Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

When I got out of the Bronco at the diner, I dropped my car keys into my shoulder bag and heard them clink on metal. A prim little voice in my aching head said, Dixie, you still have that man’s door keys. In no mood for a lecture from my conscience, I said the F-word to the prim little voice and trudged into the diner.

Inside, the windows were sprayed with fake snow, and somebody had draped a string of Christmas lights around a miniature tree at the cashier’s stand. They had also put little pots of fake poinsettias on each table, which made me remember we were a day closer to Christmas.

Bleh!

I’m such a regular at the diner that Tanisha, the cook, starts making two eggs over easy with extra-crisp home fries and a biscuit when she sees me come in the door. Today she did a double-take and rolled her eyes when she saw me with Paco. He has that effect on women. Makes them go all swoony.

Judy, the waitress who’s been at the diner for as long as I’ve been going there, grabbed two mugs and trotted to my usual booth with her coffeepot at the ready. When Paco turned to slide into the seat across from me, she surreptitiously eyed his butt, which is understandable, since Paco may have the best butt in the Western Hemisphere. Paco ordered a Denver omelet, fries, bacon, and biscuits. Judy wrote it down as if he were Moses handing down holy commandments and swished off, fanning her bosom with her order pad.

From the booth behind us, a woman’s nasal voice floated over the partition. “Ed don’t understand me one bit,” she said. “We can go to a movie, and I swear to God when we come home you’d think we’d gone to two different shows. We just don’t see things the same way. He’s not my soul mate.”

A second woman’s voice said, “Honey, a soul mate is just a man you haven’t heard fart yet.”

There was laughter, and three women stood up to leave. One of them said, “You want a soul mate, get a dog.”

They walked out grinning at their own cleverness, and Paco and I exchanged a pained smile. Love may not make the world go around, but it certainly occupies a lot of people’s thoughts—both the best and the worst of it.

He said, “What’s up with the iguana thing?”

I sighed, weary with telling it. “Some guy called me and asked me to go feed an iguana named Ziggy. When I got there, it turned out the owner of the iguana, a man named Kurtz, hadn’t called me and didn’t know who had. He also didn’t know somebody had put Ziggy in a cold wine room, which is bad for iguanas. I got him out and warmed him up and fed him. But before that, somebody had shot Kurtz’s security guard. And before that, a woman with a miniature bulldog named Ziggy had stopped me, and later I saw her photo on Kurtz’s nightstand. Then his nurse disappeared. Nobody knows where she went, and she had wiped away all her prints. Wore latex gloves while I was there. Last night on the way home, I saw the woman’s car in the driveway—the woman with the bulldog—and went to check on it. Somebody hit the back of my head and gave me a concussion, and while I was out a fire was started. Behind the house, not in the house itself. Guidry thinks it was a chemical fire of some kind. The woman was gone. Guidry checked the car’s tags, and it was stolen in Virginia. I guess that’s all, except I got a message to give to Kurtz. I’m supposed to tell him that Ziggy is no longer an option and to act now.”

Paco said, “The iguana and the dog are both named Ziggy?”

“That’s what I mean! How strange is that? Oh, and I forgot that Kurtz has blue skin, like an all-over bruise. Has something seriously wrong, and now he doesn’t have a nurse to take care of him.”

Judy came with our orders lined up on both arms, a talent so impressive to me that it seems second only to discovering DNA. She got everything settled without dropping anything, which also seems amazing to me. I love watching people do their work well. While she hustled away to get her coffeepot to give us refills, I salted everything in sight and inhaled the wonderful fried fat odor of Paco’s bacon. It was cooked just right, stiff and brittle, with no icky white spots.

Paco said, “Want some of my bacon?”

“I never eat bacon.”

“Yeah, like I never drink beer.”

He slid half his bacon onto my plate just as Judy came back with the coffee.

She said, “She conned you into giving her bacon, didn’t she? She does that with everybody. Girl gets more bacon off other people’s plates than a sneaky dog.”

She sashayed away with her pot while I shamelessly nibbled at Paco’s bacon.

Paco said, “Why’s the guy blue?”

“I don’t know. He’s really sick, though. Lots of pain.”

“Silver nitrate poisoning causes your skin to turn blue, but I don’t think it causes pain or serious illness.”

“His skin is covered with dimples that jerk and quiver.”

“Jesus, poor guy. Where’d he come from? What kind of work did he do before he came here?”

“I just went there to feed his iguana. I don’t know anything else.”

“The man who called you, how’d he sound?”

“Muffled, like he was talking through cotton. He had an Irish accent.”

Paco grimaced. “Oldest trick in the book, Dixie. Use a foreign accent, and that’s all anybody remembers. You sure it was a man?”

I hadn’t even considered that the speaker wasn’t really a man or really Irish, but of course an undercover agent like Paco would think of that first thing.

Uncertainly, I said, “Sounded like a man to me.”

Paco chewed for a moment while his dark eyes sparked with speculation.

He said, “Any idea why they chose you to call?”

“My guess is that they saw me on the news when … you know.”

“That still bothering you?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes I feel like killing somebody caused me to slip over the line that separates good and evil. You ever feel like that?”

“I don’t know about good and evil, Dixie. Those are subjective terms. But if you mean do I feel a kinship with the criminals I catch, sure. Criminals and cops are the same kind of people, we’re just on different sides.”

“But you always know you’re on the good side.”

“Depends on how you look at it. When I bust a guy for selling drugs, and selling drugs is the only way he can feed his family, which one of us is good and which one evil?”

“He could find another job.”

“No, you could find another job, and I could find another job, but maybe he can’t, or maybe he doesn’t know he can. I don’t make those judgments. Criminals choose their lifestyle, and I choose mine. If I have to take a criminal out when I’m doing my job, that’s just how it is. You did what you had to do. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t evil. Given the choice the guy had made, it was inevitable. It doesn’t have to be a defining point in your life unless you make it one.”

I said, “Bottom line, killing is wrong, no matter what.”

Paco’s dark eyes were calm. “There’s a story in the Mahabharata about a civil war between cousins. One of the warriors went to an avatar named Krishna, who by the way was dark indigo blue, and said he couldn’t kill his own relatives. Krishna told him that if he thought he actually killed anybody or that anybody actually died, he just didn’t understand life. In essence, he said that life is eternal and that a warrior’s job was to go to war and kill other warriors, and to just get on with it.”

I spread jelly on my biscuit and wondered what the odds were that any other woman in the world was sitting in a diner eating bacon with a drop-dead gorgeous undercover cop who knew the Mahabharata, something I didn’t even know how to pronounce.