Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (6 page)

That’s what I told myself. If I’d been able to, I would have thrown a light cover over myself like Big Bubba’s so I wouldn’t have to see reality.

When I got home, the sun was a golden balloon lightly bouncing on the distant horizon, sending a glittering path across the tops of waves to the shore. Michael and Paco stood on the sand watching it, Michael with his arm slung loosely over Paco’s shoulder. I scurried over and stood on his other side so he could hug me too, and we all waited in awed silence while the sun did its daily flirtation with the sea. Like a coy virgin, it hovered just out of reach, seeming at times to pull upward a bit and then dip slightly toward the lusting sea. Behind it, translucent bands of cerise and violet danced with streaks of turquoise and sparkling yellow. Just when it seemed the sun would hold itself aloof forever, it abruptly changed its mind and fell into the sea’s open arms. Within seconds, it was lost in a watery embrace, and all that was left were rainbow sighs of contentment.

Michael gave me and Paco a little squeeze and we all turned and trooped toward the wooden deck. Michael’s prized steel cooker was smoking and all the extra little gizmos for baking and boiling things were occupied with good-smelling somethings.

Next to Paco and me, Michael loves that grill beyond anything else in the world. He can get rhapsodic pointing out its little side extensions on which you can cook
something in a pan—boil potatoes, maybe—while the stuff on the rack grills. And the warming oven below the grill seems miraculous to him. He just loves to warm dinner rolls down there and never fails to mention when he does. Men and outdoor cookers are like men and cars, a mysterious love affair women will never understand.

Michael said, “Ten minutes, tops.”

I said, “Gotcha,” and raced up my stairs two at a time, punching the remote to raise the shutters as I went.

If there’s ever a reality TV show that gives prizes for the fastest shower takers, I’ll enter that sucker and win. The trick is to peel off clothes on the way so you’re already naked when you turn on the water. A squirt of liquid soap on a sponge, a slick up one side and down the other, turn around to rinse all areas, and that’s it. Two minutes tops. Then a quick foot dry to keep from sliding on tile, a fast comb through wet hair and a slick of lip gloss—another two minutes—before a gallop to the closet for fresh clothes while towel-patting exposed damp skin. In nanoseconds I was stepping into clean underwear and pulling on cool white baggy pants and a loose top. No shoes, but I took a second to slide a stretchy coral bracelet on my wrist.

I left the shutters up and clattered down the stairs to the deck where the table was already set for three, with a shallow bowl of gazpacho on each plate. Paco was pouring chilled white wine into two glasses and iced tea into a third. The glass of tea meant Paco would be leaving later on some undercover assignment. I didn’t comment on it. He’s safer if we know nothing about his work, but it’s impossible not to know some things.

Paco gave me a quick once-over the way men do and nodded in silent approval. Cats and dogs wave their tails to applaud, men nod and twitch their eyebrows.

From his beloved grill, Michael said, “Good timing, Dixie. Heat’s just right.”

I went over to a redwood chaise where Ella Fitzgerald was surveying the scene. She wore a kitty harness with a long thin leash attached to one of the chaise legs, and she gave me a glum look when I stooped to kiss the top of her head. Paco had bought the harness and leash after Ella had bounded into the woods behind the house and he’d spent several anxious hours looking for her.

Paco said, “The princess is pouting.”

I said, “She’d pout a lot more if a big critter got her in the woods.”

Michael said, “We’ll eat the gazpacho while dinner cooks.”

Like an artist setting paint on a canvas, he laid thick tuna steaks on the grill, then gave us the kind of beatific smile that only a great chef bestows when everything is going exactly the way he planned.

Paco and I didn’t need encouragement. We hurried to slide into our seats and had our spoons ready by the time Michael joined us. Michael’s gazpacho is absolutely the best in the world, with everything fresh from the farmers’ market and all the flavors blending like an orchestral creation. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the clicks of our spoons against the bowls and my soft whimpers of pleasure. There had been a time when I made those same noises when I made love. But that had been a long time ago.

Paco said, “Gazpacho is what, Spanish?”

Michael did a facial shrug with his eyebrows. “I guess. Or Portugal. Someplace like that.”

Paco said, “Did you ever think how different cultures get connected through food? We’re having gazpacho, somebody in France is eating nachos right now, some Russian is eating pizza. That’s pretty cool.”

Michael said, “Sauerbraten with potato pancakes. Some red cabbage.” He had obviously lost track of the idea and was imagining menus.

Paco said, “I’ve always had a fantasy of going to Greece and meeting distant relatives. We’d sit and talk and they’d feed me roast lamb and stuffed grape leaves and kibbe, and I’d come home feeling as if my boundaries had been extended.”

I said, “I don’t think kibbe is Greek. It’s Lebanese.”

Michael said, “You hungry for lamb? Why didn’t you say so? I’ll make you some.”

Paco grinned. “No, doofus, that’s not what I meant. I’m just talking about how food connects us to thousands of relatives we’ve never met. They’re all over the world, but we eat the same food they eat. You have relatives in Norway, probably in England too, or God knows where, and I probably have Cypriot cousins. If one of my Greek ancestors married an Irish woman and moved to Russia, I may have Greek-Irish-Russian relatives. Heck, we’re probably all related to one another in some way.”

We all fell silent at the enormity of the idea. My gosh, everybody in the world could be distant relatives of one another. Boy, talk about a family tree!

When the gazpacho was all gone, Paco gathered the
bowls while Michael checked the tuna steaks and peered at the stuff on the grill’s side cookers. I didn’t do diddly, just sat there like royalty and let two gorgeous men wait on me.

The tuna was cooked to perfection, and the side stuff turned out to be some of the corn and green beans Michael had got that morning. There was also mango-and-papaya salsa for the tuna. All in all, a dinner fit for royalty.

We chatted idly while we ate, but nothing important. Michael said the latest news report said the red tide had drifted away from us, so the fumes weren’t a problem anymore. I said Big Bubba would be happy about that because he preferred his outdoor cage. Paco asked who Big Bubba was, so I told him about Reba being in France eating at four-star restaurants. We all agreed that four-star or not, she probably wasn’t getting food as good as what we were eating.

They didn’t ask me if I’d had any scary encounters with strangers, and they probably didn’t even wonder if I had. I mean, why would they? I didn’t ask Paco why he’d been home all day, or when he would be on duty again, but I did wonder. Loving people means you let them have certain secrets they don’t share with you.

After dinner, Michael and I cleared the table while Paco took a little plate of tuna to Ella. She was still sulking, so he had to sweet-talk her until she condescended to hop from the chaise to the deck floor and eat his peace offering. Michael and I grinned at each other because Paco deals with the dregs of humanity without showing a shred of sympathy, but guilt at cramping Ella’s style
with a leash had reduced him to pleading with her to eat twenty-dollar-a-pound tuna.

In the kitchen, I loaded the dishwasher and helped Michael stow left overs in the refrigerator. Then I hugged him good night and headed for bed, with a detour to tell Paco and Ella good night. Paco had stretched out on the chaise and Ella was sitting on his chest purring at him, so I guess she’d forgiven him for trying to keep her safe.

Upstairs, I lowered the storm shutters, checked phone messages, brushed my teeth, and shed my clothes. By nine o’clock, I was in bed with a book. By ten o’clock, I’d turned out the lights and was asleep. When you get up at four
A.M.
, bedtime comes early.

In my sleep, I heard the subdued purring sound of Paco’s Harley, and knew that he was headed for some undercover job.

It was after one when I woke to the sound of somebody banging on the hurricane shutters and screaming my name. I shot out of bed in a momentary panic. It took a few seconds to get my bearings and recognize the voice hysterically shouting my name.

T
he thing about going crazy, really, truly crazy with no more pretending that you’re even a little bit sane, is that once you’ve been there you don’t have to wonder anymore what it’s like. Crazy is a dark ugly town. Stay there long enough and you’ll learn all the roads, all the houses and gas stations, until you figure out that crazy is just an alternate territory. You can live there if you want to, or you can leave. It’s your choice. There’s a kind of strength in that, a weird kind of power that people who’ve never gone crazy don’t know about. When you leave crazy and come back to normal, you feel a special closeness to people who were loyal to you while you were there—like the woman calling my name.

Sleep dazed, I grabbed a robe to cover my naked self and ran to open the door to the woman who’d been my best friend all through high school. Maureen had been a total airhead then, but fun. Her father had abandoned her the same way my mother had abandoned me. Being the kids whose parents hadn’t loved them enough to
stay with them had drawn us together like orphaned lambs huddled away from the herd. In our senior year, Maureen had fallen in love with a sweet guy named Harry Henry. Everybody had expected them to marry, but right after we graduated Maureen had broken Harry’s heart by marrying a rich old man from South America.

She and I lost contact after that. I went to college for two years and then to the police academy. Maureen learned to travel in private jets and hang out with movie stars and European princesses. By the time I married Todd, a fellow deputy, I was deep in the hard-edged world of law enforcement, and Maureen was deep in the soft world of luxury. She sent me a baby gift when Christy was born, but we no longer saw each other.

But after Todd and Christy were killed and I fell into a bottomless pit of crazed agony, Maureen had shown up one night with a tremulous smile and a bottle of Grey Goose. She had only come that one time, but I’d always been grateful for it. With Maureen, it hadn’t been necessary to pretend to be strong or rational. I could be what I truly was, broken and empty and full of fury. And baring my true self had helped me find the thread that would eventually lead me back to sanity.

Now it was Maureen screaming into the night for my help.

I ran barefoot to hit the electric control to raise the metal shutters. I saw Maureen’s feet step back a bit as the shutters folded into the soffit above the door. Her feet were bare like mine. Even sleep stunned and addled, I knew her naked toes were an especially bad omen.

When the shutters were head-high, I opened the glass-paned french doors and Maureen hurled through. She was sobbing so hard I couldn’t make out what she was saying, just that somebody was gone.

Clutching at me like a drowning person, she said, “You have to help me, Dixie! Please!”

I held her tightly for a few minutes and talked to her the way I talk to agitated animals who need calming. When her convulsive shuddering had calmed to tremors, I led her to the couch and sat close beside her. She wore white gauze pajamas and carried a pouchy brown leather bag. Even without makeup and with her brown curls in a tumble, she was still as beautiful as she’d been in high school. She also still smelled of tobacco smoke.

I said, “Mo, what’s happened?”

Wild-eyed, she choked, “They’ve taken Victor. Oh, my God, Dixie, they’ve taken Victor!”

I had to dig into my memory bank to remember that Victor was her husband’s name.

“Who? Who took him?”

She waved her hand in front of her face as if she were erasing the air. “I don’t know. Somebody who wants money. They say they’ll kill him if I don’t give it to them.”

“When? When did they say that? How?”

“Just now, tonight. They called and told me. They want a million dollars in small bills. They want me to leave it in the gazebo tomorrow night. If I don’t, they’ll kill Victor.”

She spoke as if I was familiar with her private little sunset-viewing house. Actually, I’d only been in it once when she’d invited me to her house for lunch. She hadn’t been married long, and her cook—boy, had I been impressed
that she had a cook!—had prepared a tasty little spread that we’d eaten in the gazebo. Her husband had come home while I was there and spoiled it. He’d been stiff and cold and looked at me as if I were a smelly bug. I’d left in a hurry and was never invited back.

I said, “We have to call the sheriff’s department. They know how to handle things like this.”

“No! They said if I called the police they’d kill him for sure. You have to help me, Dixie!”

It occurred to me that Maureen might think I was still a deputy.

I said, “Mo, I’m not a deputy anymore, I’m a pet sitter.”

Her eyes registered mild surprise. “You always were crazy about pets.”

Maureen never had been very interested in what other people did. In high school, that was a trait that had kept her from being nosy and gossipy. It had also kept her from being discriminating.

I said, “Do you know anybody with a grudge against Victor?”

She gave me a round-eyed stare. “
Everybody
has a grudge against Victor. It’s his business. You know, all that oil-trading stuff is cutthroat. Men in that business make enemies.”

I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t have a clue what Victor’s business dealings were like, or even how he carried them out. Maureen was sweet and cute, but
smart
would be the last adjective anybody would use to describe her.

I said, “I didn’t realize Victor was that important. To kidnappers, I mean.”