Cat Shining Bright

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  In the gang’s first descent on Molena Point they had stolen only three cars but had broken into twelve more, gleaning a fine array of cameras, clothes, money that some fool had hidden in the lining of a beverage holder, three pairs of binoculars, and a handgun tucked into a briefcase under the driver’s seat. The car owner reporting the stolen gun had been cited for not having a permit and for not properly securing his weapon. By the time Joe Grey and Kit and Pan arrived on the rooftops, the streets were black, clouds covered the thin moon, all was silent and the perps had apparently fled.

  The second round of thefts was up in the hills beyond Wilma’s cottage. A houseguest had awakened hearing glass shatter, had looked out his bedroom window to the drive where two men were breaking into his new Audi. Grabbing the bedside phone, he had dialed 911.

  The dispatcher sent out the call and then had called the chief at home. Max had risen, dressing hastily. Behind him, Charlie sat up in bed, pushed back her red hair, and tried to come awake, watching him pull on his boots. “What’s happened? Another car heist?”

  Max nodded. “Up on Light Street. They broke into an Audi but couldn’t get it started, and burglarized five other cars.”

  “They’ll be all over that neighborhood.”

  “So will we,” Max said, belting on his holstered gun. Heading out, he didn’t imagine that his call from the dispatcher threw Charlie, too, into high gear. The minute his truck skidded up the drive, throwing gravel, Charlie called the Damen household to alert Joe Grey.

  In the Damen master bedroom, Clyde snatched up the ringing phone, listened, then shouted grumbling up at Joe in his rooftop tower. “It’s Charlie. Are you there?” Hearing Joe yowl an answer, he laid down the phone and immediately dropped back into sleep. Beside him Ryan lay half awake, her short dark hair tumbled across the pillow. Above them, Joe Grey pushed in through his cat door onto a rafter, leaped down to Clyde’s study onto the desk, talked with Charlie on the extension, and was out of there, grabbing a small leather pouch in his teeth, leaping to the rafter, out through his tower, and racing across the rooftops. At the same time, at the Harper ranch, Charlie was calling the Greenlaws. By 2 a.m. tortoiseshell Kit and red tabby Pan had hit the roofs, too, heading for Light Street. Spotting the red lights of two cop cars and following them, they soon saw Joe Grey on a nearby peak, carrying his small cell phone in its leather pouch. Separating, the cats roamed the roofs watching the dark streets just as, below, the law was searching. They could see two cops attending to the Audi, taking prints, their flashlights and strobe cameras flashing off broken glass.

  By three o’clock the cats had spotted and called in five other cars with broken windows. They could only imagine what contents might be missing. In the dense night they had barely seen two dark-clad men running, vanishing among the houses; one tall and heavily muscled, the other tall and thin. Not much for the cops to go on but Joe made the call, sliding out the phone, its pouch wet with cat drool. They watched three officers melt into the bushes, searching, but they never found the men. From the roofs, the cats watched patrol cars slide along the streets, spotlights flashing in among the houses, while other officers on foot prowled the tangled yards. Cats and cops found no one. There was no sound but the quiet passing of patrol vehicles.

  The next morning Joe hit the station early, slipping under the credenza in Max Harper’s office, into the smell of freshly brewed coffee. Max was at his desk, Detective Dallas Garza sitting on the arm of the leather couch blowing on his hot brew. Two missing cars had just been called in, probably hours after the vehicles were taken.

  Now, several weeks later, none of the stolen cars had been recovered. The first round of thefts had run for three days, each night in a different neighborhood. Weeks passed before the next assault. Both times, all MPPD got were fingerprints of the cars’ owners or passengers, many smeared by the thieves’ gloves. That second round began when a man getting home at midnight was knocked down in his driveway. The perp grabbed his keys, took his car, and was gone. The victim’s cell phone was in his car. His house key was on the ring with the car key. He dug a spare key from between two strips of wooden siding near the garage door, ran in the house and called the department. Patrols hit the streets. And, at Charlie’s call, the cats hit the rooftops. This time the thieves got away with four cars, one an antique Bentley, but they had broken into nine other vehicles.

  Now, as Courtney read the article and Wilma explained to her what car theft was, the calico looked up at her, wide-eyed.

  “Surely,” Wilma said, “they won’t return now, the weather page says a big storm is brewing. Slashing rain, high winds.” Already the kitchen had grown dim; outside the windows, high, dark clouds lay waiting to descend. “Why would that front-page reporter think car thieves would be out in a downpour?” She pushed back her long, silver hair. “Surely they’ll wait for better weather.”

  “Maybe,” Dulcie said, “a storm is the best time. Harder for the cops to see or hear a man jimmy a car window, harder to see them drive away.” She was shocked and annoyed that neither Joe nor Wilma had told her about the thefts, that even Kit had been silent. But then, on second thought, she was glad. These last weeks, life had been so peaceful, nesting with her kittens, training them, reading to them, seeing them grow each day to develop his or her own unique habits and interests; no crimes to distract her, no worries about Joe out in the night stalking thieves—until now. Now she began to fret. Life beyond the cottage began to push at her; she longed suddenly to run with Joe across nighttime roofs hunting the bad guys. She was torn sharply between the excitement of the hunt, and the security of snuggling and caring for their bright and riotous kittens, safe in their peaceful cottage.

  But she couldn’t leave her family, not yet, it wasn’t time yet to go off in the night leaving her babies for Wilma to tend.

  Though she had been right about the weather. By midnight the September storm had hit Molena Point hard. The car thieves hit just as fiercely.

  Again they chose the predawn hours, the black night windy and rainy, wind so powerful a cat could hardly cling to the rooftops. That whole late summer had become a grand slam for the meteorologists as they tried to explain storms that arrived months after El Niño should have come and gone.

  The first report was a hijacked car. The woman driver, when officers reached her, was crying, badly bruised, and rain soaked. While medics took care of her, Max put out double patrols along the village’s hidden lanes where cottages crowded together, invisible in the dark, where all sounds were muffled beneath blowing oaks and pines. Ten cars were robbed between three and four in the morning while the village slept; ten cars robbed, five more stolen.

  The next night in the predawn hours patrols were increased, prowling the tangled neighborhoods with their twisting roads among the woods but with expensive cars parked behind houses and in narrow carports; and of course no streetlights, Molena Point did not have streetlights.

  But this night, Joe Grey and Kit and Pan didn’t follow the cops, they chose the very places where police patrols were thinnest, just in the center of the village. Staying to the most open streets, they separated across the dark rooftops, Joe Grey taking one route while Kit and Pan took another, all three of them straining to hear, over the wind, any sound of a wrench on metal or of breaking glass. The rain increased, the wind fierce as a tornado. Kit thought she heard Joe Grey shout, but couldn’t see him, couldn’t tell what he was saying. Had he even seen the stolen car that she and Pan had been watching, had he seen the man hide it? Or had Joe come from the other direction? And now she’d lost sight of Pan. Clinging to the shingles, she searched the dark for both tomcats and searched for the vanished thief, the wind slamming her face so hard she thought it would tear out her whiskers.

  3

  Kit clung to the rooftop, wind lashing her black and brown fur, flattening her ears and whipping her fluffy tail. Creeping along on her belly, digging her claws into the shingles, she watched the dark shadow below that she and Pan had fol
lowed—but now she followed alone, she’d lost Pan. As she turned to look behind her, the wind slammed her so hard she thought it would throw her to the sidewalk. Joe Grey had said the gale would come harder, close to dawn, that it would grow so violent that she and Pan had better be off the roofs early.

  But they hadn’t listened to Joe.

  Right now the gray tomcat was most likely safe at home wondering where they were, ready to come out again looking for them. So far they’d seen only the one break-in, the lone, dark-clad figure jimmying a white car and starting it, driving away so slowly they were able to follow him. Only three blocks away they had watched garage lights come on, the driver getting out to swing the old-style garage door open. He’d driven in, gotten out, they’d had one good glimpse of his back, heavyset, a black jacket. They’d watched the lights go out as he shut the door. Hiding that nice BMW? Or did he live here, was this his house? They didn’t think so, the way he was prowling around it now, even if he did have a garage key. And then she’d lost Pan—a minute ago they’d been together. Now, not a sign of the red tabby—when she turned back to look for him the twisting wind hit her face so hard it choked her. Come on, Pan! She cringed lower, searching—wishing they had listened to Joe Grey. Did Pan have to linger, snooping around that house? They knew where the car was, they could report it later, could call the law in a little while.

  She dug her claws harder into the crusty shingles as the wind, like great hands, tried to throw her straight down to the sidewalk. Wind made the moonlight race and shift, that’s how they’d first seen him walking the street stopping to look at each car, a darkly dressed man caught in moving streaks of light. A broad man, not fat but heavily muscled under his padded jacket. A hard-looking man, dark cap pulled down against the weather or against recognition.

  Having ditched the sleek white BMW and locked the garage padlock, he had moved close to the house, pressing his ear to the wall where, from the size of the windows and the drawn shades, there might be a bedroom. He’d stood listening. He looked angry when he turned away and headed for the front door. Taking another key from his pocket, he unlocked it and slipped inside.

  He was gone only a few minutes before storming out again and taking off up the street. That’s when Kit followed him; she glanced back once to see Pan, too, listening at the bedroom wall. Kit didn’t go back, she stayed close to the thief, clinging to the roofs, wondering where he would make his next hit. He was only two blocks from Joe Grey’s house and she thought about Clyde’s vintage Jaguar in the drive, and Ryan’s nice truck with all her tools, Skilsaws, and building equipment secured in the back and in the side lockers, her long ladder chained on top. Don’t let him steal the Damens’ vehicles, don’t let him hit the Damens’ house.

  Instead he headed up the side street, stopping again at each parked car, whether at the curb or in a driveway. He tried each car door to see if it was unlocked, then tried the various tools he carried; moonlight caught at a long slim blade, at several keys that, she guessed, might have been shaved, at other tools that bulged from his pockets. He avoided some of the newest cars with their sophisticated alarm systems. He carried a duffel bag—if he did get a car open but couldn’t start it, he rummaged through, stole whatever he wanted, dropped it in the bag, and left.

  Strange, though. He seemed to have stolen the BMW with no trouble. He’d had keys to the garage and house, though he didn’t act like he lived there, he was too sneaky as he entered and then slipped away. And now, up the side street another man appeared, a tall, slim shadow moving within patches of blowing moonlight; he stood beside a sleek new sports car, looking down at his hands—operating some device. It didn’t take long, he had the door open, and slid into the driver’s seat. A few more minutes, he started the engine and drove away, cool as you please, turning right at the next corner. They’d seen only two men, but this was a larger gang than that. Where are the others? And why does this one have more sophisticated equipment than the other?

  All summer Kit and Pan and Joe Grey had prowled the rooftops at two and three in the morning watching for the car thieves. Often they had seen plainclothes officers in the shadows of the streets below, and several arrests were made; but the thieves must have had replacements. They would work Molena Point for several nights, then would move north. A few days in one place, then gone again to another town, their movements so evenly spaced that their operation became a guessing game for local TV and small-town papers: Which town would be next?

  Molena Point was only a mile square, the streets so crowded with cottages, the yards so dense with bushes and fences and giant trees—and no streetlights to pick out a prowler—that it was hard for cops, or even cats, to spot a thief. Sometimes, if there was moonlight, the cats got a license number or a make and model. More times clouds covered the moon, or the break-in was accomplished in black alleys between buildings or in the thick shadows of sprawling cypress branches. The first week the cats had worked this gig, they had reported five cars with dark-clothed men prowling around them, but by the time they reached a phone the vehicles were gone.

  The next time, Joe Grey carried the small old cell phone with its fake registration, thanks to Clyde, his human housemate. Because of Joe’s calls, a number of stolen cars were apprehended, and arrests were made—but still the thefts continued.

  Below Kit, the heavy man had stopped and began working on a car door. Even in the windy dark, she could see it was an older Jeep sedan. Before she knew it he’d popped the lock. He slid right in, and soon, through the sound of the wind, she heard the engine start.

  He moved the car ahead slowly, driving without lights, turning left in the direction of Joe Grey’s house—maybe meaning to heist the Damens’ vehicles? Had Joe come home? Was he in his tower out of the worst of the blow, waiting for her and Pan to come bolting in out of the storm? Would he see the Jeep? She had to smile, that Joe had been so much more careful of his own safety since the kittens came. The responsibility of the three babies had made him, not less brave, but far more watchful for his own safety. Now, was he up there watching the Jeep approach? As Kit scrambled down a little pepper tree to cross the street to Joe’s house, the wind shook the small tree so hard she thought its limbs would break—the next instant, a tree did break. Not the lacy pepper tree but a tall eucalyptus that spread across the narrow street: there was a giant splintering screech as a reaching branch cracked, the main trunk split, and the tree came crashing down filling the street and covering Joe Grey’s roof, its upper branches hiding his tower, its heavy trunk twisted across the Jeep’s hood.

  The man inside moved fast; killing the engine, he swung the door open. Kit bolted from the pepper tree across the fallen eucalyptus onto Joe’s roof. She heard the perp running up the street, the pounding of his shoes soon lost in the roar of wind.

  Joe Grey’s tower was buried in the top of the fallen tree, covered with leaves and twiggy branches, Joe’s beautiful windowed aerie. Praying the gray tomcat had escaped, she yowled and yowled for him—she couldn’t shout his name, since the thief might still hear her. Worried for Pan but terrified for Joe, forgetting the vanishing thief as she scrambled across the last of the broken tree limbs and into the tangle of the shattered tower, she heard Clyde’s voice from within.

  “What the hell! Joe, are you all right?”

  “Fine!” Joe yowled. “Get this damn tree off me.”

  Kit bolted through a jammed-open tower window into Joe’s broken aerie, into a mass of leaves and branches, and broken safety glass scattered like small diamonds. She watched the tomcat crawl out from under. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” he repeated crossly, the white strip down his face narrowed with anger, his gray ears flat to his head. “I never in all hell thought that big tree would fall.” He began to paw glitters of glass from his face, from his sides and shoulders. “Cops, go call the cops. This stuff sticks like glue.”

  Kit fought her way past him through the tower and in through Joe’s cat door onto the nearest rafter, dropped d
own to Clyde’s desk to report the thief but already Clyde was on the phone—mussed dark hair, rumpled robe—describing the fallen tree to the dispatcher. Apparently he hadn’t seen the smashed car, hadn’t seen the driver run. Kit could see Ryan through the sliding doors to her studio; she had grabbed the extension before Clyde hung up, her blue robe twisted around her, her green eyes frightened.

  “A car,” she told the dispatcher. “The tree fell on a car, I can see it from my studio. The driver jumped out and ran. A square, heavy man, dark clothes, dark cap . . .” At the same moment, Kit thought she heard, up the street, another car starting. She leaped to the mantel to see better. “There,” Ryan said, “around the corner. He’s getting in another car, just the parking lights on. They’re moving off, turning north, maybe headed for Highway One?”

  Kit didn’t hear Rock; the Damens’ big Weimaraner should have been barking up a storm from the moment the tree fell. Then she remembered he was off on a fishing trip with Ryan’s dad and his wife, Lindsey; they often took Rock with them. On the love seat Snowball, the Damens’ little white cat, sat rigid with alarm in her mound of quilt. She usually had the Weimaraner to shelter and protect her. Now, alone, she was shivering at the crash, her eyes huge and afraid, though she was unwilling to race downstairs and leave the comfort of her humans. Snowball didn’t speak, she could only meow, and now her cry was pitiful.

  Clyde stopped to cuddle and reassure her, then stepped into Ryan’s studio, put his arm around her, stood looking down through the window at the wrecked Jeep. He turned to look at Kit. “Where’s Pan? He’s still out in the storm?”

  “Firettis called,” Ryan said. “They’re worried about him, worried about you cats out in this. And Lucinda . . . she knows I’ll call the minute you show up, Kit. I can just see her pacing, I know how she fusses over you. But Kit, where is Pan?”