Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

I said, “Damn, I should have brought the Bronco.”

Okay, no big deal. I’d just have to take Leo back to the Bronco and drive to Laura’s driveway, then come in and lug out the bags of cat food and the bowls. Except I’d have to let Pete know what I was doing so he wouldn’t get anxious when I left in the Bronco. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes it’s a real pain in the butt to play well with others.

With a plan in place, I went to the pull-out cabinet where I’d seen the bags of cat food. Sure enough, there they were, each weighing twenty pounds. There were also several jars of vitamins, along with a bunch of twenty-ounce bags of sun-dried bonita treats. Laura had definitely believed in having plenty of stuff on hand, which was good. Cats love those fish flakes, and Pete would be glad to have them. They made a rather large heap when I piled them on the bar next to the carrier. They were also too slippery to carry by hand, so I went looking for a bag to put them in.

While I was exploring the cupboards in the utility room, Leo popped open the top of the carrier, leaped to the floor, and streaked out of sight.

Under my breath, I said, “Shit.”

I had failed to take into consideration that Havana Browns are strong muscular cats, not to mention smart. Leo had used his brain and his muscles to open the carrier, which made him a lot smarter than me. Furthermore, every cat has its favorite hiding place, and Leo was bound to have his. Now, lucky me, I’d have to coax a stressed cat out of its hiding place.

I found a stash of plastic grocery bags and filled one with the packets of bonita flakes. Leo’s food and water bowls went in another bag. I didn’t intend to take Leo’s litter box. I had plenty of temporary boxes in the Bronco and Pete could use some of them until he got a permanent one. All I had to do was get the bags of dry food out and persuade Leo to play nice with me.

Back at the pull-out cabinet, I leaned down and lifted one of the bags. That sucker felt like a lot more than twenty pounds, but I was so tired a five-pound weight would have seemed heavy. I carried it to the bar and plopped it beside the carrier. I looked again at the description of the contents printed on the bag. Chicken and lamb nuggets, it said. Twenty pounds, it said, but I could have sworn it was a lot heavier. It was also oddly rigid. Dry cat food is usually packed a bit loosely to allow for the contents to slosh around and not break through the bag. When you set it on the floor, it sits with a certain relaxed slump, like a woman sits when she doesn’t care if she bulges in spots.

I started to get the other bag from the cabinet, then turned back to check the first bag again. The top inch had been neatly folded over and stapled. That seemed peculiar, because it seemed to me that most bags of cat food were glued at the top. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe some were glued and some were stapled, and what difference did it make? It didn’t make an iota of difference to a cat, and it shouldn’t make any difference to me.

I got the other twenty-pound bag, and as I lifted it out I had an image of Laura Halston lifting her model’s bag after she’d stuffed it with money from Martin Freuland’s bank vault. The image was so clear and so sudden that I went to my knees with the shock of comprehension. With the bag between my knees, I examined the stapled top. The staples had been driven in with careful exactness, but they didn’t appear to have been done by a machine. Some human had laid those staples in that folded-over top, and the human had probably been Laura Halston.

I stood up and got a table knife from a drawer, then knelt on the floor and gently used the knife to pry the staples out. Carefully unfolding the bag’s top, I peered inside. It took a moment to recognize what I was seeing, because I’d never seen anything like it. Two rows of brown paper bands, each band imprinted with $10,000 , each wrapped around a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Six bands in all, holding sixty thousand dollars, and that was just the top layer. I sat down on the floor and pulled out one of the stacks. It was surprisingly thin, not even an inch thick. The bag itself was about twenty inches tall. I did some fast arithmetic and came up with around a million dollars in the bag. And there were two bags, which meant Laura had been hiding around two million dollars in plain sight in her kitchen.

I said, “Son of a gun.”

As if in response, a cracking sound came from the living room. My first thought was that Leo had become so agitated at the strangeness of his home that he’d knocked something over. My second thought was that somebody had knocked out a glass panel in the front door so they could unlock it. My third thought was that I had left my .38 in the Bronco.

With the bag of money on the floor between my outstretched legs, I began scrambling to get upright. I was on one knee, with one foot on the floor, when the bag tipped over and spilled bundles of hundred-dollar bills onto the floor. Dimly aware of the puddle of money on the kitchen tile, I was frantically sorting through my options, which were more or less limited to running to the back door and hoping to escape through the garage, or climbing into one of the kitchen cabinets.

Martin Freuland came around the living room’s L and stood on the other side of the bar separating the dining area from the kitchen. He held a .9mm Glock in his hand, and his face registered a curious shock when he saw me.

He said, “Oh. It’s you.”

There were so many unspoken assumptions in those few words that I couldn’t think of a response. Obviously, he had known somebody was in the house, and obviously he had expected it to be somebody else.

His gaze swung to the money on the floor, and he nodded. “I knew it was here.”

Still on one knee, I said, “Was it really worth killing for?”

His smile was like a barracuda’s. “It will be, yes.”

That was when I realized he meant killing me would be worth it.

I said, “I was talking about killing Laura. You said you didn’t, but you did.”

He moved the Glock back and forth like a head shaking. “You’re very naïve about the way the real world works. People like me don’t kill people like Laura. We pay other people to do it for us.”

“Vaught?”

He frowned and spoke louder. “I said we pay other people to do it for us.”

Help me Rhonda, we were doing a “Who’s on First?” routine.

I said, “A man named Frederick Vaught has confessed to killing Laura. Is that who you paid?”

He actually laughed, an easy relaxed chuckle. “I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”

I wasn’t as naïve as Freuland thought. I knew about paid killers, knew how easy it is for somebody in Freuland’s position to hire somebody whose morality is measured in dollars. But professional killers simply do their job and leave. They lay a bullet in a precise location, or they surprise with a wire garrote around the neck or a swiftly driven blade between the ribs. They don’t hang around and slash the dead victim’s face in mad fury. Only killers with personal vendettas to settle do that. If Freuland hadn’t killed Laura himself, he had paid somebody with personal history with her to do it.

A wave of dizziness swept over me as I realized how a thing can happen in one place, and the entire universe shifts to make space for the fact of it. A man accepts two million dollars from drug dealers who’ve made millions more from selling hopelessness to other men, and hundreds of miles away a gap in time appears, a cosmic breath is held until a woman is finally stabbed to death in her shower, a death that no longer has anything to do with the two million dollars, but is about a child knowing her father is in her sister’s bedroom doing something shameful, and she is stunted, maimed, soul-stained with jealousy because it means her father loves her sister best.