Cat Shining Bright

She reached in the pocket where she’d had the key. Joe saw her phone light up, saw her press a single button. When Randall realized she was calling 911 he tried to get up, tried to grab the phone. “I said a doctor, not the cops!” He fell back clutching his belly, letting out an animal-like cry. She stood looking down at him, dropped the phone in her pocket, and removed the wrapped revolver. Cradling it, she looked steadily at Randall, her expression ice-cold.

“Where’s the book, Randall?”

“Cops have it,” he groaned.

“Well, that was smart. That’s a one-of-a-kind edition. When a collector sees what’s in it, it’s worth more than a few hundred thousand. That information, if it’s true . . .”

From a few blocks away, a medics’ siren screamed—and from the street below they heard a car take off, moving fast. Lena, ducking under the rafters, raced to the little window to peer out.

“Gone! The damned bastard took off on me!” Spinning around she paused again over Randall, the revolver pointed directly at him. “You sure the cops have the book?”

“They have the whole damn car. Book was . . . right there in the back.” Again a groan, and he pulled up his legs to ease his belly. Outside, the sirens screamed to a halt. Joe watched Lena unwrap the revolver not touching the metal, keeping only the grip wrapped. She stood a moment, the gun pointed at him, a hungry look on her face.

At last she knelt, moved his hands from his belly, rolled him on his side making him cry out with pain, and slipped the gun in his pocket. She eased the handkerchief out and stuffed it in her own pocket, and she fled down the ladder into the shadowed closet. Left the ladder down for the cops to see, and ran out the back door. Joe could hear her outside crashing through the bushes. Would she vanish, to lose herself in the village? Or did she think Rick would wait for her, farther up the block? Fat chance, the tomcat thought.

But he was wrong. As the cop cars and medics pulled in, Joe was out the back door behind Lena, chasing her through the neighbors’ yards to the next street where he heard a horn toot softly.

There stood the blue Ford, its passenger door open. Lena swung in, they took off fast onto a narrow side street to disappear among the crowded cottages. She hadn’t, in her rage, shot Randall as Joe had guessed she would. Maybe she thought, whatever his pain was, it would do him in. And if he didn’t die, she had left the gun to entrap him, certain proof he’d shot Barbara and Langston.

Was part of her hatred, her disgust for Randall, a mirror reflection of twenty years gone, when her first husband shot her own lover? Frowning over her mixed signals of hatred and maybe regret, Joe sped up a pine to the roofs trying to see which way they were headed, but they were already long gone. Spinning around he raced for home, for a phone, to get the cops on the Ford’s tail. Both passengers were wanted: Lena for helping highjack cars, Rick with at least one warrant out on him, and both of them for helping a killer escape. Fleeing across to his own line of roofs, Joe looked back once to see Max Harper and Detective Garza arrive in a squad car, parking beside the medical van. He didn’t wait to see the medics ease Randall down the attic steps on a stretcher, to see Dallas, wearing gloves, frisk Randall, bag the revolver and hand it to Max—but he could imagine the scene. Racing across the roofs for home, Joe didn’t see Clyde’s truck coming down the street behind him.

24

Clyde, heading home to check on the quarantined animals—not that they would get into trouble, he thought wryly—found patrol cars and the medics’ van blocking the street at Barbara Conley’s corner house. Turning, he went around the block and swung onto his own street again—as a flash of movement across the roofs made him slow, a streak of gray racing for home, white paws flashing, and a hot anger struck Clyde. This was Joe’s idea of quarantine? Not only his tower but a whole block of rooftops and how much farther? What happened to the tomcat’s solemn promise? Whatever was going on at Barbara’s house, that’s where he’d been. Damn cat heard a siren, he took off across the village like a fire horse to a three-alarm blaze. Had he been inside that house, as well, watching, hiding from the cops? What was going on?