The coon had belonged to a meth chemist in Albuquerque when Lathrop first made her acquaintance. Half starved, beaten, mean, she’d almost completely reverted to a feral state, living off scavenged trash and whatever rodents she could catch in and around some chicken barn her nominal owner was using as a clan lab. This was when Lathrop was still DEA, still chasing drug peddlers, trying to hold on to the belief that it was possible to keep the house upright, or at least slow its inevitable deterioration with management and control, patching holes with mortar, digging out the fungus that had invaded its timbers. His special agent’s badge pushed way up where the sun didn’t shine — no decent place to keep it clean — he’d been working deep to bust a relocated East Coast mafia squealer who’d used witness protection’s get-out-of-jail-free card as a ticket to organize a hot meth distribution syndicate out west, turning half the teenage kids in his new neighborhood into strung-out jugglers. That winner ended up in a supermax prison as a result of the sting operation, but before Lathrop called a task force down on the speed factory, he’d rushed to pay an unofficial call on the guy with the chemistry set, given him his justs for all the times he’d kicked the cat. Lathrop had tried to be environmentally responsible in his efforts to keep his visit a secret, and figured the pieces of the chemist he’d scattered across the desert might have endured to this day as shriveled droppings in abandoned vulture nests and coyote dens.
It wasn’t the first bit of personal justice Lathrop had administered before cutting ties with the agency. Nor would it be the last. But it was the only instance on which he’d gotten a new house pet to compensate for his trouble.
All taken into account, it hadn’t been a bad deal.
Lathrop could remember when Missus Frakes had loved going vicious on the yarn. She would attack without any quit, first stalking it, then batting it around with her front paws, then pouncing, tearing at it with tooth and claw until the whole thing unraveled, as if hoping to find some sort of bloody reward in the center, a steaming heart or liver that would satisfy her honed killer instincts.
There had been a time when Lathrop would have needed to rewind the long, scrambled skein of yarn within ten minutes after putting it down on the floor beside her.
The ball had been wrapped tight for days now, untouched, ignored.
Missus Frakes was getting old. Her muscles were stiff at the joints and her hindquarters dragged a little when she walked. She slept most of the day, needing help up onto the high perches she had once been able to reach with supple leaps. She hadn’t lost any of the toughness or smarts that had carried her along when she’d adapted to fending for herself, and Lathrop thought she still had what it took to make it on her own, might even hang on to that ability for a while longer… but the point always came when the senses dulled, and the reflexes slowed just enough to give an enemy the split-second chance it needed to get in under the throat.
Lathrop leaned forward on the couch, winked at the jade green eye studying him from across the room.
“We make some team,” he said, and patted his leg to invite her over. “Fellow travelers, partners in crime.”
Missus Frakes dropped her paw from her face, stretched, sat, yawned. Then she sauntered over in her listless, draggy way and came brushing up against his legs.
Lathrop stroked her back, heard and felt her purr, gently massaged the tight, stiffened muscles of her hips.
Suddenly a sharp hiss. She twisted clear of his fingertips and raked the back of his hand with her claws before he could pull away, slashing into it from wrist to knuckle.
Then she stood in front of the sofa, facing him calmly.
The scratches on his hand already burning, Lathrop looked at her and almost smiled. She’d gotten her message across loud and clear.
“That a girl,” he said. “You show me where it hurts, I’ ll be more careful about where I touch.”
Missus Frakes watched him, her motor purring again. After a moment she turned into the kitchenette with a noticeable little strut in her gait and sat down near her empty food dish.
Lathrop followed her inside, turned on the cold water, held his bleeding hand under the tap, and dabbed it with a paper towel. The furball had skinned him one good, he thought.
He held the blood-splotched paper towel to his hand a minute and disposed of it. Then he reached into an overhead cabinet for a can of moist cat food, opened the flip top, dropped it onto the trash as well. It occurred to him Missus Frakes had parked herself on potentially millions of dollars worth of high-tech swag. The cat’s ass. In a safe embedded in the flooring under one of its parquet wood tiles — bolted into the surrounding joists, its composite-steel door panel accessible only by enabling its invisible algorithmic lock with Lathrop’s credit card — sized remote control — were the gemstone case, data minidiscs, and hard copied schematics he’d acquired from Sullivan’s attaché. He was sure he’d be able to move the stones in a hurry once Avram the broker returned from his trip to the Antwerp bourse. The discs, though… what got him about the discs was that Sullivan had been telling the irrefutable truth when he’d insisted they were much more valuable with the keys than without them.
Lathrop reached for the cat’s dish, spooned some food into it.
Sullivan had been careful to a degree, but he’d never been as smart or guarded as he thought he was. He’d also had a habit of showing off — his conceit like a thin balloon, overinflated with insecurity, ready to burst at the prick of a pin. Those weaknesses had cost him that night on Wards Island, and maybe there was still a way to exploit them. Dragonfly was the score of a lifetime, and Sullivan had known it. Thought he was clever holding back the keys, too… it had been all over him. If he’d had the opportunity to open his mouth about that to someone — in his own mind, safely boast — Lathrop was betting he’d have done it.
He crouched, set the dish on the floor. He pictured the Irishman with his restored hairline, his trendy ski jacket, his top-end Jaguar sports car with its plush interior. All evidence of his vanity, meant to impress.
Who would he most want to dazzle with it… and also feel he could trust to hang on to what he’d thought would be a big piece of insurance, something that might bail him out of a jam in the event one of his after-hours transactions went bad?
Lathrop scratched Missus Frakes on the back of her neck, thinking the answer seemed much too easy.
“Pillow talk, Missus Frakes,” he said. “Sullivan was going to whisper secrets into somebody’s ear, it would have been his old lady’s.”
The cat bent her head to sniff the food in her dish and, satisfied it was to her liking, started on her meal with relish.
THREE
“How does this rock seem to you?” Roger Gordian said.
“Wait a second, I’m not sure which you mean.”
Ashley released the handles of their wheelbarrow, smacked her hands together to dust off the thick cowhide work gloves she was wearing, and stepped toward him. They were at the bottom of a shallow wash about thirty yards down from where they’d left her Land Rover below a switchback that zigzagged roughly east-west through the Santa Cruz mountains.