Spotted Cats (5 page)

He shook his head. ‘The wife’s at a party in Chatham. I better get there before Harry Carter drags her upstairs.’

‘I didn’t know you guys did house calls anymore,’ I said.

Sauerman shrugged. ‘He refuses to leave the house. He needs medical attention. What’s the choice?’

‘Hippocrates lives,’ I said.

He frowned for an instant. Lily took his arm. ‘Come on, then. Tondo and Ngwenya are out there slobbering. Let’s disappoint them.’

While Lily was showing Dr Sauerman out, I took my empty glass into the kitchen, rinsed it out, and set it beside the sink. I remembered Joey’s disturbing message, so I picked up the kitchen phone and pecked out the familiar number in Wellesley. It was the same phone number Gloria and I were given when we bought the place all those lifetimes ago. The line was busy. I listened to the monotonous beep for several seconds before I hung up. Then I wandered out on to the patio. I lit a cigarette and waved ineffectually at the mosquitoes that came swarming. I smoked half of it and flicked it off into the darkness, then retreated back inside.

Lily was in the kitchen loading the coffeepot. ‘Your bed’s all made up,’ she said.

I nodded. ‘How long has that doctor been treating Jeff?’

‘Around two years. He went through about half a dozen before he found one he liked. Dr Sauerman doesn’t mind coming to the house. He kids around with Jeff. Doesn’t mind spending a little time with him. The others were always looking at their watches, reminding everybody how dedicated they were.’

‘But Jeff doesn’t seem to get better.’

Lily shrugged. ‘I guess he’s as well as he’ll ever get.’ She rinsed her hands in the sink and turned to face me. ‘Aren’t all of us, though?’

I smiled. ‘Probably.’ I stretched elaborately and yawned. ‘Well, I’m off to bed.’

She tiptoed up and kissed my cheek. ‘Night, Brady. Sleep well.’

Ten minutes later I was lying there reading a new book on Western fly fishing, waiting for my eyelids to clang shut. I heard something scratching softly at my door.

‘Do not enter,’ I said.

The door pushed open and Lily came in. She was wearing a long nightgown, pale blue and sheer so that her nipples were clearly visible under it.

‘Depart,’ I said.

‘Old poop.’ she said. She sat on the side of my bed.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Please.’

She touched the side of my face. ‘You sure?’

‘Positive.’ I closed my book and put it on the floor.

She bent down and kissed my cheek. ‘Absolutely positive?’ she whispered against the side of my face.

I grasped her shoulders and pushed her gently away. ‘For Christ sake, no, of course I’m not. So please go.’

She smiled and stood up. She put her hands on her hips. ‘Who’s teasing who here?’

‘Whom,’ I said.

‘Right.’

She turned and padded out of the room. She latched the door quietly behind her.

I sighed and turned off the light. My eyelids then did clang shut.

It seemed that I had been sleeping for a long time when my eyes popped open. Through the bedroom window, I could see the sky. It was dark and starry. I lay there, tense and alert. Something had awakened me. I heard nothing.

A night bird, maybe. Or maybe it was the country silence, a kind of booming absence of sound compared to the city noises that normally lulled me to sleep.

Then I heard it. A muffled footfall outside my door, a rustle of fabric. The latch clicked. Slowly the door opened, emitting a faint light from the hallway. A figure appeared silhouetted against it.

Lily. She had come back. I started to speak to her but, for some reason, weakness, probably, or curiosity, I didn’t. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and waited for her to come to me.

The hand on my mouth was hard and callused. A light shone in my eyes. I closed them against it. I felt an elbow on my chest and I could smell harsh breath. I tried to gather my knees to shove at this weight on me, but he was strong and he had me pinned.

I tried to yell, but his hand covered my mouth.

‘Keep quiet or I’ll kill you,’ said a deep muffled voice.

I squinted against the blinding light. There were two of them, I realized. One holding a flashlight, the other pressing his weight on me. They wore something over their heads. Ski masks. I felt something sharp pressed against the side of my neck, and it took no imagination to know it was the point of a knife. I closed my eyes again, waiting.

‘Say a word and this goes in to the hilt.’ He took the knifepoint away from my chin and pressed its sharp edge against my collarbone. ‘I mean it, pal,’ said the man. Then the blade broke the skin, a sudden, hot, tugging pain. I felt blood ooze and begin to dribble down my chest.

He removed his hand from my mouth. He moved the point of the knife into my nostril. ‘Should I rip off his nose?’ the man said to his companion. The other guy laughed. I remembered what had happened to Jack Nicholson in the movie
Chinatown.

‘Just don’t move,’ he said.

‘OK,’ I managed to say. I hated the fear I heard in my voice. I hated the man for creating my fear.

He wrapped a wide strip of tape over my mouth and completely around my head. He taped my wrists to the bedposts. I twisted and tugged at them, but the tape was too strong. Duct tape, I thought vaguely. That’s what I’d use.

‘I think I’ll kill him anyway,’ said the voice conversationally.

‘Why not?’ said the other man, the first time he had spoken.

I felt the knife edge across my Adam’s apple. He moved it a millimetre and again my skin split open. The blade was as sharp as razors I had cut myself with shaving, and the sensation was the same. Except I could picture the glittering blade and how easily it could slice through tendons and muscles and cartilage.

My heart pounded. I felt an almost irrepressible urge to urinate. I swallowed against my gag reflex. I couldn’t seem to get enough air through my nose. With the tape over my mouth, I thought I would suffocate. Never had I felt such fear. I stared wildly into the darkness, but outside the cone of light from the flashlight all I could make out were the intruders’ fuzzy grey shapes.

I waited for that blade to slice across my throat, to sever all those tubes and tendons that connected me to my body, so that my life would spill out on to my pillow. I expected to die, and the thing that made me angriest was that if I died, I’d lose the chance to rip the eyeballs out of the heads of those two men.

When one of them slugged me on the side of my head with something hard and heavy, I saw lights for an instant, brilliant, exploding flashes like a silent fireworks display, reds and yellows and greens bursting and cascading inside my head.

They faded as quickly as they had appeared. Then the darkness became absolute.

I
DON’T KNOW HOW
long I was out. When I opened my eyes, the sky outside the bedroom window looked the same as it had before. The only thing different was the sharp pain in my head and the dried blood that I could feel caked on my chest from the wound on my collarbone.

I twisted my wrists against the tape that bound them to the bedposts. Both of my arms had gone tingly and numb and weak, and I was unable to get them loose. I felt a moment of panic. Suppose Jeff and Lily were similarly immobilized. All three of us might just lie there in our beds until we died. Nobody but Dr Sauerman ever came to the place, and he wouldn’t be back for a week. Besides, he couldn’t get past the dogs.

These kinds of thoughts accelerated my pulse so hard it thudded in my chest and throbbed in the wound on the side of my head, and I gasped against the band of tape over my mouth. I couldn’t seem to get enough breath through my nose.

Calm down, Coyne, I told myself. Relax. Think.

Easier said than done. I realized that I was terribly thirsty. My throat was raspy and constricted, as if blood had dribbled back there and dried. I thought about water. It was impossible not to think about water.

The back of my neck itched. I wanted to rub away the aching tingle in my arms.

I hitched myself backward in my bed until my shoulders were propped against the headboard. That eased some of the tension in my arms, and I felt the blood gush through previously constricted arteries. It was terribly painful.

I twisted and yanked at the restraints around my wrists. The effort only made them tighter. I tried to bite at the tape across my mouth, to no effect. Every muscle in my body hurt. Every organ complained.

OK, then, Don’t think. Squeeze thoughts out of your mind, Coyne. Find an empty black hole in there and focus on it until it becomes larger and larger and blots out the rest. Sylvie Szabo had once told me how she prepared herself for meditation. She had called it a sort of conscious effort towards unconsciousness, an orderly progression towards relaxation. Begin with the body. The mind follows.

Slow, deep breaths. Relax toes, then arches, ankles, and knees. Left leg first. Then the right one. Concentrate on each muscle, one at a time. Let them go.

I remember working up my body as far as my chest before I went back to sleep.

When I awakened, sunlight was streaming through the window and Lily was bent over me, her breasts pendulous under her nightgown. My arms were completely numb. My head ached wickedly. But there I lay, admiring Lily’s breasts. I took that as a good sign.

Her eyes were wide. ‘Brady, what has happened?’

I made noises in my throat.

‘The place has been ransacked. Oh, look at you.’ She picked at the tape on my mouth with her fingernails. ‘It won’t come. Wait. Let me get scissors.’

She left and returned a minute later with a pair of long shears. She sliced through the tape on the back of my head and began to peel it off. I squeezed my eyes shut against the sharp pain of my hair being uprooted. She did it slowly, so that each hair was dragged outgone at a time, each a separate dart of pain. I wanted to tell her just to give the tape a good yank. But, of course, I couldn’t speak, because there was tape over my mouth. If there hadn’t been tape over my mouth, I wouldn’t have needed to speak.

Irrelevantly, it reminded me of the old childhood joke:

‘Hey, you’ve got a banana in your ear.’

‘Sorry. I can’t hear you. I’ve got this banana in my ear.’

As she dragged the tape away from my cheeks and mouth, it seemed as if several layers of skin came off with it. Tears welled up in my eyes.

When it was off, I whooshed out a great breath. ‘Man!’ I said. ‘You should’ve just given it a big quick yank.’ My voice was a croak.

She smiled. ‘Sorry.’

‘Are you all right?’ I said through stiff and swollen lips.

‘Me?’ She nodded. ‘Sure. I’m fine.’

‘What about Jeff?’

‘Still asleep, I suppose.’

‘Go see.’

‘Your hands…’

‘Lily, for Christ sake, go check on Jeff, will you?’

She stared at me for an instant, then nodded.

She was back a minute later. Her eyes were wide. ‘He’s not there. He’s gone.’

‘Get my hands. Quick.’

She worked at the tape with her scissors and soon she had them free. My arms fell beside me, dead senseless weights. I tried to lift them. It was as if they were not attached to my body. I couldn’t even wiggle a finger.

‘My arms won’t move,’ I told her. ‘Help me get my clothes on.’

She tugged my pants up on to my legs. ‘Brady, the jaguars are gone.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That’s what they were after.’ I arched my back so she could yank my pants up around my waist.

‘Jeff…?’ she said.

‘Lily, my sweatshirt.’

She started to jam my limp arms into my sweatshirt.

‘Was anything else missing?’ I said, groaning as she manoeuvred my numb limbs.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, frowning as she worked on my clothing. ‘The furniture’s all shoved around and cabinets and drawers are open. I haven’t really had a chance to check. I noticed the cats were gone. Then I came in to get you.’ She tugged the bottom of my sweatshirt down over my stomach.

Sensation was returning to my arms as blood began to course through the constricted veins and arteries. The pain was exquisite. I whooshed out a deep breath.

‘It must hurt,’ said Lily. She began to massage my shoulders.

‘It hurts like hell. Rubbing me doesn’t help.’

She jerked her hands away. ‘Sorry.’

I pivoted around awkwardly so that I was sitting on the edge of the bed beside her. Lily was still wearing her slinky nightgown. ‘Will you for Christ sake get some clothes on,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to see what Jeff’s up to.’

She nodded and left the room.

I lurched to my feet and staggered into the living-room. The big glass cases where the jaguars used to live sat on the long table beside the fireplace where they always did. But the cats had escaped. The sofa had been shoved aside so that the carpet was wrinkled, and one of the big chairs lay on its back. One drawer from Jeff’s desk had been pulled out and tipped upside down on to the floor. The others hung open. Papers were scattered everywhere.

I yelled for Jeff.

No answer.

I went out on to the patio and yelled again. Jeff did not answer. I called for the dogs. They did not come bounding up to me.

I had started down the path towards the gate when Lily caught up to me. She had donned denim overalls over a pink sleeveless T-shirt. She had wrapped a blue bandana around her hair. Bare feet. Daisy Mae Yokum. Fetching.

Lily was hugging herself. ‘Brady, where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jeff!’ It was a scream, sudden and full of terror, and then she screamed again. Her voice echoed emptily back to us.

She stared wild-eyed at me and began to shake her head violently from side to side. She opened her mouth again. I went quickly to her. I put both of my arms around her and held her tightly. ‘Hey,’ I whispered into her hair. ‘He’s probably out there in the yard somewhere, stomping around, too mad to answer. Pissing and moaning as usual, right?’

She clung to me. Her nails dug into my back. I murmured to her, ‘It’s all right. He’s OK, now. Take it easy.’ I hugged her against me. Gradually I felt her relax.

After a minute she tilted her chin up to look at me. She tried to smile. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m all right now.’