Shirley Murphy - Cat Breaking Free

Harper had marked twelve jewelry stores on the map, and five other upscale shops. He had noted, beside each, the store name, the opening and closing times and the names of the owners. Every officer, even the rookies, would have all the information at hand-every officer and one tomcat. Joe concentrated as hard as he could to set the layout clearly in mind. He wished Kit were there; with her photographic memory, she'd have the diagram down cold.

Through narrowly shuttered eyes, he studied Harper's notes, which included hidden video cameras both inside and outside the targeted stores, several still photographers and a team of officers hidden near each location-in one huge departmental sting. A sting that would employ not only every officer in the department-no one off duty or on leave-but a dozen or more men Harper would borrow from surrounding districts up and down the coast.

"Have them down here in time to get familiar with the layout. Billet them among us."

Dallas said, "I can take four comfortably, more if needed."

"Two, maximum," Davis said. She had, a little over a year ago, sold her house and moved into a small condo. Harper said he and Charlie could take the rest. "Ryan should have the upstairs finished by then-finished enough."

"Maybe not a shot fired," Garza said hopefully. "Not a piece of jewelry unaccounted for."

"If we're lucky," Harper said tightly. "Don't count your chickens."

"Jewelry stores still happy with their plan?" Juana asked.

Max nodded. "They've already collected every piece of faux jewelry they could lay hands on. This whole thing makes me edgy, it's too pat. The fact that we have a specific date, specific hits… If our intelligence is valid."

Joe closed his eyes so he wouldn't stare at the chief. What intelligence? These guys were talking about things that neither he nor Dulcie were aware of. Nor the Kit, surely. Who was passing information to the department? And was it good information?

Or was someone playing snitch, meaning to double-cross the cops? His anger at that made his claws want to knead into the leather cushion. Hastily he shifted position, scratching a nonexistent flea. These officers thought their information was coming from their regular snitches, and they could be walking into a trap, being set up big-time. Joe's heart was pounding so hard he thought Harper and Dallas must hear it or notice its hammering blows right through his fur. He closed his eyes, trying to get a grip.

Juana said, "This snitch has never let us down. Without her, we wouldn't have a clue. If she's setting us up…"

She? She, who? Dulcie hadn't made those calls. Kit had made a couple of calls when she spotted Chichi spying. But did she have all this other information, that Luis planned to hit all the stores at once? As far as Joe knew, Kit hadn't been privy to any one specified time and date. Unless she hadn't told them- hadn't had time to tell them?

Had Kit learned this and called Harper while they were locked up? And in her panic to save them and to help the ferals escape, she hadn't thought to tell them?

It was earlier that morning, long before dawn, when Kit woke in the dark in the branches of the pine tree and thought about Luis chasing them and about his dead brother Hernando. She looked over at her three sleeping companions and shivered and was hungry again and lonely and didn't know whether to go home or to keep running with them, didn't know what she wanted. Didn't know if they would search for their clowder and their cold-hearted leader and return to that miserable life, or if they would go off on their own, as she wanted, just the four of them, and start their own clowder and be free of Stone Eye? Or defy him, battle him, run from him forever?

Was that what she wanted? This morning she wasn't sure, she didn't know. But a voice inside whispered, "Lucinda and Pedric love you. You will hurt them terribly if you don't go back."

Crouching in the pine boughs shivering from exhaustion and cold and the effects of fear, Kit wanted to run on across the open hills forever and she wanted to return to Lucinda and Pedric, to her human friends, to human civilization with all its faults and goodness. To her own dear Dulcie and Joe, to Wilma and Clyde and Charlie and all her human family, to a life so layered in richness and the mysteries of humankind that she would never truly learn it all.

She wanted both. Wanted everything. Crouched miserably among the branches, she might never have known what she wanted if she hadn't grown thirsty and backed down the tall trunk to find a drink of water-and come face to face with Stone Eye.

She dropped the last six feet into the soft cover of pine needles smelling the scent of water on the wind and there he stood on a fallen log. Watching her. Stone Eye. Broad of head and shoulder, heavy of muscle, ragged of ear. His eyes blazed with rage, his fangs were bared. He looked up into the pines where Willow and Coyote and Cotton slept, and he snarled with fury. As if they had purposely escaped him, had defied him and intentionally run away. And as he closed on Kit lifting his knifelike claws to strike, Kit ran.

When Charlie looked up from her computer, she was surprised to see that the predawn dark had brightened into morning. She glanced at her watch. Max had been gone for nearly an hour. He'd been quiet this morning, solemn and distracted as he often was when police business presented a knotty problem. Breakfast in the village with his officers was good for him, he hadn't done that in a long while; and it lent her some extra time, which she appreciated right now.

She had wondered, slipping out of bed at four a.m., if she was raving mad to be getting up at that hour. She'd eaten yogurt and fruit at the computer, and now she was ravenous. But she was so into the world of the book that it was hard to leave-hard to leave the kit, cold and shunned by the older cats, wandering the winter hills alone. The story was so real to her that sometimes she was the homeless tortoiseshell, feeling sharply the terror of the thin, frightened creature creeping through the night, hiding from the clowder leader among jungles of dense, tall grass. Charlie's rough sketches for the book marched across the cork wall behind her, sketches for which Kit had been the model. At first Charlie had meant the story for young children, but it had grown of its own accord, enriching and complicating itself until it had become a far more involving novel.

Rising from her desk she headed for the kitchen, her thoughts partly on her empty stomach but mostly still on the book. While the cat in the story looked and acted like Kit, the real challenge was that this fictional cat was an ordinary feral, and she must show the cat's life from that aspect. No speaking, no uncatly notions. The fictional cat's vocabulary was limited to mewls and caterwauling, to growls and hisses and body language. She had no name, there was no human to give her a name. Charlie called her, simply, the cat. But the details of a feral cat's life were as real as she could make them-facts right from the cat's mouth, Charlie thought, smiling. Immersed in Kit's story, the words flowed out in a rush, all the joys and terrors of that feral cat's perilous existence.

She was standing at the kitchen table making a peanut-butter-on-whole-wheat sandwich when she heard rustling and scrabbling outside, beneath the bay window. Crossing to the window seat to kneel on the scattered cushions, she looked down into the bushes.

Within the tangle of geraniums and camellias and ferns, she could see nothing. Looking up across the yard, she saw nothing unusual around Ryan's truck where it stood beside Scotty's car in front of the barn. Rock was out in the pasture playing with their own two dogs. Turning away, she spun around again when a thud hit the window behind her.