Cat Pay the Devil (2 page)

N
ow, as Joe Grey and Dulcie stood on the scorching
rooftops looking up toward the old ruins, Dulcie frowning and wondering, up there among the fallen stone walls, they could see no creature. If they'd been nearer, an occasional small shadow might have been glimpsed flitting through the tall dry grass and brown weeds. But among the ancient oaks, no deer grazed; the deer had left in search of water. Only the wild little cats slipping stealthily among the rubble, only they knew where to find water, deep in hidden cellars and chambers beneath the fallen walls of the crumbling old estate: ten sentient cats prowling through the ruined mansion, wandering through its moldering interiors that now stood open, like ancient stage sets, the faded wall-paper curling down in long, dirty strips.

Atop a ragged wall, Willow paused in her nervous pacing, her bleached-calico coat blending into the colors of the fallen stone; thinking of Dulcie, she stared down across the dry hills, to the far village. “Something's wrong,” she
told her two companions. “Dulcie's troubled, she is afraid and troubled.”

“Even if she was,” said the long-eared tom skeptically, “what could we do? We could do nothing.”

But the white tom said not a word; he hated the village, he had still not recovered from their entrapment there and their panicked escape.

The other seven of their small wild band had already vanished at Willow's mention of trouble, fleeing among the basement caverns; and soon Cotton and Coyote slipped away, too, leaving Willow alone, shivering and wondering.

 

And down in the village, Dulcie turned away from pacing the hot shingles, restlessly counting the hours until Wilma would be home. Her housemate had been gone only three days, but to Dulcie it could as well have been three months. She'd never felt like this before at Wilma's absences. She thought of going home again, thought maybe Wilma would be there now. Or she could stay home and wait for her in the relative coolness of their stone cottage—but she'd been home just an hour before; the bright rooms were too empty, their cozy cottage echoed with loneliness; she had left again quickly, her skin rippling at the desolation of the empty house and the fear that gnawed at her.

Her increasing panic was wearing her into a near frenzy; she was so wired that Joe, who had lain down again, collapsing in the one small patch of shade on the hot roof, raised his sleek, silver-gray head to stare irritably at Dulcie, the white strip down his nose narrowed in a frown, his slitted yellow eyes flashing his annoyance.

“Will you calm down? What do you expect? The woman's shopping. Give her a little slack.”

“But she might not know that Cage Jones escaped from jail this morning!” Dulcie stared at Joe, her tail lashing. “She might be wandering innocently around the shops, without a clue. Don't you care?”

“She's a trained federal officer, Dulcie. Even if she is retired. You don't give her much credit. She's armed, and she isn't going to let some sleazy escaped con slip up on her.”

“But Jones
hates
her. He has to hate her now, after she testified to send him back to prison. Don't you think he's in a rage!
That's
why he broke out, Joe! To get at Wilma!”

“You can't know that!”

But Dulcie looked away, toward the clock in the courthouse tower; it seemed ages ago that it had struck five thirty. “She promised to be home by early afternoon, and now it's nearly suppertime!”

“The clock struck five thirty ten minutes ago. In my book, that's late afternoon. A woman shopping should punch a time clock? When
we're
hunting rabbits, do you come home right at suppertime? How many nights has Wilma paced the cottage worrying about
you
?”

The kit had awakened and was listening, licking her long, mottled fur. She gave Dulcie a round-eyed gaze. “You know what shopping's like.
We
dream of shopping, of being human shoppers…The silks, the cashmeres…And she's not only buying clothes for herself, she'll buy presents for us, and for Charlie. Wilma always buys presents.” Charlie was Wilma's only niece, the only family Wilma had, besides Dulcie—but Wilma was
Dulcie's only
family! And now, when Joe and Kit refused to understand, Dulcie turned her back on them, lay down, and closed her eyes.

Ever since Dulcie had discovered she could speak and could understand human language, she and Wilma had shared all confidences. Almost all, Dulcie thought. Some
things, like teasing coyotes or leaping long distances from tree to tree, would unnecessarily worry a human. They shared most of their meals and certainly they shared the special treats from Jolly's Deli that Wilma liked to bring home. They shared the blue afghan on the velvet couch, and they shared the big double bed in Wilma's bright bedroom, where they curled up to read, both from the same page, while a cozy fire blazed in the small red woodstove in the corner of the bedroom. Or Wilma would read to her; that was how Dulcie had learned to read, by following the pages as Wilma said the words. She'd had no idea, when she was a kitten, that those strange papers Wilma stared at for hours could offer up such wonderful worlds for a cat to explore. Dulcie's discovery of her latent talents, of her ability to master the human language, had opened gigantic worlds for her—just as that discovery had revealed amazing new worlds to Joe Grey; together the two cats had stepped into realms of history and myth and human endeavor far beyond their own feline world.

The kit, on the other hand, had always known she could speak, from as far back as she could remember, from the time when she was an orphaned kitten tagging, unwanted, behind a band of feral cats; though those wildly roaming cats had seldom spoken to her, keeping their conversations among themselves. Except when they said cruelly, “We don't need that straggly weanling. No one wants a tortoiseshell around. Chase it away, there's hardly enough garbage for the rest of us.”

Dulcie tried to think about the tortoiseshell's precarious kittenhood, to think about anything besides Wilma, but she couldn't.
Wilma will be home in an hour
, she told herself.
Wilma can take care of herself
,
she
is
trained and she
is
armed and she
is
clever.

But maybe she should just go home once more. Each time she'd raced home, she'd tried to reach Wilma, leaping to Wilma's desk, punching the speaker button and then the one-digit number for Wilma's cell phone. Five times, the voice mail came on. Five times, she'd left the same message. “Cage Jones has escaped from jail! Have you turned on the news or seen the paper? He escaped this morning, about the time you left the city. Please, please watch out for him! Please, come home! Now! Please, please be careful!” Wasn't Wilma checking her phone?

And why wasn't she?

If she'd gotten Dulcie's frantic messages, she would have replied.

If she could reply. And terror gripped Dulcie. No one had any idea what Jones would do. The ex-con would be wild with fury not only at Wilma but at her partner, too. Both Mandell Bennett and Wilma had testified before a federal judge to send Jones back, and Dulcie knew enough about that kind of offender, from Wilma herself, to know that Jones would be hot for revenge. She had left three messages on Bennett's tape, too; though his office was in the city and he surely would have heard that Jones had walked out of jail using a false ID. Probably laughing to himself, the bastard.

This would be the second time Wilma and Bennett had helped send Jones up; the first time was ten years ago, just before Wilma had retired as a U.S. Probation Officer. This time, he had come out of federal prison in early June on conditional release. He'd stayed clean for all of a month, then been arrested the first week of July for transporting a stolen car across the state line. The judge, after looking over Jones's files, had, in an unusual move, requested the testimony not only of Mandell, who was his present probation officer, but of Wilma, who had supervised Jones before her retirement.

Dulcie had seen Jones's picture, and she knew from Wilma that the beefy, big-boned convict found the idea of rehabilitation a huge joke. Jones pretended to reform, lied and made a big show, then went his own way, following his own lawless agenda, forcing Mandell Bennett to send him back before the judge.

Bennett had been a green young officer when Wilma first met him; his first assignment was as her partner. Now he covered Molena Point out of the San Francisco office, and when he made a trip to the village, they often had lunch together. Wilma had driven up to the city four days ago, meeting Mandell there, in court, to testify at Jones's revocation hearing. The hearing had lasted two days; Friday afternoon, after the sentencing, Jones had threatened both Wilma and Bennett, and had been forcibly hauled out of the courtroom and locked in the San Francisco city jail to await transport back to the federal prison at Terminal Island.

Wilma had stayed in the city Saturday, seeing friends. Her plan was to leave for home early this Sunday morning, in time for several hours of shopping at the discount mall in Gilroy—and this morning Jones had walked, mistakenly released when he presented the officer on duty with borrowed identification. Had walked out free, and dangerous.

Pacing the hot shingles, lashing her tail, Dulcie created such turmoil that Joe hissed and growled at her. “Will you stop! She's all right! She'll be home before dark. Between the heat and your fussing, you'll work yourself into a frothing cat fit.”

“But she keeps her gun locked in the glove compartment, she won't take it in the stores while she's shopping, and a lot of good that will do her!” Dulcie lashed her tail harder. “Jones is as volatile as a pit bull jabbed with hot pokers. Armed robbery. Seven assaults on guards while he was in prison. Solitary confinement half the time, for fights with
other inmates. And in this heat…” The tabby sighed. “You know how a heat wave affects the unstable ones. Three weeks of scorching weather, every nut in the world is on the prod! The papers are full of it—petty thefts turning violent, family arguments escalating into rage and battery. Add all this heat to Jones's anger, you don't know what will happen!”

Joe looked at her, and stretched in the sun's baking heat, and he licked a white paw. But then he rose and nuzzled her ear and said he was sorry—and he had to admit that in hot weather there was always a jump in the crime rate. Ask any cop, Joe saw the reports and arrest sheets on Chief Harper's desk. Or ask the highway patrol—CHP could tell you about the increase in road rage. And all up and down the coast, the unseasonable heat had escalated silly pranks into acts of hate, prodded simmering resentments into mayhem, exploded friendly arguments and familial conflicts into violence. And now, just two nights ago, a brutal murder in the village.

Both of Chief Max Harper's detectives and the chief himself were working long hours overtime, as were their street patrols, who yearned for additional men and women on the force. The three cats, intent on their own input into police matters, with their own unique ways of discovering evidence, wished they could lead double lives. Or, given that cats have nine lives anyway, they could use several of those lives now, all at once. This late-afternoon's nap on the roof was the first time Joe had been still in days, the first time he had not been lying on the dispatcher's desk listening to radio communications or snooping into apartments or homes where the police did not yet have sufficient evidence to enter. He was idle now, waiting for additional information on the break-in murder to come into the station, just as the
detectives were waiting. The village woman, whom everyone knew and liked, had been shot and killed in her bed at three in the morning. She had been alone, her husband on a business trip.

Perhaps she had awakened, surprised the burglar in her bedroom and maybe screamed or in some way alarmed him, and he'd fired at her in panic; the coroner's report said she had not been molested. The event created unusual fear in the village; suddenly everyone was security conscious. Doors and windows were being kept locked at night despite the killing heat, and all five village locksmiths were working overtime to replace credit card locks and weak window closures that should have been tended to long ago.

After the police left the crime scene, the three cats had slipped into the house through a roof vent and down through the attic trapdoor; they had gone over the scene carefully, searching particularly for scents that the officers couldn't detect. But they had found nothing suspicious, no smell that did not belong to a cop or to the householders, no tiny overlooked item that the police hadn't listed and cataloged. Ordinarily Dulcie was as eager as Joe and the tortoiseshell kit to track a killer, but now she couldn't even keep her mind on the appalling murder. Every fiber of her little cat body resounded with missing Wilma, she
knew
that Wilma was in danger or was soon to be; now, nervously, she rose. “I'm going home again.”

Joe looked at her with strained patience. But then he gave her a whisker kiss and licked her ear. “Shall I come with you?”

“No. I just want to go home and see.” She was panting with the heat but shivering, too, all at odds with herself. “I'll be right back. If—if she isn't there.” And she turned away. But at once, Joe was beside her again.

“Don't, Dulcie. Don't be angry. I know you're worried. I just…” The tomcat's fierce yellow eyes looked naked for a moment. “I just don't know what to do about it.” He looked deeply at her. “I could call Clyde, we could go to Gilroy to look for her. But we could miss her on the highway. We could call the station, tell the chief she's not home yet, but it's—”

“I
know
it's too soon,” Dulcie said. “And I know that every cop is looking for Jones—CHP, the county sheriffs.” California Highway Patrol always provided excellent backup. “I
know
there's a warrant out for him. Maybe—maybe she's pulling into the drive right this minute. Or…” She stared hopefully at Joe. “Or standing in the garden, calling me!” For a moment, she leaned into him. Then she took off across the rooftops, running flat out—and praying hard.