Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Cradle

I thought, You’re exactly right. I need to do that. I need to gaze off into the distance with an empty head. I need to wear a bikini. I need to drink some margaritas in the middle of the day. I need a damn break. I need to get away.

And I knew exactly who I wanted to get away with.

23

I looked at my watch. It said exactly 4:38, which meant it was exactly a minute past 4:30. I like to be on time, so I trick myself. I set all my clocks seven minutes fast. That way if I’m running late or hit traffic, I always have a few minutes to spare. I knew Ethan usually left his office around 4:30 every afternoon and walked over to the café for a cup of coffee. I decided I’d drive by and see if I could catch him. It was silly, but I knew it would cheer me up. My conversation with Mrs. Harwick had put me in a lousy mood.

The coffee shop is right on the corner at the light. As I pulled up to the curb, Ethan was just coming out the door with a coffee and a bagel. I honked the horn and rolled down the passenger window. He was deep in thought, probably mulling over the details of a case he was working on, but when he saw me his face lit up and he came bounding over and stuck his head in the window. If he’d had a tail he would have wagged it.

“Hey! Fancy meeting you here!”

“Well, not really. I’m sort of stalking you. I know you usually get coffee around now, so—”

“Hold on. You drove over here just so you’d run into me?”

I shrugged. “Well, I was sort of in the neighborhood, but basically yes.”

“Wow. That is the best thing that’s happened to me all day.”

I could literally feel my heart racing. “Me, too.”

“So, when am I seeing you again? I am seeing you again, right?”

I said, “Yes. In fact I have a fantasy that we’re sharing a margarita on some faraway island in the middle of the day.”

“I have some fantasies, too, but we can go over those later.”

Huh.

He looked at his watch. “I wish I’d known you were going to be stalking me. I would have made some excuse not to go back to the office.”

“No, it’s okay. I need to get home anyway.”

“Maybe I could stop by later?”

“Definitely.”

He smiled. “Good. I’ll call you. I had a great time last night. I even enjoyed all the crazy drama.”

“There won’t be any more craziness, I promise.”

His eyebrows went up, and I braced myself for whatever sarcastic yet witty remark he was about to make. Instead he said, “Damn, look at this beautiful automobile.”

He tipped his chin at a car that had just rolled up next to us and was waiting for the light to turn green, but I didn’t look over. I had no interest in some silly car. I was more interested in how excited Ethan was. He was beaming like a dog in a butcher shop.

“That’s a Fiero Miyata. They only make about a hundred of them a year, and you need major connections just to get on the waiting list. That little baby probably costs a cool hundred thousand at least.”

I’ll never understand what it is with boys and their cars. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a nice car as much as the next person, but as far as I’m concerned, cars are just like shoes—they help you get from one place to another. I wouldn’t waste a hundred thousand dollars on a fancy designer car any more than I’d waste it on a pair of fancy designer shoes. Except that I have been known to have a weakness for shoes. So I might fantasize about buying a hundred-thousand-dollar pair of shoes, if they even make such a thing, but I’d never actually do it. I mean, they’d have to be pretty nice shoes.

Ethan saw the grin on my face as I was watching him. “What?”

I said, “I’m just wondering if I’ll ever see that gleam in your eye when you’re looking at me.”

He laughed. “Oh, you’re way hotter than that car. But still … you have to admit. That is one nice car.”

With a cheesy wink, he headed off down the sidewalk. I watched him go and thought to myself, and that is one cute butt.

As the light changed to green, I turned to look and my smile instantly vanished. I couldn’t see who was driving, but I recognized the car immediately. It was the same black sports car that August was driving the first time I met him outside his parents’ house. In and of itself, that was no big deal. We live on a tiny island, so people’s paths are bound to cross every once in a while, and I run into people I know all the time. What made my jaw drop open and my eyebrows jump was that I thought I recognized the person that was sitting in the passenger seat.

The windows were rolled up and slightly tinted, so I couldn’t see the face clearly. I waited until the car had gone through the light, and then I pulled out onto the road a few cars back. I followed it all the way up Higel Avenue and through Bay Island to the bridge that crosses over Roberts Bay onto the mainland. At Tamiami Trail, the car turned north and headed out of town. I kept a safe distance just in case they saw me and got suspicious. We drove on for about five miles, and then finally made a right onto University.

I realized we were headed for the Sarasota International Airport, but then the car passed by the main entrance without even slowing. About a mile farther, it made a quick turn down a long gravel road that led into what looked like an old, abandoned factory. There were several hulking cinder-block structures with vaulted roofs clad in corrugated iron, clustered around a sprawling expanse of white-hot concrete baking in the late-afternoon sun. At the far end was a row of small, single-engine airplanes. I realized the buildings must have been airplane hangars. Adjacent to the concrete yard was an open field choked with tall grasses and weeds. I couldn’t see it from the street, but I knew there would be a long single-lane runway cut through its center.

There was no way I could have followed the car in without drawing attention to myself, so I sped on to the next light and made a U-turn. Before I got to the lane where they had turned, I pulled in behind a long, low warehouse with rusted corrugated roofing and slid to a stop, sending a cloud of dust into the air. I caught a glimpse of myself in the window as I shut the door. I knew what I was doing was completely foolish, but I needed to know if I was right about who was sitting in the passenger seat of that car.

I hustled across the graveled surface to the far end of the warehouse and carefully peeked around the corner. A field of grassy weeds lay between me and the cluster of airplane hangars. I could see the black sports car parked in the center of the concrete courtyard, and there were a couple of men in black shorts and dark blue polo shirts making their way toward the car. The driver’s door opened, and a tall, shaggy-haired man wearing a black suit stood up, but it was too far to make out his face through the waves of heat coming up from the concrete. I needed to get closer.

There was a chain-link fence smothered in vines alongside the warehouse, creating a narrow strip of dried-out brush about two feet wide.

I whispered to myself, “You are one hundred percent out of your mind.”

I squeezed through the gap between the chain-link fence and the warehouse and inched my way closer, ducking behind the weeds and dodging broken bottles and rotting trash banked up against the side of the building. At the end of the fence, I came to what looked like an old electrical generator, surrounded by a low concrete wall. I ducked down behind the wall and peered over the edge.

The man standing by the car was indeed August. He was talking to one of the traffic control men while one of the planes positioned itself at the head of the runway. It must have been a private charter plane. Another car had arrived now, a gray Mercedes sedan, and a conservatively dressed middle-aged couple was waiting with small rolling suitcases. They were probably wealthy travelers off to a private island resort somewhere.