1 Take the Monkeys and Run

by Karen Cantwell

  I slipped the phone, whose display now read “MISSED CALL,” back into the pocket and was about to storm up the driveway to confront Colt and find out why he and Howard were lying, when a shiny black Lincoln Town Car crept onto White Willow. It moved slowly past me, nearly stopping, but then continued slowly on. The windows were tinted so black that I couldn’t see in. I watched as it made a torturously slow turn in the cul-de-sac and came back, stopping right beside me. The driver’s side window came down, revealing a man in a black wool coat wearing black leather gloves. By the crags and folds of skin on his square face, I guessed he was easily in his sixties, but his hair was jet black. It looked unnaturally black, so I was guessing he dipped into the L’Oréal. The black hair was jelled back and up high onto his head in what appeared to be a failed attempt to mimic Elvis Presley. His dark, droopy eyes screamed Italian ancestry.

  Get a grip, I thought, my heart pounding. Maybe he was just lost and wanted directions. It happened all the time. Of course, not in my neighborhood, but there was a first time for anything. I guess. I was working up the courage to say something cute and quippy so I could appear innocent, but he beat me to the punch.

  “Hey, you,” he said. I looked around. Not seeing anyone else, I pointed to myself and mouthed, “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. You think I’m talkin’ to the fuckin’ squirrels?”

  My first impulse was to ask him not to use such coarse obscenities in my very child-friendly neighborhood. Who did he think he was? My second, more life-preserving impulse was to run, screaming at the top of my lungs, but my legs were wobbling like overcooked spaghetti and my vocal cords had locked up. The palms of my hands were juicing up and my armpits began dripping like two leaky radiators.

  “I got a little present for you. Come here and get it,” he said, holding up a shoebox-sized package wrapped in brown paper. I do a lot of stupid things, but taking that box was not going to be one of them.

  “Oh, no, thanks. I don’t really know you . . . and . . .” I found some strength in my legs and started to move backwards when a man with a pug-dog face moved into my view from the passenger’s seat and spoke.

  “Listen, Snoopy,” said Pug Mug, “we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.” I was guessing the hard way would be taking a bullet from the small black gun he had conveniently pointed at my shaking body. Easy was good. I leapt forward, snatched the box from his hands and took four giant steps backward without asking Mother May I?

  “That’s better,” said the Elvis impersonator. “There’s a message with instructions in there. If I was you, I’d follow ’em, strict like, capisce?” The window motored back up to black and the car crept back down to the stop sign and turned away.

  There I was, standing in the middle of the road, wanting desperately to move, but my legs weren’t getting the orders from my frazzled brain. The synapses just kept misfiring. My body kept shaking from fear, yet I couldn’t help but think that if I had read the scene in a movie script I would have laughed at how cliché it was. Great, I thought—things just keep getting worse and worse, and to add insult to injury, when my life starts to imitate art, it has to imitate BAD art. Suddenly, without warning, the dam broke and a flood was unleashed. I started crying buckets. I had finally broken down. No more Sigourney Weaver. No more Lieutenant Ripley, Alien Killer. I’d wimped out, big time. Huge, uncontrollable sobs wracked my whole body.

  Colt was suddenly at my side. How he got there, I don’t know, because I had lost touch of the world around me. “Curly! What’s wrong?” he asked, enveloping me with his arms.

  “I . . . SOB . . . I . . . SOB . . . SOB . . .”

  He saw the package in my arms. “What’s that?”

  “I . . . don’t . . . know . . .” I felt like I was choking. “Man. . . SOB, SOB. . . . gun . . .a . . . GULP . . . message . . . SOB . . . look.” My whole body was in a spasm. Colt grabbed the box and tore off the brown wrapping in one swift move. He pulled up the top to peek in without letting me see the contents. He threw the top back down fast and blew out a strong breath. The color in his face drained away.

  “You don’t want to see this,” he said. Even though I was terror-stricken beyond reason, some inner voice shouted at me. “Get a grip!” I managed to stop the sobs and wipe away the tears. Then the voice—sane or insane, I’m not sure which—told me that I needed to see what was in that box. If that message was for me, the voice said, then I’d better darned well see what it had to say. I grabbed the box from Colt and threw off the top.

  “Indiana Jones!” I screamed, seeing the curled-up, stone-like figure of my now dead cat. On his lifeless body was a folded piece of paper.

  Chapter Twelve

  COLT SAID THAT I DIDN’T faint, but I have no memory of the several minutes after seeing Indiana’s body in the box. The next thing I knew, I was sitting at my kitchen table wrapped in my warm, red fleece blanket sobbing and wringing my hands. My vision had tunneled, the periphery black. I put my attention on the blurry mug on the table next to me, until the blackness faded and it came into focus. There were voices and I tried to make them out. Colt. Roz. I was disoriented and didn’t remember how I’d gotten there.

  “Are you okay, sweetie? Barb?” It was Roz’s voice. I looked down. She was kneeling on the floor looking up into my face. “Barb? Do you know where you are?” she asked.

  I scanned the room. The fog was receding and I became aware of my surroundings. I felt cold and could see steam rising from the mug, so I grabbed it with both hands. Oh, it was so warm. I wanted to warm my insides, too. “Tea?” I asked, inquiring about the contents of the mug. Roz nodded. I pulled it off the table and slowly toward my lips. Still shivering like mad, I could barely drink without spilling. While I sipped haphazardly, the image of my dead cat popped into my mind.

  “Omigod! Indiana Jones! They killed him!” I screamed, standing up.

  “No, they didn’t.” said Roz soothingly, coaxing me back into my chair. “It wasn’t Indiana. He’s safe here in the house.”

  “It’s okay, Curly.” It was Colt’s voice. I had been aware that he was talking, but now I realized he was standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder.

  “But . . . but, that cat!” I stammered.

  “It looked like him, but it wasn’t him,” Colt said. I heard a mewing and felt a soft, furry, LIVE cat rub against my leg. I took a deep breath. Thank God. I picked up his fat, wonderful body and cuddled him good.

  “I thought you were gone, Indy.” I sniffled into his fur. Indiana Jones, always the talkative feline, replied lovingly: “Mew, mew.” Then he jumped out of my arms, having had enough human bonding for the day.

  “But it’s not all good news,” Colt continued. “There’s something you need to see.” He handed me the piece of paper, which I now remembered seeing on top of the cat’s body in the box. It was folded over two times and had small, smudged bloodstains on it. I unfolded it and attempted to read, but the words blurred in front of me. “Oh, crud!” I snapped, expressing a very familiar frustration.

  “What’s wrong?” Roz was still worried about me.

  “I need my reading glasses.” The day I’d hit forty-four was the final death blow to my near vision. I couldn’t read a thing anymore without my reading glasses. Soup cans, price tags, papers from school, threatening notes from the Mafia. My eye doctor had been kind when he broke the news, but I did detect him raising his voice a bit when he spoke, just in case my hearing was gone, as well. I scanned the room for a spare pair—I kept several pairs around since seeing is often important to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t spot any.

  “Use mine,” said Colt. “My inside jacket pocket.” I smiled at him, glad to know that men were not immune to the inconveniences of old age. I reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of smart-looking rimless bifocals and slipped them on. The words came nicely into focus. The message wasn’t so nice: “Stop your snooping or you’ll end up like the cat. Tell your friends too.”

  Th
e cream-colored paper was the type that would have come from a telephone message pad. Slightly darker-shaded flowers decorated the paper, giving it a distinctively feminine feel. Odd choice of paper, I thought, for two men of the criminal set. The writing, in blue ink, was odd as well—formal, long, elegant lines in cursive. It was a practiced penmanship and another feminine touch. Only the smudge of blood and the words themselves indicated deadly intent. I took a sniff—whoever wrote it was a smoker.

  I cocked my head and looked at Roz. “Did you read this?” I asked. She nodded her head. Two little worry lines were furrowed between her eyebrows. I considered the note quietly for a minute, then asked Colt, “What does this mean?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Colt said, raising his voice in a shrill tone that I’d never heard come out of his happy-go-lucky mouth. “What this means is that you’re going to do what they say, and stay the hell away from this. All of this. I'm serious, Curly. No more playing fun little solve-the-mystery games.”

  “He’s right,” said Roz, shaking her head. She got up and sat in the chair next to mine. “Who would’ve known this could happen in Rustic Woods, of all places? We have our problems here, but I sure as heck didn’t think organized crime was one of them. It’s unreal.”

  “Well, they can’t be very bright,” I said. “I mean, they only thought they had my cat. Right? They weren’t even smart enough to get the right pet. One of the guys had this wacky, ridiculous, Elvis-like hair thing going on. And look at that paper and the handwriting. I thought those kind of people were a little more manly, if you know what I mean.” Was I actually mocking the Mafia? Had the events of the past few days stripped me of common sense brain cells?

  “They don’t need to be bright to kill you,” countered Colt. “Tell me exactly what happened.” So I relayed the whole story, starting from the point where I found his cell phone ringing in the jacket that he had given me to wear. He winced, obviously chagrined that he’d been caught in a lie, but he didn’t seem to be chagrined enough to explain the reason why. I continued on, telling him about the Elvis wannabe and the pug-faced thug with the gun. Yikes, the gun. I shivered at the thought. I tried to repeat everything that had been said to me verbatim, or at least as best as I could recall. Roz had her hand to her mouth, her blue eyes as big as dinner plates. Colt sat with his head in his hands. He shook his head when I finished the story, and his blond locks shimmered. He took a deep breath.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Colt said. “I’ll take you and the girls to a hotel. You’ll stay there for a few days, lay low, be cool, until this blows over. Once they see you’re staying clear, it should all be good.”

  Wow. This didn’t sound like the Colt I knew. The guy who loved to jump head-first into anything, no matter how dangerous. Of course, there’s dangerous, and then there’s deadly. This was definitely deadly. I guess he had grown up a little. And I liked how protective he was being toward me. It made me feel warm and cozy and important. Roz suggested we stay with my mother in her condo across town. I shook my head violently at that proposal.

  “Probably not a good idea,” said Colt. “While it might be unlikely, these creeps could be capable of finding her. Which brings up a good point. Maybe she should go with you.”

  “No!” I screamed. Two hours in a twelve by twelve room with my mother and I’d be calling Elvis and Pug-Mug myself to come put me out of my misery. “No way, Jose! Colt, you know my mother—she’ll drive me crazy before the girls can ask ‘Where’s the ice machine?’ Besides, how do you suppose we even explain to her that she should come stay in a hotel room just five miles from her own condo? Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.”

  “Fine,” he relented. “We’ll table that one for now.”

  “You could stay at the Wildwood Suites in Herndon,” suggested Roz. “It’s not too far away, but it’s out of Rustic Woods.” I said that was fine. Colt asked me for his cell phone with a childish, guilty look on his face, still not offering an explanation. I took it out of his jacket pocket and handed it to him, frowning the whole time.

  “I’ve got a couple of calls I need to make,” he said, not willing to look me in the eyes.

  “Important business in Century City? Any other lies you want to run by me?” I asked.

  “Not right now.” That was all he said as he walked out of the room with the phone. I heard his footsteps pound up the stairs.

  Roz waited until he was out of earshot. “So his story about needing to go back to L.A. was a lie. Why?” she asked.

  “Best I can figure, Howard must have said something to him to convince him to leave. They must have come to some sort of ‘gentlemen’s agreement.’” I said it out loud, but something about how they were both acting just seemed a little off. Or maybe a lot off. I was sure Howard was jealous that Colt had come to stay, and I supposed it was plausible that Colt might have agreed to leave in order to keep the peace, but the way everything was going down just smelled worse than rotten eggs.

  Roz was at the kitchen counter making a cup of tea.

  “You know,” she said as she poured the water into the cup, “Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s been nothing going on over at that house?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean with crime scene investigations and . . . I don’t know . . . stuff,” she said, plunging the tea bag up and down. “Don’t you think there would be people—police, CSI, ATF, FCC . . . Geraldo Rivera, anybody—whoever cares about this stuff? Wouldn’t they be coming around, asking more questions, searching the premises for more evidence? It’s been oddly quiet since the last official car rolled out of here Saturday afternoon.”

  She had a point. I hadn’t given it much thought. But common logic would lead even an ordinary civilian like me to think there would be more investigations, given the strange circumstances.

  “There was the illusive Marjorie from the FBI,” I said. “Acting all PETA-like and asking me that question about Tito Buttaro.”

  “See? Now that’s just plain weird. What’s the big secret?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’ve never found a dead guy in a house full of dead monkeys before, so admittedly I’m a little inexperienced with the process, but you’re right. Something just isn’t adding up,” I said. Roz nodded her head in agreement.

  “Don’t you wonder whose head that was you found?” she asked.

  “Not really. I spend most of my time trying to forget what it looked like. Although, after today, my interest is rising.”

  “I’m so curious I could scream.”

  “That’s not the only thing that’s got me bugged,” I added. “Something’s up with Colt, too. He knows something he’s not telling us.”

  Roz leaned in, the excitement of conspiracy glowing on her face. “Certainly, I don’t know him as well as you do to know about his quirks and such, but in my opinion, he was acting very strange. I happened to look out my window and see you two in the street—I couldn’t really see exactly what was going on, but then you screamed so I ran out. Colt was holding you up when I got there—we both walked you into the house and the first thing he did was grab your kitchen phone and run upstairs to make a phone call. He wasn’t on the phone long, because he was back down in less than a minute. I asked him if he’d called the police, assuming that’s what he’d done. He just shook his head no. He didn’t seem like he wanted to offer up an explanation, and I was more worried about taking care of you than I was about giving him the third degree. A few minutes later I suggested we call the police, but he didn’t say anything—sort of pretended he didn’t hear me.” We sat and sipped our tea in silence. I was going over the events of the last few days in my head and I assumed Roz was doing the same.

  Monkeys from an animal testing lab show up mysteriously in my trees. No one gives me a reason why. Rotting human head and three dead monkeys found in the basement of a vacant house. No one gives a reason why. House vacant for thirty years. People afraid to give a reason why. Neighbors fleeing faster than Gloria A
llred chasing down another celebrity lawsuit. Colt suddenly needs to leave town and, oh by the way, he won’t call the police when the Mafia threatens my life. Yup. Not my ordinary kind of week. I thought about the poor cat that really had been murdered. Some cat lover somewhere was missing their poor pet right now, not knowing it had met a grisly end. I looked at Roz. “Where did you put the dead cat?”

  “We left it outside by the front door.”

  “Still in the box?”

  She grimaced. “Yeah.”

  Knowing I would need to do something with the poor little fella, I got up from my chair. Roz followed me to the front door. We both gasped when I opened it. Right in front of us, the yellow tabby cat that we thought had been dead was lolling around lazily on the ground next to the box. Roz pulled the door closed behind us, while I stepped down for a better look. Upon closer inspection I could see he wasn’t lolling lazily so much as rolling drunkenly. His eyes were sort of glazed and glassy. “Roz,” I said, “I think he’s drugged!” I searched through his fur carefully. There had been blood on that note, and I wanted to know why. I found the reason soon enough. A small, raised, bloody spot, barely smaller than a dime. I had seen the same sort of welt left behind when our vet had given Indiana his yearly vaccinations. This cat had been given a shot of something, I was fairly sure. The question was, who was the perpetrator? Elvis and Pug Mug? Were they intending to actually kill the animal? Certainly, by the words in the note, I was meant to think he was dead.

  While examining the cat’s fur some more, I discovered something even more interesting—a tattoo on his tummy. The numbers ‘47592’ were clearly tattooed in black ink on a shaved area of his upper tummy, closest to his chest.