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“Dammit!” Marco cried, and threw his ball cap on the floor for good measure, then stomped on it. Contrary to Gordo, he was thin and rangy, but that didn’t mean he was in better shape. And he didn’t feel like going off on a wild cat chase.

He searched around for Boomer, and found him whimpering behind a nearby bush, a bloody scratch mark across his nose.“Too many for you to handle, huh, buddy?” he said, patting the dog affectionately. Boomer loved chasing cats, but when faced with a hundred of the damn creatures, he’d clearly had to admit defeat.

Gordo was already on the phone.“Got some bad news for you, sir,” he said. “Yeah, the cats escaped. Yeah, all of them.” He held the phone away from his ear while a stream of profanities burst from the phone, then held it closer to his ear again. “So what do you want us to do now, sir?”

The response was short and powerful, and Gordo put down his phone.

“Well? What did he say?”

“We have to catch them.”

“But we just went and done that!”

“I know. So now we should go and do it again.”

“No way!” said Marco, and stomped on his ball cap some more. Only this time a piece of glass had found itself underfoot, and it sneakily sliced into his big toe. And as he was dancing on one leg, he suddenly noticed a woman running in the direction of the house.

It was that nosy reporter. The one who wrote for theHampton Cove Gazette. And when he looked beyond her, he saw she wasn’t alone. That damn cop was with her.

Chapter 29

The moment Odelia saw a swarm of cats spread out across the road, she halted in her tracks. They’d just walked out of the August house and she’d glanced at the neighboring house, wondering why her intuition suddenly told her to take a closer look, when she suddenly recognized Max, Dooley, Harriet and Brutus!

“It’s them!” she yelled. “Chase, Gran! It’s the cats!”

And then she was running along the road. The moment she reached her darlings, they jumped into her arms, and buried their faces into her neck.

“Finally,” she said. “Finally I found you.”

“Or we found you!” Dooley said, and he was right, of course.

Gran had also run up, and Chase, and they all stared at the old house.

“We were held in there,” said Max. “In an underground room.”

“And Uncle Alec is also in there,” Dooley added.

“He’s being held in a cage,” Max said.

Odelia cut a quick glance to Chase, and he nodded, a grim set to his face. He took out his phone and called it in. And as he was talking to Dolores, giving her instructions, a white van suddenly emerged from the back of the house, and burst through the rickety old fence, then shot out onto the road. It quickly righted itself, then sped right past them. As it did, Odelia saw two men staring back at her: a bearded one, and a scraggly one.

“That’s them!” said Max. “That’s the men that abducted us!”

“I’m on it,” said Chase, and hurried back to his pickup. He wasted no time firing up the engine and then he was roaring away, in hot pursuit of the suspicious van.

“Let’s take a look inside the house,” said Odelia. And along with Gran, and her cats, she set foot for the dilapidated old structure.

Max and Dooley led the way, and as they stepped over a bunch of rubble and decaying carpet, then down some slippery stone steps into the basement, it didn’t take them long to find the cell where Uncle Alec was locked up, along with two more men.

“Oh, thank God,” said Alec. “Once I saw Max and Dooley zipping past, I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before you got here.”

“Where are the keys?” asked Odelia.

“No idea. Probably upstairs somewhere. Where’s the guard? The bearded giant?”

“Fled,” said Odelia curtly. “Chase is chasing him.”

“Oh, and he’ll get him,” said Alec. “Chase always gets his guy.”

“And so do we,” said Odelia, as she gave her uncle’s hand a squeeze through the bars of his cell.

“Really, Alec?” said Gran. “Couldn’t you keep out of trouble just this once?”

“Nice to see you, too, ma,” said Alec.

“Next time you decide to get yourself kidnapped you should think first.”

“Hey, it’s not as I chose to get nabbed, ma.”

“I’m old, Alec, and my ticker ain’t what it used to be. Did you stop to think what all this stress would do to your poor old mother? Huh?”

“I’m sorry, ma,” said Alec dutifully. “I’m sorry for allowing myself to get snatched.”

“Now go and get me those keys,” Gran told Odelia. “So I can give my son a hug, for Christ’s sakes.”

“Please get my keys, too!” a young man shouted. He had a big zit on the tip of his nose.

“And mine, please, miss!” yelled a bespectacled man in a rumpled brown suit and Burlington socks.

Odelia scaled those stairs as quick as she could, and searched around upstairs. She soon found herself in an old kitchen, the only place that seemed to display recent signs of life, and saw a bunch of rusty old keys lying on the table, next to an ashtray, and a pile of car magazines. She grabbed the keys from the table and hurried back down the stairs, then fumbled with them until she found the right one, and was able to spring her uncle from his prison.