Клер Донелли - The Big Kitty

“It’s your call,” he said. “If you want to spend the time chasing the cat.”

“No.” She shook her head. “We’ll find Shadow when we come back.”

But as she climbed into Will’s truck, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a bad omen.

23

In the darkness,Shadow crouched by the bushes at the end of the driveway. He’d enjoyed having Sunny pet him, but hadn’t liked the scents coming off her. She smelled of the old place where he’d lived, the place of death. And he caught a whiff of something else. It wasn’t quite fear—he knew that stink all too well. There was worry in there, too. He felt that in her touch. But there was also an odd tickle, the sort of thing he sensed when a strange cat had decided to fight.

Sunny was very quiet, talking with the Old One, so she wasn’t going to fight with him. Then the new male came in. Something was going on between them, though it didn’t seem like a fight, either. But something kept warning him of danger.

When he saw they were going out, he escaped before they could stop him. He heard Sunny calling to him, but stayed hidden. When she went to the door on the big vehicle, he dashed across the sidewalk and launched into a jump for the open back. His bruised ribs complained at the exertion, but he landed successfully.

Even better, no one had noticed him.

They didn’t go far. But even though he couldn’t look over the sides of this large box, his nose told him where they were. He stretched to hook his forepaws over the top of the wall, scrabbled over, and landed in the street.

Why did they keep coming back to the Dead One’s house? Didn’t they know that this was a Bad Place?

*

Sunny released adeep breath as she walked up the driveway to the rear of the Spruance place. She didn’t want to admit it, but the house definitely looked creepier in the dark.

Pulling out a pocket-sized LED flash, she lit her way down into the basement and up into the pantry. She flipped a switch, and the kitchen lights came on. Sunny breathed a sigh of relief. The power company hadn’t pulled the plug yet.

She prowled around the kitchen and then glanced at her watch. Five minutes had passed. Will should be in place by now. How to kill time before Shays turned up?

Sunny repressed a shiver. Maybe “kill” wasn’t a good word to use while waiting for a murderer. She decided that she might as well actually continue looking for the ticket to spend the time and drifted back to the pantry to finish the search that Shadow had interrupted earlier.

All she found was more canned goods, more dust, and an unidentifiable damp patch that was unpleasantly sticky. She washed her hands in the sink, then tackled the cabinets beneath.

No errant lottery ticket had fluttered down to land among the cleaning stuff. Sunny was on her knees, shifting the pots and pans, when the pantry door screeched open.

“Wow, that was quick. Did you get them already?” Sunny began, but she stopped when she saw who was standing there. “Raj? What are you—?”

Sunny stopped again when he brought up his right hand—the one with the pistol in it.

“Recognize it?” he asked, his voice more nasal and a lot less polished. “It’s your boyfriend’s.”

“He’s not—” Sunny broke off her denial, realizing it wouldn’t do much good arguing about her relationship status when a murderous character was holding a gun on her. Then a more important thought crowded out that reaction. “What did you do to him?”

“He just went nighty-night when a lost traveler asked him for help with an address, and then slugged him with a tire iron.” Raj thought that was really funny and gave her a smile; a real, openmouthed smile, one that revealed his distinctive, brown, mismatched teeth.

“Ron Shays,” Sunny said. “Well, you clean up pretty well.”

Shays made an airy gesture with his manicured hand—the one not holding the gun. “I do, even if I say so myself. Headed down to Boston for a haircut and beard trim, not to mention an improved wardrobe. Then I booked myself into an expensive spa—tanning bed, mani-pedi, all kinds of skin goo.” He gave her another snaggletoothed grin. “I came out a new man.”

“With a new name,” Sunny said.

He nodded. “A lot of people, when they got to change their identity, choose something with the same initials. You can almost pick ’em out. Me, I go by sounds. Lately, I was doing business as ‘Rob O’Shea.’ You hear that in a crowded room, and it almost sounds like ‘Ron Shays.’

“And so, in a slurred kind of way, does ‘Raj Richer.’” Shays beamed.

Sunny felt stupid to admit it, but she could see his point.

“A bit more upper-class,” he said, falling back into the vaguely European accent he’d been using in his latest identity. “The only problem was the teeth. No time to get them fixed. But that whole British tight-lipped thing really made it convincing.”

“Yeah.” Sunny grimaced at her gullibility. “What I don’t understand is why you came after me at all.”

Shays shrugged. “A customer from up this way tells me some local gossip about a down-on-her-luck newspaper reporter poking into the old woman’s death. I needed a place to lie low, and I wanted a look at the person who was following the news story. Figured I’d take care of both jobs by going to your office. And as soon as I saw you at work, finding me a place, digging up that genealogy crap, I knew you’d have to be stopped. You’d have kept digging, going after Gordo, until you found out about my business. So I figured I’d keep an eye on you—with an eye to getting rid of you.”

Sunny suddenly recalled how she’d always happened to bump into her new pal Raj right before bad stuff started happening. He identified her car before the bullet gizmo got placed in it. He spotted her on the bike when that SUV started following her. She’d told him about her dad’s truck being towed. And it would have been easy to have his stooges waiting for her when Ollie the Barnacle sent for that file. The only one that didn’t fit the pattern—

“Did you have somebody follow me to O’Dowd’s?”

Shays shook his head. “Eddie went in there for a beer and spotted you with Gordo. He called me, and I set something up quick.” His lips curled away from those ugly teeth again. “Only those nimrods screwed it up—like they did every time. Even when I dropped the pills in your glass, Gordo knocked it over before you drank the wine.” His teeth showed in an angry snarl. “I spent a lot of money acting like a rich guy. Now I gotta get paid.” He was still dressed like Raj Richer, but with his lips twisted and his eyes angry, he looked a hell of a lot more like crazy Ron Shays.

“It’s like there was a curse on us, right from the beginning, when the old biddy woke up and found me looking for her frigging ticket. I had to shut her up, and nothing’s gone right since.”

“Well, you kept me fooled,” Sunny hastily said, trying to calm him down. She glanced at a big, cast-iron frying pan just beside her knee. If she grabbed that, maybe threw it at his face—

Shays must have read something in her expression. “Don’t fool yourself, now. You’re too far away. I could put a bullet in you before you even get off the floor.”

For the first time, he seemed to notice the pots around her.

“You’re still looking?” the drug dealer burst out. “When I heard about you on the news, I figured you must have had some inside information from the old woman or Gordo.” His eyes skidded around the room, and Sunny could almost see the thoughts bouncing back and forth in his meth-fueled brain. Paranoia, low impulse control, and the coldhearted business acumen that had made him a successful criminal …