The Cat Dancers

by P. T. Deutermann

“And where’s Mary Ellen Goode?”

  Several of the SWAT guys were looking up at something. Cam did the same and saw a small airplane with an oversized Perspex bubble cockpit and ridiculously long wings swoop low overhead.

  “Owl says something blew up,” the controller announced in a dry tone.

  “Go, Owl,” Cam said glumly.

  64

  CAM DROVE DOWN HIS street at 2:30 A.M. He slowed as he drove under the lone streetlight in the cul-de-sac. He was bone-tired, still sore from his adventures in the river, and hugely disappointed at not finding Mary Ellen Goode. He’d been on the phone with Ranger Marshall after getting back to Sheriff’s Office headquarters, and it had not been a pleasant conversation. Apparently everyone up in Carrigan County would be calling for his head.

  Me, too, he thought as he pulled up into his driveway. His ears were still ringing. The house was dark, and the Leyland cypress trees were swaying gently in the wind. The word from the hospital in Triboro was “satisfactory.” The sheriff had been the only serious casualty. The shard hadn’t severed any major arteries but it had not been a clean wound, and infection was a major concern now. He scanned the front of the house but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He hit the remote for the garage door, but nothing happened. He hit it again. Nothing.

  He parked in the driveway and turned off the engine. The streetlight was on, so there should be power in the house. And where were the dogs? They would ordinarily have heard the car, come through the dog door, and run around to the fence in the side yard. No dogs. He was tempted to blow the horn to see what would happen. He hit the remote again, but the door continued to ignore its signals. He checked the little red LED to see if it came on when he pressed the button. It did, so the remote was working.

  He unholstered the Sig .45 and got out. Then he got back in and called the ops center to request that a cruiser be dispatched to his house. “Ten minutes,” the operator said. Decision time: He could take a quick look in and around the house, or wait for the cruiser. No-brainer. Wait for the deputies.

  Two units showed up in six minutes, and the two deputies and Cam went into the house together. The lights worked normally inside, but the dogs were nowhere to be found. The deputies accompanied Cam into every room and the garage. They looked for signs of explosive or incendiary devices, and they checked the windows and doors for evidence of tampering, but everything appeared to be normal. They made a sweep of the backyard, going all the way down to the creek, and then made a quick, if somewhat creepy, walk through the cypress groves on either side of the house.

  Embarrassed, Cam sent them away forty minutes later. He knew he’d done the right thing, but still, the expressions on their faces had told a story. The only thing still very much out of order was the fact that the dogs were gone. They never roamed. The wind was steady now and the moonlight was dimming as the sky filled with low-hanging gray-white clouds. It was unseasonably warm. So where were they? He got one of his big flashlights and went back down to the creek line again, checking for signs that they’d gone under the old fence. And then he found the gate open.

  He shone his light across the creek, which at this point was no more than two feet wide, and saw some flattened grass on the other side and what looked like a trail going up the hill. The gate was normally locked with a double-end snap, which was now gone. So someone had let them out. Or had sneaked into his yard, discovered two big dogs, and let himself out in a big hurry. Pursued by the dogs? There was a faint chemical smell hovering down in the grass, despite the wind. Something in the creek? He sniffed hard, but he couldn’t place it. He called for them, but only the wind answered.

  He went back to the house, aware that he was clearly silhouetted by the backyard spots as he walked up the lawn. Had the dogs gone on up into the Holcomb property? And if so, why? Looking for him maybe? Frick might do that, but Frack would stay behind and watch. And they would certainly come when called.

  He yawned. He was exhausted. And yet, if his dogs were nearby and in trouble, he knew he’d never sleep. He went back into the house, got his gear, turned out the spots on the back deck, and went down to the creek. One pass, he promised himself. I’ll go up the hill, look around the buildings, then come back. Tomorrow is another day—or rather, today is. I’ve got bigger problems than two missing dogs.

  Get some backup, he told himself as he went through the gate, but then he remembered the looks the two deputies had exchanged. Not again, and if they weren’t dog people, they wouldn’t be too happy at traipsing through the underbrush in search of his two runaways. The Holcomb place would be spooky by moonlight, but he and the mutts had been up there a hundred times before. He yawned again, then started out up the hill. He kept going, pretty much in a straight line. The farmhouse loomed up to his right, the barns and a topless silo to his left.

  He checked the barns first, sliding a large wooden door to one side and scaring off an owl and some other unidentified nocturnal creatures. The place smelled of musty old hay, ancient grease, and decaying wood. Ghostly mantles of cobwebs swayed in the draft from the open door, but there were no other signs of life in the building. A piece of tin on the roof flapped gently in the wind. But no dogs. He looked into the empty concrete garage briefly, saw signs of a teenage love nest with all the appropriate graffiti, and then turned to the house itself.

  There was plywood on the doors and first-floor windows, but it had been put up a long time ago and the local demon spawn had evidently been going inside the house, too, as some of the panels, warped and grayed by weather, were stuffed rather than nailed into the window embrasures. Cam had poked his nose in once several years ago, and said nose had advised him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to pursue his explorations. He didn’t really intend to go inside now, other than to call for the dogs. Even as he pulled one of the plywood panels aside, he knew that if the dogs were inside, they’d have been whining at the windows.

  Once inside, his search was anticlimactic. An abandoned old house on a windy night should have been at least a little creepy, but with the smell of empty beer cans, rotting Sheetrock, human excrement, fast-food cartons, and mouse droppings, the place was mostly just annoying, even in the dark. He gave up and went home.

  65

  A WEEK LATER, CAM found himself sitting in his office, realizing that his career as a police officer was all over but the shouting. His formal announcement that he wouldn’t testify had put the expected crimp in the vigilante investigation. The day after his dogs disappeared, he’d been called into a meeting with DA Klein and the grand jury foreperson. He’d told them then that in order to save a hostage from certain death, he’d made a deal with his own voice mail that he wouldn’t testify.

  “So what?” Steven said. “She wasn’t there, so they didn’t keep their part of the deal. Why should you?”

  “Because we still don’t have her back,” Cam replied, suppressing a desire to add a “duh” to that. He pointed out that Jay-Kay never had answered his question as to when they’d get Mary Ellen back, and logically, that wouldn’t happen until they knew he wasn’t going to testify.

  “Are you trying to tell me that the Sheriff’s Office is just going to quit on this one? And even if you all are, you don’t really suppose the feds will just close the book, do you?”

  “I can’t speak for the feds, counselor,” Cam said. “But we got our vigilante, didn’t we?”

  “You mean Sergeant Cox?”

  “Yes, Steven,” Cam said with a sigh. “I meant Sergeant Cox. And as for the feds, they now know that their fancy consultant was on the wrong side of this problem. And now she’s out of the picture.” Until their computers blow up, he thought, although he didn’t say it.

  “We have that list. I’ll remind you that my office didn’t make any deals.”

  “You go right ahead, Steven,” Cam said evenly. “But if we get Mary Ellen back in a body bag, that will be on your head, not mine. Plus, Jay-Kay was pretty clear that at least some of the so-called evidence she
gave you was not everything it seemed.”

  Klein, furious, had thrown him out of the office. Cam was sympathetic but not too worried. Much of the cell’s effectiveness had been that no one suspected they even existed. And the Sheriff’s Office had that list, too. Bobby Lee would work it one day, back-channel if he had to. But first they had to vet the whole thing, because the source of the list was, of course, Jay-Kay. MCAT’s efforts to track her down had come to nothing. She had disappeared, leaving behind her office and apartment complex in Charlotte, along with two IBM mainframes running diagnostics on each other with nothing else left in their vast memory banks but some transient electrons. A check of airlines and passport controls revealed no one by that name leaving the country. Her fancy car was gone, and the Sheriff’s Office dutifully had a warrant out for the car and its owner. The Bureau reported similar results, although they were a little vague as to precisely which strings they had been pulling to find her. But Cam well knew that if anyone wanted to go off the grid, that woman was more than qualified. She could as likely be in Indiana as back in India.

  The sheriff was recovering but slowly. The doctors had beaten one infection but were now confronting another one, and the range of antibiotics was narrowing. Cam had been able to see him twice, and, if anything, he looked sicker the second time. With the sheriff out of action, Cam had become increasingly isolated within the Sheriff’s Office, especially after Steven had started running his mouth. He had a similar meeting with the federal authorities from Charlotte. They had most of the secondhand story, of course, but short of imprisoning Cam until he talked to them, the only physical evidence anyone had amounted to one dead minimart robber and bits of the homemade electric chair that had killed him, one dead wilderness guide and the head of the mountain lion that had killed him, one missing Sergeant Cox, the remains of one smashed-up vehicle grille, and bits and pieces of two bombs, one from Annie’s house and a second from the trucking terminal.

  Cam’s bigger dilemma was how to reestablish his good reputation within the Sheriff’s Office in general. It didn’t take a genius to tell that a slow freeze-out was beginning, and this was reflected in the way other officers in the Sheriff’s Office were treating him. There’d been polite hellos, but increasingly the others evaded him: “Sorry, don’t have time to shoot the shit right now. Lots going on. You know how it is.” The members of the MCAT team had been individually detailed to various training and recertification courses, and there were rumors that the team was going to be broken up, due, somehow, to “budget constraints.” Rumors were spreading everywhere, and he desperately wanted to sit down with his contemporaries and tell them why he had recanted.

  From his hospital bed, the sheriff advised against that, saying the feds could come back and subpoena any or all of them, forcing them to reveal what Cam had said. He’d talked to Mike Pierce about his status as a potential suspect in the federal books. Pierce told Cam that as long as he kept quiet, nobody should be able to put any hooks into him. Pierce was also the first one to come right out and suggest that Cam take early retirement.

  “Hang around for ninety days,” he suggested. “Tell Bobby Lee you’re going to put your papers in, give him time to either restructure MCAT or appoint a new boss. Then fold your tents and steal away into the desert night.”

  “Should I go out the front door or the back?” Cam asked bitterly.

  “Are you part of some vigilante group?” Pierce asked.

  “Hell no.”

  “Like I said before, if that’s good enough for Bobby Lee Baggett, that’s good enough for me, too. Which means it should be good enough for your friends, as well. Your enemies can go screw themselves, right?”

  The report from the army had finally come in on the incident that had ended Kenny’s military career. He had been on a temporary assignment to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. He had failed to return on time from a seventy-two-hour leave. Subsequent investigation revealed that he and his brother, one James Marlor, had been engaged in an illegal hunting expedition on the federal reservation. James Marlor had been injured, and Kenny had taken him to a civilian medical facility for treatment. The ER people had reported to the local police that the injuries suggested a mountain lion attack. Because Kenny was army, the report made it back to Fort Huachuca.

  The brothers had indeed been hunting mountain lion, which was forbidden within the installation’s vast boundaries. James Marlor had shot a cat. He’d approached the body, thinking the cat was dead, but it wasn’t, and it had mauled him. Kenny had killed it, then lied to protect his civilian brother. He was subsequently court-martialed, not for hunting mountain lion but for moral turpitude—that is, for lying to his superiors. He’d been dismissed from the service with a general discharge and had subsequently changed his name to Cox.

  Cam wanted to pull Kenny’s Sheriff’s Office service records to see how he had accounted for those years in the army, but the personnel office had closed out the records upon notice of Kenny’s death. At this juncture, Cam wasn’t willing to pursue it. There had been a Sheriff’s Office memorial service for Kenny, where the sheriff spoke about the sacrifices police officers made in defense of the American way of life, among other platitudes. Department heads were told that Sergeant Cox had died in a hunting accident in the Smokies and that it was pure happenstance that Lieutenant Richter had been sent to look for him at the time of the incident.

  Cam’s phone lit up for the first time in a week, snapping him out of his reverie. He picked up. It was Oliver Strong, Annie’s lawyer.

  “Lieutenant, I’ve heard through the grapevine that you might be taking early retirement. Any truth to that?”

  Cam laughed. “Which grapevine was that, counselor?”

  “Courthouse mail room, to be exact,” he said. “And they’re never wrong, as we all know. I don’t mean to pry, of course, but if you are going to make a career move, I have some good news and some bad news.”

  “Bad news first, Mr. Strong. That’s been my diet recently.”

  “Okay, the bad news is that the IRS has sent me a letter saying that we’ll need to suspend liquidation of Judge Bellamy’s estate because the prospective beneficiary is, and I’m quoting here, ‘a person of interest’ in an ongoing federal investigation. They cite the law about a bad guy not being permitted to benefit from the fruits of his criminal acts.”

  The feds reminding me of who has the real power, Cam thought. “Person of interest’?” he said.

  “That’s what they call somebody when they want to hang him but don’t have enough evidence to take the poor bastard to a federal indictment.”

  “Okay, I think I understand that. And the good news?”

  “Remember that provision about past-due alimony? Where she said that when you retired from police work, she would augment your pension?”

  “Vaguely,” Cam said. “Although truly, I’m a whole lot more worried about finding a certain park ranger right now than I am about money, pension or otherwise.”

  “I understand, Lieutenant, but you just might care. Because the way this works, as soon as you put your papers in, you will begin to get the earnings from her estate. Not the principal, of course, but whatever earnings some nine million dollars’ worth of investments produces will come to you in quarterly payments. Even at five percent, that will not be chopped liver, as the expression goes.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Cam said.

  “Not a pound, Lieutenant,” the lawyer said. “In fact, it’s worded so that even if you’re fired from the Sheriff’s Office, it still works. The relevant clause speaks to your leaving law enforcement permanently.”

  Cam laughed. “I guess she knew that my getting shitcanned was always a possibility,” he said.

  “Well, retire, resign, or piss somebody off, but if you leave law enforcement, you let me know, okay?”

  Cam said he would, then hung up. He had meant what he’d said: He’d have preferred to have found Mary Ellen wrapped in duct tape in that trailer to all the money in Chin
a. He’d never had big bucks before, and he recognized that suddenly having money might present its own problems, especially if he left under what looked like an increasingly dark cloud. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, he thought.

  The phone rang again. He picked up and identified himself.

  “You have mail,” said a clone of the chipper voice from AOL.

  He laughed and hung up, thinking it was a joke, but then, curious, he went to his computer. He did have mail, and it was from JKB@tigereye.com. Well now, he thought. He opened the E-mail.

  A color picture began to unfold on his screen. He couldn’t fathom it until it was just about done, and then he saw that it was of the interior of a dimly lit cavern that looked fairly large. In the foreground was what appeared to be an enclosure area with three large cages that had straw on the floor and watering troughs toward the back. Each cage was about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, and each had a heavy wooden door at the back.

  The cages were empty. The reinforced wire doors at the front of each cage were standing open. All three of the wooden doors at the back were shut and barred by heavy metal strap handles. Superimposed at the top of the picture was a string of numbers, which Cam recognized as GPS coordinates. At the bottom there was a line of text, which read. “The lady or the tiger? Come at noon. Come alone or don’t bother.”

  66

  AT NOON THE NEXT day, he stood by his truck and looked across a creek at a very old house trailer and some sheds that were nestled in a fold at the base of a heavily wooded hill. He would have driven into the yard except that he didn’t think the rickety wooden bridge in front of him would hold up under his truck. He’d spent an hour finding the place once he’d left the paved road. The final mile had been little more than two ruts through the woods that paralleled the creek. The ruts kept going past this trailer, but the GPS unit on his dash said he was there.

  He had come in patrol uniform, even though he had no Sheriff’s Office authority in this county. He was alone but not entirely on his own. He’d gone down to the hospital to see Bobby Lee after getting the E-mail, and he’d told the sheriff what he proposed to do. The sheriff looked somewhat better and was lobbying hard to go home. He immediately vetoed the whole idea of Cam going out there alone.