“This trip has been a huge break in Louie’s routine.” Temple told the puzzled non-cat associates, “I’m sure he’s hiding away somewhere to soothe his frazzled nerves.”
“So he’s high-stung?” Krys sounded disdainful.
“Willful,” Temple answered. “Like all cats, he often knows better than we feeble humans do.” She exchanged a glance with Matt.
They both knew that Louie was opting out of the highly charged family reunion coming up. Too bad they weren’t cats and easy to hide.
Chapter 16
Search and Unexpected Seizure
Alone at last.
My ears had been burning up a bonfire overhearing all the speculation about my druthers and whereabouts.
I had done the Houdini trick of hiding in plain sight. Well, for one of my species.
I had been lounging in a hammock … the canvas sling at the bottom of the kitchen laundry bag, inhaling the comforting, homelike scents of antiperspirant, cosmetics, and shampoo. After all, my current roommate enjoys being a girl.
How wonderful to have all the social murmurs and palavers reduced to the hum of the refrigerator. Actually, refrigerators mimic major digestive upsets nowadays, have you noticed that? They do so many tricks with ice and water and defrosting and burping like Tupperware that one is tempted to throw Pepto-Bismol at their stainless steel faces. That would be like topping the Taj Mahal with strawberry sauce.
Anyway, I am in official search and seizure mode, accompanied by a canny glaze of lying-in-wait.
No one here had noticed that I noticed that Miss Matt Mama had kept the noxious threatening notes in a folder in her bottom dresser drawer, so as to keep Miss Krys’s nosy nose out of them.
Drawers might be an obstacle for one of my limited digital dexterity, but my primal brain knows how they work, so off to work I go.
First I flip onto my back. Then I drag my muscular torso beneath the drawer under siege by planting all sixteen of my built-in pitons in the feeble wallboard people use as mass-produced furniture these days.
No way would I have been able to perform this feat on, say, Sam Spade’s desk. Those days produced men and file cabinets of steel and noggins and drawers of walnut, as in “hard walnut to crack.”
Now, my motions as I shimmy under the drawer bottom might be adult-rated but we are all friends here. Once in position, I start driving my leg pitons into the wall-to-wall carpet, pushing with my mitts. The resulting push-pull action inches the drawer forward. In a thrice—well, after several full body rolls—I can wriggle out from under the dresser, snag a few shivs inside the drawer’s now-ajar gap and wrestle the insert out.
Okay. It takes me about five times longer than some light-fingered career criminal to open a drawer, but they have the weight and opposable thumb advantage.
Once in, working out the papers in question is kit’s play, nothing any curious puppy could not accomplish with three brain cells. Leaving them unchewed, priceless.
I use my main four-finger shiv to spread the missives out like a hand of playing cards.
I have been known to decipher printed matter, but human handwriting is a tougher problem. I recognize the messages are formed of that old crime story staple, individual letters in different type fonts cut out from that disappearing artifact of contemporary life, the daily newspaper.
I may not be able to read the tortured text, but my eyes and nose tell me two suspicious facts: I do not pick up the odor of ink on pulpwood paper, a scent I have been known to shower with my ill will on the few occasions I have been incarcerated. Newsprint is a favorite litter box filler for the group homes that shelter many of my kind at a time.
There is no such fulsome scent on these missives, only the faintest whisper of toner power, which means they were computer generated. Now, what kind of degenerate stalker is computer literate?
I recognize key words from my long list of oldie movies viewed on cable TV when my Miss Temple is out gallivanting, or at home gallivanting in a manner that ejects me from my own bed.
You will recognize such cherished turns of phrase as: “We know you know.” “We mean business.” “Or else.” “Comply or die.” And I read the same ugly words I saw in tiny print in a tiny news story on Miss Temple’s coffee table copy of the Las Vegas Review-Journaclass="underline" Clifford Effinger. Along with the also corny phrase of “mysteriously found dead.”
A fancy computer font combined with corny vintage clichés? Who do these bozos think they are intimidating? Obviously, they think they are scaring Miss Matt Mama and Mr. Matt, by means of the ghost of her crummy husband and his stupid-mean stepfather.
At this moment of deep cogitation, which must be accompanied by a trancelike state often mistaken for a nap, I hear a door creak in the living room.
Doors do not creak except in scary movies, folks.
Has someone in the Sunday dinner party forgotten a crucial something … such as breath mints or Tums or gas pills? From what I have been hearing about the joys of Polish cooking and beer drinking I am sure that they would be the least required.
So I scramble to push the threatening missives into a pile, prong them back into the drawer, and reverse my physical exertions of the past ten minutes in two, trying not to make any noise. I will not bore you with the details except to say I am fairly twisted into a knot when I leave the dresser closed and shimmy under the bed.
Footsteps—large careless stepping-on-tail footsteps—clomp onto the bedroom carpeting.
“I heard something in here,” a deep male voice says.
“Yeah,” mocks another. “The wimpy curtain hitting the window glass in the draft of the ceiling fan. We saw them drive out of here in the rented sedan, all four, all dressed up like for a funeral. They ain’t coming back soon.”
Spare me the crude contractions. This is not an episode of Jersey Shore.
I gaze out on mud-edged work boots.
“Good,” says Mr. Hearing Things. “I will leave a note under the old lady’s pillow. That ought to put a wasp in her—”
No lady will be the object of crude language when Midnight Louie is around. I strike like a snake, a shiv finding the sweet spot between the ankle-boot top and the wrinkled jeans bottom as the creep bends to place his latest poison pen note under Miss Mira’s pillow.
“Ow!” he yells, straightening up in a hurry.
“What is the matter now?”
“A wasp stung me.”
“Get real.”
“No. Look. My leg is all red in this spot. It is bleeding.”
“I am not looking at your bleeding ankles. Maybe you got an allergy. Leave the note and I will do something nasty with a butcher knife and whatever is in the meat drawer in the kitchen on the way out.”
“It is not just the two chicks now. They have visitors.”
“So. We back off because of ‘visitors’? We been hired—”
I wince again. As grammar goes so arrives the coarseness of modern life.
“—to terrify and that is what we do best. That dude is the woman’s son. I bet if we got a hold of him we could get her to come across.”
“I would rather kidnap the little redheaded chick. Less trouble and more fun.”