“He’d find me,” Violet said in a flat voice. “There’s nowhere he wouldn’t find me.”
“He won’t find you if he’s in prison. If you help me get him there, he can’t follow you. I have enough on Cage and Eddie to put them both behind bars for a long time.”
Violet turned, a question in her eyes.
“Believe me. A long stretch in the federal pen.”
“What happens when Eddie gets out? He wouldn’t be locked up forever. He’d know I helped you, he’d come after me.”
“Not if he can’t find you.” She was losing patience with Violet, but she couldn’t afford to snap at the girl. Violet, with no sense of self-worth, could easily become useless to her. “What’s the alternative?” Wilma said gently. “You’re going to sit here like a lump waiting for him to come back and beat on you for the rest of your life? Or kill you? If he’s in jail where he can’t get at you-”
“I don’t believe you can lock him up. He never-”
“He has aided and abetted Cage’s escape, the escape of a federal prisoner. He has kidnapped a retired federal officer. Both are offenses with long mandatory sentences. Mandatory, Violet. The judge has to send him away.”
Violet looked hard at her.
“If the law can make Eddie for theft, too, if Cage and Eddie have made some big haul-if that’s what Cage is looking for, that added to the other offenses could put Eddie in prison for the rest of his life.”
“And Cage, too?” Violet asked warily.
“Of course, Cage, too. That’s the law. Both locked up where they can’t hurt you.”
Violet was very still; Wilma watched her, trying not to let her hopes rise. No matter how much psychology Wilma had studied, it was still hard for her to relate to the masochistic dependence that made an abused woman love and cling to her tormentor. Wilma was too independent to understand the self-torturing, or guilt-ridden pleasure, an abuse victim took in harsh mental lashings and harder physical blows, even in wounds that could be fatal. Such an attitude disgusted her, went against her deepest beliefs. Disgusted her because these women had abandoned their self-respect, were committing self-abuse by their complicity.
She wanted to shout and swear at Violet, almost wanted to strike the woman. No wonder such women were ill treated. Violet’s cowering submission made a person want to hit her.
Violet looked at her for a long time.
“I can help you,” Wilma repeated; she was tired of this, tired of everything. “I will do all I can to help you, will use every kind of assistance that the federal system has to offer.” She prayed she wasn’t promising more than she could deliver. “But you have to want to be rid of him-and first, you have to help me.”
Violet’s blank expression didn’t change. She didn’t speak; she turned back toward the wall and disappeared behind it. Wilma listened in defeat to her soft footsteps mounting to the upper floor.
But then, swallowing back discouragement, she reached awkwardly behind her again to fight open the next drawer, to scrabble blindly for another tool sharp enough to cut her bonds.
21
W hen Cage Jones grabbed Charlie Harper, the only witness was the white cat-the only witness who could speak of what he had seen in the alleyway and behind the Harper stables. The other animals could not.
It had taken more courage than Cotton thought he possessed to go to that ranch seeking out the tall redheaded woman and ask her for help for the captive human. He had never in his life approached humans except to steal their food in the back alleys where his clowder had sometimes traveled.
But he had once seen Kit speak with the redheaded woman, and that lady had seemed gentle and respectful of his kind, so he’d thought maybe it would be all right. He had heard her promise that if ever his small, wild band should need help, she would come. Cotton remembered.
But now the redheaded lady needed help, perhaps to save her life.
Approaching the ranch, three times he had nearly turned back. But at last, shivering and ducking away from nothing, he had come down through the woods, avoiding the bridle trail, not wanting even to leave paw prints.
When he slipped into the stable, the horses had stared over their stalls at him with only mild interest, but the two big dogs in their closed stall had huffed and sniffed under the door, then had barked and kept barking, and in a moment he heard the door of the house open. When he looked out of the stable, redheaded Charlie Harper was coming across the yard to see what they were barking at. He’d tried to steel himself to speak to her, but he was so frightened he had ducked into the stall that held saddles, shivering, not daring even to peer out-and the next moment he was filled with guilt because his presence had brought her there.
He’d heard a vehicle approach from behind the barn where there was no road, only a horse trail. Little rocks crunching under its wheels. The dogs were barking too loudly for Charlie Harper to hear it stop quietly beyond the closed back door. But Cotton had slipped out of the saddle room’s open window and around to the back, along the side of the barn, concealing himself among the bushes as best he could considering that he was blindingly white and seldom able to hide very well.
Peering around the corner of the barn, he’d watched two men step out of an old rusty vehicle. It was the same strange, rusty car that had been near the house up in the woods beyond the ruins, where the silver-haired woman was tied up.
And these were the same two men he’d seen there, the one bulky as a bull, the other, thin with long brown hair. The two men stank the same, too. Sour sweat, and the whiskey humans drank; Cotton drew back in the bushes as they slipped around the building to the front, where the big doors stood open. Cotton followed.
The minute they saw Charlie in the stable they raced in and grabbed her, scuffling and swearing and fighting, and Charlie Harper was shouting and the dogs were barking and leaping against the stall door and the horses plunging in their stalls; the big man laughed at Charlie’s rage-then Cotton found his nerve and leaped into the thinner man’s face, clawing and biting. But the big man was gone with her, dragging her out the back door to the old car. And the thin man grabbed Cotton off his face and threw him; he landed twisting and screaming in a pile of straw.
Leaping up, he raced out the back again, to see them shove her into the back of the old car they called the Jeep, and tie her hands and feet together. They muttered and argued between themselves, then the thin man snapped, “That rotting trailer won’t hold her, you could jam your fist through those walls. Damn woman’ll kick them apart, kicks like a mule.”
“Not if we tie her up good, she won’t. Get a move on, I don’t wanna be stumbling around in the dark up there in that mess.”
“Ain’t near dark yet. And we can’t get the Jeep in there, not anywhere near enough. Have to drag her-”
“So we drag her,” the big man said. “What’s your problem?”
“She’s that cop’s wife, is what! The damn chief. You think of that, Cage! It’s a federal-”
“It ain’t no federal offense to mess with the wife of a cop, for Chrissake. That ain’t the same as-”
“How the hell do you know? You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
But Cotton heard no more. He couldn’t stop them; they could easily kill him, and then maybe no one would know what had happened to redheaded Charlie Harper, or to the gray-haired human. And Cotton knew only one thing to do. Despite his terror of the human world, he spun away out of the stable, across the yard and away through the pasture, running full out, hitting only the high spots across the open fields, heading for the village. Not only fear drove him now, but rage. Running and panting and his heart pounding too hard, the feral tom was a dazzling white streak exploding down across the brown hills, as incandescent as a small meteor. Something in Cotton, recalling his own captive misery last winter, couldn’t bear that those two women who were not like other humans were now captive and helpless. He could only pray that he could find Kit, who would know how to bring help, could only pray that he could find his way to her through the village among the confusion of houses and shops and so many moving cars and hurrying people-among all the millions of smells that would hide the scent he remembered, of the kit’s home.