by M. A. Owens
Marty and I looked at one another. Here comes the strange.
“Pretty sure Trigger just gave you a few explanations,” Marty said. “Besides, we ain’t got all day. You convince Trigger that you’re being straight with us, and you’ll convince me too. It’s that easy. So, how about you answer the question,” Marty said, cracking his knuckles. So much for following my lead, but maybe I needed to follow his on this one. This meeting was really starting to stink. He was stalling, and we let ourselves be stalled for too long.
“Let’s go, Marty. This is a waste of time. Guess he’s been ignored too long and just wanted someone else to rant to. Let him find someone else.”
“Oh, I think an audience of four is plenty, don’t you?” Hans said, rising to his feet.
Great. Why can’t I be wrong, just once?
“Yes, four should be enough,” two voices came from behind us, almost simultaneously. Where had they been? Didn’t matter now. They were here, and I should have gotten us out of here sooner. Now, it was too late. Three cats against two dogs, and the cats knew funky martial arts.
“This time, Trigger,” Hans said, rubbing his paws together, smiling widely. “There won’t be any Lady coming to your rescue.”
“You sure about that, Hans? I cut a deal with Marty. Maybe I cut a deal with her too, and she’s waiting around the corner.”
“Hah! Enough of your tricks, detective. Lee. Lou. Kill them!” he shouted. All three advanced toward us. Lee and Lou from behind, Hans from the front, and no way out of this cell except through them. This just kept getting better and better.
10
Lucky for Marty and I, we’d both been expecting this from the start, or at least knew it was a possibility. I probably counted on it being more of a possibility than Marty.
“What do you think, Trigger? Two on three. I just hate how unfair it is.”
“Oh, boo hoo,” Hans said, rubbing his paws together.
“For you,” Marty finished, pointing at Hans. “See if you can stay on your feet for a couple of minutes, Trigger, while I take care of this big mouth. Only ever let one target escape, and I won’t let it happen again.”
Hey, at least I knew the target he was talking about.
Lou or… Lee? I had no idea which cat was which. They were twins, and they both looked as ugly as a burned piece of wrinkled fish. Lady made quick work of them, but I was sure I couldn’t. But, one thing I was even more sure of, is that it wouldn’t be from lack of trying.
One twin made a grab for my arm, but I stepped back, leaving him with air. He seemed surprised. I didn’t remember them being this slow before. Prison life must not have been good to them. I stepped back into a punch, which he tried to dodge. He was unsuccessful, and I caught him across the jaw, sending him staggering backward. His brother stepped in and caught him to prevent him from falling.
“I see someone’s been training!” the unpunched cat shouted.
“I think you’ve just gotten slower. Come on. Surely you can do better than that,” I said, putting my fists back up again with a grin. Maybe it was watching Kerdy, Brutus, Fire Claws, and other skilled fighters in action so long, that maybe I’d picked up a thing or two from them.
I wanted to look over my shoulder, to see what was happening with all the commotion behind me, but that would be asking for a one-hit kind of cheap shot.
They both came in this time, one from the left, one from the right. Cat from the right came in with a knee, the one from the left with a hook on a quick trip to my jaw. No way I could dodge both attacks. This wasn’t right. Why were they slower? Noticeably slower. You don’t get rusty that quick, and I hadn’t exactly been training hard since the last time I met them.
I blocked the hook but caught the knee to my ribs. It knocked out a bit of my breath. I stayed standing, grabbing onto his leg from behind his knee and lunging forward in a headbutt. It caught him in the nose, and he started bleeding on the floor.
“What is this? Some kind of joke? How is he doing that?” one brother said to the other. Okay, so it wasn’t just me. Whatever was happening, I wasn’t about to complain. It had better keep happening or Marty and I were dead meat if we weren’t already.
They were quick to recover, coming at me again with another simultaneous attack, one making a spinning sweep with his legs, and the other falling into an elbow that I assumed would hit me when I landed exactly where I was supposed to. Despite them being slower than usual, the sweep still caught, and I landed on my back, hard, on the concrete floor. Even my head bounced, but I didn’t lose consciousness. I glimpsed Marty and Hans when I fell. Marty’s face had been rearranged thoroughly, but he’d just gotten a hold on Hans he couldn’t fight out of, and Marty was squeezing him hard in a tight hug.
The elbow caught me in the gut, but I’d expected it, so I’d tensed my stomach, hoping to lessen the blow. I gasped as he connected, blowing out the air that was in my lungs, and followed Marty’s lead by grabbing him before he could get back to his feet. I wrapped my paw under one of his arms, and around his neck, clasping my paws together in front of him. I squeezed with everything in me. He grunted, and I could feel crunching and popping beneath my arms.
“Get—” he gasped again. “Get him off me, brother!”
The other cat scrambled to the floor, trying to pry my arms off his brother, but without success. I could feel him fighting less and less the longer I squeezed. He was about to go to sleep, and it would just be me and whichever ugly brother was left. He jumped to his feet and started kicking me in the back, the head, the arms. Wherever he could land blows. Eventually, they took their toll, and I had to get to my feet.
Marty had just lost his grip on Hans, who had kept hitting him the whole time. Marty’s attack had left him hurting and took all his previous enthusiasm and extinguished it. Like water on a fire.
“Hey!” a shout came from outside the cell, as several guards rushed in and began pulling us apart.
Having been a cop, I knew this game well. The first one to speak up had an enormous advantage over the one who spoke next. Whoever framed the events first was the winner, more often than not. I snapped at the chance.
“We were working on their cell door, and they asked us to come back later. Maybe we should’ve, but we were afraid we’d forget, so we insisted on doing it now. Argument just escalated. I guess you could say we started it, but they didn’t have to attack us.”
Hans opened his mouth, but Marty cut him off. “Yeah, officer. This is our job. Supervisor said we better get enough work done, or he’d stick one of us back to tying knots in the rope room. We didn’t want any trouble. Honest!”
The officer looked to Hans and the two brothers.
Checkmate, idiots. What are they supposed to say? That they invited us here, claiming they were the ones trying to escape?
The three of them stood silently. If any of them could come up with something to say, it was Hans, but he was at a loss for once.
“Nothing to say for yourselves, huh?” the officer said. “Alright, then the three of you can pull all day duty in the rope room tomorrow. Oh, and you’re sleeping in the cool down cell tonight. A nap on the cold floor ought to make you thankful the supervisor even allows prisoners to maintain the floor at all. Maybe I’ll talk to the supervisor about sending you down a level.”
Hans dropped to his knees and nodded for the other two to do the same. “Sorry, we must have misunderstood why they were here. We thought they were lying because they’re both new. We thought they were going to steal our belongings. Now we see we’ve made a mistake, and they were telling the truth. Please, accept our apologies. We would not dare disrespect Floor Supervisor Dan, who treats us far better than we deserve.”
That got to him. Why was he this terrified to go down a floor below?
Oh, right. Mr. B. Except I’d take my chances with Mr. B over Lady any day. It really must be true that she’s been ignoring them. Why? I was forming a theory at least.
“Alright, that’s enough.
Stop that and get up. Apologize to these two, and I might put in a good word to the supervisor for you. Still gotta report all this anyway, and all of you have to see the nurse right now.” His eyes lingered on me for a moment. “What did you do, sit most of it out? You’ve barely got a scratch on you.”
“My one and only talent in life is avoiding getting killed, officer. Sad to say. I stink at pretty much everything else,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, well, keep this up and even that kind of luck won’t keep you going for long.” A second, far more intimidating guard stepped beside him. “Alright, troublemakers, to the nurse’s station. You make one wrong move on the way there and you’ll get to hear her scold me for adding to her workload. That clear?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, followed by the others.
No one spoke, or even looked at one another the entire way there, the entire time we were being treated, and after they released us. Hans learned his lesson, I hoped, but this was problematic. If it was one of my old friends orchestrating the escape attempts, it had to be one of the hermits, either Fernando or Lady. What was my dough on? Definitely Lady. Unless one of the escape attempts was to impress the guards with historical knowledge or to give them art world advice, which wasn’t the case.
Before I made it two steps out of the nurse’s office, a guard grabbed me by the arm. “Sorry, Eight Eight Nine. The supervisor wants to speak to you about today’s incident. Don’t keep him waiting.”
Now who was the one calling too many meetings?
I walked with the guard back to Dan’s office, which I was learning the way to and from by heart. Stepping inside, it surprised me to see him pacing back and forth behind his desk. When I walked in, he frantically shooed the guard out. He eagerly waited for the door to close, and when it did, he lit into me.
“What are you thinking?” he shouted, shaking his fists as he paced. “You’re supposed to be solving problems down here, not creating a sack of new ones!”
“Dan, I—”
“I’m warning you, you better run through all those excuses in your head and pick the best one before you open your mouth. I’m of a mind to call the warden and tell him you were clearly the wrong dog for the job. What am I supposed to do, assign guards to patrol the cell areas when no one is supposed to be there anyway? I don’t have the personnel for that. I’m stretched thin already with all the additional inspections I added to the guards. They’re working overtime. Most of them aren’t sleeping well. Are you part of the problem, or are you part of the solution?” He paused, jabbing his paw into the air violently in my direction. “Hmm?”
“Dan, I—”
“Floor Supervisor, or Floor Supervisor Dan when I’m this angry, Eight Eight Nine.”
It really boiled my blood to be called Eight Eight Nine. I’d rather my name be ‘Dog Meat’ instead. At least that would make me sound like a mean, one-eyed mobster. Eight Eight Nine made me sound like a serial number on the back of a radio. I liked Dan until this moment. Now? I’d like to sock him one right in the kisser and see how that ‘Eight Eight Nine’ rolls out of his mouth the next time.
“Floor Supervisor, I went there because we had a lead on the ones organizing the escape attempts. Hans claimed it was him. Even confessed when we went down there before—”
“Aha! You have my apologies. My deepest, sincerest apologies, detective. If I’d known you’d already wrapped this thing up so quickly, I would have been shaking your paw and pouring you a drink the moment you walked through that door. Forgive me for being so on-edge lately. I just—”
“Dan!” I shouted, cutting him off. “Doggone it, let me finish. He got caught up in his lie, and we realized it was just a trick to get us down there for an ambush. It’s not ideal, but it narrows down the list of most likely suspects further.”
Dan stared at me, his expression so blank and defeated that I almost pitied him again. Sheesh, this dog was more overworked and underpaid than I was. Nah, who was I kidding? No one was that overworked and underpaid.
He pointed his paw at me, and began shaking it, clenching his teeth. He paced again, three more trips back and forth behind his desk, before he’d finally calmed himself down enough to speak again.
“Trigger, if something like this happens every time you narrow down a suspect, I’m afraid I won’t be alive to appreciate your work. My heart’s going to give out if this place gets any more disorderly. So how about you do me and you both a favor, and learn some subtlety, eh Trigger?”
“How about you do me and you both a favor, pal, and let me do my job? You want this solved overnight? Go ahead! Solve it. What am I down here for? Clearly my methods aren’t up to your standards, so bring the better dog or cat in here to replace me. Go ahead. I’ll wait.”
I crossed my arms and tapped my foot.
I thought for sure Dan would blow his top, but after a few seconds of clenching his teeth, his fists, and shaking, he just laughed, flopped down into his chair, and covered his face with his paws. He slid his paws down his face, sighing while stretching his massive amount of loose skin so far I thought his eyes might fall out.
“Detective, this job’s going to be the death of me. You have any idea what that feels like?”
I grinned, rubbing the top of my head, suddenly wishing more than ever I had my hat back. “Dan… there are no words to express just how much of that feeling I know.”
11
Marty and I, in no hurry to get into another brawl, continued with the normal maintenance routine and minded our own business. Wanted to at least give the swelling and cuts on Marty’s face time to go down, and a few weeks seemed to suffice for that. Fernando, either by accident or by design, avoided us entirely during this time. No word of Lady, and no sight of her either. It was as though she wasn’t here at all, and no one seemed to know anything about her. Something had clearly happened since the last time I spoke to Dan, but I didn’t want to rush things. I’m sure if she’d escaped somehow, he’d have brought me in to tell me about it. She was somewhere here, on this floor, and that would have to be enough for now.
“Say, Trigger…” Marty said, with hesitation in his voice.
“Yeah, what is it?” I asked, pulling the cell door back and forth, trying to clear debris from the track.
“You been working out or something? No offense, but I don’t remember you being that good in a scrap before.”
“Not sure I’d admit that Marty, considering the shape we both found ourselves in when we went at it before.”
He paused, gathering his words. “Yeah, but that was different. You used some pretty smooth tricks, like with that letter opener. Took advantage of the environment. You didn’t go toe-to-toe just straight out, the way you did with those cats. Those cats weren’t pushovers either.”
“Not sure what to tell you, Marty. I’m a lucky dog. Somehow always get out of situations I shouldn’t. You know that. Not like I did much damage to them either. Maybe they really are pushovers.”
“Yeah, I guess so…” he said, rummaging through the toolbox.
He was right, of course. More than ever, I was convinced the thing Kerdy injected me with was causing this. Painkillers without side-effects? That would explain a lot. Maybe it helped heal wounds faster and has a longer-term pain dulling effect. I wished the cat was here to ask, but she wasn’t, and odds were good I wouldn’t see her again any time soon.
“If I had to guess, it’s probably plain old experience. Bet you learned a thing or two being Mr. B’s bodyguard.”
He chuckled. “Yeah.” He paused, still smiling, apparently digging through old memories. “Say, did you hear about the time one of Mr. B’s top cats tried to have him assassinated while he was watching a play? Friend of Saint’s actually. Explains a lot now in hindsight, I guess. Always suspected he might’ve been in on it, but the boss wouldn’t hear it.”
“Gotta be honest with you, Marty. I stayed as far away from Adria and anything related to Mr. B until I was shoved into the middle of it all. I barely
read the papers.”
Guess I should’ve said I knew about it, because his face lit up with joy when I said I didn’t. He took it as a go ahead to tell the story.
“So, Mr. B wanted to see this play. Romance tragedy kind of thing. Said the lead cat reminded him of his mother when she was young. Couple has a kitten, husband dies, she struggles to raise him by herself. One of the first plays in Adria with an actual cat as a lead. Anyway, not important. So, we—”
I held up my paw. “Sorry to detour your story, Marty, but I’m not convinced that part isn’t important. What else do you know about the play, that interested him so much?”
He narrowed his eyes, frustrated I’d interrupted. “Well, I don’t remember much. Mr. B’s father died in that recycling plant, and they just threw him in the incinerator. Not even a proper burial. His mom tried to raise him by herself. Impossible for a cat in Black District. You know that. She almost pulled it off by ripping off the same recycling plant after her husband’s death, stealing scrap. Problem is she got caught, and… also keep in mind that this is all second-paw information. Not like he sat me down and told me all this. Could all be made up.”
I shook my head. “Can’t be all made up if he was interested in that play. What else?”
“So, me and a couple of the bodyguards, we notice something fishy with—”
I waved both paws. “No, Marty, with the play. What else do you know about the play, or Mr. B’s mother? Where is she now?”
He shrugged. “Prison after she got caught. Now, the grave, I guess.”
“What do you mean, you ‘guess’? Couldn’t Mr. B get his own mother out of prison after he made it big, or did he just not care enough to bother?”
