Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

by Blaize Clement

  What did you plan to do, take these vials home and pass them out on the street?”

  She looked from his face to the vial.

  I was hoping she would spit again, this time for real, but instead she looked distracted. She actually gestured with her gun as she talked, like a teacher holding a pointer.

  “I take them to health department. My government will take them to laboratory … they will know what to do with them.”

  Showing a lot more energy and strength than I’d seen before, Ken Kurtz moved another step closer to her, and I knew that in the next moment he planned to take her gun. I wasn’t so sure I liked what I thought he might do once he had it. Gilda might be a thief and she might have tried to hire a hit man to kill Kurtz, but I sort of liked her team better than his.

  I said, “I hate to burst all your bubbles, but an FBI team has this house under surveillance and you’ll both be arrested.”

  Ken Kurtz settled the vial in the cooler and looked up at me with a smug smile. “That’s like telling Jonas Salk that his parking meter has expired so his polio vaccine is lost to the world. You have no idea how important my work is.”

  “Sure I do. You’ve developed a vaccine for bird flu.”

  Both their jaws dropped in such identical gapes of shock that it was almost funny.

  I pointed at a whirling centrifuge. “I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know how you make a vaccine, but I know virus-extracting machines can separate a virus from blood and concentrate it.”

  His eyes narrowed in paranoid suspicion. “Only another scientist would guess at a vaccine for avian flu.”

  “Oh, please! You don’t have to be a scientist to know that iguanas and chickens have identical respiratory and digestive systems. When an iguana is sick, you give it bird tonic. If you transferred a bird virus to an iguana, the virus would weaken because the iguana is a cold-blooded animal, but the iguana would essentially become a vaccine-producer.”

  Kurtz stared at me with a look of surprised respect, sort of like a dog looks at a human after the human makes barking sounds.

  I spread my hands, palms up. “Once you know how, I imagine it’s rather easy. You’ve infected Ziggy with avian flu, he has produced antibodies, and now you’re drawing blood from him to spin them out in your vaccine-making machines.”

  Sounding like somebody who had always wanted to talk about his work to an equal, Kurtz said, “In the beginning, I tried to use silver nitrate to attenuate the virus. It went much faster when I conceived of using iguana blood instead.”

  I looked at the welts on Kurtz’s hands and knew he had planned to draw blood from Ziggy that night. That had been the purpose of putting him in the wine room, to shut him down so he could draw blood without being whipped or scratched. I also knew that when Ken Kurtz was between bouts of debilitation, he was a lot stronger than anybody had imagined possible—strong enough to pick Ziggy up and carry him to the wine room, strong enough to walk out to the guardhouse and shoot Ramón in the head while he slept.

  I said, “I don’t understand why you killed Ramón.”

  A flicker of surprise moved across his cheeks. “How did you know?”

  “Until this minute, I didn’t. But it’s the only thing that makes any sense. What I don’t understand is why you did it.”

  “He saw the lab. He would have talked.”

  Gilda said, “You killed Ramón?”

  “It was your fault. You opened the door from the wine room to the lab while he was still in the wine room. He saw through the door.”

  “Bastard!”

  I didn’t know which one disgusted me more, Kurtz for always blaming somebody else for what he did or Gilda for trying to rise to his level of sliminess. From the fury and pain in Gilda’s eyes, I had a feeling that Paloma’s suspicions about her husband and Gilda might be true.

  She backed up a step from Kurtz, got a firmer grip on her gun, and glared at me as if I had been a partner in the crime.

  I said, “Some people are damn disappointing.”

  She waved the gun side to side. “Now you will both go into living room. I will walk behind. If you run away, I will kill you.”

  She might not have been capable of murder before, but I believed her. Gilda had crossed over her own drawn line, and now she wasn’t simply furious and determined, she was full of fine reckless vengeance.

  Stepping smartly in my high heels, I clacked through the wine room. Drawn to the living room’s warmth and light, Ziggy had moved closer to the door that Kurtz had left open. Careful to stay far enough away to avoid his tail or his claws, I circled around him and stepped through the doorway. Kurtz and Gilda must have followed my lead, because they both got past him without being lashed or clawed.

  When I reached the fireplace, Gilda called out, “Stop.”

  Beside me, Kurtz bent to the basket of wood on the hearth. At first I thought he hoped to fling a log at Gilda and knock the gun from her hand, but instead he carefully arranged kindling and fresh logs on the smoldering fragments to reignite them.

  Scientific minds have screwy priorities.

  Gilda had a wild-eyed grip on her gun, but I could tell from the way she held it that any shots she got off would be poorly aimed—not that a random bullet isn’t as destructive as an aimed one, especially if it hits you. It seemed to me that the situation required somebody with a cool head. Unfortunately, the best we had was me.

  I said, “Gilda, the police are looking for you because they think you may have killed Ramón. Once they know you didn’t, they’ll have no interest in you. But you’re in Florida where the death penalty is alive and well, so if you kill either Ken Kurtz or me, you’re a dead woman.”

  I didn’t think it necessary to point out that Guidry might arrest her for conspiring to kill Kurtz.

  Still looking unfazed by her big gun, Kurtz said, “Gilda, do you really believe you can simply pack up the vaccine and walk away from here? Dixie’s telling the truth about the FBI. The minute you go out the door with the vaccine, they’ll take it.”

  He sounded so certain that for a moment I believed him. Maybe the FBI really was out there somewhere in the darkness watching us, maybe they were picking up our conversation on remote speakers. If they were, Ken Kurtz would surely be arrested for industrial espionage and for murder.

  If Gilda believed him, it only fueled her anger. “Yes, they will take vaccine and let you go free! They will say I killed Ramón, that I am evil one. They will kill me and make you a hero.”

  Something uncoiled in my chest, and as I looked at that raving woman with the oversized gun and the outrageous imagination, I knew she might speak the truth. I also knew that I was the expendable one, the fly in the ointment that nobody would miss. It wouldn’t be hard to frame Gilda as Ramón’s killer. And if they killed me, they could easily say Kurtz had shot me after I’d broken into his house.

  The galling thing was that a lot of people, including Guidry, wouldn’t have trouble believing I had broken into Kurtz’s house. The fact that I actually had broken in didn’t make it any easier to like the idea of people thinking I had.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Kurtz and Gilda stood facing me with the wine room behind them. While my brain spun out the possible scenario that Gilda had just described, I became aware of a green movement behind them. Through the wine room’s open door, Ziggy had got enough warm air to get his brain spinning too. He was on the move with his tongue flicking forward to smell the air, running silently on the pads of his feet toward the leaping flames Kurtz had restarted in the fireplace. I braced myself. If Ziggy did what I thought he would do, he might be my salvation.

  When he was within a foot or two of Gilda and Kurtz, Ziggy’s tongue smelled the fire.

  His reptilian brain hollered, Heat is to the right!

  He made a quick turn toward the fire, sensed danger to his side, and whipped his tail sharply around Gilda’s legs.

  Gilda screamed and threw up her gun hand. In a flash, I leaped to grab it. She st
ruggled, but Gilda wasn’t exactly an Amazon and surprise had caused her to lose balance. With her gun in one hand, I only had to shove her hard with the other to cause her to fall backward. She fell like a tree, stiff-legged and stiff-armed, arching her back over Ziggy, whose tail was still wildly lashing. She landed in the perfect location for his whipping tail to slash whatever part of her body was closest to him. Since she lost her head and scrambled around on all fours, that meant pretty much all of her.

  Fighting back the nauseating dizziness of knowing I might kill somebody again, I spread my legs in my damned high heels and stiffened my arms, holding the gun pointed at her with both hands. She was too busy trying to get away from Ziggy to notice.

  With his dewlap billowed to its fullest extent and his forelegs stiffened to raise his chest, Ziggy stretched himself in front of the warm fire and bobbed his head. His color was still dull, but he looked quite pleased with himself.

  A figure moved across the glass so rapidly I wasn’t sure I had seen it, but it set off a contest in my head between euphoric hope—that I’d accidentally been telling the truth and FBI agents were ready to come in and arrest Kurtz—and paranoid fear—that they’d arrest Gilda, kill me, and let Kurtz go free.

  The paranoia was too awful, so I went with hope.

  To distract Kurtz, I said, “I should have known you weren’t that sick. A man that bad off couldn’t drink wine.”

  Scientist to the end, he said, “Not so. Red wine has antiviral properties.”

  Behind him, the front door eased open half an inch.

  I looked around at Gilda to see if she had noticed, but she was examining the ugly slash marks on her arms and hands. The ones under her pants legs weren’t visible, but I knew from experience that an iguana’s whip burns on your legs hurt like nobody’s business.

  The door opened wider, and a tall man slipped silently into the room. He wore black jeans and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, so it took me a moment to recognize the fanatic who’d called me a harlot. He was carrying a Colt .357 Magnum, a gun even larger than Gilda’s. In his large hand it didn’t look out of place.

  He winked at me and I almost sagged with relief. I had been right about him; he was FBI.

  He said, “I’ll take over now.”

  Shocked, Kurtz spun around to look at him.

  I lowered Gilda’s gun and handed it the man.

  Feeling proud but trying for humble self-effacement, I said, “I took this from Gilda.”

  Then, to show I was too smart to be taken in by a burlap robe and a fake fanatic act, I said, “That was a great disguise you used. But I knew you were an agent.”

  I felt like a kid with a gold star. I couldn’t wait to tell Guidry how I’d known all along who the good guys were. Me, Dixie Hemingway, was in cahoots with an FBI agent who was there to arrest Ken Kurtz for corporate espionage.

  Kurtz said, “Hello, Walt.”

  I heard a tiny buzz in the back of my skull, as if a gnat had slipped through my bones and got trapped in there.

  The monk-turned-agent tipped his chin toward Ziggy.

  “You know, Ken, we could have shared him. But no, you had to hog all the credit like some publicity-hungry diva.”

  The buzzing in my skull grew louder. I looked at the FBI agent’s hands and saw crusted claw marks and welts.

  Kurtz said, “I’m sorry I didn’t kill you last night.”

  I said, “You’re the one who tried to steal Ziggy.”

  The man gave me a blank look, and Kurtz laughed. For a man with a gun pointed at his head, he was remarkably cheerful.

  “She calls the iguana Ziggy,” he said. “Sort of an inside joke.”

  To me, he said, “Dixie, meet Walter Cahill, chief zoobiologist for the Clarex Foundation. I imagine he’s the one who knocked you out.”

  The phony monk had the gall to grin at me. “Sorry, nothing personal.”

  As if she’d just noticed that our number had grown, Gilda stood up and waved her arms like a traffic cop.

  “Monsters! You are monsters, both of you!”

  They turned toward her with the lazy insolence of men who can’t be bothered by criticism. Cahill held a gun in each hand the way movie cowboys do, his .357 pointed toward Kurtz, and Gilda’s .44 Magnum carelessly at his side.

  Behind them, Jessica Ballantyne slipped through the open door.

  If it hadn’t been for the Glock .45 in her hands, she could have been the latest arrival at a happening midnight party. Once again, I vacillated between relief and caution. She was genuine FBI, but she was also in love with the man she had been sent to arrest.

  Gilda shouted, “You say you make world better, but is not true!”

  Absorbed in her fury, Gilda didn’t notice Jessica. Absorbed in themselves, the men were smirking while they watched Gilda’s performance.

  Jessica had adopted the gun stance that every trained law-enforcement officer uses. Feet spread, knees slightly bent, shoulders back, chin parallel to the floor, both arms extended, the gun in both hands, left thumb over right thumb, trigger finger stretched toward the barrel. She might be a lovesick mess, but the woman knew how to handle a gun.

  In a low menacing voice, she said, “Drop the weapons, Walt.”

  Both men froze, and for an instant a play of emotions rippled across their faces.

  Low as an exhaled breath, Kurtz said, “Jessie.”

  The word held so much love and longing that I forgot about the guns and looked at him. He wore the smile of a happy man, and his eyes burned with new excitement.

  Cahill let the guns fall to the floor.

  Kurtz said, “God, Jessie, I’ve dreamed for two years that you came back to me. I thought it was an impossible fantasy. When Dixie told me you were alive, I was afraid to believe it, afraid it would turn out to be a hoax.”

  Jessica’s face remained still, but her eyes showed the turmoil she felt.

  Gilda had been ignored as long as she could stand. Still bleeding from Ziggy’s claws, her arms windmilled as she bounced in place.

  “He killed Ramón!”

  The woman’s one-track focus was beginning to get on my nerves, but at least she was telling the truth.

  I said, “She’s right, Jessica. Ken Kurtz killed the guard.”

  With her eyes still locked on Kurtz’s, Jessica said, “Is that true, Ken?”

  Kurtz flapped his hand. “Don’t get distracted by extraneous details, Jessica. The important thing is that we’re together again. You’re a scientist, a brilliant scientist. Together we can do everything we always dreamed of doing.”

  Jessica said, “I was sent here to arrest you.”

  “They’ll drop it, Jessie. I can name a long list of judges and congressmen and FDA people who’ve been bought by BiZogen or ZIGI. There’ll be some media flap for a while, and then it’ll die down. Don’t worry about it.”

  Her voice went even huskier than usual. “I understood how you felt about our colleagues being killed, but I’ll never understand how you could deliberately murder a man.”

  He went very still, as if her words held coded meaning that only an old lover with intimate knowledge of another’s pitch and turn of phrase could translate. Then he raised a hand to his face, where spasms moved like small jerking animals under his blue skin. In that moment, he was such a pitiable figure that every eye in the room fixed on his quivering visage. Nobody noticed his other hand plunge into his pocket until he pulled out a small gun. It appeared to be a Smith & Wesson

  .38 Special, a revolver with a two-inch barrel. Since revolvers don’t leave casings, I supposed it was the gun he’d used to kill Ramón, the same gun he’d worn under his robe when I first met him. Now I knew why he’d fussed with the logs in the basket. That’s where he’d hidden the gun.

  From the corridor, somebody yelled, “Freeze!”

  In the next instant, what looked like half the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department exploded into the room from all directions, all with their weapons trained on Ken Kurtz.
/>   Like a highway accident in which a second of chaos seems to stretch into sequential minutes, time slowed to a crawl.

  Kurtz pivoted toward the southern corridor with his gun raised and pointed directly at deputies there. At that same moment, Ziggy panicked from all the new smells and sounds and streaked across the room, running straight toward the deputies in the southern corridor. Seeing a small dragon coming at him, the nearest one jerked his weapon toward him.

  I yelled, “Don’t hurt the iguana!”

  With his body still turning toward the southern corridor and his gun still raised, Kurtz became aware of Ziggy’s blind run and of the deputy’s startled reaction. Instinctively, he leaped toward Ziggy, for an exquisite moment spread-eagled above him. At that precise instant, Jessica put a bullet through his neck.

  Kurtz fell on top of Ziggy and rolled to his side facing Jessica. His gun fell from his hand, and in the moment before death claimed him, it looked as if his eyes were focused on her with calm acceptance.

  Ziggy scrambled free and scuttled away, his tail dragging through Kurtz’s blood to form a red connection between blue man and green beast.

  The room went eerily quiet.

  With his own gun drawn, Guidry came around the corner from the north corridor.

  He said, “Jessica Ballantyne?”

  With tears streaming down her face, she handed him her gun. “I’m an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Lieutenant.”

  Guidry’s gray eyes were watching her intently. “I think you’d better sit down.”

  “I’m quite all right, Lieutenant.”

  With his phone to his ear, Guidry came to stand in front of me. Behind him, an officer was arresting Gilda, and another officer was cuffing Cahill and advising him of his rights.

  Guidry clicked his phone closed. “Thanks for leaving the back door open for us.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “An officer tailed Gilda here, then watched you come in. While he waited for backups, the other two dropped in. You must have sent out invitations.”

  “Kurtz killed Ramón, not Gilda. The man’s name is Cahill. He’s a rival scientist. He’s the one who hit me, and he tried to steal Ziggy.” In sudden alarm, I said, “Don’t let anything happen to Ziggy! He’s producing bird flu vaccine.”