by Rosa Jordan
“You’re driving to Nashville? That’s at least seven hours,” Kyle pointed out.
“Not driving, flying. It’s only an hour by air. Lady Fontaine said she’d have a ticket waiting for me at the Little Rock airport tomorrow morning. She’ll meet me in the Nashville airport with Santiago and all the required paperwork. All I have to do is call the U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent she dealt with and make sure I have their approval for her to give me the ocelot, and get the Arkansas Game and Fish office to fax me a state transport permit.”
“She seems in an awful big hurry to get rid of that animal,” Kyle commented, as he poured himself a second cup of coffee.
“She’s afraid the authorities might change their mind and confiscate him outright, and then she won’t have any say in where he goes,” Wendy explained. “She thinks if he comes here she can visit him whenever she likes. And of course she can. But she probably never will. Especially since, now that she has paid that humongous fine, they’re letting her keep the two she bought illegally. This one does sound like handful, but he is just a kitten. How bad can he be?”
38
RADAR CHAOS
As they sat talking, Wendy suddenly held up her hand. “Listen. Do you hear that?”
“What?” Kyle and Danny asked together.
“Silence. No music. Where’s Radar?”
“Maybe in the living room playing with his pop-up tent?”
Kyle gave a half-laugh. “Which he has already squashed so it doesn’t pop up anymore.”
“He still likes jumping on it,” Danny said. “And being inside. I think he might like it better now that the nylon lays on him like a blanket when he crawls in under it.”
“But I don’t hear him,” Wendy insisted, and left the kitchen to find him.
Radar was not in the living room, not in the downstairs bedroom, not in the downstairs bathroom. He was not on the stairs, not in her office, not in the upstairs bedrooms. She was just beginning to get seriously worried when she thought of the upstairs bathroom. The door was cracked open, just wide enough for a slender serval to squeeze through.
Suddenly there was a tremendous crash, which left no doubt as to where Radar was. Racing to the bathroom, Wendy saw shower rod and curtain on the floor. The part of the tile floor she could see was so covered with tiny bits of toilet tissue that it looked as if the room had been hit by a snowstorm. The empty toilet paper holder showed where all that shredded paper had come from — and the young serval squirming around under the tumbled-down shower curtain gave Wendy a pretty clear idea of who had created the mess.
“Radar!” she shouted. “What have you been doing?”
Instead of acting guilty, Radar poked his head from under the shower curtain wearing an expression of profound relief, as if to say, “Mommy! Thank goodness you’re here! A monster was trying to get me! Look what it did to the bathroom!” The second he was untangled from the shower curtain, he leaped into her arms and began rubbing his face all over her face and neck in a serval show of love.
“Ah, Radar!” Wendy laughed. “Who would believe that anybody as sweet as you could create such a mess? Did I know, when I told Karen I’d take you, that I’d spend the rest of my life as your personal maid?”
Radar squirmed to get down, so Wendy let him go. He stood for a minute, looking at the shower curtain that had attacked him. Then turned and sprayed pee all over it.
• • •
Back downstairs, Wendy told Danny and Kyle, “I think Radar was trying to tell us that he’s getting bored with the “Wild Thing” song, too. We should take him outside where he can do something more natural for a serval than tearing toilet paper into itty bitty pieces.”
“I’m not working today,” Kyle said. “You want to build that new enclosure?”
“For the ocelot?” Danny asked.
“No,” Wendy told him. “The ocelot is a tiny kitten, barely weaned. It’ll be a couple of months before he can be put outdoors. And Radar is still too young, too.” She glanced at the serval, now sitting primly on the fourth chair at the kitchen table. “When he’s a little older, he’ll probably decide he’d rather be outdoors in a larger space than here in the house. But right now he wants to be close to mommy, which he thinks is me. The new enclosure is for Lucky. It will adjoin BB’s, with a den box and everything just like his. But we’ll put a gate connecting the two enclosures. That way they can be together, but don’t have to be together. You know, like a couple with separate bedrooms. In case they just want to be friends.”
• • •
Construction on the new enclosure went quickly, as Wendy had already purchased all the materials, and had measured and marked the area. With Danny and Kyle both digging post holes and the three of them stringing and stapling wire, they accomplished a lot that day. They might have got even more done except for the fact that they were constantly being interrupted, or interrupting themselves, to watch Radar’s antics.
“Look at how he moves through the grass,” Danny marvelled. “He lifts his feet really high, like he’s tiptoeing. And he sprongs, almost like the llamas. There! He just did it!” Danny exclaimed, as Radar suddenly leaped into the air and came down in a completely different place
“Not quite like the llamas, though,” Danny amended. “He springs in the air like they do, but it’s a pounce, too. And not just straight ahead. That one was sideways.”
After about three hours, Radar seemed to think they had been outdoors long enough. He communicated this by leaping onto Wendy’s back and hanging there, with his long front legs holding onto her shoulders. She tried to push him off, but he hung on tighter. “He’s trying to tell us it’s time for lunch,” Wendy said.
“He’s telling you he’s tired and wants a piggy-back ride to the house,” Kyle laughed.
So they headed for the house with Radar, exhausted from his morning of “spronging” through the long grass, riding piggyback all the way.
“Radar sticks so close to you,” Danny said wistfully. “He only comes to me when he wants me to restart the ‘Wild Thing’ song.”
“I think it’s because I haven’t felt too great in the past month. Radar seems to have got the idea that he has to be close by to look after me. But,” she smiled, “I know how you can get him to come to you.”
When they got to the house, Wendy left the room and came back with a blanket. “Sit there on the sofa,” she told Danny, “and put this over you. Radar can’t resist a blanket.”
Danny draped the blanket over his lap. Radar watched with interest, then minced across the living room toward him.
“Wendy!” Danny said in alarm. “I think he’s mad about something! Look how fluffed up his tail is!”
Wendy laughed. “No, Danny. Domestic cats fluff their tails when they’re angry, but servals are the opposite. They do it when they’re happy. Just sit tight; you’ll see.”
Sure enough, Radar soon had his nose under the blanket. After a few seconds of exploration to see exactly what was under there, he squirmed onto Danny’s lap, leaving only his fluffy tail and long hind legs sticking out.
• • •
At supper that night, Kyle said, “I have to go back to work tomorrow. Wendy, what time do you have to be at the airport?”
“Ten,” Wendy said. “I’ll need to leave here by eight. Don’t ask me how Lady Fontaine got plane reservations on such short notice during Christmas week. Maybe she bought the airline or something. I talked to her on the phone about an hour ago, and she said it’s all set. She said the paperwork is ready, too. And that I know would have taken an ordinary, non-rich person at least a month.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the money,” Kyle grinned. “Maybe she kept talking until the Fish and Wildlife authorities collapsed in exhaustion and gave her what she wanted.” He gave Wendy a teasing glance. “Or maybe she’s a really bea
utiful woman.”
“Ah yes.” Wendy grinned back. “I do recall that she was drop-dead gorgeous. But you don’t suppose that would influence a law enforcement person, do you?”
As they kidded back and forth, Wendy noticed that Danny had become very quiet, the way he sometimes did, as if he was trying to make himself invisible. Because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, Wendy thought.
Kyle must have noticed the same thing, because he said, “Why don’t you ride into town with me in the morning, Danny? I’ll drop you off at your house so you can get some clean clothes, and then, if you want, you can come back out here. Ride your bike out if you don’t feel like staying in town all day.”
“You mean sleep here again?” Danny asked.
“Sure. You can stay till your folks get back.”
“Okay. I’ll come back in the afternoon, after I’ve checked around for cans. Oh, and Mrs. Armstrong asked me to clean out her chicken coop, so I better do that, too.”
Kyle laughed. “She asked you? You’re lucky. When she wants me to do something she just tells me. Been like that ever since I was in first grade.”
Danny snickered. “She is like that. But not with Tripod. He can do anything he pleases.”
“That Tripod must be about a hundred years old in ferret time,” Wendy said. “I doubt he can do anything much nowadays except keep Mrs. Armstrong company.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “But he’s really good at that.”
“So, do we have a plan for tomorrow?” Kyle asked.
“Yes,” Wendy said. “You’re going to drop Danny at his house on your way to work in the morning. I’ll drive to Little Rock, fly to Nashville, then turn around and fly back. And Danny, when you’re done at Mrs. Armstrong’s, you’re coming back out on your bike, right? I should be home by five. If you get here first, will you feed the llamas and take Velvet for a walk?”
“Sure!” Danny said, and suddenly he was there again, just an ordinary kid, looking forward to an ordinary, or maybe better than ordinary, next day.
Radar leapt into a chair, holding the stuffed leopard in his mouth. “And you,” Wendy said, “will be on your own tomorrow. You can finish demolishing your pop-tent, and after that, maybe you can figure out how to squeeze the paw on that thing to make your own music.”
39
THE LONGEST TRIP
The flight to Nashville took barely an hour, although the time needed for check-in and getting through security made it feel much longer. Lady Diamond, as promised, was waiting at the airport with the ocelot kitten in a very expensive pet carrier, and all the necessary papers. Wendy was dying to hold the little ocelot, but not in a public place where people would stare and want to touch it because it might cause the kitten to freak out. She used the short time before her flight back to go over the paperwork, making sure everything was in order and almost before she knew it she was on a return flight to Little Rock.
By mid-afternoon she was zooming along in the RAV, chauffeuring a barely weaned ocelot to his new home. She exited the interstate on to the country road that led to their farm. She passed a used-car dealership, a plant nursery, and a few other businesses; then it was rural, with only an occasional farmhouse. Between the farms stood small patches of woods, the trees mostly bare this time of year. It was a grey, overcast day. Snow was predicted. The closer she got to the farm the more excited Wendy got. She could hardly wait to get acquainted with baby Santiago.
She was about two miles from the farm when her cellphone rang. It was on the seat beside her, but she had belted Santiago’s small carrier into the seat, so it took a minute to get her hand under the carrier to reach the phone. The ring, or maybe the way she tilted the carrier, woke Santiago. He began to snarl in the fussy, demanding way of a kitten who wanted to be fed now.
“Hold on, baby,” Wendy murmured. “We’ll almost there.”
But there was only the one ring, and when she answered, she didn’t get a signal. Wendy hadn’t been using a cell long enough to remember to charge the battery regularly. No matter. It was probably Kyle calling to find out where she was. In another five minutes she would be home and could phone him from there.
That was when she saw the car behind her. Was it the one she had passed a mile or two back, parked by the side of the road? She had sort of seen it, but not really because it was right when she was trying to get the cellphone out from under Santiago’s cage. The car was coming up on her fast. She looked for a farmhouse where she could pull off the road, but this was an empty stretch of highway and there were no houses around. She sped up. The car behind her sped up, too.
Within seconds it was close enough that she could see two people in the front seat. Two black men. No! Not black men! Men wearing black ski masks!
Wendy’s foot quivered on the accelerator. She wanted to stomp it to the floor, but she was coming up to the turn into her driveway, the dirt lane that ran from the main road to the house. She waited until she was almost at the turn, then slammed on the brakes and hung a hard left. Santiago yowled as he was thrown against the side of his carrier.
Wendy took the dirt lane faster than she ever had before, but it wasn’t fast enough. As she screeched to a stop in front of the house, she thought she glimpsed Danny’s face in the living-room window. The thought skittered through her mind that he shouldn’t be in the house, because Kyle wasn’t home and Danny didn’t have a key. But she had no time to take a second look to see if he actually was there or if it was just her imagination. The car following her had pulled to a stop about ten feet back.
She flung off her seat belt, but what she saw in the rear-view mirror told her that she’d never make it to the house. There was a slim chance that she could outrun the man who was already out of the car, but there was no way she could outrun a bullet from the gun he pointed at her.
The driver opened his door and hauled himself out. “Hey, Blondie,” he called in a voice muffled by the knitted ski mask covering his mouth. “You the little girl who plans to ID us in a lineup? Well, my buddy and me, we wanna make sure you don’t make a mistake. We want you to see us close up. Real close up.”
Kyle had told Wendy what kind of hole a .40 calibre bullet could put in a person. She didn’t know how much of a hole it could blow in a car, but the RAV was all the protection she had. At least, that’s what she thought for one terrifying minute. Then she saw, incredibly, a police van streaking along the highway. But it couldn’t be coming to her rescue! Nobody knew she was in trouble! It must be on an emergency call to somewhere else and would go zooming right by!
That was what her mind told her, but her eyes told her something else. The police van hung a sharp left and came flying along the dirt track even faster than Wendy had.
She dove for the floor. There was sure to be a shoot-out, and bullets fired by good guys could do just as much damage as ones fired by bad guys!
“Hang on!” she whispered to Santiago. “Help’s on the way.”
Her voice did nothing to soothe Santiago, who, though just a tiny kitten, snarled and growled so loud she didn’t hear the shots — or else there weren’t any. What she heard was a roar of engines. Cautiously, Wendy lifted her head high enough to see out the back window. The car that had followed her was no longer there. It was tearing across the field toward the main road, with the police van in hot pursuit.
Then Danny was pounding on the passenger-side car window. She hit the unlock button, and released the seat belt holding Santiago’s carrier. Danny grabbed the carrier and ran up the steps to the house, Wendy on his heels. She slammed the door shut behind them and stood gasping for breath as if she’d run a mile instead of twenty feet.
Danny dashed to the window. Wendy followed, but the tree in the front yard blocked their view. As if they’d had the same thought at the same time, they tore up the stairs to Wendy’s office. From there they had a cle
ar view of what was going on out on the main road.
“Holy smokes!” Danny gasped. “Every cop in the country’s out there!”
Actually, there were only five vehicles — two police cruisers blocking the road in one direction, two sheriff’s cars blocking it in the other direction, and the police van pulled up sideways to the criminals’ car. As to how many law enforcement officers there were, Wendy couldn’t tell, nor could she see if Kyle was among them. But it was clear that the chase was over and the two men were in custody.
Suddenly Radar burst into the room and ran circles around Wendy and Danny. “Merow, merow, merow!” he cried plaintively.
Wendy picked him up. Although her heart was pounding, just holding the serval next to her chest helped her to breathe normally again.
“I don’t think he wants us to play ‘Wild Thing’ for him,” Wendy said shakily. “I think he’s trying to tell us there’s a real wild thing in that carrier downstairs.” She started for the door. “I’m going to fix Santiago a bottle.”
Danny stared at her. “Wendy, you are incredibly weird!”
“I am? Why do you say that?”
“Five minutes ago, you just about got shot. Or kidnapped, or something. And all you want to do is fix a bottle for the new kitten!”
“I guess that is weird,” Wendy admitted. “But it’s just how I am. The best way I know to calm down is to curl up in a quiet place with an animal in my lap. Lady Diamond said Santiago’s been weaned, so I don’t know that he needs a bottle.” She held out a trembling hand. “But look how I’m shaking. I definitely need to give him one.”
40
BRAVE HEART
When they got downstairs, Radar was still clinging to Wendy, so she told Danny that he could take Santiago out of the carrier if he wanted.
Danny reached in and gently lifted the kitten out. “He’s awesome!” Danny breathed. He brought the little ocelot up close to his face, then yelped, “Ouch!” as the kitten reached out and swatted him on the ear.
