Блейз Клемент - Even Cat Sitters Get The Blues

I said, “Gilda, the police are looking for you because they think you may have killed Ramón. Once they know you didn’t, they’ll have no interest in you. But you’re in Florida where the death penalty is alive and well, so if you kill either Ken Kurtz or me, you’re a dead woman.”

I didn’t think it necessary to point out that Guidry might arrest her for conspiring to kill Kurtz.

Still looking unfazed by her big gun, Kurtz said, “Gilda, do you really believe you can simply pack up the vaccine and walk away from here? Dixie’s telling the truth about the FBI. The minute you go out the door with the vaccine, they’ll take it.”

He sounded so certain that for a moment I believed him. Maybe the FBI really was out there somewhere in the darkness watching us, maybe they were picking up our conversation on remote speakers. If they were, Ken Kurtz would surely be arrested for industrial espionage and for murder.

If Gilda believed him, it only fueled her anger. “Yes, they will take vaccine and let you go free! They will say I killed Ramón, that I am evil one. They will kill me and make you a hero.”

Something uncoiled in my chest, and as I looked at that raving woman with the oversized gun and the outrageous imagination, I knew she might speak the truth. I also knew that I was the expendable one, the fly in the ointment that nobody would miss. It wouldn’t be hard to frame Gilda as Ramón’s killer. And if they killed me, they could easily say Kurtz had shot me after I’d broken into his house.

The galling thing was that a lot of people, including Guidry, wouldn’t have trouble believing I had broken into Kurtz’s house. The fact that I actually had broken in didn’t make it any easier to like the idea of people thinking I had.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Kurtz and Gilda stood facing me with the wine room behind them. While my brain spun out the possible scenario that Gilda had just described, I became aware of a green movement behind them. Through the wine room’s open door, Ziggy had got enough warm air to get his brain spinning too. He was on the move with his tongue flicking forward to smell the air, running silently on the pads of his feet toward the leaping flames Kurtz had restarted in the fireplace. I braced myself. If Ziggy did what I thought he would do, he might be my salvation.

When he was within a foot or two of Gilda and Kurtz, Ziggy’s tongue smelled the fire.

His reptilian brain hollered, Heat is to the right!

He made a quick turn toward the fire, sensed danger to his side, and whipped his tail sharply around Gilda’s legs.

Gilda screamed and threw up her gun hand. In a flash, I leaped to grab it. She struggled, but Gilda wasn’t exactly an Amazon and surprise had caused her to lose balance. With her gun in one hand, I only had to shove her hard with the other to cause her to fall backward. She fell like a tree, stiff-legged and stiff-armed, arching her back over Ziggy, whose tail was still wildly lashing. She landed in the perfect location for his whipping tail to slash whatever part of her body was closest to him. Since she lost her head and scrambled around on all fours, that meant pretty much all of her.

Fighting back the nauseating dizziness of knowing I might kill somebody again, I spread my legs in my damned high heels and stiffened my arms, holding the gun pointed at her with both hands. She was too busy trying to get away from Ziggy to notice.

With his dewlap billowed to its fullest extent and his forelegs stiffened to raise his chest, Ziggy stretched himself in front of the warm fire and bobbed his head. His color was still dull, but he looked quite pleased with himself.

A figure moved across the glass so rapidly I wasn’t sure I had seen it, but it set off a contest in my head between euphoric hope—that I’d accidentally been telling the truth and FBI agents were ready to come in and arrest Kurtz—and paranoid fear—that they’d arrest Gilda, kill me, and let Kurtz go free.

The paranoia was too awful, so I went with hope.

To distract Kurtz, I said, “I should have known you weren’t that sick. A man that bad off couldn’t drink wine.”

Scientist to the end, he said, “Not so. Red wine has antiviral properties.”

Behind him, the front door eased open half an inch.

I looked around at Gilda to see if she had noticed, but she was examining the ugly slash marks on her arms and hands. The ones under her pants legs weren’t visible, but I knew from experience that an iguana’s whip burns on your legs hurt like nobody’s business.

The door opened wider, and a tall man slipped silently into the room. He wore black jeans and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, so it took me a moment to recognize the fanatic who’d called me a harlot. He was carrying a Colt .357 Magnum, a gun even larger than Gilda’s. In his large hand it didn’t look out of place.

He winked at me and I almost sagged with relief. I had been right about him; he was FBI.

He said, “I’ll take over now.”

Shocked, Kurtz spun around to look at him.

I lowered Gilda’s gun and handed it the man.

Feeling proud but trying for humble self-effacement, I said, “I took this from Gilda.”

Then, to show I was too smart to be taken in by a burlap robe and a fake fanatic act, I said, “That was a great disguise you used. But I knew you were an agent.”

I felt like a kid with a gold star. I couldn’t wait to tell Guidry how I’d known all along who the good guys were. Me, Dixie Hemingway, was in cahoots with an FBI agent who was there to arrest Ken Kurtz for corporate espionage.

Kurtz said, “Hello, Walt.”

I heard a tiny buzz in the back of my skull, as if a gnat had slipped through my bones and got trapped in there.

The monk-turned-agent tipped his chin toward Ziggy.

“You know, Ken, we could have shared him. But no, you had to hog all the credit like some publicity-hungry diva.”

The buzzing in my skull grew louder. I looked at the FBI agent’s hands and saw crusted claw marks and welts.

Kurtz said, “I’m sorry I didn’t kill you last night.”

I said, “You’re the one who tried to steal Ziggy.”

The man gave me a blank look, and Kurtz laughed. For a man with a gun pointed at his head, he was remarkably cheerful.

“She calls the iguana Ziggy,” he said. “Sort of an inside joke.”

To me, he said, “Dixie, meet Walter Cahill, chief zoobiologist for the Clarex Foundation. I imagine he’s the one who knocked you out.”

The phony monk had the gall to grin at me. “Sorry, nothing personal.”

As if she’d just noticed that our number had grown, Gilda stood up and waved her arms like a traffic cop.

“Monsters! You are monsters, both of you!”

They turned toward her with the lazy insolence of men who can’t be bothered by criticism. Cahill held a gun in each hand the way movie cowboys do, his .357 pointed toward Kurtz, and Gilda’s .44 Magnum carelessly at his side.

Behind them, Jessica Ballantyne slipped through the open door.

If it hadn’t been for the Glock .45 in her hands, she could have been the latest arrival at a happening midnight party. Once again, I vacillated between relief and caution. She was genuine FBI, but she was also in love with the man she had been sent to arrest.

Gilda shouted, “You say you make world better, but is not true!”

Absorbed in her fury, Gilda didn’t notice Jessica. Absorbed in themselves, the men were smirking while they watched Gilda’s performance.

Jessica had adopted the gun stance that every trained law-enforcement officer uses. Feet spread, knees slightly bent, shoulders back, chin parallel to the floor, both arms extended, the gun in both hands, left thumb over right thumb, trigger finger stretched toward the barrel. She might be a lovesick mess, but the woman knew how to handle a gun.