Two more police cars arrived, pulling up in front of the brightly lit houses. He could see half a dozen uniforms searching the yards, their flashlight beams cutting into the shadows of trees and bushes. Their predatory search panicked him. Helplessly watching, wanting only to get away, he turned nervously to attend to the flat tire.
He didn’t want to use the flashlight, not with all those cops down there, one of them was sure to look up the hill, and they’d be on him like a bunch of damned commandos. He hadn’t changed a tire in years. He found the spare under the floor in the back, just inside the door, but it took him a while to figure out how to release it. She’d tripped up there, not to have gone over the manual with him. In all the five years they’d had the RV, parked in that rented garage or off on short trips, the tires had never even gone soft on them, and they’d sure never had a flat.
When he released the spare and bounced it, it was soft, too. It took him awhile to find the hand pump. He was almost convinced there wasn’t one, until at last he found it down in the well where the tire had been housed, jammed way to hell down under the bracket for the jack and other tire tools.
He got the tire pumped up, his heart pounding, his breath short. After two tries, he got the jack set, lying under the RV so he’d be sure to get it right under the axle. He’d started to jack up the vehicle when he remembered he hadn’t set the brake, or loosened the lugs before taking the weight off. He had to ease the wheel down again, set the brake, then start over, and that angered him.
When he removed the nuts, he nearly lost them before he thought to put them in his pocket. He hadn’t changed a tire since he was in his teens. The one time more recently that her car had had a flat, he’d called AAA, had let the emergency road crew do it. Tires didn’t go flat now like they had years ago.
He was sweating and nervous when he finished, anxious to get away. When he looked over the edge, the cops were still all over the place. He thought he saw the chief of police, Harper. And the woman who ran the cleaning service, that was his wife. Regular family affair. He could see that woman detective, too. For an instant he felt a belly-wrenching fear that somehow they knew he was up there watching them. But that was stupid. He was tired, that was all. Worn out from changing the tire, breathing hard. He needed that inhaler. Turning away, he checked the lug nuts again, but they were tight. He’d screwed them on hastily in the dark, wanting to rest. It had taken the last of his breath to get them all good and tight.
Shoving the wheel he’d removed into the back of the RV and laying the tools beside it, he carefully eased the door closed so it made hardly a click. His hands shaking, he got in, started the engine, and headed slowly up the dark street using only his parking lights. Squinting through the windshield at the sheer drop, he saw again in uncomfortable memory that pale cat staring in the window at him, watching him bury her, watching him lay her down in the grave and clumsily scoop earth over her, shovel by slow shovelful. He couldn’t stop thinking that the cat knew he had killed her.
When he was around the first bend, he switched on the headlights. Driving slowly across the hills, his thoughts were filled with the inhaler that he seemed to see clearly now, sitting on that contractor’s worktable among the hammers and screwdrivers. Driving the dark and winding residential road toward the freeway, he turned right at the top of the hill, crossed over the freeway, and headed for the empty remodel.
This time, he parked right in front of the place, right beside the dirt pile. He’d be there only a minute. The houses below were all dark, not one light; he’d just pick the lock, get the inhaler, and he’d be out again and gone.
Letting himself in, he searched the table, then the dirty floor under the table. The inhaler wasn’t there. He stood at the edge of the pit shining the flashlight’s beam back and forth across the raw earth, but he picked out only the black drainpipe and the boot prints. He turned to search the rest of the garage, along the wall where he’d sat on the floor, everywhere he’d been; once in a while he glanced up at the broken window, thinking about that cat, hoping he’d killed it.
The window remained empty, the cold air scudding in. He didn’t find the inhaler. The cat didn’t appear again. At last, trying to figure out where he could have left it, he locked up again and headed for the RV, taking a moment to circle the yard to see if he might somehow have dropped it there. Cupping his hand around the flashlight, directing only a thin beam onto the ground, he approached the broken window. Across the lumber and on the earth around it, shards of broken glass blazed up at him, scattered among deep paw prints. For an instant, he lifted his beam to the window.
As his light hit the sharp teeth of glass, the pale cat exploded out of the blackness straight into his face, its eyes ablaze, its pale fur standing out like licks of white flame. It landed in his face, raking and biting him. He stumbled backward and fell, and a second cat was on him, cats all over him in a tangle clawing him, so many cats their weight held him down. They screamed and raked him and the pale cat was right in his face. The dark cat with a white stripe down its nose was at him, too, so fierce he was terrified they’d blind him. Blood ran into his eyes. Wild with terror, he drove them off enough to stagger up and run, cats clinging to his back and shoulders and throat. As he knocked them away, he could swear he heard a voice say, “Leave him, let him go.” He spun around to see who was there, saw no one in the blackness. He’d dropped the flashlight, its beam shining uselessly along the ground picking out shards of glass. The cats had drawn back but they crouched on the lumber pile as if to leap again. He ran and stumbled and nearly fell again as he made for the RV. Flinging open the door, he bolted in, slammed and locked it, leaned against it, shaking.
Someone was out there, someone had spoken, but he’d seen no one. Fearing a witness, he started the engine and took off with a squeal of tires, heading for the highway.
32
THE TRUCK HAD backed up to the garage of the remodel, ready to dump its gravel. Joe, Dulcie, and Kit, watching from the tall grass on the hill above, shifted from paw to paw, and every few minutes Joe Grey reared up, scanning the road below. Still there was no sign of Ryan.
The pickup belonging to the two Latino laborers was parked beside Scotty’s pickup, the two men sat in the cab smoking cigarettes, waiting to haul gravel and spread it evenly across the pit. Only Ryan could stop the work, she was the only person the cats could tell, her uncle Scott didn’t know the cats’ secret. Though Joe thought that with his heritage, with that mysterious turn of mind the Scots-Irish seemed to have, the truth might not come as such a shock. But they didn’t need anyone else to know, too many people already shared their secret.
Watching for Ryan, fidgeting nervously, Joe knew he should have gone home, should have woken her before dawn and told her to stop the deliveries, told her what the gravel and cement would be burying.
None of the three cats had been home. After they attacked the killer, they and the feral band had spent the few remaining hours until dawn licking bruises and hurt places on their bodies, licking blood from their cut paws and carefully pulling out small shards of glass with their teeth. Glass that they’d dropped into a little hole and covered over, as they would cover anything vile. As the first light of dawn grayed the sky, most of the ferals had headed home smiling with pleasure at their night’s adventure; Sage’s retribution had been sweet. Only Sage and Tansy had remained with the village cats, Sage wanting to see what would happen next. He and Tansy rested higher up the hill, well hidden among the weeds and grass.