Shirley Murphy - Cat Pay the Devil

“Or,” Wilma said, speculating, “maybe something he thought would increase in value? I wonder if he has that much foresight.”

“Or,” Clyde said, shaking his head, “he meant to hide it until the law forgot about it?”

Wilma laughed. “Cage won’t be around that long. If it’s of interest to Treasury agents, they don’t forget.” She yawned, beginning to relax, feeling the aches and tension subside. The cozy retreat, and Clyde’s company and the promised steak, had made her feel almost normal again. That, and the fact that Dulcie and Joe Grey were tucked up on the leather bench beside her, Joe with his head on her lap, treating her to a rare show of affection. She was greatly touched that the tomcat had put aside his macho disdain of cuddling.

Clyde made a pattern of rings on the table with his glass. “What will happen to Violet? I guess she’s glad Eddie’s in jail. Or she should be.”

“I don’t know that she’s glad. I half-expect she’ll go back to him when he gets out, even years down the road.” The subject of Violet tired her. “I don’t have much patience for a woman who won’t help herself, and I don’t think she plans to do that.”

Clyde shook his head. “Maybe she’ll change.”

“If she has any sense, she’ll get out of Molena Point and go where Eddie won’t find her, go while she has the chance. I told her I’d help her.” She stroked Dulcie, then looked up at Clyde. “At least Mandell is mending.”

On their way down from the ruins, she had called the San Francisco hospital on Clyde’s cell phone and had been able to speak with Mandell. He was out of intensive care and wanted to get into physical rehab as soon as possible. He said that when he got his hands on Cage Jones, he planned to be in top form.

“I’ll be right beside you,” Wilma had told him. “Have you been able to figure out what Jones thinks we took?”

“Nothing my secretary could find in his early files. She went through everything. But those years he was in Central America, who knows what he did down there? Didn’t you and Cage go to school with some guy who later moved down to Panama? A diver for the Panama Canal?”

“Greeley Urzey. Greeley was older, but it was a small school. When Cage grew up, he and Greeley ran around together for a while. They were in Panama at the same time.”

Mandell had been silent for a few moments, then, “Something I read, some years back. I keep thinking about it, but can’t bring it clear. Be glad when I’m off this pain killer and I can get my mind straight.”

“About crimes down there, some unsolved crime?”

“Seems like something spectacular. How would I forget that?”

“Let me do some checking. I’ll run it by Max.”

Talking with Bennett, she’d had the speaker on. Both cats, when they talked about Greeley and Cage, had been glued to the phone. But when she’d said good night to Mandell and hung up, she had studied their two sleek little faces, Dulcie’s green eyes and Joe’s yellow eyes as innocent as the gazes of kittens, the two cats looking back at her blandly and saying nothing.

Mandell had described how Cage had shot him, how he’d gone into the office as he often did on weekend mornings to catch up on paperwork, worked from seven until midmorning, then had gone out for a good breakfast. When he stepped out of the courthouse elevator in the parking garage, checking around him as he always did, he felt the impact a second before he heard the shot. He took a second shot in the shoulder and heard a car speed away, glimpsed Cage’s face as the car swung up the ramp. He had tried to run after it, then to use his cell phone, then he must have blacked out, which embarrassed him; he could remember nothing more.

“Woke up in the ambulance,” Mandell had said, “thinking strange thoughts…about my Cherokee ancestors who I never knew. I could see them marching as prisoners across the continent into that dry hot land they hated. Woke up hot and parched, thinking I was marching…Strange,” he said, “what the human mind will do.”

Wilma thought of Mandell again after dinner, when Clyde dropped her and Dulcie off at home, thought that it would take Mandell time to recover, that he would be pretty laid up for a while, and no one to do things for him in his little bachelor apartment.

Clyde insisted on going through the house with her. The trashed rooms were heartbreaking, daunting. She tried to put that out of her thoughts; she’d clean up tomorrow. The first thing she did was go to her car, unlock the glove compartment, and retrieve her.38, which was locked there, just as she’d left it.

“It would be nice,” Clyde said, “if you’d sleep with that where you can reach it. And,” he said, “if you would consider putting a lock on the bedroom door, to narrow the odds of someone walking in on you. Dulcie can’t play watch cat all night.” He stroked Dulcie gently. “She stands guard all night, she’ll never get her beauty sleep.”

Wilma laughed and gave him a hug. “I’ll keep it close, and I’ll call a locksmith in the morning.” And within half an hour of Clyde’s leaving, she and Dulcie were tucked up in bed, a chair propped under the doorknob, which at least would make some noise if someone came in. She didn’t see how it would be needed, now that Cage was in the hospital, and Eddie in custody, but she’d promised Clyde. She did straighten up the bedroom. Then, stretched out in bed between smooth sheets, she relished the clean feeling from her shower, the feel of Dulcie snuggled warm beside her, extravagantly purring, and the thick stone walls of her own house secure around her.

T here was no need now for stealth on the dark bridle trail; the two riders headed home using their torches to throw wide beams of cheering light among the trees that crowded their passage, bright paths that delineated tire marks ahead, broken by the hoofprints of their horses and the paw prints of the big Weimaraner. On her sorrel mare, Charlie welcomed the quiet, empty night around them as she tried to get centered again, after seeing Cage Jones’s bloodied face when she shot him, the explosion of bone and blood, seeing Cage twist and fall. Her mind and spirit were sick with that moment, with the shock of shooting a man.

But the alternative could have been her own death, and Max, too.

“Takes a while,” Max said, watching her, riding close and putting his arm around her.

“Does anyone really get over it?”

“You live with it. Better than not stopping him.”

“I know. But it’s hard to get used to. Do you remember, when I read C. S. Lewis aloud, where a damned soul wouldn’t change itself, so it went out like a snuffed candle? Just vanished? And you said, ‘What would the alternative have been?’”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I keep seeing Jones’s face, all bloody. And a moment before, when he raised his gun at me, so vicious and filled with hate.” She looked at Max. “The devil’s face, it seemed to me,” she said, looking at him shyly.

“That’s not crazy,” he said softly. “Evil is evil, Charlie.”

She leaned into Max, their legs bumping against each other, the horses fussing because they were forced too close together. There had been moments this evening when she’d wondered if they would ever be together again, if she would ever see Max again. Tonight, when she’d thought that Cage had killed Wilma, when she’d thought that they would both be dead by morning, hope had nearly deserted her.

She sat up straight, looking away through the trees where the lights of the ranch shone, welcoming them home, and she squeezed Max’s hand. And as they headed down the last hill through the woods, loud barking greeted them and the three dogs came running-their own two unruly half Great Danes, and Rock, dancing around the horses. Beside the house, Ryan’s red truck stood parked beside a squad car. The air was filled with the aroma of something spicy cooking.