A Cat Was Involved (2 page)

They parked beside the yellow car. The passenger—slightly smaller than the driver, and clothed only in jeans and dirty work boots—jumped out. He took a jimmy from his pocket—I was plenty familiar with jimmies from my gangbanger days—and in a flash he’d opened the door and slid behind the wheel.

Cat, I thought, do something.

The cat opened its eyes and turned its head toward the front, but that was all. The dude in front ducked down out of sight for a moment. Then the engine went
vroom vroom
, a soft kind of
vroom vroom
, probably not very noticeable to humans on account of their hearing problems, no offense. The dude straightened up, spun the wheel, and the yellow car zipped out of the lot, the jeep right behind it. I caught a last glimpse of the cat, now standing, its tail up and teeth bared. Too late, buddy boy. I barked. A weird thought—something about me being too late as well—almost took shape in
my mind and then vanished. I’ve got the kind of mind that’s on my side.

A convertible pulled into the lot. I’d never been in a convertible and it was one of my strongest desires ever since the time, back in my puppy days, that I’d seen a dog riding shotgun in a topless lowrider. I’d been living in a crack house in the worst part of Vista City at the time, but that’s not the point. The point is that the gangbanger dog was loving it! And I knew I’d love it, too.

This particular convertible, which parked close by, wasn’t shiny and new like the yellow car, but old and dented, the body sandblasted down to no color at all. The driver got out and looked around. He was a pretty big guy, although not as big as the two dudes who’d taken the yellow car. I tended to watch big guys carefully. This particular big guy wore a Hawaiian shirt with palm trees on it. I was a fan of Hawaiian shirts, and also of palm trees. We’ve got palm trees out the yingyang here in the Valley; I’d marked lots of them, but had many more to go.

The Hawaiian shirt guy saw me and came closer. Human faces are a big subject, no time to go into it now. This guy had a strong face. I was familiar with strong faces on men. Those strong faces often had a mean part as well. This one didn’t. No meanness that I could see, although neither would I have called it a happy face. He came right up to the cruiser.

“The cruller brothers meet again?” he said.

Which I didn’t get at all. But it didn’t matter because right about then I caught a whiff of this man. Apples, bourbon, salt, pepper; maybe a little heavy on the bourbon at the moment. The combo worked for me, big-time. The truth was I’d never come across a better human scent. A nice breeze sprang up in the backseat. I glanced back to see what Butch was up to: still dozing, but what
was that? My tail was wagging kind of wildly? I tried to ramp it down and maybe succeeded a bit.

“Friendly, huh?” said the guy in the Hawaiian shirt. A smile appeared on his face—almost making him look like someone else. “Well, uh”—he peered at my tags—“Chet, how’s K-9 school going?”

Great! Couldn’t be better. Only the leaping test left, and leaping was my very best thing. Bobby was going to be amazed.

The Hawaiian shirt guy laughed. I wasn’t sure why, but he had a lovely laugh, the sound rich and warm, kind of like some music I’d heard, not the crack-house kind. I found I was sort of sticking my head through the window. He raised his hand to give me a pat. A woman screamed.

We—the Hawaiian shirt guy and I—turned to look. The woman in the short shorts and halter top had come out of Donut Heaven and was standing where her car had been, holding her hands to her face.

“Oh, my God! Where’s my car?” She took a few steps toward the empty space—tottering steps on account of the shoes she wore, women’s shoes being something we can maybe go into another time—and raised her voice even higher. “My car’s gone! Someone stole my car!” She spotted the Hawaiian shirt guy. “Hey, mister. Did you see what happened? Someone stole my car.”

“Sorry, I just got here,” the Hawaiian shirt guy said. “But are you sure that’s where you left it? Sometimes in these parking lots people get—”

She stamped her foot. “There are what? Ten cars in this goddamn lot? Of course I’m sure. My car is gone. You’re just like my asshole boyfriend.”

“I am?”

“He never believes me either.”

“I believe you,” the Hawaiian shirt guy said. “One hundred percent. Maybe, um”—he glanced around—“someone else saw . . .” But there was no one else. Except for me and Butch, of course. The guy’s gaze went to me and I thought he was going to say something, but he did not.

“What am I going to do?” the woman said. She started to cry.

The Hawaiian shirt guy looked alarmed. “It’ll work out,” he said, taking a few steps toward her, the slow steps humans take when they’d rather not.

“How? How is it ever going to work out? My car is gone. I love that car.”

“What kind was it?”

“Was? You’re saying was?”

“Slip of the tongue. Is, of course. What kind of car is it?”

“An Audi Four. Yellow with pink leather interior. I happen to know it’s the only one in the whole Valley.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Not surprised? What does that mean?”

“Just that it’s such an unusual combination.” The woman’s face got all pinched up and the Hawaiian shirt guy started talking faster. “Unusually great, aesthetically speaking, museum-quality or even better.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” He cast a look around. Humans sometimes have a panicky way of doing that, like when they’re outnumbered in a bar fight, for example. This was a look-around of that type. “Tell you what,” he said. “There are a couple cops inside that I happen to know. Why don’t we report the crime to them?”

Her eyes and mouth opened wide, like she’d seen something horrible.
“Oh, my God—Beauty’s in there!”

“Audis are nice, no question, but I’m not sure they rise to the level of beaut—”

“God almighty! I’m talking about my cat, Beauty. She was in the backseat. I can’t live without her.” The woman ran sobbing into Donut Heaven, the Hawaiian shirt guy trailing. He tried to get the door for her but wasn’t quick enough. Did he have a bit of a limp? That happened to me once back in Vista City when the pickup I was riding in got in a wreck, but I was fine the next morning so maybe he would be, too.

Butch shifted around, getting more comfortable. His eyes opened. He looked at me. I looked at him. His eyes closed. Butch was one sleepy dude today. I myself was wide-awake—in fact, just about at my very widest.

The door of Donut Heaven opened and out walked the short shorts woman, with Bobby and Rick close by, and the Hawaiian shirt guy lagging behind. They moved over to where the yellow car had been parked, and then came lots of talk and gesturing, although not on the part of the Hawaiian shirt guy, who mostly gazed into the distance, and once glanced over at me. I caught another whiff of him, quite faint but still superb.

“ . . . move now is to bring in ATS,” Rick was saying.

“What’s that?” said the woman.

“Auto theft squad,” Rick told her.

“And they’ll get my car back?”

“Best auto theft squad west of the Mississippi,” Bobby said.

The expression on the Hawaiian shirt guy’s face changed and I wondered if I was about to hear that laugh of his again. No laugh came.

“What about Beauty?”

“They’ll make it a priority,” Bobby said.

“She’s a she,” the woman said.

“You can include that on the form,” said Bobby.

“I’ll call them right now,” Rick said. “I’ll need your name.”

“Cherry,” the woman said. “Cherry Monroe.”

Rick wrote in his notebook and headed my way, toward his cruiser, the Hawaiian shirt guy following. I shifted a little, watched them through Butch’s window.

“What’s new, Bernie?” Rick said, reaching into his car for the dashboard phone.

“The usual,” the Hawaiian shirt guy said. His name was Bernie? Not bad at all. Bernie.

“Meaning you’re looking for leads?” Rick said.

“Doesn’t have to be missing persons,” Bernie said. He looked down at the ground. “Truth is, Rick, I’ll take just about anything right now.”

“Divorce work?”

“Even that.”

Rick had raised the dashboard phone and looked about to speak into it. He lowered it instead, turned to face Bernie. “Can I say something without you biting my head off?”

Uh-oh. Bernie was a biter? I’d come across some human biters in my life—none of them really any good at it, not with those little teeth—but Bernie didn’t look like one to me.

“Not if you’re going to tell me I’m not cut out for private investigation,” Bernie said.

“Not saying that. Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“The investigation part? The actual crime-solving? No one better than you. But there’s a business side.”

“I can add and subtract.”

“More to business than that.”

“Such as?”

“Start with PR.”

“Telling me I should hire a PR firm? No way I can afford that.”

“I meant PR in a more general sense—not alienating potential clients, that kind of thing.”

Bernie looked over to where Bobby and Cherry Monroe were talking. “You’re saying I alienated her?”

“She hinted at that inside,” Rick said. “‘ . . . Even if this gentleman doesn’t think it’s much of a car.’ You’ve forgotten that part?”

Bernie gave Rick a hard sort of look; it kind of surprised me, how hard it was. “I just wanted a crummy lead or two from you, Rick, not a goddamn makeover.”

Rick’s face hardened, too. “Sorry. I’ve got nothing.”

Bernie turned, jumped in his car, and sped away, burning rubber as he hit the highway. Rick made his call on the dashboard phone and drove off, waving to Bobby and Cherry Monroe on his way out. Not long after that, a couple black-and-whites pulled in. Bobby shook hands with Cherry Monroe, got in our car, and then we were gone, too. How come Bobby hadn’t picked up another cruller when he’d gone inside? No cruller at all for me today? Really? I started to give up on the idea of a cruller, although not completely. Giving up completely wouldn’t be me.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Out,” said Bobby, opening the back doors of the cruiser.

Butch and I hopped out, had a nice stretch, both of us getting our chins right down in the grass and our butts up high. Did that feel good or what? Butch got more lively right away. He gave me a bump.
I gave him a bump back, a bit harder. He rebumped, harder still. I—

“So help me God!” Bobby said. “Can’t wait to see the last of you two. Get on over here.”

We trotted up to Bobby. We were back at the range. I loved the range: a big grassy field with a shooting hut, targets, and sometimes lots of gunfire. Back when there were more of us in the school, not just me and Butch, we’d come here to get used to gunfire, which I already was, on account of where I’d come from, and learn about gun smells, another thing I already knew, and also about explosives, which were new to me but turned out to be a snap when it came to sniffing them out.

No guns today. We had the range all to ourselves. Bobby led us over toward the fence at one side of the range, if him walking and me and Butch sprinting around him in circles counts as leading. The side fence was very high and made of solid planks tight together so you couldn’t see through, but I smelled interesting things on the other side, like paint and grease and gasoline.

Not far from the fence stood a big tall shape hidden by a tarp. “What we got here,” Bobby said, pulling off the tarp, “is a three-bar horse jump.” He started adjusting the bars and muttering something about how they were looking for distance as well as height. “Yea high for this one, a foot more in the middle, and we’ll top out at six feet.” Or something like that. For some reason I found myself yawning. Butch, right beside me, was panting. “Look at you guys,” Bobby said. “What the hell?”

He walked around the horse jump to the other side. “Chet,” he said. “Sit.”

I sat, head up and alert. It hit me that soon we were going to be leaping over this horse jump. That top bar wasn’t very high at all.
What could be easier?

Bobby produced his clipboard. “Butch,” he said. He clapped his hands. “Up and over. Come.”

Butch stood very still. For a moment I thought he might be planning a quick little detour around the jump, but Butch was way too good for that. He sprang to life, took off at real good speed for a dude his size, and launched himself—up and over! Oops. Or maybe not. True, Butch was over, landing with just a little stumble, hardly noticeable at all, and sitting down for his biscuit, but one of his back paws had clipped that top bar and now it was vibrating and wavering, about to—No. The bar quivered back to stillness and stayed where it was.

“I’ll give you that one,” Bobby said, and made a mark on the clipboard. “You’re in.” He gave Butch his biscuit and Butch curled up and went to work on it.

“Okay, Chet, you’re up,” Bobby said. He clapped his hands. “Chet. Up and over. Come.”

Leap over this horse jump, was that it? A snap. I dug my front paws into the grass—best way for getting the kind of explosive start that makes the rest of it a piece of cake, as humans say, although why I’m not sure, cake being nothing special in my opinion—but at the very last moment before there’d be no stopping me, I caught a slight movement from the direction of the wooden fence. I paused, glanced over, and saw, peering through a small hole down where the fence met the ground, a cat. And not just any cat, but a plump, white cat with golden eyes and a pinkish nose: Beauty.

Beauty? Beauty, who I’d last seen getting driven off in the stolen yellow car? I took off in my best explosive style but not toward the jump. Instead I headed directly toward Beauty, barking my head off.

“Chet!” Bobby shouted at me. “What the hell are you doing?” And maybe more like that; I wasn’t really listening. I skidded to a stop right in front of that hole in the fence, shearing off a long clump of turf, and came face-to-face with Beauty. She gazed at me with those golden eyes, and then, so quick I barely saw the movement, one of her paws came flashing up and clawed me right across the nose. That made me so mad, I—

I did nothing, because at that moment, Bobby grabbed me by the collar and lifted my front end clear off the ground. As he dragged me away, I saw Beauty backing out of the hole and disappearing from view on the other side of the fence.