'd see in some L.A. street riot, not in Molena Point. What was coming down here?

There had been no trouble at the school, no student unrest or complaints building up to this, and no hot issue that might draw outside agitators. Keen with predatory curiosity, longing to paw the photos out across the desk to see every detail, Joe turned away instead. He was too torn by Clyde's need, too conscious of Clyde's pain to attend even to this perplexing crime.

Glancing at Dulcie with a look he hoped she would understand, he leaped from Mabel's counter to the front door and reared up against the glass, pawing impatiently until Mabel came around the counter and let him out. And he headed fast for home, a wild gray streak racing over the rooftops and across the highest oak branches above the narrow streets, heading home. Going home, where Clyde needed him.

Dulcie seldom hung around Molena Point PD, spying and picking up intelligence, without Joe Grey by her side. Sitting with Kit on the dispatcher's counter, with cops milling all around them, she tried her best not to look interested in the pictures of the fire. The four officers who had just returned from the high school smelled nose-itchingly of smoke. Their faces and hands were smeared black, their uniforms torn and wet.

Dulcie did not want to appear to be reading their reports; but she could hardly look away. A schoolroom had been deliberately set afire, as well as some trash cans under the wooden grandstand. Kit kept crowding her, staring so intently at the pictures that Dulcie could not distract her. This kit did not know the meaning of finesse. As much as Kit hung around the station, as many cases as she'd helped to solve, some spectacularly, the little tortoiseshell still was impetuous to the point of alarm. Terrified that any minute Kit would forget herself and blurt out some burning question, Dulcie hissed softly at her and pressed a paw on her paw.

But only when, glancing up through the glass door, they saw Dallas Garza approaching across the parking lot, did Kit back off and curl up as if for a nap, tucking her nose under her tail. Dulcie washed her own hind paw, then feigned great interest when a rookie dropped a wadded-up gum wrapper on the floor; she made a show of creeping along the counter peering down, lashing her tail.

Dallas Garza swung in through the heavy glass door looking sour and angry. He said very little but double-timed on down the hall, followed silently by the officers around the desk and half a dozen who came in behind him. They turned into the coffee room-cum-squad room. The cats waited a moment, then leaped down, wandered along behind them, and crouched outside the door. The room smelled of overcooked coffee.

"Store window was already broken when the call came in," Garza said. "Security alarm disabled. They were in and out before the first car arrived. Cameron's in the hospital, shot in the leg. Lucky as hell it missed the bone. She should be out in a few days." Jane Cameron had been on the force only a few months. She had come down from San Jose PD where she'd graduated from the police academy. "She didn't want to fire her weapon in that neighborhood. Guy doubled back on her. His first shot took her down, hit her twice before she fired and killed him," Garza said. "She's feeling more mental pain than pain from the leg wound." It was doubly hard for a rookie to live with having killed someone. There would be a routine investigation, which would surely amount to nothing.

Dulcie was just glad that Cameron was alive. The tall, soft-spoken blonde always had a smile and a pet for a visiting cat. The cats listened with switching tails as Garza described the action.

"Besides the man Cameron killed, we have one arrest and the make on two cars." He glanced at Officer McFarland.

"McFarland pursued a black Ford Neon, no lights, forced it into an alley against the brick wall of The Patio restaurant. Car took out three feet of wall. McFarland might never have spotted it-but the license plate flat fell off."

McFarland grinned. "Bounced and rattled like a barrelful of tin cans." McFarland was a young, fresh-faced cop with soft brown hair that, when freed from his cap, immediately fell over his forehead. "Puny little guy. Fought me like a nut case, bit me twice. Flailed around until I shoved my gun in his ribs. Little twerp, Latino. Dark eyes, dark complexion. Long bleached hair and a nose ring. Made me want to lead him along like a ringed bull. We're towing the car in.