Mabel laughed. "You know I'd go hungry to see the satisfied smirks on their furry faces and hear the little freeloaders purr."
On Mabel's counter, lolling between two stacks of reports, Joe heard Clyde's voice on the phone, and went rigid. They were talking about cats, about him, and he was wild with anger. Clyde had called about him. But the next minute his anger vanished, and he knew.
Rube. This was about Rube.
Clyde wouldn't have called if this were good news. Joe's stomach felt like it had dropped to the cellar, he was cold all over and lost, felt sick all the way to his paws.
He was about to take off for home when Officer Blake came in. The tall, thin officer tossed a handful of Polaroids on the desk, color shots of the fire at the high school. Slipping closer again, between Dulcie and Kit, Joe stared at candid studies of smoke and flame licking up a building, and of the burned interior of a classroom. It was the kind of mess you'd see in some L.A. street riot, not in Molena Point. What was coming down here?
There had been no trouble at the school, no student unrest or complaints building up to this, and no hot issue that might draw outside agitators. Keen with predatory curiosity, longing to paw the photos out across the desk to see every detail, Joe turned away instead. He was too torn by Clyde's need, too conscious of Clyde's pain to attend even to this perplexing crime.
Glancing at Dulcie with a look he hoped she would understand, he leaped from Mabel's counter to the front door and reared up against the glass, pawing impatiently until Mabel came around the counter and let him out. And he headed fast for home, a wild gray streak racing over the rooftops and across the highest oak branches above the narrow streets, heading home. Going home, where Clyde needed him.
11
Dulcie seldom hung around Molena Point PD, spying and picking up intelligence, without Joe Grey by her side. Sitting with Kit on the dispatcher's counter, with cops milling all around them, she tried her best not to look interested in the pictures of the fire. The four officers who had just returned from the high school smelled nose-itchingly of smoke. Their faces and hands were smeared black, their uniforms torn and wet.
Dulcie did not want to appear to be reading their reports; but she could hardly look away. A schoolroom had been deliberately set afire, as well as some trash cans under the wooden grandstand. Kit kept crowding her, staring so intently at the pictures that Dulcie could not distract her. This kit did not know the meaning of finesse. As much as Kit hung around the station, as many cases as she'd helped to solve, some spectacularly, the little tortoiseshell still was impetuous to the point of alarm. Terrified that any minute Kit would forget herself and blurt out some burning question, Dulcie hissed softly at her and pressed a paw on her paw.
But only when, glancing up through the glass door, they saw Dallas Garza approaching across the parking lot, did Kit back off and curl up as if for a nap, tucking her nose under her tail. Dulcie washed her own hind paw, then feigned great interest when a rookie dropped a wadded-up gum wrapper on the floor; she made a show of creeping along the counter peering down, lashing her tail.
Dallas Garza swung in through the heavy glass door looking sour and angry. He said very little but double-timed on down the hall, followed silently by the officers around the desk and half a dozen who came in behind him. They turned into the coffee room-cum-squad room. The cats waited a moment, then leaped down, wandered along behind them, and crouched outside the door. The room smelled of overcooked coffee.
"Store window was already broken when the call came in," Garza said. "Security alarm disabled. They were in and out before the first car arrived. Cameron's in the hospital, shot in the leg. Lucky as hell it missed the bone. She should be out in a few days." Jane Cameron had been on the force only a few months. She had come down from San Jose PD where she'd graduated from the police academy. "She didn't want to fire her weapon in that neighborhood. Guy doubled back on her. His first shot took her down, hit her twice before she fired and killed him," Garza said. "She's feeling more mental pain than pain from the leg wound." It was doubly hard for a rookie to live with having killed someone. There would be a routine investigation, which would surely amount to nothing.
Dulcie was just glad that Cameron was alive. The tall, soft-spoken blonde always had a smile and a pet for a visiting cat. The cats listened with switching tails as Garza described the action.
"Besides the man Cameron killed, we have one arrest and the make on two cars." He glanced at Officer McFarland.
"McFarland pursued a black Ford Neon, no lights, forced it into an alley against the brick wall of The Patio restaurant. Car took out three feet of wall. McFarland might never have spotted it-but the license plate flat fell off."
McFarland grinned. "Bounced and rattled like a barrelful of tin cans." McFarland was a young, fresh-faced cop with soft brown hair that, when freed from his cap, immediately fell over his forehead. "Puny little guy. Fought me like a nut case, bit me twice. Flailed around until I shoved my gun in his ribs. Little twerp, Latino. Dark eyes, dark complexion. Long bleached hair and a nose ring. Made me want to lead him along like a ringed bull. We're towing the car in.
"We ran the plates," McFarland said. "Stolen off a '99 Cadillac DeVille, West L.A. address. There was ID on him, driver's license, couple of credit cards. Likely turn up fake."
Detective Garza read off the jewelry store inventory of stolen items, which the store's efficient assistant had prepared for him. "She'll have pictures of some of the pieces by morning."
Dulcie was wondering why the elderly owner of the jewelry store hadn't shown up after the break-in, when Garza said, "Sam Marineau's visiting his daughter in Tacoma, be gone a week. Left Nancy Huffman in charge, she's over there now, with Davis." Juana Davis was the department's other detective, a solid, no-nonsense Latina with a quiet, reassuring way that could quickly calm an upset victim. She and Nancy Huffman must both have arrived just after Dulcie and Kit and Joe raced away from the demolished store. Garza unfolded Nancy's inventory and began to read, listing the items. Their value added up to a sum large enough to keep every village cat in caviar through the next century. Garza said, "We've contacted all departments in the Western states." The wonders of electronics, of the department's ability to contact all those offices within seconds, still impressed Dulcie, as did so many of the accomplishments of human civilization.
She expected that if the insurance company offered a sizeable reward, the fence might cooperate, too. Maybe give them a line on the crooks. When the cats heard Captain Harper come in the front door, they vanished from the hall, slipping into the first darkened office.
Harper stopped to speak to the dispatcher, then passed their shadowed door, heading for the squad room. His shoes and pant legs reeked of smoke and wet ashes. They crept out behind him to crouch, again, outside the door.
Harper stopped just inside to pour himself a cup of coffee, then moved to the front to face his men. His thin, tanned face was drawn into long, angry lines. "It was arson," he said. "Payson and Brown picked up oily rags, two empty gas cans.
"One classroom trashed and set afire. The amount of smoke and flame, I thought at first the whole school was burning. Books pulled from the shelves, desks overturned, stuff pulled out of cupboards. The other fires were on the grounds. Two in trash barrels near bushes and trees-we got them before they spread. Fire on the football field under the stands, in trash bins. Another few minutes, those wooden stands would have gone up, as well as the pine trees in the greenbelt, and then the buildings.