Ник Сайнт - Purrfectly Deadly

“Do you need me to pick you up later on?” she asked, gesturing at the tracker and panic button combo that was still fastened to my collar.

“Yes, that would be great,” I said. We’d been traipsing around so much I was starting to feel the strain.

“So where are we going?” asked Dooley when Odelia had left.

I motioned to a small collection of dumpsters across the parking lot from the strip mall. “Where do you think?”

He stared at the dumpsters. “Are you hungry? If you are, you should have asked Odelia to drop us off at Johnny’s place. I’m sure Princess and George wouldn’t mind sharing their food with us again. They’ve got plenty.”

“We’re not here to eat, Dooley,” I said. “We’re here to talk to a certain individual who’s usually very well-informed and might be able to help us.”

He frowned. “You mean that bearded hipster drug dealer?”

“Not him,” I said as I set paw for the dumpsters. Brutus and Harriet were lagging behind, still consoling each other and coming to terms with their imminent breakup. It broke my heart to see them, and I had to admit I just might have misjudged Brutus. To look as brokenhearted as he did, it meant he really cared about Harriet, which meant that he actually had a warm heart beating beneath that rugged exterior of his and not just a solid block of ice.

We arrived at the dumpsters. It was here that the shops comprising the mall dumped their trash, and it also served as a place where all manner of vermin gathered. Not just critters favored this place, though, but also one of Hampton Cove’s most feral feline inhabitants. She lived out in the woods, near the old hunting lodge that was now the Writer’s Lodge, where best-selling and not-so-best-selling writers came to write in all peace and quiet.

A murder had taken place there last year, and Clarice, the cat I was hoping to meet, had helped us solve it. She belonged to no one and got her food all over the place, so she was the right cat to ask if she knew how to catch Commissioner Necker and Mayor Putin’s wife in the act. It was a long shot, but it was the only thing I could think of. We were all out of options, and if we were going to keep Chase around, we had to go for broke.

“Clarice,” I called out. “Are you here? It’s Max.”

“Clarice?” asked Brutus. “Who’s Clarice?”

“Oh, Clarice!” Dooley cried happily, then his face dropped. “You’re not thinking about making another deal with Clarice, are you?” His paw involuntarily reached to his nose and he winced.

The last time we’d talked to the feral cat, she’d made us vow a blood oath, which had involved cutting ourselves and mixing our blood. Only Dooley hadn’t been able to cut himself, so Clarice had done the honors and sliced her claws across his nose. I’d been forced to listen to his laments for days.

“What do you want now?” suddenly asked a hollow voice. It seemed to come from all around us, echoing between the dozens of metal dumpsters.

“A friend of ours is in in big trouble!”

“So you’ve come to ask me for a favor again?” the voice echoed.

“That’s right. We need your help, Clarice.”

“Yes, Clarice,” Harriet chimed in. “We really need your help.”

“Who’s that?” the voice bellowed.

“My name is Harriet. I’m Marge Poole’s Persian? My friend Brutus’s human is in trouble.”

“Helping humans again, are we?” Clarice growled, not sounding convinced. “When are you finally going to realize you’re cats? Cats help themselves! Not humans!”

“Well, we happen to like our humans,” said Dooley. “So we like to help them if we can. And in exchange they give us food and shelter and love and cuddles and—”

“Shut up, you make me sick!” Clarice bellowed.

Suddenly there was a loud clanking sound behind us, and the wild cat appeared at the rim of a dumpster, then gracefully jumped to the floor beneath. She had a fishbone stuck to her brow, and Dooley winced. He didn’t like Clarice, and he didn’t like fish, which was a little strange for a cat.

Clarice was a mangy cat, scrawny and more than a little scary. Her eyes seemed to glow red in the obscurity between the dumpsters, and her claws clicked on the concrete ground. When she spoke, it sounded like a hiss, and she gave the impression she was about to pounce and rip us to shreds.

“What do you want?” she hissed. She wasn’t the most pleasant cat to deal with, but because of her peripatetic ways she was unusually well-informed.

I quickly explained the predicament we found ourselves in, and she eyed me stoically all the while. If she knew something, she wasn’t letting on.

“I might be able to help you,” she finally said, “but what is in it for me?”

“We know a place that serves the most delicious food imaginable,” I said. “Actual pâté in an all-you-can-eat buffet. They’ll even adopt you if you like.”

“Where is this place?” she asked, plucking the fishbone from her brow and throwing it down.

“John Paul George’s house,” I said. “Xanadu.”

“He’s not there right now,” said Dooley helpfully, “because he’s dead, but his boyfriend is. Oh, wait, no. He’s in jail for murder. But the food is there. And so are a dozen cats. But they won’t bother you,” he hurriedly added.

“Pâté, huh?” asked Clarice, her eyes glittering. “I’ve heard rumors about Xanadu, but I always thought it was just a myth. A folk tale.”

“It’s not a myth,” I told her. “We were there, and we ate that pâté.”

“And it was to die for,” said Dooley.

Harriet slowly turned to me. “You ate pâté and you didn’t tell me?”

“We were there on official cat choir business,” I said. “And since you’re not in the cat choir…”

“Cat choir?” asked Brutus. “That sounds like something for me.”

“Oh, God,” groaned Dooley.

“Can you even sing?” I asked. “The first rule of cat choir is—”

“You do not talk about cat choir,” Dooley said, eyeing me reproachfully.

“Is that you have to be able to sing,” I said, ignoring Dooley’s outburst.

“I sing like a nightingale,” Brutus grunted. “Listen to this.” And he suddenly broke out into a caterwauling the likes of which I’d never heard before—it was truly terrible. Like a cat being castrated without sedation.

“Shut the hell up!” growled Clarice. “If you don’t want me to cut you.”

Offended, Brutus said, “If you think you can do better…”

“I don’t think I can do better,” Clarice hissed. And at this, she burst into song, belting out an aria from some little-known opera. It sounded… nice.

“Hey, that was great!” cried Dooley. “You have to join the choir!”

“Over my dead body,” she grumbled. “I wouldn’t be seen dead with a bunch of namby-pamby losers like you.”

“You could be our conductor,” I said. “We have a conductor now, but she’s… not very good.” In fact Shanille simply tried to copy her human, Father Reilly, who led the church choir, and did a pretty lousy job as well.

“Enough about the cat choir,” she said. “Do you want to know about this cheating commissioner business or not?”

“Yes, please,” said Harriet, clutching Brutus’s paw. “It’s a matter of life and death.” She turned to Brutus. “I can’t imagine life without you, sweets.”

“Aw, sugar pie,” said Brutus, touched.

“Enough with this nonsense!” cried Clarice. “I’ll take your offer of the Xanadu pâté, but first we need to do the oath.”

“Oh, not the oath!” Dooley cried.

“Yes, the oath. I can’t tell you about my private affairs unless we all swear an oath to secrecy.” She held up her right paw and gave it a quick slit with her left claw. A drop of blood appeared, and suddenly there was a sigh behind me and a dull sound. When I looked, I saw Brutus had collapsed.