But she couldn’t leave her family, not yet, it wasn’t time yet to go off in the night leaving her babies for Wilma to tend.
Though she had been right about the weather. By midnight the September storm had hit Molena Point hard. The car thieves hit just as fiercely.
Again they chose the predawn hours, the black night windy and rainy, wind so powerful a cat could hardly cling to the rooftops. That whole late summer had become a grand slam for the meteorologists as they tried to explain storms that arrived months after El Niño should have come and gone.
The first report was a hijacked car. The woman driver, when officers reached her, was crying, badly bruised, and rain soaked. While medics took care of her, Max put out double patrols along the village’s hidden lanes where cottages crowded together, invisible in the dark, where all sounds were muffled beneath blowing oaks and pines. Ten cars were robbed between three and four in the morning while the village slept; ten cars robbed, five more stolen.
The next night in the predawn hours patrols were increased, prowling the tangled neighborhoods with their twisting roads among the woods but with expensive cars parked behind houses and in narrow carports; and of course no streetlights, Molena Point did not have streetlights.
But this night, Joe Grey and Kit and Pan didn’t follow the cops, they chose the very places where police patrols were thinnest, just in the center of the village. Staying to the most open streets, they separated across the dark rooftops, Joe Grey taking one route while Kit and Pan took another, all three of them straining to hear, over the wind, any sound of a wrench on metal or of breaking glass. The rain increased, the wind fierce as a tornado. Kit thought she heard Joe Grey shout, but couldn’t see him, couldn’t tell what he was saying. Had he even seen the stolen car that she and Pan had been watching, had he seen the man hide it? Or had Joe come from the other direction? And now she’d lost sight of Pan. Clinging to the shingles, she searched the dark for both tomcats and searched for the vanished thief, the wind slamming her face so hard she thought it would tear out her whiskers.
3
Kit clung to the rooftop, wind lashing her black and brown fur, flattening her ears and whipping her fluffy tail. Creeping along on her belly, digging her claws into the shingles, she watched the dark shadow below that she and Pan had followed—but now she followed alone, she’d lost Pan. As she turned to look behind her, the wind slammed her so hard she thought it would throw her to the sidewalk. Joe Grey had said the gale would come harder, close to dawn, that it would grow so violent that she and Pan had better be off the roofs early.
But they hadn’t listened to Joe.
Right now the gray tomcat was most likely safe at home wondering where they were, ready to come out again looking for them. So far they’d seen only the one breakin, the lone, dark-clad figure jimmying a white car and starting it, driving away so slowly they were able to follow him. Only three blocks away they had watched garage lights come on, the driver getting out to swing the old-style garage door open. He’d driven in, gotten out, they’d had one good glimpse of his back, heavyset, a black jacket. They’d watched the lights go out as he shut the door. Hiding that nice BMW? Or did he live here, was this his house? They didn’t think so, the way he was prowling around it now, even if he did have a garage key. And then she’d lost Pan—a minute ago they’d been together. Now, not a sign of the red tabby—when she turned back to look for him the twisting wind hit her face so hard it choked her. Come on, Pan! She cringed lower, searching—wishing they had listened to Joe Grey. Did Pan have to linger, snooping around that house? They knew where the car was, they could report it later, could call the law in a little while.
She dug her claws harder into the crusty shingles as the wind, like great hands, tried to throw her straight down to the sidewalk. Wind made the moonlight race and shift, that’s how they’d first seen him walking the street stopping to look at each car, a darkly dressed man caught in moving streaks of light. A broad man, not fat but heavily muscled under his padded jacket. A hard-looking man, dark cap pulled down against the weather or against recognition.
Having ditched the sleek white BMW and locked the garage padlock, he had moved close to the house, pressing his ear to the wall where, from the size of the windows and the drawn shades, there might be a bedroom. He’d stood listening. He looked angry when he turned away and headed for the front door. Taking another key from his pocket, he unlocked it and slipped inside.
He was gone only a few minutes before storming out again and taking off up the street. That’s when Kit followed him; she glanced back once to see Pan, too, listening at the bedroom wall. Kit didn’t go back, she stayed close to the thief, clinging to the roofs, wondering where he would make his next hit. He was only two blocks from Joe Grey’s house and she thought about Clyde’s vintage Jaguar in the drive, and Ryan’s nice truck with all her tools, Skilsaws, and building equipment secured in the back and in the side lockers, her long ladder chained on top. Don’t let him steal the Damens’ vehicles, don’t let him hit the Damens’ house.
Instead he headed up the side street, stopping again at each parked car, whether at the curb or in a driveway. He tried each car door to see if it was unlocked, then tried the various tools he carried; moonlight caught at a long slim blade, at several keys that, she guessed, might have been shaved, at other tools that bulged from his pockets. He avoided some of the newest cars with their sophisticated alarm systems. He carried a duffel bag—if he did get a car open but couldn’t start it, he rummaged through, stole whatever he wanted, dropped it in the bag, and left.
Strange, though. He seemed to have stolen the BMW with no trouble. He’d had keys to the garage and house, though he didn’t act like he lived there, he was too sneaky as he entered and then slipped away. And now, up the side street another man appeared, a tall, slim shadow moving within patches of blowing moonlight; he stood beside a sleek new sports car, looking down at his hands—operating some device. It didn’t take long, he had the door open, and slid into the driver’s seat. A few more minutes, he started the engine and drove away, cool as you please, turning right at the next corner. They’d seen only two men, but this was a larger gang than that. Where are the others? And why does this one have more sophisticated equipment than the other?
All summer Kit and Pan and Joe Grey had prowled the rooftops at two and three in the morning watching for the car thieves. Often they had seen plainclothes officers in the shadows of the streets below, and several arrests were made; but the thieves must have had replacements. They would work Molena Point for several nights, then would move north. A few days in one place, then gone again to another town, their movements so evenly spaced that their operation became a guessing game for local TV and small-town papers: Which town would be next?
Molena Point was only a mile square, the streets so crowded with cottages, the yards so dense with bushes and fences and giant trees—and no streetlights to pick out a prowler—that it was hard for cops, or even cats, to spot a thief. Sometimes, if there was moonlight, the cats got a license number or a make and model. More times clouds covered the moon, or the breakin was accomplished in black alleys between buildings or in the thick shadows of sprawling cypress branches. The first week the cats had worked this gig, they had reported five cars with dark-clothed men prowling around them, but by the time they reached a phone the vehicles were gone.