When he was ready, he said,“Can you get him to sit up? I’d like a straight-on shot.”
Ingrid lifted D.C. and shoved his haunches into place, but when she let go he sank like a heap of jelly. She tried again, coaxing him and rubbing his ears.“I guess he’s weak from hunger. I’ll get him something to eat.”
After she left the room, Zeke tried to prop the cat up.“Come, kitty, please, kitty,” he said in his most endearing tone. “Nice cat, nice cat.” D.C. reared back and hissed and spat. He recognized a hypocrite when he saw one, and brother, here was one.
“Why you little so-and-so,” Zeke muttered under his breath. “Just you try that again.”
Ingrid returned unexpectedly, bearing a dish of canned cat food. She said coldly,“I heard you swearing. I didn’t think an FBI agent ? “
“I was not swearing. I was using some perfectly good king’s English to work off a few repressions.”
“Don’t you like cats?”
“I love them.” He sneezed again. “Honest to goodness, I love them.” Allah forgive me, he thought, and J. Edgar Hoover, and the Kennedy brothers.
“I don’t think if you’re a dog man Patti will like you. She can’t stand dog men. We’ve got a neighbor across the street ? he’s awful nice ? but Patti can’t stand him because he has a dachshund, and this dachshund comes over all the time to our apricot tree, and the tree is dying, and Patti, who never gets mad about anything, says she’s going to call the police or the fire department or someone.”
She asked unexpectedly,“Do you have a dog?”
“No, not now. I did, a long time ago.”
He had been six that Christmas when his father brought the collie pup home, and Zeke had named him Tom after an old, gnarled ranch hand. The collie had grown up along with Zeke. For seven years they roamed the hills and canyons together, and went to a country school where the teacher didn’t mind a dog curled up under a desk. Then one morning Zeke got up to find Tom missing, and went calling him. He found him behind the clump of dark red oleanders, by the corral, shot by an unknown prowler. Two of the ranch hands helped Zeke bury him under a cottonwood, and Zeke carved Tom’s name with his pocketknife across a fence board and put it up as a marker. The last time he was home, two years ago, he had sauntered down to the cottonwood and propped up the marker that years of wind and rain had toppled.
Zeke was proud of the strategy he worked out for taking D.C.‘s picture. It proved, he told Ingrid, that man was smarter than a cat, a moot point in certain circles. It was all a matter of timing. Under Zeke’s instructions, Ingrid lifted the plate of cat food to a calculated point in the air, and D.C. pushed himself up on his haunches to reach for it. He did this only after a certain amount of rumination. He took into consideration, with a glance through narrowed eyes at Zeke, that this might prove a trick. But the smell of fish was strong, and he figured he could trust his girl.
As he reached for the plate, Ingrid withdrew it, and in that second before D.C. could follow it, Zeke took his picture.
The flash momentarily blinded them. Afterwards, in telling his fellow agents about it, Zeke credited D.C. with pulling off the fastest cat-disappearing act in history. One second he was on the bed reaching for the dish, and the next he had vanished. Talk about genii. This cat had a built-in one.
“I should’ve taken his prints first,” Zeke said regretfully.
After a brief search they found D.C. under the bed where he dared them to come after him. The FBI be hanged. Ingrid, on her knees, tried to reach him, but he only backed off, looking hurt. It was getting so you couldn’t trust anyone.
“I can’t go all the way under,” she said, looking up at Zeke from a position that reversed the head and derriere. “I’ll get dirty and Patti will murder me. I’m supposed to keep my room as clean as Mom does while she’s gone.”
She offered a suggestion.“If you get on the other side, and we both use our arms, one of us can grab him.”
Zeke took off his coat and unholstered note 5 his gun, placing it carefully on the bed. He suppressed an overwhelming urge to use it. He got down on his hands and knees with all of the caution and prudence a man should show when setting forth on a tiger hunt. The thought sped swiftly in and out that if he should be injured, say with a slash across the face, he would find it difficult to explain exactly how it happened in the memo the Bureau would require. And from D.C.‘s expression, it was evident that D.C. intended to scar him for life.
D.C. asked no quarter, and had no intention of giving any. He was in the same position that a man would be with two elephants closing in. The fact that he was small had never occurred to him, nor that he was outweighed many times over. And while he was angry to the point of murder with Zeke, he was furious and hurt that Ingrid would give aid and comfort to the enemy.
“You ready?” Ingrid shouted, looking under the bed as Zeke’s eyes found the level of hers.
“I guess so.” If a dangerous killer had lain in wait there, Zeke would have known what to do. The FBI Academy in Quantico had coached him thoroughly about how to handle such situations. But he had no idea how to apprehend this unco-operative informant. He readily perceived that if he grabbed him, he might lose a hand.
Ingrid’s hair fell over her tilted, puckish face. “We’ll have to go for him at the same time, and fast, and back him toward the wall.”
“I’ll count to three.”
On three, they both lunged. D.C. was in a weakened condition, of course, since he had had no breakfast. But he still had sufficient strength to slash out with the speed of a Samoan knife thrower. Zeke stood his prone position with courage, and while he missed capturing D.C., possibly because of the blood running down his hand, he forced D.C. in Ingrid’s direction where she got a hammer lock on D.C.‘s hind leg. She pulled him out and took him into her arms, mumbling soothing words. But D.C. would have none of them. He glared unmercifully at her, utterly and forever disowning her. He gave her a swift kick with his hind leg, strong as a crossbow, a maneuver which propelled him halfway across the room. She frowned and asked, “Do you have to take his paw prints? I just don’t know ? “
Then she saw the blood, and crossed the narrow hall to the bathroom. She returned with a wet towel and a tube of antiseptic paste, and doctored Zeke over his protests that it was nothing at all, which it was.
“I’ve got to get his prints,” Zeke said determinedly. Unlike the photograph, though, this involved actual physical contact, and the Bureau would insist on good sportsmanship? He dared not use knockout pills or chloroform.
D.C.‘s attitude changed inexplicably. He sat on Ingrid’s little gold chair, before the make-up table, and washed himself. He was following Paul Gallico’s perceptive observation: When in doubt, wash.
From a brief case Zeke brought forth an ink pad and several blank fingerprint cards. Each had ten spaces. Through eyes swollen half shut he studied one of the cards, uncertain where to place D.C.‘s paw print. He decided that it should go in the space set aside for the thumb.
Ingrid’s glance hopped from the ink pad to her white bedspread and white carpet, and she suggested they fingerprint D.C. in the bathroom. Zeke hesitated, suddenly conscious that Ingrid was very much a woman ? lovely, sweet, uncomplicated. He had no idea how they could become so calculating and devious by twenty-five.
She stood in the doorway, looking quizzically at him, with D.C. in her arms. He thought of the Bureau. Oh, what the blazes, he decided; he’d already broken enough regulations to get himself deported to Wake Island .
In the bathroom she dumped D.C. into the blue tub before D.C. could assimilate that he was in this room only for an evil purpose. What a lousy, dirty trick to put him into something he couldn’t get his claws into.