From the kitchen Ryan heard the cat door flap open. She looked out to the living room as the three cats bolted in, sopping wet. As they fled for the kitchen she grabbed the phone. First she called the Firettis. “Pan’s here, and Kit, too. They’d better stay until morning, until the storm dies. Yes, Joe’s fine, they all seem fine, just hungry as bears.” The cats stared up at her impatiently, dripping puddles on the linoleum. On the phone, John Firetti said something that made her laugh but that made her wipe a tear, too. “I know, John. Well, it keeps the adrenaline flowing.”
When she’d hung up, she dialed Kit’s house. Normally, Kit might be out anywhere at night getting into all kinds of trouble, Lucinda and Pedric had learned to sleep through their worries; but they didn’t often have a storm like this. She had started to tell Lucinda about the fallen tree when Kit hopped to the counter. Ryan held the phone so Kit could talk; she imagined tall, gray-haired Lucinda Greenlaw in her robe and slippers listening patiently as the bedraggled tortoiseshell went on and on in her usual endless narrative. “. . . and there was glass over everything, too, all over us like little diamonds, but Clyde and Ryan got it off us and Officers Crowley and McFarland are here lifting prints off the car and . . .”
Ryan put a hand on Kit, and at last Lucinda, at the other end of the line, was able to quiet her. Lucinda gave her strict orders, she was not to come home until morning, until the wind died and branches quit falling, and she was to watch for power lines. Kit, switching her tail, hissed at the phone and stalked away. She did not like to be told what to do.
Ryan, laughing, breaking the connection, called Wilma because Dulcie would be worried about Joe; then she called Kate Osborne. Their beautiful blond friend was staying by herself up in the hills at the cat shelter that Ryan and her construction crew had just completed. The living arrangement was temporary, until Kate could hire acceptable caretakers; she wouldn’t leave the shelter cats alone at night, in case of fire or some other emergency. But it was a lonely place, and Ryan worried about her, in this storm. When Joe and Pan leaped to the counter beside Kit, crowding close to listen, Ryan turned on the speaker.
“I’m fine,” Kate said. “Scotty’s here. He . . . wanted to make sure we didn’t have any damage.”
Joe and Pan glanced at each other, guessing that Scotty had been there much of the night.
“But then there was an accident,” Kate said. “That neighbor who lives alone on the five acres that I wanted to buy? Voletta Nestor? The wind broke the window over her bed, cut her pretty badly. Scotty drove her down to emergency and they patched her up. They just got back, he covered the window with plywood. I had cleaned up the glass, pulled off the bedding, dumped it on the back porch and remade the bed. Scotty told her he’d order a new window.
“You can imagine how grouchy she was,” Kate said. “She’s bad tempered at best, and the storm and broken window and her cuts and pain didn’t help. He was glad to get her home again, see her settled and get out of there. The doctors wanted her to hire a nurse to be with her, but of course she refused.” Voletta Nestor, small and wrinkled, with frizzled gray hair sticking out as if she’d stuck her finger in a light plug, and her disposition about the same. Kate said, “She seemed edgy and nervous to have Scotty in her house, even if he was helping her. Taking her home, helping her down the hall, he glimpsed, on the dresser in one of the guest rooms, a stack of cartridge boxes, .38 specials. Voletta didn’t see him looking, she was too busy trying to use the walker the hospital rented her.”
Ryan laughed. “That little old woman with a firearm? Well, it is lonely up there. I hope she’s had some sensible training—she can be pretty cranky.”
“Scotty said that in her bedroom she kept glancing nervously out the other window down at that flat half acre of mowed weeds that she calls her lawn. What was she looking at? Or looking for?”
Ryan said, “She is strange. Could you put Scotty on the phone? We have a tree down, across the roof. And we’ll need new windows for Joe’s tower.”
“Oh my,” Kate said. “Is Joe all right?”
“He’s fine,” Ryan said as the cats began to wash themselves dry. Scotty came on the line, he said he’d be down in the morning to clear away the tree and start repairs. Ryan said, “I’ll have Manuel and Fernando here. It’s that big, heavy tree that stood just across the street.”
Hanging up, she turned to feed the cats. They sat glaring at her, demanding her full attention, hungrily licking their whiskers. She warmed up a helping of roast beef but saved a nice slab for Officers Crowley and McFarland. If they stayed to watch over the stolen Jeep as she guessed they would, they’d be hungry before morning. Her last words to the cats were, “You three are to stay out of the refrigerator. Paws off. The rest of the roast is for the law.”
Joe Grey scowled.
“If you ever want to eat in this house again, Joe, you will leave the rest of it alone. Eat the cold spaghetti.” Followed by another angry scowl, she moved out to join the men. She stood with Clyde, his arm around her, looking up at Joe’s poor, damaged tower.
Officer Crowley, tall and gangly, and young Officer Jimmie McFarland stood beside the wrecked Jeep. They watched Detective Dallas Garza pull up in his tan Blazer and get out, carrying his camera and strobe light. Garza’s dark, short hair was tangled in the wind, his square, Latino face solemn from sleep. He had pulled on a faded sweat suit. His shoes had no laces. “My God, a straight hit. Is Joe Grey all right?”
Clyde laughed. “We thought a bomb had struck. It took Joe a while to untangle himself and shake off some of the glass beads.”
“But he wasn’t hurt?” Dallas said. The Latino detective had never been much for cats, had been a dog man all his life, but with Joe Grey hanging around the station, Dallas had learned to care for the tomcat. Dallas didn’t know Joe’s secret, no one in the department knew that the tomcat could have sassed them back as cuttingly as they needled each other.
Dallas put his arm around Ryan. “Did you see the driver before he took off, did you see anything?”
“I saw just what I told the dispatcher,” Ryan said. “Darkly dressed, heavy man. Ran around the corner, got in a waiting car, and took off. The car was running dark.” One could see the resemblance between uncle and niece; though Ryan’s eyes were green, and Dallas’s nearly black, their hair was dark, they had the same warm Hispanic coloring, the same fetching smile—and often the same deadpan expression that gave nothing away. Dallas had been her mother’s brother. Redheaded Scott Flannery, her building foreman, was her father’s brother—Ryan a charming Scots-Irish and Hispanic mix. Her two uncles had moved in with Mike Flannery and the three little girls when their mother died. Raised by three men, two in law enforcement, the girls had grown up obedient, hard workers, and with minds and tempers more keyed to the interests of three sensible men than to frilly dresses and callow high school boys.
“The crash woke us,” she told Dallas. “I grabbed the flashlight, I thought the tree would be halfway through the ceiling. But there were only leaves and smaller branches poking through Joe’s cat door. Clyde and I pulled the ladder off my truck, he held it while I had a look. In the wind, the whole roof was a mass of blowing leaves. With clouds coming over the moon, I couldn’t see much of the shingles, just the damaged tower.”
Dallas photographed the Jeep, the damage to its body and interior, as much as could be seen beneath the fallen tree. Working in between the broken branches, wearing gloves and using a flashlight, he found and copied information from the registration so he could notify the car’s owner. When he’d finished, he turned to the two officers.
“I’ll be back as soon as it’s daylight, for more shots. Crowley, McFarland, go ahead and set up sawhorses and reflective lights. You’re on watch, leave your cars where they are. And try to stay awake. On my way out I’ll check the side streets.” None of the three officers, heading for the fallen tree, had seen on the dark side street the vandalized cars that the cats had observed. With the noise of the wind, it was doubtful any of the nearby residents had heard the sound of breaking glass and called the station, unlikely that anyone yet knew that their cars had been broken into or were gone.
Ryan told Crowley, “Give me your thermoses. I have a fresh pot of coffee, and I’ll put together some sandwiches.”
In the kitchen, the cats heard Dallas’s Blazer pull away. They heard Clyde come in, fighting the front door against the wind. He was carrying a roll of plastic from the garage. “I gave Crowley a key to the front door. Make sure the coffeepot’s full.”
The cats followed him upstairs, watched him cover Joe’s broken window and cat door with plastic and duct tape to break the heavy wind. Clyde cleaned the rest of the glass fragments off Joe, removed those that clung in Kit’s long, fine fur. Ryan toweled them dry, and they all piled into the big king bed, Ryan and Clyde, the three cats, and little Snowball. As the wind howled harder, the down comforter felt deliciously cozy. Kit, curled up beside Pan, fell at once into deep sleep, worn out and full of supper. But in sleep she dreamed of her own small house, her tree house blowing and shaking, she could feel its oak branches whipping and her pretty pillows sucked away and thrown across the yard; in her dream she thought the wind grabbed her and carried her away, too, she thought the whole world was blowing apart.