“It’s not necessary. I have to go drive the Hamster truck this afternoon anyway.” Peter released Nick’s hand. “I’ll see you at home.”
“Right, I’ll see you there,” Nick paused then, cracked a sardonic smile, and added, “Dad.”
With that, he fled the scene.
Like most other members of the Bellingham Police Department, Officers Patton and Clarkson were known to Peter. The very same officers had been first on the scene of Shelley Vine’s murder. They looked very much the same. Officer Patton still sported the same dykey mullet, and Officer Clarkson’s heavy moustache remained eternal, as if stamped out of some mold made in the mid seventies when CHiPs had still been popular.
They exchanged pleasantries. Officer Patton inquired about Nick, and Peter said he was doing great. Both police officers nodded at him as though it had been their duty to check up on the happiness level Bellingham’s premier young gay couple.
Officer Clarkson said, “Dr. Nagelschneider tells us you found a cat.”
Peter explained where he had found the kitten, omitting the fact that he’d been heavily engaged in skulking through the alley minutes beforehand.
“And you didn’t see anyone there?” asked Officer Patton.
“Not even a jogger,” Peter replied.
She nodded, jotted something down in her notebook. “What were you doing in the park that early? It’s pretty far away from Wildcat Cove.”
Peter thought, ah, small-city police. They do remember where you live.
“Riding home from a party.” Peter supplied the excuse he had prepared. “Hey, do you mind if I ask a question?”
Both officers glanced up at him. Peter took this to be assent and said, “Have you seen any other instances of this kind of cat abuse recently?”
Strangely, Officer Clarkson chuckled. The receptionist, who had been silently eavesdropping on their whole conversation, shot him a glare so cold that Peter felt his testicles shrinking back up into his body.
Shaking with outrage, she stood and said, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t see what’s funny about that.”
“I’m sorry. I just thought Mr. Fontaine was going to ask me about the statue that went missing from the university campus.” The officer took off his hat, scratched his head. “I should have known you’d want the inside scoop on this. This is the third incident that veterinarians have reported to us this month, but that’s not unusual for the month of October.”
“Three reported incidents means there are probably more,” the receptionist said. Now that she’d entered the conversation, she’d apparently decided to stay.
Officer Clarkson reapplied his hat and turned to address the receptionist directly. “I already spoke with the chief, and he told me that we’ll be issuing a warning to the public later this afternoon. It should be in the Herald and on KGMI first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Do you think it’s the same sicko as before?” Peter asked.
“Hey, who’s interviewing who here?” Officer Patton cut in before her partner could answer.
Peter held up his hands in mock defense. “I’m just curious. I know that the police had a suspect before.”
“It’s not the same one,” Officer Clarkson said. Peter focused on him, since he seemed in a repentant and therefore extremely forthcoming mood after sticking his foot in his mouth.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because that individual died very shortly after the investigation began.” Officer Clarkson cast a glance at the receptionist—who had finally returned to her seat—and then to Peter.
“Can you tell me who that individual was? Now that he’s dead, I mean?” Peter caught himself unconsciously leaning in closer to the officer. He couldn’t help it. Juicy tidbits of information drew him like… Well, like a cat to catnip.
Officer Patton stepped forward, probably to save her partner from divulging anything else. She said, “We have no new suspects at this time, but we encourage the public to come forward with any information they might have regarding this matter. You have a nice day now, Mr. Fontaine.”
Chapter Three
After giving his statement to the police, Peter rode his bike the seven blocks to the Hamster’s offices in downtown Bellingham. He picked up keys to the Hamster’s white Toyota—the bed was already full of bundled papers—and checked the delivery route. It had been a few months since he’d delivered and even longer since he’d driven out into the county for any reason other than to go to the ski area.
His mind roved as he jiggered the old truck into gear.
Snuggled up against the largely undefended Canadian border and bounded on the west by the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Whatcom County is a place of extremes. Tie-dyed liberals from the university in Bellingham keep hope alive, facilitating the country’s longest-running peace vigil—forty years old and still going strong—while out in the county the Aryan Nations holds routine meetings, complete with target practice. The one thing these disparate elements can agree upon is that the mainstream media comprise nothing but propaganda, provocation, and lies.
Enter the Hamster, a weekly paper that, while slanting to the left at least manages to deliver the truth.
Someone’s idea of the truth, anyway.
It always amazed Peter that anyone outside of rock-throwing distance of the university would be interested in Doug’s conspiracy-theory-laden editorials or his leftist views on watersheds and zoning laws.
But the Hamster had a strong readership in the county. Right on the outskirts of the city of Lynden—a municipality so religious that it still outlawed dancing—were vineyards producing award-winning wines and dairy farms crafting artisanal cheese. Farther into the mountains, near Glacier, survivalist militia types shared solar-shower tips with off-the-grid environmentalist homesteaders. Rifle ranges stood within sight of alternative no-kill animal-rescue organizations.
He drove from restaurant to coffee shop to corner store throughout greater western Whatcom county setting out bundles of free papers among the stacks of other free papers, the Thrifty Nickel, Whatcom Watch, and Whatcom Independent Tribune—the Hamster’s rival for local news—and real-estate brochures and a paper devoted entirely to buying and selling horses. More than one person asked him about Shawn’s whereabouts, some with looks of weedy desperation that gave Peter the distinct impression that Shawn had been using this route as a distro for his own sideline alternative pharmaceutical business. He wondered who exactly their delivery driver owed so much money to. Not any of these people, certainly. These were his regular customers, not his supplier.
Five hours later, with a sore back and dirty hands, Peter found himself heading west again toward Bellingham. He pulled over at Nugent’s Corner to drop off a bundle of Hamsters and get a coffee. When he returned, a young woman was standing by the truck, tucking a note under the windshield wiper.
Peter sidled up beside her. “Can I help you with something?”
She jumped and smoothed her straightened and streaked blonde hair, and glanced past Peter toward a black truck that sat idling close by.
Her ride, clearly.
Flame decals decorated the side panels along the truck bed, but the tinted windows didn’t allow him to see the driver’s face. Neither of these features was uncommon in the county, but Peter took note of the truck because it contained a large black goat. Again, animals in the backs of pickups were not unusual in this neck of the woods, but they were normally dogs.
How odd…
The girl, who had recovered herself somewhat said, “I’m sorry, I thought this was my friend’s truck.” She went to retrieve the note, but Peter stepped between her and the windshield.
“Is your friend Shawn?”
She smiled. “That’s right. Do you know where he is? I really, really need to talk to him.”
Probably really, really needed to buy some pot from him, more likely, Peter thought ungraciously. Aloud he said, “Shawn’s taken a short vacation. You should try calling him.”
&nb
sp; “I did, but he’s not answering.”
The driver of the truck honked, and the girl jumped again. She made a second attempt to grab her note from under the windshield wiper, but Peter was quicker. He pocketed the folded square of paper, saying, “I’ll make sure to give this to him, Miss…?”
“Thanks, I’ve got to go now.” She turned and practically ran back to the truck, which started rolling away before she even got the passenger-side door closed. Peter watched them peel out along 542, heading east toward Maple Falls. Mud spattered the whole back of the truck, including the license plate.
Not that Peter had any way of looking up a license plate number, anyway. He sipped his coffee and watched the car until it rounded a bend on the two-lane blacktop.
Then he unfolded the note.
It had been scribed in big, bubbly handwriting: Fucker. We will eat your soul.
And there was a pentagram. Inverted, of course.
Peter pondered the note for a moment before replacing it in his pocket and heading back into town.
Unless Shawn had become engaged in some kind of live-action role-playing game, he seemed to be in some serious shit.
* * *
Peter’s last stop was a Mexican restaurant directly across the street from the Vitamilk building where Nick had his studio. Because Peter felt it was better to apologize than to ask permission, he was always in the position that he was in now—having to say he was sorry for not asking Nick about the kitten before he’d agreed that it could stay with them.
It wouldn’t do any good to prolong the agony. He figured he should cross the street now and see if Nick was mad at him.
Originally a dairy distribution warehouse, the Vitamilk Building had been converted into cheap studio space sometime in the mid-eighties. Nick and seven other artists, whose prestige and talent ranged from international gallery quality to church craft fair…er, fare, produced masterpieces in the dingy interior. It was where Nick and Peter had first met, when Peter had walked in on Nick, bent over the body of Shelley Vine at what looked like the scene of a murder.
Well, in fairness, it had been the scene of a murder, but Nick hadn’t been the culprit. Still, he’d been covered in blood.
Not exactly the best first impression, but somehow Peter had decided to ask him out anyway. The rest was history.
Walking up the wide stairs to the second-story studios, Peter always had a glimmer of a memory of that night. It had been the first time he’d ever seen a dead body, though, as it turned out, not the last.
He had no idea why Nick stayed here after that. He had enough money to rent a better space. Hell, Walter had had a better studio built into his house. It had climate control and ventilation. Nick never went into the room except to access his camping gear, which was all that he stored in that state-of-the-art facility.
Peter would have thought that Nick enjoyed the camaraderie of the Vitamilk Building, except he always kept his door closed, no matter how hot or cold it got. It was closed now, and Peter knocked, as he always did.
No matter how long they lived together, Peter didn’t think he would ever be able to just walk into Nick’s studio. It was Nick’s sanctum, seeming almost a sacred space—if Peter had believed in sacred spaces, which, as an investigative reporter, he most certainly did not. He dearly yearned to rifle through the drawers and canvases of Nick’s studio, leaf through the books, sniff the assorted solvents, and otherwise stick his nose into Nick’s creative business.
But Nick liked his privacy, and Peter wanted to keep him, so he always knocked and, like a lurking vampire full of hope, waited to be invited in before crossing the threshold.
Nick answered the door and invited him in, his expression not as hostile as Peter had imagined it might be. Warm afternoon light slanted in the large, mottled windows to illuminate Nick’s most recent canvas—an abstract expressionist seascape.
He wore his typical autumn studio gear: an old army T-shirt, paint stained and so threadbare that Peter could clearly see the outline of his muscular torso. Nick’s only concession to the chill air had been to put on a pair of fingerless gloves, which lent him an air of starving, turn-of-the-century Paris Bohemian.
Peter perched himself on a three-legged stool that Nick had installed specifically for this purpose. He wasted no time, just got down to business.
“Are you mad about me offering to take care of the cat?”
Nick glanced over at him. “I’m not happy about it, but I’m not mad. I thought you were doing the Hamster delivery route.”
“I just finished.”
Nick nodded, taciturn as ever—but not more taciturn. That was a good sign.
After painting a few wide strokes, Nick said, “I guess as long as we don’t end up keeping the cat, it’ll be all right.”
“Did I say anything about keeping the cat?”
“You like cats.” Nick spoke as though delivering incriminating evidence at a trial.
“So what?”
“You get a cat, you’re going to get attached to the cat and end up keeping the cat. And I’m just not really a cat person,” Nick said. “If we got any pet, I think I’d prefer a dog.”
“Yeah, a big dog, right?” Peter crossed his arms and leaned against the wall behind him. The chilly mid-October air seeped in through wide cracks in the window frames.
“I like retrievers.” Nick didn’t look away from his painting. Nor did Peter expect him to. After spending hours and hours in Nick’s studio, he’d grown used to having conversations during which little or no eye contact was ever made.
“Regardless of the fact that you suspect me of being some kind of stray-cat sympathizer, I do not want to keep this cat forever. I just want to give her a hand until she’s better, because nobody is going to want to adopt a mangled little dehydrated cat.”
“She’s not mangled.”
“She’s definitely not completely whole,” Peter countered. “And I don’t know why you’re getting so bent out of shape about a having a cat houseguest for a couple of weeks. I live with your dead husband’s furniture every day, and I don’t complain.”
Even as the words were leaving Peter’s mouth, he knew he should not have said them. And yet, he had. More shockingly, to himself at least, he hadn’t even known he was going to say them.
Normally when he was going to fire a shot across the bow of Nick Olson, he rehearsed. He carefully chose his words. He didn’t just say whatever the hell he was thinking the absolute moment that it occurred to him.
Nick dropped his paintbrush into a jar of solvent, fixed Peter with his Viking blue eyes, and said, “Where the fuck did that come from?”
Peter himself did not know where the fuck that had come from. But he also intuitively knew that the words he’d spoken were nonetheless true. Peter replied, “I know I didn’t pay for the Castle. My name isn’t on the title, but I live there too, and I think I should get to make some sort of decision about it. That’s all I meant.”
“But we’re not talking about the house. We’re talking about a cat.” Nick picked up his brush again, swished it though the solvent.
“Are you allergic to cats?”
“No, but—” Nick began, but Peter cut him off.
“Are you afraid of cats?”
“Of course I’m not.”
“Then why are you fighting with me? She weighs less than a pound. She’ll be there for maybe a couple of weeks. How much trouble could she be?” Again, even as he spoke, Peter knew that his argument was anything but watertight. A single kitten could cause quite a lot of trouble, and he knew it. But he stared levelly at Nick anyway, daring him to call him on it.
Nick didn’t.
He daubed his brush in Naples yellow paint and said, “I’m not fighting with you at all, and I’m not bent out of shape. I already said she could stay until she’s better.”
Suddenly embarrassed that the fight that he’d been preparing to put up seemed now irrelevant, Peter said, “Thank you.”
Nick shrugged
, saying nothing. What started off as a pause stretched into silence. Peter couldn’t tell if he was getting the cold shoulder or if Nick had just become absorbed in his work. Either way he’d won Battle Kitten.
Even as he savored this victory, he realized that he didn’t have anything to keep a kitten in, not even a carrier to get one home. He decided that before he returned to the Castle, he should call on someone who did.
Chapter Four
Peter’s best friend, Evangeline, had been his roommate during the last half of college as well as three grim post-baccalaureate years when neither of them could find a real boyfriend. During that time he’d grown very attached to her late three-legged cat, Tripod, and grown well acquainted with her family, since he was her usual date for any holiday-related event. It wasn’t that Peter didn’t have a family. It was simply that his own parents had moved to Austin some years back, and flying to visit them in Texas more than once a year rarely fit into his schedule.
Since then, both Evangeline and he had shacked up with men who suited them. Tripod had passed away, but Evangeline and her lover, Tommy, had recently acquired a young wiener dog from the Whatcom County Humane Society. The wiener dog had been scooped up along with seventeen other mixed-breed dogs in a raid on an animal hoarder who lived out in the county. Being a sucker for runts, Evangeline had picked the sickliest of the animals, nursed him back to health, and named him Mitch.
Peter resisted the urge to draw a correlation between the injured wiener dog and his own disastrous mental state when Evangeline had taken him in during his junior year of college. She was the first person he’d come out to, and when, drunk and bleary, at six o’clock in the morning, he’d finally managed to spit the words out, she’d said, “It’s okay. I already knew that.”
Shortly thereafter he’d moved into her rented house. No one had seen him through as many sad and angsty nights as she had done. Even today, when he and Nick fought, she was the first person Peter autodialed. While what had just occurred hadn’t exactly been a fight, Peter dialed her anyway, out of habit. He explained the situation and asked if he she still had Tripod’s old cat carrier. She did. She invited him over to pick it up.
Bellingham Mysteries 3: Black Cat Ink Page 2
