Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues (2 page)

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Authors: Blaize Clement

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I said, “Oh, excuse me,” and beat a fast retreat, knowing all the time that Tom would feel bad at the way I acted, but not able to do anything about that, either. I didn’t even hang Billy Elliot’s leash in the hall closet before I left, just left it sloppily looped over the arm of a chair.
The nasty truth was that I was jealous. Not like a woman jealous that another woman is with a man she wants, but jealous that Tom had found the strength to let his old love go and be happy with somebody new. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to do that, and I was afraid I would self-destruct if I didn’t—and soon.
An hour later, the sky was beginning to go lemon as I led a miniature beagle from her driveway to the sidewalk. Funny how I remember the moment so well, as if that were the real beginning of all the awfulness to come. It wasn’t, of course, but it seemed so at the time.
A flurry of fish crows flew overhead, and the beagle and I both looked up to watch their flight. Either by accident or design, I was never sure which, a miniature English bulldog careened around the hedge by the driveway and almost collided with the beagle. The bulldog was white, with a brown hand-sized mark on his back, another covering his right eye, and a wrinkled, squashed face so ugly it was adorable. The two miniature dogs lunged toward each other like long-lost cousins, with lots of tail-wagging and butt-sniffing and leash-tangling.
At the other end of the bulldog’s leash was a tall woman whose back and shoulders were so erect and squared that the open smile she gave me was a little surprising. By the time we’d got the dogs separated and
they were at our feet panting and grinning—and drooling, in the bulldog’s case—the woman and I were as friendly as the dogs, except without the tail-wagging and butt-sniffing.
I guessed her about five years older than me, which would make her around thirty-seven, with the long-boned, athletic, Katharine-Hepburn-type beauty that always makes me feel short and dumpy. She was wearing jeans and a hooded gray sweatshirt that hid her hair, but I had the impression the hair was dark, like her eyes. I noticed she wore the same kind of Keds I wore, the washable kind you can get at Sears for twenty bucks. The only unusual thing about her was that she had a nervous way of looking over her shoulder, and her dark eyes tended to dart from side to side as she talked, as if she were checking to see if somebody lurked behind the thick foliage lining the street.
In one of those husky voices that make every word sound full of portent, she said, “I guess the cooler weather has made Ziggy friskier. He’s usually not so aggressive.”
“Your dog’s name is Ziggy?”
She laughed. “Ziggy Stardust, actually. I’m a big David Bowie fan.”
“That’s the second time I’ve heard about a pet named Ziggy.”
Her smile flashed again. “Another dog?”
“No, an iguana.”
“Really? How interesting. But you’ve just
heard
about him? You haven’t seen him?”
“Not yet. I’m on my way there now.”
“Okay, that’s good. Well, see you later then.”
She jerked on the bulldog’s leash and ran off in the
direction she’d come. Halfway down the block, she stooped and picked the bulldog up and broke into a hard run. At the end of the block, she turned the corner and disappeared, and in a minute or two I saw a dark sedan drive from the direction she’d gone.
The beagle and I continued our walk, but I felt uneasy. One of the cardinal rules of professional pet sitting is not to carry gossip from one client to another. I don’t tell one cat owner that somebody else’s cat vomited up decapitated lizard on a guest’s shoes. I don’t tell when somebody’s valuable stud dog failed in his studly duties when presented with a voluptuous bitch in heat. I keep all those things to myself, both because it’s confidential information and because I’m not the kind of person who runs around telling everything I know.
But I had a nagging feeling that I had just betrayed a confidence in telling the woman that I was going to see an iguana named Ziggy. I also had a nagging feeling that she had been ever so deliberately mining me for information, and that I’d given her what she wanted. Even worse, in retrospect I was beginning to think our encounter hadn’t been an accident at all but that she’d been waiting for me to come out. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut about the coincidence of two pets named Ziggy. I felt as if I had given away an important secret.
That was such a nutty, paranoid idea, I took it as evidence that I had lost some ground in the move toward complete sanity.
Still, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t plotting against you.
After I left the beagle’s house, I started retracing my way south, calling on cats. No matter what kind of pet
it is, I always do a fast check to make sure they haven’t had any embarrassing accidents or done anything naughty to get attention, then I spend about thirty minutes concentrating on them as the unique individuals they are. I feed them, exercise them, groom them, and do whatever else they need to feel special. Pets are like people; their need to feel important is as great as their need for food and water. Before I leave, I turn on their favorite TV station. When I tell them goodbye, they always look happier than they did when I arrived. That may not seem like a great accomplishment to a lot of people, but I like knowing I’ve made somebody happier, even if the somebody has four legs.
The exception was Muddy Cramer, who never seemed happy no matter what I did. Muddy’s full name was Mud Fence, because when he was found huddled in the Cramers’ backyard, Mark Cramer had declared him ugly as one. Muddy was a two- or three-year-old mixed breed shorthair whose tailless rump indicated an ancestor in the Manx family. He had a dull orange and black tortoiseshell coat, one of his ears had been partially chewed off, and his left eye squinted like a Caribbean pirate’s.
Instead of showing gratitude for being rescued from the wild, Muddy seemed hell-bent to test his humans’ loyalty. He sprayed the curtains, upchucked on the carpet, and clawed the furniture. The Cramers loved him anyway, which proves that love is not only blind, it also can’t smell. I always carried my quart bottle of Anti-Icky-Poo spray to Muddy’s house to neutralize the urine odors, but it was an uphill battle.
I left Muddy’s house feeling sad for both Muddy and
his humans—and thinking there is nothing in the world that smells worse than male cat pee. The sky had darkened, and the rain clouds that had seemed hours away were moving in fast. Nuts. I still had several pets to call on, and if there was anything I didn’t need today, it was to get caught on my bike in a cold rain.
Home was just a couple of miles away, so I headed that way to get the Bronco, but I was too late. In seconds, driving rain was slamming me hard, and passing cars were ever so slightly hydroplaning on the oil-slick asphalt. Terrific. I was not only soaked, I could be hit by a flying car.
One of the sucky things about life is that your problems always begin with choices you make. Even worse, you usually know a bad choice when you make it, but you barrel on with it anyway. I had one of those moments when I came to a bricked driveway and saw a small guardhouse set well back from the street. We don’t have many private guardhouses on Siesta Key, so I knew this one was there to preserve the seclusion of somebody who was either very wealthy or very famous or both. I didn’t know the owner of that place. I didn’t know the guard working in the guardhouse, and private guardhouses aren’t known for being refuges for people caught in rainstorms. I knew all that. Nevertheless, I pedaled toward it. With luck, there would be a guard who would let me come inside and wait out the storm. If not, I thought I could at least huddle under its roof overhang until the rain stopped.
Bad choice number one. Or maybe it was number two or three. It’s always hard to trace back to the true start of things.
As I drew closer, I could see the square window in the side of the guardhouse was open. Good. That meant a living person was inside, not a voice box manned from some other location.
The main house was beyond a tall areca palm hedge, and that was good too, because if a kind guard befriended me, his employers wouldn’t be able to see.
With my mouth half open to charm the guard into helping me, I rode under the roof’s overhang and looked through the open window. Then my mouth snapped shut and I jerked my bike to make a U-turn back to the street.
No way was I getting involved in what I saw. No way was I going to have anything to do with it. The last time I’d seen something like that, I had ended up killing somebody before he killed me. Uh-uh, no way. I wasn’t doing it again.
I think I may have actually spoken out loud to the rain. I think I may have actually said, “I don’t care! Somebody else can handle this! Not me!”
The guard was sprawled in his chair with an ugly red welt running up his cheek and a contact bullet hole in his left temple. It could have been a suicide, but I had a bad feeling that somebody had pressed the barrel of a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.
No matter how it had happened, the man was dead, dead, dead, and it didn’t make any difference how soon his death was reported, he was still going to be dead.
At the end of the driveway, my conscience made me come to a guilty stop. Inside the hidden house, somebody might be looking down the barrel of a gun held by the person who’d shot the guard. Somebody’s life
might be saved if I called 911 and reported what I’d seen.
While I teetered between conscience and cowardice, a dark blue panel truck pulled into the driveway and sped toward the guardhouse. Within two nanoseconds, I was on Midnight Pass Road and pedaling like hell toward home, not minding the cold rain at all now, just glad that somebody else would see the murdered guard and call 911.
As if to let me know that my decision to stop at the guardhouse had been not only stupid but unnecessary, the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. By the time I got home, the sun was shining and all the clouds were moving toward the southeast. My brother was out on his deck, wiping water off the plank table. As I started up the stairs to my apartment he turned and yelled.
“Anybody ever tell you not to play in the rain?”
I gave him the finger and kept slogging up the stairs in my wet Keds.
My brother is Michael. He’s two years older than me, which makes him thirty-four, and he’s been feeding me and taking care of me since I was two and our mother decided that the demands of motherhood—like putting food on the table and staying with her children—weren’t her favorite way to spend a life.
Michael is a blond, blue-eyed firefighter with the Sarasota Fire Department, so good-looking that women tend to arch their backs like cats in heat in his presence. Fat lot of good it does them. He’s been with Paco for over twelve years, and they’re as committed to each other as the pope is to celibacy.
Paco is also thirty-four, also a dreamboat that women
vainly drool over. As dark and slim as Michael is broad and blond, he’s with the Sarasota County Special Forces Unit, which means he does undercover work, often in disguises that even I don’t recognize. Michael and Paco live next door in the frame house where Michael and I grew up with our grandparents after our parents left us. They’re my closest friends in the whole world. I don’t like to admit it, but I’m not sure I would have survived without them after Todd and Christy were killed.
Using the remote to raise the hurricane shutters, I unlocked the French doors to my minuscule living room, left my wet Keds on the porch, and padded barefoot over the Mexican tile to the bathroom, shedding clothes as I went. My apartment is small—living roomkitchen with a one-person eating bar, bedroom barely big enough for a single bed and dresser, tiny bathroom next to a narrow laundry room with stacked appliances. But I have a large closet with a desk on one side and my T-shirts and shorts stacked on shelves on the other side. I like the fact that my living space is spare and utilitarian without any unnecessary color or life. It suits me just fine.
Or at least it used to. Lately I’d been feeling a tad cramped.
I stood in a hot shower until my skin was rosy all over, but it didn’t make me feel normal. Instead, I felt more and more disappointed in myself. I might not be a deputy anymore, but I was a human being, and it had been wrong to run from the scene of a murder. Maybe the driver of the panel truck had done the same thing.
Maybe he had cut and run too, and the guard was still sprawled in his chair with that strange angry weal on his cheek and a bullet hole in his temple.
Avoiding my eyes in the bathroom mirror, I screwed my damp hair into a ponytail. Then I padded to the kitchen and put on water to make tea. While I waited for the kettle to boil, I put a Patsy Cline CD on the player. Sometimes I listen to Roy Orbison and sometimes to Ella, but mostly I listen to Patsy because she never lets me down. I can feel like buzzards are roosting in my brain, and Patsy’s straight-at-you, tell-it-like-it-is, love-wasted transparency makes me feel like the world isn’t such a bad place after all.
I carried my tea to my combination office-closet, where I pulled on clean underwear, a pair of faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and fresh Keds. Then I sat down at the desk and pretended to be businesslike. I checked the answering machine, but it was still too early in the morning for business calls. I squared up some pieces of paper. Then I went back to the bathroom and brushed my teeth again, even though I’d done it earlier at four o’clock. It didn’t sweeten the nasty taste of guilt in my mouth. Even with Patsy Cline belting out lyrics designed to make life seem simple, right now mine seemed more complicated than I could handle.
In my head, I heard a voice quoting the Bible—or maybe it was Shakespeare—“Let the dead bury the dead,” which doesn’t make any sense at all when you think of it, but then nothing was making much sense right then, least of all me.
I still had a couple of cats and the iguana to take
care of, so I grabbed my backpack, went out the French doors, and clattered down the stairs while the remote lowered the storm shutters behind me.

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