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Tom Power 68,800 words

© Tom Power
773-573-3940
tptompower@gmail.com

CURIOSITY
By Tom Power

“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.”

—Joseph Wood Krutch

1.
Yoda and Doug were settling into a nice midmorning nap upstairs in the bedroom when

Yoda heard it. The sound was faint but familiar:

“Oodly-ooh.” It was Zeus, with that baby-talk gibberish he uttered whenever things

weren’t going his way—something he should have outgrown long ago. Yoda had been

wondering why Zeus was not up on the bed with them, being a bother like he usually
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was. Now she knew. He was downstairs somewhere, and in some kind of trouble. Yoda

tucked her head back down and shut her eyes, pretending she didn’t care, hoping she

wouldn’t have to.

“Oodly-ooh.”

There it was again. She looked over at Doug, who was fast asleep in his Superman

position: his head lying flat between his front legs, which were stretched straight out in

front of him, while his hind legs were stretched straight out behind him.

“Oodly-ooh.” The cry came once again from downstairs, a little louder this time. Yoda

rolled her eyes, stood up and did her best Halloween back arch, a well-timed one at that,

with Halloween just a day away. Yoda, of course, didn’t know that tomorrow was

Halloween, nor would she care if she did know. She took another look at Doug, yawned,

and then hopped off the bed onto the hardwood floor.

Yoda scowled as she sauntered out of the bedroom and down the carpeted steps. She

had just drifted off into a dream about a nice, fat mouse when she was so rudely

interrupted.

I wonder what he’s done this time, Yoda mused, even though she was pretty sure she

knew. She stopped for a moment at the bottom of the steps by the front door and licked

her paws. After a few silent seconds, Zeus sang out again: “Oodly-oodly-ooh!” It came

from the coat closet behind the staircase. He must have heard me coming down the steps,

Yoda thought, walking over to the closed closet door.

Had the People been there, they would have heard a series of meows from Yoda. What

Zeus heard was this: “Again, Zeus? When are you going to learn?”
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“How was I supposed to know they would leave me in here?” Zeus answered.

“It’s not like it hasn’t happened before, Zeus,” Yoda snapped, pausing to scratch her

right ear with her hind leg. “Besides, it’s not the People’s fault that you have to see

what’s inside every time a door opens.”

“You should talk, Yode,” Zeus said.

Yoda did a slow burn but didn’t reply.

“Come on, Yode! Help me get out of here!” Zeus cried. He sounded truly sorry for the

mess he had gotten into, although he would never say so out loud.

Yoda smirked. “Easy for you to say, Zeus. Not so easy to do.” She looked up at the

brass doorknob doubtfully. “I suppose you’ve already tried pushing on the door from the

inside.”

Silence.

“Zeus?”

Zeus said nothing, but Yoda could hear his paws rustling against the other side of the

door.

“Zeus?” Yoda said it louder this time.

“Of course I tried that,” Zeus lied. “What do you take me for?”

Yoda muttered something but Zeus couldn’t make out the words.

Just then the two of them heard a big boom followed by what sounded like a bowling

ball rolling down the steps. It was, of course, Doug, all eighteen-and-a-half pounds of

him, jumping off the bed upstairs and bounding down the steps. All this talk must have

woke him up. Either that or he heard the call of the litter box.
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Doug skulked slowly by Yoda, stopping briefly to lick his sister’s ear.

“Did it again, did he?” Doug whispered. He didn’t stick around to hear Yoda’s reply.

He was on his way to the kitchen, home of their cat dishes, which he hoped still

contained a few morsels left over from their breakfast. Yoda scratched her ear again as

she watched Doug waddle around the corner and disappear into the kitchen. After nearly

five years, she still sometimes found it hard to believe this Siamese behemoth was her

brother.

“I’ll be right back, Zeus. Hang in there,” Yoda said, walking off in the direction Doug

had gone.

“What else am I going to do?” Zeus muttered. Then he noticed a shoe on the closet

floor and attacked its laces with a passion.

In the kitchen, Doug was sitting before the sliding glass door, looking out at the patio

and the backyard. He was licking his chops, a telltale sign that he had, in fact, found a

little bit of food left in the cat dishes. Yoda walked over and sat down next to him. They

both watched in silence for a time as the gremlins that the People called leaves danced

across the concrete and the grass in the morning sunshine, oblivious to the fact that the

gremlins were being blown by the cool autumn wind. They spent much of their day

looking out the sliding door, wishing they could be out there in the backyard.

After a moment or two, Yoda looked at Doug, who was still licking his chops.

“You know, as much as I’d prefer to have Zeus locked up, I think we need to find a

way to open that door,” Yoda said finally. They continued to watch the dancing gremlins,
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keeping their eyes peeled all the while for a squirrel or, better yet, one of the cardinals

that sometimes visited the apple tree.

“How?” Doug finally asked.

“I don’t know,” Yoda said. “But who knows when the People will get home today? It

could be one of those late nights. Or worse, maybe they’ll be gone for a couple of days

again.”

“They would’ve left more food,” Doug said matter-of-factly.

He’s got a point, Yoda thought. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes Doug surprised

her. Still, she reasoned, all day is a long time to spend in a dark closet all alone with no

cat food or water or a litter box. She knew all about it. She had once spent a long

weekend locked in the utility closet across the hall from the closet that was now Zeus’s

prison, and there was nothing fun about that.

“There’s got to be some way to open that door,” Yoda said. Doug turned and looked at

her, but she didn’t immediately look back. She didn’t have to to know he was giving her

one of those blank looks of his.

Finally she did turn to look at him, but by then he was watching the gremlins again.

“How?” Doug asked again, staring straight ahead into the backyard.

Yoda didn’t reply. She was thinking. Hard. Finally she stood up and trotted off toward

the closet. Doug sat awhile, watching the gremlins, wishing he were out there doing

battle with them. Then he yawned, gave his chops one last lick and waddled off to join

his sister.
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Yoda was in midair when Doug rounded the corner, and the sight stopped him cold. It

was Yoda’s second attempt at turning the doorknob. She was a good jumper, even better

than Zeus, but then she’d had three more years of practice than young Zeus.

Doug sat down to watch the proceedings, not being much of a jumper himself. He saw

Zeus’s paw with its pink toe pads shoot out under the door as Yoda was getting set for

her third attempt. Yoda’s eyes were staring intently at the doorknob while she crouched

down, ready to spring.

“Zeus, stand up on your hind legs and push against that door,” she said. “I’m gonna try

it again.”

“Okay,” Zeus said, standing up, “but I don’t think it’s gonna work, Yode.”

“Shut up and push,” Yoda said, and with that she jumped. For a moment it looked to

Doug as if Yoda had landed on the doorknob and intended to stay there for a while. And

in a way she was trying to do exactly that: find her balance with her paws on the top of

the knob and then let her weight turn the knob as she eventually began to fall.

It almost worked. Yoda could feel the doorknob turning but her paws slipped off too

soon and the knob sprang back when she dropped to the floor again.

“What are you doing?” Doug asked absently, licking the fur on his chest and

scratching under his collar. Yoda scowled at the question and decided it didn’t deserve an

answer.

“Never mind. Come here, Doug,” she said. “I got another idea.”

A minute later Yoda was standing on her hind legs on Doug’s back, using all her

might to try and turn the doorknob with her paws.

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“Zeus, you still pushing on the door in there?” she asked.

“Yes,” he snapped, even though he wasn’t. He had been playing with the shoelaces

again. Zeus stood up and put his front paws against the door when suddenly he heard a

tremendous bang. A dump truck had hit a bump while passing by on the road in front of

the house. It might as well have been a bomb. Doug bolted to the kitchen in fright,

leaving Yoda dangling from the doorknob. Just as she was losing her grip, the doorknob

gave and the door opened.

Zeus came hopping out of the closet with his back fully arched and the fur on his tail

fully flared out. After a few moments passed and there was no repeat of the big bang, he

stopped and sat down to scratch the fur under his collar. It was only then that he noticed

Yoda staring at him.

“That’s okay, Zeus, you don’t have to thank me,” Yoda said with a scowl. Doug had

waddled back into the room and was now staring at Zeus as well. Zeus looked back at the

two of them, bewildered.

“Oodly-ooh,” he said finally.

2.
Ten minutes later, all three Siamese cats were sitting before the sliding glass door in the

kitchen, watching the gremlins performing their ballet on the patio. It was partly torment

and partly pleasure. The torment part was not being able to be out there chasing the

gremlins, all the while smelling the air and feeling the wind blowing through their fur.
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The pleasure part was being able to watch things move, as opposed to staring at the walls,

or worse, staring at each other.

The fact was, they were house cats, and all three of them from time to time wished it

were otherwise, especially when a stray ventured into the backyard, which happened

fairly often. The most frequent visitor was the cow cat. He was a big cat with black and

white splotches, and “cow cat” was what Yoda heard the People refer to it as. Yoda

didn’t know what a cow was, so she took their word for it.

The cow cat would skulk into the backyard and walk right up to the sliding glass doors

when the cats were sitting there. They would see his mouth opening and closing, but they

had no idea if he was saying words or if they would even understand them if they could

hear them. Zeus thought the cow cat was teasing them when he walked up to the door,

but Doug and Yoda weren’t so sure.

Today there was no sign of the cow cat, or any other cat, for that matter. Only the

gremlins, which were active enough.

Now that he was free, Zeus realized it had been several hours since he last paid a visit

to the litter boxes, so off he went through the cat hatch that had been built into the door

from the kitchen to the garage. When Doug and Yoda saw Zeus disappear through the cat

hatch, they realized it had been a while for them as well.

When they entered the garage, neither of them was surprised to see that Zeus had

grabbed “the good cat box.” It was the white one with the hood. There were three cat

boxes in all. Two of them had hoods, but the white one was clearly the Cadillac of cat

boxes. The gray one was smaller and felt more cramped. The third one, a green box with
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no hood, was the cat box equivalent of an outhouse with no door. Strictly for emergency

use only.

Since Doug was the last one into the garage, this qualified as an emergency. Besides,

he wasn’t bashful about such things anymore. Life is too short, he reasoned, even if you

have nine of them.

After they finished with the matters at hand, the cats made their obligatory rounds in

the garage, inspecting the workbench, the snow tires, the shovels and rakes stuffed into

the corner, the blue recycling bucket overflowing with bottles and cans. They had

inspected it all time after time, yet somehow another look-see always seemed necessary.

Yoda hopped up onto the workbench, knowing full well that she wasn’t likely to see

anything she hadn’t seen before. And she wasn’t disappointed. There was the vise, bolted

onto the edge of the old wooden workbench. Here was that ancient drill hanging from the

pegboard. Farther down was the toolbox that wouldn’t close because none of the tools in

it had been put back in their places properly.

Doug, meanwhile, was sniffing the wheels on the lawnmower. He often did that.

Neither Yoda nor Zeus ever asked him why.

Zeus was inspecting the bicycles, which appeared to have been moved since the last

time he checked them out. He was looking up at the handbrake levers when something

else caught his eye. It was a rolled-up extension cord hanging on a nail high on the wall

behind the bikes. He had never seen it before. The plug end of the cord had unraveled and

was dangling. A gust of wind that had blown through the cracks on the sides of the

garage door must have caused it to sway, and that was when it caught Zeus’s eye.
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Zeus was entranced. He had to get that cord. It was his prey. Without even thinking he

leaped up and landed on the seat of one of the bikes. Doug and Yoda were watching, and

for a moment it seemed that the bikes were going to fall over. They didn’t, though, and

after mastering his balance, Zeus got into a crouch. The dangling cord was still a good

four or five feet above him, and he would need to make a good leap. He didn’t even

consider what would be underneath him when he jumped. His eyes were fixed on the

cord.

To Doug and Yoda, what happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. Zeus made

a good jump, but this time the bikes fell as Zeus’s hind feet pushed off from the seat.

After his paws hit the dangling cord, they hit something else. It was a black box mounted

on the wall underneath the nail. Suddenly a light came on in the garage and the sound of

a motor filled the room. Doug and Yoda flinched at the sound, then watched as the garage

door slowly began to roll up. By itself.

Zeus ended up landing with his feet tangled up in the spokes of one of the bikes’

wheels, but he escaped without a scratch, despite the racket he caused when the bikes fell.

It turned out he had been successful in knocking the extension cord off the nail, but the

cord wasn’t of much interest now. The garage door opening by itself was.

The three of them watched the garage door roll all the way up on the rails, and then

they heard the motor shut off. Slowly they approached the edge of the driveway outside

the garage. They hesitated a moment, then stepped out onto the blacktop of the driveway

in the cool autumn sunshine.

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Being house cats, Doug, Yoda and Zeus rarely got a chance to go out. Occasionally on

nice summer days the People would let them out in the backyard for a few minutes, but as

soon as they started to wander off—boom!—back in the house.

They just sat there on the driveway for about a minute, watching the cars whiz by on

the busy street in front of the house. Yoda couldn’t help thinking the People would

somehow emerge from the house behind them and hustle them back into the kitchen. But

the People were wherever the People went most days, and here the three of them were,

out on the driveway on a breezy fall morning. They were free.

3.
The “People” were Mary and Martin Katz, and that very moment as the three cats sat on

the driveway, the Katzes were having a phone conversation about them in their offices in

the city.

“How many rabies vaccinations does a house cat have to get?” Martin said, putting his

dogs up on his mahogany desk.

“I don’t know, Martin. I’m not a veterinarian,” Mary answered, slightly annoyed.

“Well, these bills are killing us, Mare,” Martin said. “Are you sure the vet knows they

don’t really go outside?”

“Yes, he does, Marty. He says it doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “Listen, don’t worry

about it. The bills are big now because of Zeus. He’s still basically a kitten. Remember

when the other two were young?”

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“Yeah, I guess,” Martin said, scowling. “So we were able to get a Saturday

appointment?”

“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“So much for golf, I guess.”

“Nobody said you had to go.”

“I’ll go,” Martin said. Whined was more like it. There was an awkward silence.

“Want to meet for lunch today?” Mary asked.

“Can’t. Got a meeting.”

“All right,” Mary sighed. “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Right,” Martin said, placing the telephone handset in its cradle on his desk. Beside

the phone was a picture of Mary and himself in Hawaii taken during their honeymoon.

He looked at the picture and let a brief smile fall away. He had just told a lie. Not

technically. He actually did have a meeting scheduled at 12:15, but it could easily have

been put off till later.

When was the last time he had met Mare for lunch, Martin asked himself. It had to be

months. Something was coming between them, and he didn’t know what it was. And here

it was the day before their seventh anniversary. Seven Halloweens nearly gone by the

wayside. It was scary. He stared at the photo and his mind drifted away.

Mary Katz was an art director for a company on the Upper East Side of Manhattan

that published catalogs. Martin was a vice president at a department store in midtown.
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They had a comfortable life, with a house in Worthington, New Jersey. Demographers

would classify them as upper-middle-class DINKs: a dual-income, no-kids couple.

And as is the case with so many other DINKs, the “no kids” part of the equation was

by design…at first. For the first five years they were married, Mary and Martin didn’t

want children. Doug and Yoda, the Siamese twins, as they called them, were plenty of

company. Mary had always been a big fan of cats, especially Siamese. Martin was a big

tolerator of cats, on his best days, although he did his best to humor them. And it was no

small source of irritation to Martin every time someone remarked how cute it was that

two people named Katz should have cats for pets.

Then around their fifth anniversary, Mary and Martin decided they did want kids.

They soon found out that they couldn’t have them if they tried. And they did try. And try.

And it became trying.

That was when Mary started reminiscing more and more about how much fun Doug

and Yoda were when they were kittens. Wouldn’t it be nice if they just stayed kittens

forever, she’d say. Wouldn’t it, in fact, be fun to get a new kitten? Martin tried to ignore

the hints, but in the end, Mary’s longing had won out. For her 30th birthday, they picked

up seven-week-old Zeus at a home cattery.

For Doug and Yoda, that was the darkest day since the Katzes had brought them home,

shivering with fright, from their cattery. Their breeder had not been a very good one, and

had not petted them or scratched their ears or even picked them up. In fact, Doug and

Yoda had had almost no contact with people at all until the Katzes brought them home. It
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was two weeks of hiding behind the furniture, shaking like leaves on a tree, before they

became convinced that the People didn’t want to hurt them.

For the next five years, they basked in cat nirvana. Mary doted on them, which they

loved, and Martin refrained from hitting them or kicking them when they threw up or

scratched the carpet, which they appreciated. They were getting two good meals a day,

his-and-her litter boxes and plenty of peace and quiet. It didn’t get much better than that

for cats.

Then, wham! Their world was shattered with the arrival of Zeus. And he was a

purebred, chocolate-point pipsqueak at that.

It wasn’t just that Zeus was suddenly getting all the attention. From the moment he

had set his paws on the carpet in the living room that fateful late-summer day, he was a

terror. It didn’t matter that he was barely bigger than a mouse. He didn’t care. He came

right after them, nipping at their tails, their ears, their hind legs. At first, Doug and Yoda

ran away from Zeus because they didn’t want to hurt him. Now that he was full-grown,

they ran away from him because they didn’t want him to hurt them. He had grown up to

be about the same size as Yoda in length and weight, but he was about twice her size in

ego. And he was strong.

Martin prided himself on being able to spot an opportunity when one came around.

The breeder had told them that if they had a problem with the cat, she would take him

back and refund their money, no questions asked. And in Martin’s view, the increasingly

vicious skirmishes Zeus was instigating did constitute a problem. Mary wasn’t
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convinced, and to Martin’s dismay, the cat did begin to mellow a little after a few

months. A little.

And Martin himself had also mellowed. A little. He didn’t like to admit it, but he had

begun to take a fancy to the way Zeus would jump up onto his shoulders, without an

invitation. Nothing the cat did seemed to make any sense. Still…

Staring at the photo on his desk reminded Martin that he needed to get Mary

something for their anniversary. Whatever that something turned out to be, it wasn’t

going to be another cat. Martin looked at his watch and smiled. Sometimes being vice

president of a department store came in handy.

The intercom on Martin’s desk phone buzzed and he hit the button.

“Is that Bob Winters, Jo?”

“Yes, sir. It’s your 12:15.”

“Send him in, Jo,” Martin said, shutting off the intercom and pulling his dogs off the

desk. Maybe Bob can tell me what’s on sale in jewelry, he thought with a grin.

4.
Basil Macauley was a little disappointed. He was sitting at the cluttered kitchen table in

his mobile home, staring at the pebble-sized thing that lay motionless on the community

newspaper spread out in front of him. It was what was left of a daddy longlegs; Basil had
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pulled the last leg off of him. Now it just lay there. Basil thought it might do something,

but it didn’t.

He brushed the daddy part and his former longlegs off the table and was about to fold

up the paper and toss it when his Australian eyes bulged. A headline caught his attention:

“Man Gets $2,000 Reward For Returning Lost Pup.”

“Hmm,” Basil mused to himself, crushing out his fifth cigarette of the morning.

“That’s a tidy sum, sport.”

The article detailed how a man in Jackson Township found an Irish setter puppy that

had wandered away from its home, which just so happened to be the home of one of the

wealthiest men in town. Since the dog had tags, the man who found him was easily able

to locate the owner, and was handsomely rewarded for doing so.

“Never would have even crossed my mind,” Basil snarled to himself. With that he put

down his paper, stood up and walked over to the wall where his trophy case was

mounted. Basil considered himself an amateur taxidermist. He inspected his handiwork

and adjusted one or two of the subjects that seemed to have been shifted out of place. The

Yorkshire terrier always seemed to be out of place, as did the ferret.

“I’ll bet you would have fetched a bundle,” he said, putting the Yorkie back in its

rightful spot between the ferret and the dachshund.

When all seemed in order in the trophy case again, Basil grabbed his jacket off the

back of a kitchen chair. It was time for him to go to work. As he approached the door, the

phone rang. Basil glared at the phone and let it ring a couple of times before picking it up.

“Macauley?” a voice asked.

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“Yeah, this is Mac. Who’s this, mate?”

“Don’t mate me. You know who this is. You trying to get cute?

“No, no. What do you mean?”

“You got the money?”

“Yeah, sure, I got it. I’m just on me way to work. I was planning to drop it off on the

way, mate. I mean, friend. Sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

“You don’t need to remember my name. Just remember to bring me the money.”

There was a sharp click on the other end of the line. Basil wiped his brow with his

shirtsleeve and shivered a little.

He was a custodian down at the Foodtown supermarket. He’d been there almost six

months now, and it was the steadiest job Basil had held in the two years he’d been living

“Up Over” in the States. The steadiest legitimate job, that is. His main occupation was

compulsive gambling, which was why he lived in a trailer and why he was always on the

lookout for quick ways to raise some cash. Just the night before he’d resorted to holding

up an Exxon station with a cap pistol to pay off the impatient bookie who’d just called.

He didn’t want to have to take that kind of risk again. There were certain lines even Basil

Macauley preferred not to cross.

Basil pulled his wallet out and checked to make sure the bills were still there. Then he

stepped out the door and locked it behind him. He started his pickup truck and peeled out

of the trailer court, spewing gravel behind him. As he drove off, the headline about that

reward for the dog stuck in his mind.

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5.
It was Zeus who took the first steps. He waltzed over to the edge of the front lawn and

began to graze on some particularly yummy looking high blades of grass. Doug and Yoda

soon followed suit. It irked them, Yoda especially, when Zeus acted on a good idea

before they did.

Soon all three of them were grazing away on the long grass at the edge of the

driveway. And soon after that, all three of them were throwing up, as cats will do when

they eat grass. As far as Yoda knew, it was the first time any of them had thrown up on

anything other than the living room carpet inside the house.

“I don’t know why I get sick every time I eat that stuff,” Zeus grumbled, ambling

toward the sidewalk. “It tastes great.”

“I think it’s supposed to do that,” Yoda said, following Zeus without realizing she was

following Zeus.

“Do what?” Doug asked, tagging along absently.

“Make us sick,” Yoda said.

“What do you mean, it’s supposed to make us sick?” said Zeus. “If it’s supposed to

make us sick, why do we eat it?”

“I don’t know, Zeus,” Yoda snapped.

Zeus shrugged and sat for a moment so he could scratch his ear and lick his shoulder.

He was about to continue the argument when something caught his eye. It was the cow

cat. The three cats were used to seeing the cow cat through the sliding glass door in the
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kitchen. He always seemed to be flaunting his freedom, rubbing it in, when he paid them

his visits. Now here he was, in the fur, about 20 yards away, just on the other side of the

wooden rail fence separating the People’s yard from the next-door neighbors’ property.

Doug and Yoda spotted him at about the same time Zeus did, and at about the same

time the cow cat saw them. They all froze for a moment, unsure of how to proceed.

Again, it was Zeus who made the first move.

And move he did. He bolted for the cow cat, his tail flared out like a raccoon’s. At first

it appeared that the cow cat was going to stand his ground, but then Doug and Yoda

bolted toward him and that apparently was too much. He tore across the neighbors’ front

yard, with Zeus and then Doug and Yoda in hot pursuit. They streaked past the shrubs

beneath the neighbors’ picture window and around the side of the house.

By the time they got into the backyard of the house, Doug was pretty well winded, so

he decided to give up the chase. He watched Zeus and Yoda close the gap as the cow cat

leaped over a hedge that separated the neighbors’ backyard from the backyard of the

house behind theirs. Zeus and Yoda followed suit, and Doug lost sight of them.

Then he heard sounds. First came a volley of deep, thundering barks, ones that could

only come from a big dog, like the terrifying dogs that were always sitting there

slobbering away in the waiting room at the vet’s office. Then came a chorus of hisses,

and suddenly Doug saw Yoda and Zeus come flying over the hedges, with the cow cat

behind them. Doug didn’t stick around to see if the dog was coming over the hedges, too.

He turned tail and joined Zeus and Yoda, tearing around the side of their neighbors’

house.
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When they got to the front yard, instead of turning right and heading back toward their

yard, they found themselves being led by the cow cat, who turned left at the sidewalk and

tore off into the parking lot of the township library next door. They paused there behind a

big oak tree to catch their breath and to look behind them to see if there was any sign of

the dog. There wasn’t.

That was when Yoda realized that “they” now included the cow cat. In all the

confusion after they surprised the dog, they had retreated as a team, not even noticing that

the dog was chained to his doghouse. They also didn’t notice that as they fled, the cow

cat had become part of their entourage.

The cow cat sat among them, eyeing them warily, but not quite with fear. Doug was

staring back at the cow cat with about the same degree of wariness. Zeus had already

forgotten that there had been a chase. He was licking his paws. Yoda vigorously

scratched an itch under her collar with her hind leg, but never took her eyes off the cow

cat. She wondered if they could talk to this cat.

It wasn’t a given, after all. Yes, Yoda, Doug and Zeus could talk to each other, but that

didn’t mean they could talk to just any cat, or any animal, for that matter. Some animals

had better communication skills than others. For example, for the first six months that

Zeus was in the house, Doug and Yoda didn’t think they were ever going to be able to

talk to him. Then one day—poof!—he was talking. Now the trouble was getting him to

shut up.
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Yoda decided to give it a try. She slowly approached the big spotted cat, sniffing him

from afar at first. “We only know you as the cow cat. Never mind why,” Yoda said

between sniffs. “Who are you?”

The cow cat sat there as he had been sitting there—silently—as Yoda began giving

him a close-up sniffing. Doug and Zeus soon followed suit. The cow cat blinked and then

yawned. Yoda looked at Doug and Zeus.

“I thought as much,” she said, to no one in particular, doing a quick yawn and stretch.

Only moments before, they had been chasing this cat. Now it was hard to remember why.

Yoda was losing interest in the cow cat fast. She turned her attention to a group of yellow

gremlins that were blowing across the parking lot. Doug and Zeus followed.

“They’re dead, you know.”

Doug, Yoda and Zeus stopped in their tracks. They turned as one and looked back at

the cow cat. He was sitting as he had been sitting, still looking vaguely bored.

“What did you say?” said Yoda.

“They’re dead,” the cow cat said matter-of-factly. “The leaves, I mean.” He looked up

at the branches of a nearby tree, and the Siamese cats followed his gaze. Then he looked

back at Yoda. “I think they’re alive when they’re up there. But not when they’re down

here, they ain’t.”

Yoda was not only surprised but intrigued when the cow cat spoke up. Mostly it was

the use of the word “leaves.” It was the term the People used when referring to the

gremlins. Till now, Yoda believed that she was the only animal who understood People-

talk. And she sensed that what the cow cat said was true. When she watched the gremlins
 22

from inside the sliding glass door in their kitchen, she couldn’t feel the breeze, so the

leaves, as the People—and now the cow cat—called them, appeared to move by

themselves. Now that she was outside, she could feel the breeze, and she could feel the

truth in the cow cat’s words as well.

“I’ll ask you again, cow cat. Who are you?” Yoda said.

The cow cat walked over to Yoda and sniffed her hindquarters, which elicited a hiss

from Yoda. Yoda was not an equal-opportunity sniffer.

“Well, ‘cow cat’ would probably do, but if you must know, I go by the name of…”

The cow cat paused and then whispered something in Yoda’s ear. Yoda turned away

from him as if he had suddenly emitted a foul odor. She gave Doug and Zeus a look.

“Meet Buttons,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Buttons?” Doug said in a near chuckle.

“Pretty lame,” Zeus said, forgetting for the moment that Buttons was roughly twice his

size.

“I won’t argue with you,” Buttons said. “What’s your name, pretty boy?”

After a slight hesitation, Zeus answered.

“Zeus? That’s a great name,” Buttons said. “I wish my People called me that.”

“Yeah, right,” Doug said.

“Shut up, Doug,” Zeus snapped. “He has a right to his opinion.”

“You shut up,” Doug said.

“Your name is Doug?” Buttons said with a grin.

“What about it?” Doug said defensively.

 23

“Nothing,” Buttons said. “In fact, I think I’d prefer that to the name I got, too.”

“Why don’t you just ignore your People when they call your name if you don’t like

it?” Yoda said.

“They don’t call my name no more,” Buttons said, softly. “They ain’t around no

more.”

“You mean you have your house to yourself?” Doug exclaimed.

Buttons was about to respond when a question of his own popped into his head.

“Hey, what are you guys doing out here anyway? Aren’t you house cats no more?”

“Well,” Doug said, “what happened was—”

“We get out when we want,” Zeus interrupted haughtily. “It’s just that most of the

time we don’t want to come out. What for? We have everything a cat could want.”

Then they all heard a sound coming from the other side of the library building.

“Come on, get over here behind these bushes,” Buttons said. With that, they scrammed

across the parking lot and disappeared underneath some shrubs surrounding the building.

A loud car came rumbling by and stopped briefly up by the sidewalk before pulling out

onto the street with a screech. There was a deep, steady booming sound coming from

inside the car that they could still hear long after the car had sped away down the street.

The experience gave Doug, Yoda and Zeus the chills. They had seen cars from the sill of

the picture window in the living room of the People’s house, and on television, of course,

but they’d never been this close to one. Perhaps this was why they weren’t allowed in the

front yard.
 24

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting out of here,” Buttons said. “This is the

time of day when a lot of them things start coming around this place.”

Doug, Yoda and Zeus watched the cars whizzing by on the street.

“Well, I guess you guys will want to be going home,” Buttons said. “Myself, I think

I’ll head down to the Spot and see what the fellas are up to.”

“The Spot?” Yoda said.

“Yeah, there’s this place where a bunch of us hang out. It’s not far from the market.

You know, the place where the people get all the food. We raid the Dumpsters and

garbage cans. You wouldn’t believe what they throw out. Salmon, halibut, tuna steak.”

Buttons paused a moment. He could tell he had them intrigued. “But what’s that to you

guys, right? With all that good stuff at home…”

Yoda looked up at the sky. It was still early in the day, and she knew the People

wouldn’t be getting back till well after dark. Meaning they wouldn’t be fed till well after

dark. She looked at Doug and could tell he was thinking along the same lines. Zeus was

looking at both of them intently, waiting for a decision to be made.

“How far is this Spot?” Yoda said.

“A hop, skip and a pounce,” Buttons said.

“Let’s go,” Yoda said.

“Let’s go,” Buttons replied.

 25

6.
Buttons’ assertion that the Spot was not far from the market turned out to be an

understatement. It was practically right in the market’s backyard, in the woods just

behind the area in back of the store where the garbage cans and Dumpsters stood. The

Spot itself was an old shack that had probably been abandoned long before the

supermarket was built. The glass panes had long since fallen out of the window on one

side of the shack, and the doors on the front were hanging precariously from their rusty

hinges.

To get to the Spot, the cats had to journey through dozens of backyards and cross

through several neighborhoods before finally entering the woods. Buttons turned out to

be quite a guide, pointing out things that he knew wouldn’t be obvious to these house

cats, which he knew them to be despite Zeus’s pompous pronouncements. For instance,

he warned them that it was important to keep close to the houses and to make sure that

they scanned the area for any movement before coming around a corner or stepping out
 26

into the open. “There could be dogs, mean cats, blue jays, kids on foot, kids on bikes. Not

to mention cars,” he warned.

As they were passing one small ranch house, a dog in the backyard began to bark

loudly. The fur on Doug, Yoda and Zeus’s tails immediately flared out, but Buttons

seemed unimpressed.

“Don’t worry about that fleabag,” he said. “Watch this.”

Buttons began walking up the driveway toward the back of the house, and Doug, Yoda

and Zeus followed at a distance. When they were about halfway up they could see the

dog, a big, black bruiser of a mutt, straining against a long leash that was tied to a stake in

the backyard. The leash allowed the dog to get about five feet from the edge of the

driveway. As Buttons approached the end of the driveway, the dog became incensed,

yapping viciously as he hurled himself forward, only to be pulled back by the leash.

Buttons sat for a second and washed his face by licking his paw and wiping his nose

and whiskers. Then he stood up again, took two steps toward the dog, turned around and

promptly took a squirt.

Doug, Yoda and Zeus watched the dog stop his tirade for a moment in apparent

disbelief. For a second it was so quiet they could actually hear Buttons doing his

business. Then the dog went berserk, making his earlier tantrum seem lame. Buttons

continued to take his time, winking now and then at the other three cats.

Suddenly they heard the sound of a creaky door opening in the backyard, and as

Buttons began running toward them, Doug, Yoda and Zeus didn’t need to be told what to

do. All four of the cats bolted across the front yard and then across the street.
 27

They slowed back down to a wary walk after they were a few houses away and the

sound of the dog barking had faded away.

“I love to annoy that dog,” Buttons said with a smirk.

“What happens if he gets loose?” Zeus said, eyeing this cow cat with a new sense of

respect.

“Aw, they’re always tied up. It’s the law, I think.”

When they finally got to the woods, Yoda and Doug, for their part, were relieved.

They weren’t as impressed with the stunt Buttons had just pulled as Zeus seemed to be,

and it was just as well to them that they put civilization behind them. But the light proved

to be dimmer in the woods, and that made it harder to tell how much of the day remained.

Falling leaves were swirling in the breeze, and birds in the branches high above cawed

and cackled at them. And there were smells in the woods. Some were interesting, but

most of them were bad smells. Smells of things long dead and rotting.

As they approached a clearing, they came upon a creek that Buttons told them about

along the way. It wasn’t a very wide creek, but if there were not a faint, enticing smell of

fish wafting through the air, Buttons would have ended up crossing over it alone. Doug,

Yoda and Zeus watched in awe as the cow cat hopped up on a birch tree and calmly

climbed along a limb that spanned the creek. When he approached the thinner branches at

the end of the limb, it began to sag, and he simply jumped off, landing on a bed of fallen

leaves with a thud. He immediately sat and looked back expectantly at the Siamese trio,

who were in turn looking at him.

“Come on,” Buttons said finally. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s a cinch.”
 28

“How do we get back?” Yoda said, eyeing the limb over Buttons’ head. It was easy

enough to see that this was a one-way tree. Buttons looked off to his right for a moment,

then looked back at Yoda.

“Down that way, not too far, is another tree like this one, only it’s on this side.”

At that moment, the wind picked up and they caught a more pungent whiff of fish.

Doug was up on the birch tree in a heartbeat, walking across the limb like a circus

performer. Zeus followed, and when the two of them had made it safely across, it was

Yoda’s turn. She had watched all of them go across without incident and truly believed

she could do it backwards.

When Yoda was about halfway across the creek on the limb, a crow somewhere above

her cawed extra loud and her head jerked as she looked up. It was a mistake. One of her

front paws slipped on the shiny white bark and the next thing she knew she was dangling

from a branch, which might have been okay if it had been a strong branch. But it wasn’t a

strong branch. It snapped and down went Yoda with a splash.

She was out of the creek in no time, shaking the water off her like a dog. Doug, Zeus

and Buttons were on their backs, rolling one way and then the other.

“Very funny,” Yoda said to no one in particular. She was cleaning and drying herself

now with her tongue, watching them all the while. She didn’t know which was worse: the

taste of the dirty creek water that had soaked her fur or the humiliation she felt for falling

off a limb that even Doug had no trouble crossing—in front of Zeus, no less.

“Happens to the best of us, young lady,” Buttons said finally. “Did the same thing

myself once. How’s that water taste, Missy?”

 29

“Yuck,” Yoda said with a scowl. “And it’s Yoda to you.”

“Well, come on over to the Spot, Yoda,” Buttons said with a smile, beckoning all three

to follow him. “Chances are we’ll have something there to take that taste out of your

mouth.”

7.
Five minutes later they were at the Spot, which definitely was near the source of that

strong aroma of fish. Doug sensed that it was coming from the Dumpsters in the

supermarket parking lot, but it also seemed to be coming from the shack itself. The

dangling front doors of the shack were ajar, but Buttons walked over to the side where

there was a pane-less window. He quickly crouched down and then leaped up onto the

windowsill.

“Surprise!” he yelled into the shack, then turned to look back at Doug, Yoda and Zeus.

“The gang’s all here. Come on in.” With that, he leaped inside.
 30

Yoda looked up at the window and dismissed it immediately, heading around to the

front doors instead. Doug followed, with Zeus right behind him, nipping at his tail.

The first things they saw inside the dark, dank shack were the skeletons. There were

four of them on the dirt floor, and if it were not for the lingering smell, they wouldn’t

have known what they were. They had been fish once. Now they were just bones.

Then they noticed that there were four other cats inside the shack besides Buttons,

lying down on assorted boxes and on shelves that had been hung on the walls a long time

ago. These cats all looked like they had just been awakened from a deep nap, and weren’t

particularly happy about it. Two of them were what were known as calicos: white cats

with plenty of orange and black blotches in their fur. (And plenty of fleas and dirt to boot,

Yoda wagered.) Another was a tabby with one good eye. He was an older cat and he

looked pretty mean. But then, so did all of them.

The biggest of them—and they were all pretty big—was a large black cat with green

eyes who was arching his back up in a Halloween stretch and yawning as Doug, Yoda

and Zeus were walking in.

“Who are these jokers, Buttons?” he said gruffly.

“Um, I’d like you to meet some friends of mine, Jack.” Buttons was rubbing up

against the three Siamese cats as he introduced them. “This here’s Doug, this is Zeus and

this young lady’s name is Yoda.”

Jack’s tail stood straight up when he saw Yoda. Although her fur had not yet fully

dried, her beauty shone through, as always. Jack boldly walked right up to Yoda and

began sniffing her face and ears, and then worked his way back to her tail. Then he took a
 31

couple of cursory sniffs at Doug and Zeus before returning to the cardboard boxes he had

been on before.

“What do you think, Jack?” Buttons said.

Jack yawned again. “I don’t think so, Buttons.”

“But Jack, why?” Buttons cried. Doug, Yoda and Zeus looked at each other, puzzled.

“The girl’s plenty cute, I’ll give you that, Buttons, but…” Jack’s voice trailed off.

“But what, Jack?”

“But they ain’t the right material, that’s what,” Jack snapped. “These three are cream

puffs; look at ’em.”

Buttons looked over at the three Siamese. Jack had a point. They didn’t exactly fit in

with this scruffy crew. Still, Buttons had a hunch.

“Come on, Jack, give ’em a chance, huh?”

“No, no, Buttons, it’s no good,” Jack said. “I think you better get these pretty young

things home. They’re probably homesick for their litter boxes and stuffed cat toys

already.” For some reason, he was looking squarely at Zeus when he added, under his

breath: “Pussy cats.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Yoda saw movement. It was Zeus, who had scrunched

down into an all-too-familiar crouch. Oh no, she thought. This could be bad.

Before she had a chance to even try to do something, Zeus pounced. It still astounded

her how fast he was. She watched as Zeus turned into a white streak before bashing into

Jack so hard he knocked him over onto his back. When the fur stopped flying for a
 32

moment, Yoda and Doug—and all of the cats, for that matter—could see that Zeus had

his jaws around Jack’s throat.

The fur was soon flying again as Jack got back on his feet and the two tussled in a din

of hisses and snarls. Then came the familiar pause: the two combatants facing each other,

seemingly frozen in their positions except for their tails snapping back and forth behind

them, paws raised and ready to strike, teeth bared. They would have gone at it again if it

hadn’t been for Buttons.

“As I was going to say, Jack,” Buttons said, stepping in between the two cats, “looks

can be deceiving. And it’s not their fault they are house cats. I’ve watched these cats, and

I’m telling you they’ve got moxie.”

The tension between Jack and Zeus eased up a bit, and now Jack was using his hind

leg to scratch his neck where Zeus had grabbed a hold of him. It had been quite a grip.

“Maybe you’ve got something there, Buttons,” Jack said. He sidestepped Buttons and

took another good sniff behind Zeus’s ear. “You got guts, kid, I’ll give you that,” he said.

“Oodly-ooh,” Zeus said.

Jack blinked. “What’s with the doubletalk?” he snarled.

“That’s just his way of saying he doesn’t need you to tell him he’s got guts.” It was

Yoda who had spoken, and it grabbed Jack’s attention, and that of his friends as well.

Yoda chose her moment in the spotlight to have a good stretch and yawn of her own.

“You don’t say,” Jack said.

“What’s this all about anyway, Buttons?” Yoda said, ignoring Jack. “I thought you

were going to show us all the salmon and halibut you guys get to feast on.”
 33

“Yeah,” said Doug. All of the cats’ heads jerked in the direction of Doug, who hadn’t

uttered a word since they had left the library parking lot. They looked at him as if they

expected him to say more. He didn’t.

“There’s plenty of all that,” Buttons said, “if you’re accepted into the club.”

Yoda’s eyes narrowed while Zeus’s ears pricked up. Doug yawned.

“What club?” Yoda said.

“Our club,” said Jack. “Allow me to introduce you to the other fellows. These two

over here are Jingles and Mingles.” Jack rubbed up against the two calicos. They were

brothers who had been left to fend for themselves when their owners moved away, Jack

explained. “I wouldn’t make fun of their names if I were you,” he added. Jingles and

Mingles stared back at them, stone-faced.

“And this here is Meaper,” Jack said, licking the ear of the one-eyed cat. “Meaper lost

an eye in brawl a few years back.”

“You should have seen the other guy,” Buttons said. There was an awkward silence as

Jack and Meaper shot him an annoyed glance.

“As I was saying, this is Meaper,” Jack continued. “He’s sort of the founder of this

club of ours. I run the joint, with his blessings.”

“What do you need to have a club for?” Zeus asked, drawing sneers and hisses from

the members. He wasn’t trying to be a smart aleck. The idea of a club seemed to Zeus

both intriguing and silly at the same time. The question even seemed reasonable to Yoda.

“Well, I guess you can’t blame him,” Buttons said. “He is a house cat, after all.”
 34

Jack paced back and forth silently for a moment. “Sure, Zeus,” he began, “we have it

made here. Food? Not to worry. The market’s right out there; you saw it. We eat like

kings. Shelter? We manage to stay nice and dry here, and reasonably warm, too.” He was

gesturing at the walls inside the shack.

“The problem is, we’re not alone out here,” Jack said, walking right up to Zeus and

looking him in the face. “Not only are there other not-so-friendly cats out there, but there

are dogs, and there are squirrels, and there are skunks. And there are raccoons who would

be only too happy to have us for lunch—or, more likely, steal our lunches and dinners

and this swell shack, for that matter.

“And the only way we can keep them from doing that is by outnumbering them, see?”

Jack was staring Zeus right in the eyes. “That is what we need a club for, Zeus. So that

Meaper there doesn’t have to worry about losing his other eye.”

Zeus sat down and scratched an ear with his hind leg. A good scratch helped him sort

things out sometimes.

“You see, don’t you, Zeus?” Buttons said. “Yoda? Doug? We’re looking for new

members, to help build a strong club that nobody will mess with. What do you think?”

“Wait a minute, Buttons,” Jack said crossly. “They ain’t even taken the test yet. You

can’t offer to make them members just like that.”

“Could I talk to you outside, Jack?” Buttons said. Jack blinked and then did a long

stretch before going into a jumping crouch. Without a word he leaped up onto the

windowsill that Buttons had been on when they first arrived. Then he disappeared.

“Wait here, you guys,” Buttons said, and then went out the way Jack had.
 35

Jingles, Mingles and Meaper continued to lie on their respective perches, staring down

at the Siamese cats with expressions that straddled the boundaries of boredom and

contempt.

Yoda didn’t like the direction this discussion was taking and she shot Doug a look.

Doug wasn’t much of a talker, but he had always been a good listener, and Yoda could

tell he wasn’t crazy about this club thing either. Zeus was now scratching his other ear,

and it wasn’t clear at all what he thought of the club thing.

“Let’s get out of here,” Yoda whispered.

“Right,” Doug whispered back, arching his back nonchalantly.

“Where are we going?” Zeus said, for all the world to hear.

“Yeah, where are you going?” It was Meaper. He was standing up now and staring at

them with his one good eye. “You wouldn’t want to leave without saying your proper

good-byes, now would you?”

Yoda was about to say something when Buttons and Jack came back in, this time

through the door behind them. Jack rubbed up against each of them in an almost

ceremonial way, then sauntered silently over to his favorite spot in the Spot.

“Good news, fellas,” Buttons said. “I told Jack I would vouch for all of you, and he

has agreed to grant you honorary memberships. To make it official, he has invited you to

lunch with us today. On one condition.”

Yoda and Doug looked at each other warily, then back at Buttons.

“What’s the condition?” Yoda asked.

“That you fetch the food.”

 36

Yoda and Doug looked at each other again and nodded this time, and then they looked

at Zeus. Zeus looked at Yoda, Doug, Buttons and Jack and smiled.

“Oodly-oodly-ooh!”

“Listen, Zeus,” Buttons said. “Be careful over there. That goes for all three of you.

You have to beware of the people who work over there. They don’t like us cats much. If

you hear the back door open, hide. Either that or run, cause if they see you, they’re likely

to throw something at you, and it won’t be food.”

“Aren’t you coming?” Zeus asked.

“Can’t. I’m afraid you’ll have to go solo this time. Don’t you mind. You’ll be fine.

Just keep your wits about you.”

With that, Doug, Yoda and Zeus ambled out the door and headed for the brush and

trees shielding the shack from the back of the supermarket.

8.
Basil Macauley was still stewing when he stepped out the back door of the supermarket

into the midmorning sunshine with a bucketful of old fish bound for the garbage. On his

way to work he had stopped by the auto body shop and handed his bookie the eight
 37

hundred bucks he got when he knocked over the gas station. It caused him physical pain

to part with cash, whether it belonged to him or not, and he was still wincing as he

recalled the encounter.

“This is all you got? Come on, where’s the rest of it?” the bookie had scowled. His

name was Mitch, Basil now remembered. It helped that it was monogrammed right over

his dirty shirt pocket. Mitch wasn’t tall like Basil, but he was burly, and Basil had no

interest in ever tangling with him.

“I’ll get the rest; don’t worry,” Basil had assured him.

“When?” Mitch barked.

“Soon. I’m working on a deal right now. I think I can get it to you in a day or two.”

Mitch had looked Basil in the eye doubtfully, then flipped through the bills.

“I want to see the rest of the money Monday morning. Or you’ll be seeing me. Got it?”

Basil had nodded and turned away with a shiver. As he drove away, the fear he felt

morphed into anger. He was getting tired of being pushed around.

Now as he stood outside behind the store, he lit a cigarette and watched as the crisp

autumn breeze took the smoke away in a wispy hurry. As he puffed, he looked around to

see if there were any strays in sight. Basil really hated cats. Especially the strays he

sometimes spotted scrounging around the garbage cans and Dumpsters near the loading

dock. If he happened to see one of the strays while he was out there, he’d usually pick up

a rock and throw it at it.

It had given him tremendous satisfaction one day when he caught one of them off

guard ready to jump into a Dumpster. “Put-ssssst!” he’d said, and when the cat leaped off
 38

the Dumpster and ran for the woods, Basil hit him right in the side with a stone that

would have been good for skimming down by the river. That cat happened to have been

Buttons.

Basil was about to toss the bucket of fish into the Dumpster when he spotted a cat

picking at the cellophane wrapper of a piece of discarded chicken breast that it had

evidently found in one of the trash cans. Basil’s first instinct was to look around for a

rock, but then he took a closer look at the cat. This was not your typical alley cat. He had

a soft-looking, thick white coat that was offset by a dark-brown face and matching ears,

paws and tail. And he wore a red collar, another sign that this was not one of the strays

that usually prowl around the back of the store.

Basil grabbed a piece of fish out of the bucket and held it out before him. “Here, kitty

kitty,” he said. The cat tensed and looked like he was about to run, but apparently a whiff

of the fish got caught up in that autumn breeze and wafted Zeus’s way.

Zeus tentatively approached the man who was holding the fish out to him. He didn’t

look particularly dangerous: just a middle-aged person wearing blue jeans under a white

apron and a striped shirt with something written on the pocket. He had a bushy

moustache and thin graying hair.

“Here, kitty,” Basil said again. Zeus took a couple more tentative steps toward the

outstretched hand offering the fish. Basil put the fish down on the ground, and Zeus gave

it a good sniffing. It smelled pretty tasty to Zeus. This ought to win me some points with

the boys in the shack, he thought.

Zeus went to grab the fish’s tail fin with his teeth when Basil Macauley grabbed him.
 39

“There we go, mate. Nice little kitty, right?” Basil said. This time his voice had a

rough edge to it. “Nice little kitty indeed.”

“Oodly-ooh!” Zeus cried.

9.
Doug and Yoda had been working one of the Dumpsters, taking the liberty of sampling

some fine tuna steak that they planned to bring back with them, when they heard Zeus

call out. Doug dismissed it as typical Zeus babble, and Yoda did, too—at first. Then she

thought about it and realized there was a tone of anguish in that cry, not unlike the one

she’d heard this morning when he was stuck in the closet.

Yoda stopped eating and listened. She thought she heard it again, faintly this time.

“Come on, Doug,” Yoda said, hopping up onto the closed lid on the other side of the

Dumpster. Doug joined her, just in time to see a man carrying Zeus around the corner of

the store. Both of their tails immediately flared out, but they knew what they had to do.

After hopping down, Yoda and Doug kept their distance as they followed the man up

the dirt and gravel alleyway that led to the parking lot in the front of the store. As he

approached the parking lot, the man wrapped Zeus in his apron. Then, after looking

around to be sure he wasn’t being observed, the man walked into the lot and approached

a pickup truck that was parked there. He opened the driver’s side door of the truck and

put Zeus inside the cab. To Doug and Yoda’s surprise, he then closed the door of the
 40

truck and turned back the way he had come. Doug and Yoda scrammed back down the

alleyway and hid behind one of the Dumpsters in back of the store, hoping the man

hadn’t seen them.

He hadn’t. Basil, who was smoking another cigarette, flicked the butt in the direction

of the Dumpster Doug and Yoda were hiding behind and went back into the store through

the door he had come out of earlier. The door wasn’t completely closed.

“Wait here, Doug,” Yoda said.

“Where are you going?” Doug whispered.

“I want to keep an eye on this guy.”

Before Doug could ask, let alone think of, another question, Yoda took off, stealthily

pawing open the screen door Basil Macauley had just walked through. She slinked down

a short hallway that led to a big room. She could hear voices coming from within, and she

crept forward to get a listen.

“I’ll be right back, I swear, Jose. I promised me neighbor I would take his dog for a

walk during me lunch hour.”

“Hey man, your lunch hour is not till one o’clock. What gives? I got a truck coming in

here any minute now and Jenkins is out sick. I was counting on you to help out.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Jose, but I need to take me break early today. This dog is a real

regular animal. Know what I mean?”

“All right, Mac, but you better be back here by noon. I want these floors waxed

today.”

“No problem. Thanks, mate.”

 41

“I’m not your mate, man,” Jose snarled.

Yoda high-tailed it down the hallway and out the back door. She was nearly panting

when she returned to the Dumpster where Doug was hiding.

“Doug, you head back to the shack and tell those other guys what’s going on. I’m

going to try and stow away in the back of that truck and see if I can figure a way to spring

Zeus.”

“Wait—”

“Wait nothing,” Yoda said. “Just do it. There’s no time to waste.”

And she was right. At that moment, Basil Macauley stormed out the back door of the

store and quickly walked around the corner and on up the alleyway toward the parking

lot.

“Do what I said, Doug.” With that, Yoda trotted off the way Basil had gone. Doug

watched her disappear around the corner and then he ran off toward the shack in the

woods.

Yoda almost didn’t make it to the truck. She followed the man up the alleyway to the

parking lot, but she underestimated how many cars were moving about near the front of

the store. She watched him cross the main parking lot thoroughfare in front of the store

without incident and she proceeded to do the same at a safe distance behind him when

she heard tires screech. She looked to her right to see that a car had been barreling right

toward her. Luckily, the driver saw her before she saw it.
 42

The sound got the attention of Basil, who turned to see what had happened, but Yoda

quickly darted underneath a parked car. She saw Basil open the door to the truck

carefully so as not to let Zeus get out.

When Basil was in the cab, she crept forward, watching him. After he started the

truck, he turned his head to look the other way before backing out, and Yoda made her

move. Her leaping prowess came in handy as she first hopped up onto the truck’s rear

bumper and then she jumped into the bed of the truck. She crept all the way up to the

front of the bed so that Basil would not be able to see her in the rearview mirror.

As the pickup truck backed up and then started moving forward, she breathed a

thankful sigh. So far, so good. Or so she thought.

10.
When Doug walked through the doors of the shack empty-pawed, the other cats erupted

into a chorus of discontent.

“What is this?” snarled one-eyed Meaper.

“Where’s the eats?” Jack cried.

“What did you do, eat it there by yourselves?” Jingles whined. It was the first time

Doug had heard Jingles say anything.

“Yeah, eat it yourself, fatso?” Mingles chimed in. They even sounded alike.

“What happened?” Buttons asked in a wary tone. He apparently was the only one who

immediately found it odd that Doug had come back by himself.

 43

“It’s Zeus,” Doug began anxiously. “Somebody took him.”

“What do you mean, ‘somebody took him’?” Jack snapped. The mood in the shack

had changed from hostility to annoyed concern.

“One of the people from the store, I think,” Doug said. “Grabbed him and put him in

one of those big things that move. Yoda calls it a truck.”

“Get a good look at him?”

“I think I’d know him if I saw him.”

“Where’s Yoda?” Buttons asked.

“She went to follow them. She was going to try and get into the back of the truck and

see where he was taking him.”

“Did you see her get in the truck?” Buttons asked.

“No.”

Silence filled the shack as the cats considered the gravity of the situation. Jack looked

at Buttons, then at Meaper, then at Doug. Even Doug was able to figure out that the strays

didn’t think Zeus’s chances looked promising.

“Will you help us?” Doug said to all of them, though he was looking at Jack.

“Help you what?” Jack snapped. “What are we supposed to do with this guy, reason

with him? Besides, what’s it to us if your little friend is stupid enough to get stolen by

people?”

Doug looked to Buttons for sympathy but Buttons looked away. It had grown

uncomfortably quiet in the shack. Doug looked back at Jack.

 44

“A moment ago Buttons here said we were honorary members of this club,” Doug

said, looking around at the other cats with growing contempt. “We were out there

scrounging for food for you guys as part of our initiation when this happened. Now,

honorary or not, are we members or aren’t we?”

“No way!” Meaper scowled, drawing grunts and hisses of approval from Mingles and

Jingles.

“Hold on,” Jack said. He shot Buttons another glance, then looked back at Doug as the

other cats grew quiet. He stared at Doug silently for a moment.

“He’s got a point, Jack,” Buttons said. “A deal’s a deal.”

Jack was still looking at Doug, but he was thinking about that gray cat that had been

with him and the pipsqueak. Yoda, her name was.

“Let’s go over there,” Jack said finally. “Find out if Yoda got on that truck or not. If

she did, we’ll wait. If this guy works there, he’ll be back.”

“Yeah, let’s go,” Buttons said, winking at Doug.

The others moaned, but they knew Jack’s statement was an order.

“All right,” Meaper said, taking a good stretch as he stood up. “Maybe we can grab

something to eat while we’re at it.”

Doug had no reply. For once, he had no appetite.

 45

11.
Friday was garbage pickup day, and despite the Katzes’ protestations, Marge Sullivan

usually did them the favor of hauling their empty trash receptacle up the driveway after

doing the same with her own.

Marge was the kind of next-door neighbor that most people would kill for, and Mary

Katz, for one, appreciated her. If Martin and Mary were away for a few days, Marge

would grab their mail and hold it so it didn’t pile up in the mailbox. She even came over

and fed their cats occasionally when they were on vacation.

Martin, on the other hand, considered Marge to be a borderline “Kravitzer,” as in the

Gladys Kravitz character from the old “Bewitched” TV series. “She’s Kravitzing,” he’d

say whenever he thought she was stepping over the line, like the time she lowered their

flag to half-staff on the morning of Memorial Day one year when they were out on an

errand. Marge had been technically correct about how to position the flag that morning,

but Martin didn’t think she was right to do it.

 46

On this day before Halloween, Marge didn’t get around to grabbing the trash

receptacles until after noon, and as she approached the Katzes’ house, she noticed the

garage door was open. This isn’t a holiday, Marge reasoned. She rolled the trash

receptacle up the driveway and placed it by the side of the house near the garage, then

walked into the backyard to see if either of them was raking leaves. No one was there.

Must be inside, she thought, and she walked around to the front door and rang the

doorbell.

Marge expected to see some furry faces greet her at the picture window in the living

room after she rang the bell, but no cats showed up. No Katz showed up at the door,

either. She rang the doorbell again, peering into the frosted glass in the front door for

signs of movement. There wasn’t any.

Now she was getting concerned. It wasn’t like Mary or Martin to leave the house with

the garage door open, even if it was just for a trip to the 7-Eleven for a paper. Marge

walked around to the garage and looked at the door to the kitchen. The plastic barrier in

the cat hatch was not in place, as it normally would be if the garage door were open.

She walked over to the door and knocked.

Silence.

Marge knocked again. “Hell-o-oh,” she sang. Again there was no answer.

She found the cat barrier and placed it in the hatch slot, just in case the cats were

sleeping. She turned the doorknob and opened the door slightly, careful to make sure the

cats didn’t come rushing out. Marge had a cat of her own, and she knew how they
 47

operated. But as she suspected, there was no sign of the cats. She stepped inside and said

hello again, hoping to hear a familiar reply. None came.

The house looked absolutely normal. Kitchen cabinet doors were all closed, there were

some glasses and plates in the dish rack. An average-size pile of junk mail sat on the

kitchen counter. In the living room, the television and stereo were off. The front door was

locked.

Marge approached the stairs that led to the bedroom and said hello again. Still there

was no answer. She didn’t want to go upstairs; she thought of how horrified she would be

if someone peeked in on her own bedroom when she wasn’t prepared. But she knew she

had to.

Every creak on the carpeted steps seemed amplified as she slowly walked up to the top

of the stairs. The door to the master bedroom was open, and to her relief it was quite tidy.

The bed was made, and there were no clothes strewn on the floor. She knocked on the

bathroom door, which the Katzes kept shut to keep the cats out of it. There was no

answer, so she opened the door. The light was off; the room was empty.

The other “bedroom” upstairs had been turned into an office. Marge knocked on the

door, got no answer, opened it. This room also was unoccupied and the computer and

stereo equipment were off.

She shut the door behind her and felt both relief and dismay as she descended the

stairs. There was no apparent foul play going on here, but there also was still no

explanation for the garage door being open. And where were the cats? She searched the

closets and the bathroom downstairs, again to no avail.

 48

Marge went out through the garage the way she came in and decided to switch the

garage-door opener to manual, enabling her to pull down the door behind her so the

house didn’t look so vulnerable.

Then she went home, pulled out her address book and found Mary Katz’s work phone

number. She wasn’t looking forward to the call as she punched in the number.

12.
Yoda and automobiles never did mix very well. The only thing she dreaded more than a

visit to the veterinarian was the car ride to the veterinarian. From this day forward, a car

ride would seem like a walk in the park.

The driver of the pickup truck was a maniac behind the wheel. Yoda was pretty sure

he hadn’t seen her hop into the filthy bed of the truck, but he was driving like had seen

her and was trying to punish her. As he tore around corners and floored the gas pedal, it

was all Yoda could do to keep all fours planted on the cold, rusty metal of the truck bed.

The fur on her tail was flared out and her blue eyes bulged as the truck hit bump after

bump and pot hole after pot hole.

 49

After about fifteen minutes of stomach-rattling, fur-raising terror, the truck began to

slow down enough for Yoda to venture a glance at the rear window of the truck’s cab.

Zeus picked that moment to hop up onto the driver’s shoulders, and he was looking down

at her as if her being there was the most natural thing in the world. His mouth opened but

she couldn’t hear him.

It didn’t matter; Yoda had a pretty good idea what he said anyway. Oodly-ooh

yourself, she thought.

Basil turned off the road and pulled into his trailer park much the same way he had left

it, spewing gravel behind him as he turned onto his “street.” He parked in front of his

trailer and looked around to see if anyone was about. Zeus hopped off his shoulder as

Basil turned his head to look out the back window of the truck. Yoda scrunched down as

low as she could while Basil surveyed the trailers across the street.

“Coast is clear, mate,” Basil said. He grabbed Zeus and quickly got out of the truck

and whisked him inside the trailer.

Yoda jumped out of the truck bed after she heard the trailer door shut. There was a

blue trash receptacle standing near the steps leading up to the trailer door, and Yoda

quickly ran behind it and sat still, listening for sounds from inside the trailer as well as

from her unfamiliar surroundings. Her tail was still mighty flared out, but that didn’t

begin to tell how frightened she felt inside.

Basil put Zeus down on the kitchen counter and with difficulty held him still long

enough to examine the tag on his collar. He pulled a pen from a coffee mug full of pens

and pencils and jotted the information on the tag onto a pad on the counter.
 50

“Well g’day, Zeus. Welcome to the Macauley residence,” he said, grabbing the wiry

cat again with both hands and walking him over toward the trophy case. Basil held Zeus

out at arm’s length to see how he measured up against the shelves in the trophy case.

“Ah, you’d fit in perfect, Master Zeus,” Basil said.

The fact was, Basil was torn. On the one hand, he really wanted to add this animal to

the empty space on the second shelf of the trophy case. He ordinarily hated cats, but even

he had to admit that this was an extraordinarily beautiful specimen. And that was what

was conflicting him: He knew that if he could appreciate the cat’s beauty, certainly its

owners would as well. The question was, how much would they be willing to pay to get

him back?

Basil put the cat down on the back of his couch. Zeus immediately jumped off the

couch and instinctively ran over to the door they had come through, knowing full well it

was shut.

“Oodly-ooh,” Zeus said woefully.

Basil smiled and grabbed a soup bowl that had been sitting in the sink for a couple of

days. He filled the bowl with water and placed it on the kitchen floor. Then he tore the

note he had written off the pad on the counter, grabbed his keys and headed for the door.

“Make yourself at home, mate,” Basil said, turning the doorknob. “You may be here a

while.”

Yoda, meanwhile, had a new problem to contend with. After a few minutes had passed

and the driver of the truck had not emerged from the trailer, she got curious, as cats will,
 51

and she decided to take a walk around the mobile home. She didn’t get far before she

caught the eye of a dog that was chained to a doghouse behind the trailer next door. The

dog must have been sleeping inside his doghouse when the truck first pulled up, for she

hadn’t seen him when she hopped out.

“RUR-RUR-RUR-RUR!!” the dog howled, his jowls slobbering as he strained against

the chain that, luckily for Yoda, held him fast to the doghouse.

Now it wasn’t just Yoda’s tail that was flared; all the fur on her body seemed to be

standing straight up. She felt like a gray porcupine with a crew cut. She didn’t dare run

out to the front of the trailer, for fear that the man who took Zeus might see her. Instead,

she scrambled around the back, incensing the dog even further since she actually had to

get closer to him in order to round the corner.

“RUR-RUR-RUR!!” he roared again. Just as Yoda rounded the corner behind the

trailer, Basil came out, locking the door behind him. He found the barking disturbing.

Basil and Scout didn’t have a warm relationship, but they had an understanding, and it

was unlike Scout to bark when he came home. He walked back behind the trailer and

looked around, then walked back up to the front, searching for whatever it was that might

have prompted the dog to bark.

“Pipe down,” he said to the dog finally, dismissing his outburst as a reaction to a

passing squirrel or a stray cat. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match absently to the

ground before climbing back into his truck.

When Yoda heard the trailer door open and close, she skulked around the back and

then up to the front of the trailer along the other side. From behind a bush, she watched
 52

the man who took Zeus get back into his truck empty-handed. As he started the truck and

peeled out of the trailer park, Yoda sat down and wondered exactly what she was going

to do now.

13.
“Here it comes now,” Doug said. He watched the Ford pickup truck enter the

supermarket parking lot and proceed to park in precisely the same space it had been in

before. Doug felt an odd sense of relief. He and Jack, Meaper, Buttons, Jingles and

Mingles had been pacing around the front corner of the store for at least a half-hour, and

he could tell that Jack was growing impatient, not to mention angry.

They had been chased away twice by a person who kept going out into the parking lot

and retrieving shopping carts. “Scat!” he would say and they would run off down the

alleyway toward the back of the store, only to return a few minutes later.

“All right, let’s head to the back behind the trash cans,” Jack said. “Mingles, you wait

here and watch in case the guy goes in the front door. If he does, watch where he goes.

Otherwise, hide here till the guy goes past and then run up and see if Yoda’s in that

truck.”

The five cats scurried back down the alley and took up their positions behind the trash

cans.
 53

Basil Macauley had no intention of walking in the front door, although he could have

if he wanted to. He was smoking another cigarette and he meant to finish it as he came

around the rear corner of the store. He took one last drag and tossed the cigarette into a

puddle, then walked into the store through the back door. A moment later Mingles came

tearing around the corner. “No sign of Yoda,” he said breathlessly, “but listen, Jack, that

—”

“Doug, go on in there and see what he’s up to,” Jack said, cutting Mingles off.

“I don’t understand people talk,” Doug said.

“Buttons does,” Meaper said.

“Listen, Jack, I—”

“Is that right?” Jack said to Buttons, cutting Mingles off again.

“Yeah, well, a little,” Buttons lied. He wasn’t too happy about being volunteered.

“Okay, well, see what little you can find out,” Jack said.

Buttons reluctantly ambled off toward the door, giving Meaper a look that said,

“Thanks a lot.”

Like Yoda, Buttons had good strong nails and was able to paw open the screen door.

Inside he immediately heard voices coming from another room getting louder, closer.

“I said I was sorry, mate; what do you want me to do?” one of the voices said. “It took

me ten minutes to find the keys to their house.”

“You’ve got excuses for everything, Mac,” the other voice said.

“Look, I’ll put in an extra hour if you want me to,” the first voice said.

“Aah, just get to work and get out of my hair, man.”

 54

Buttons sensed he wasn’t going to hear much more for a while, so he quietly crept out

the back door.

“Well, what’s up?” Jack said.

“Not a lot. We might have a long wait before he comes back out again.”

“Well, then, we’ll just have to wait,” Jack said with a grimace.

“No we won’t.” At last Mingles got Jack’s attention, and the other cats’ ears perked up

as well.

“What do you mean?” Jack said.

“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Jack. When I was hiding out up in the front of

the store, I got a real good look at this guy.”

“So?”

“So I recognized him. I think I know where he lives. And I bet that’s where Zeus and

Yoda are.”

Jack and the other cats were dumbfounded.

“How far away is it?” Doug said, beating Jack to the question. Doug didn’t show it,

but his concern for the missing cats, especially Yoda, was growing by the minute.

“It’s not that far if we cut through the woods, but we’ll have to get across that big river

at some point.”

That last bit of information silenced them all for a few moments. Doug didn’t even

know what a river was. Finally Jack stood up and arched his back.

“Lead the way, Ming.”

 55

14.
Martin Katz was getting ready to leave his office for another meeting when the telephone

rang. He thought about letting the voice mail take a message, then went ahead and picked

up the receiver.

“Marty, it’s me,” said Mary Katz in a decidedly urgent tone.

“Hi, what’s the matter?”

“I just had a call from Marge Sullivan. She said she saw our garage door open and

decided to check things out. The cats are nowhere to be found.”

“All right, now, calm down, Mare,” Martin said, sitting down behind his desk. “Did

she see any signs of a burglary?”

“No, none at all.”

“Was your car locked?”

“What? Why? I mean, yeah, I think so. Why would that matter?”

“You’ve got a garage door opener remote on your visor. I don’t know how else the

door could have been opened. Unless…”

“Unless what, Marty?”

“The sun glare was really bad this morning. I remember putting the visor down. I

wonder if I hit the button on my remote accidentally.”

“We would have seen the door go up, wouldn’t we?”

Martin didn’t answer. He supposed it was possible, but it didn’t seem likely.

“Okay, I’m assuming Marge closed the garage door,” he said.

 56

“Yes, but—”

“Did you call the police?”

“No.”

Martin hesitated a moment. He felt something like hope rising in his chest. After all, if

the cats suddenly disappeared, it wasn’t going to break his heart. But he didn’t want it to

come across in his voice. “All right, I’ll give them a call. I’m sure it’s just—”

“Martin, there’s more,” Mary said.

“What?”

“After I hung up with Marge, I decided to check our home answering machine, before

I called you.” Mary paused. She felt a lump in her throat.

“And?” Martin said, as calmly as he could.

“There was a message. From some man.”

Martin had picked up a paper clip and had begun unfolding it and twisting it, the way

he always did when he started getting agitated.

“Who was it?” he said.

“He didn’t leave a name. He said he had Zeus, that Zeus was fine and that he would

remain fine if we were willing to pay the price.”

“What price?” Martin snapped.

“He didn’t say. Said he’d call back tonight at seven o’clock with more details.”

“Did he mention the other cats?”

“Not a word.” Mary’s voice was a little shaky.

 57

“Then where are the other two? And besides, who in the world would kidnap a cat?”

Martin wondered aloud, twisting the paper clip. “Listen, don’t worry about this. I’ll call

the police. Maybe they can send someone over to listen in when that call comes in.”

“He called from a pay phone, Marty. I could tell. I doubt they could trace it,” Mary

said. Martin could hear the anguish in her voice. “Marty, let’s not get the cops involved

in this yet. Let’s just see what he wants.”

Martin started in on a new paper clip. The other one had broken. “If that’s what you

want, okay,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s much we can do till we hear from him tonight,” Mary said. “Can

you make the 5:45?”

“Yes. Mare, it’ll be okay. Try not to worry.”

“I’ll try,” Mary said. But she knew she would fail.

15.
 58

The cats trudged single-file through the woods like a squad of soldiers in the jungle.

Mingles was the point cat, followed by his brother Jingles, then Jack, Meaper and Doug.

Buttons was bringing up the rear. The sun was still pretty high in the sky; shafts of bright

sunlight fell slantingly on the bushes and tree trunks as they worked their way west.

After they had traveled for about an hour, Doug was beginning to wonder what

Mingles’ idea of “not that far” was. They were deep in the woods now, nowhere near any

roads or buildings or houses that made the sounds of civilization. As he marched along,

Doug tried not to think about “that big river” that Mingles mentioned.

“Sure you know where you’re going there, Ming?” Jack said.

“Sure I’m sure,” Mingles said, not sounding very sure at all.

“Just checking,” Jack said.

Mingles was beginning to have doubts, even though he was sure he had covered this

ground before. But in the last fifteen minutes or so, the scenery had become unfamiliar.

There was an unpleasant musky smell hanging in the heavy air. He didn’t recognize the

deadfalls that were strewn about the leaf-matted floor of the forest. And lately the path

they had been following had grown less defined. He wondered if he had missed a turn

back there somewhere.

As the woods grew thicker, Mingles finally stopped. He was ready to endure the

humiliation of telling Jack and the rest of the cats that he had led them astray, that they

were, in fact, lost, when Meaper said, “Listen!”

They all stood stock-still and craned their necks. There was a faint but steady hiss

coming from somewhere ahead.

 59

It was water. Flowing water. Beyond the thicket ahead was the river, Mingles realized.

They weren’t lost after all.

Mingles looked at Jack and Meaper and the others with a gaze that was a silent gloat.

“Now comes the hard part, fellas,” he said.

New experiences were starting to get old for Doug. As he and the other cats emerged

from the bushes on the bank of the river, he wished he were at home on the People’s bed,

taking a nice catnap. Instead, he was looking at a wide, brown swath of water rolling past

them.

The river was about five hundred feet wide—not huge as rivers go, but for the cats, it

might as well have been five hundred miles.

Jack looked at the river, then at Mingles, then at the river again. Nobody had to say

there was no way they were swimming across, even if cats were amenable to swimming

in the first place.

“All right, Ming,” Jack said. “I give. What do we do now?”

Mingles was looking upriver, and slowly, one by one, the cats followed his gaze.

Way upstream where the river narrowed slightly was a dark structure spanning the

water. It was the Plainfield Road bridge, although Mingles didn’t know the road by name.

“Um, that’s where we were supposed to come out,” Mingles said humbly. “I guess my

reckoning was a little off.”

“I guess,” Meaper said.

 60

Without another word, the six cats set off along the riverbank, in the same single-file

order they had taken through the woods. The river was up, and there wasn’t much bank

between the water and the woods, so the sandy clay they had to trudge through was

moist, never a pleasant thing for a cat, especially a house cat like Doug. His paws were in

for a major lickfest when all this was over.

It took them almost another hour to get up to the bridge. As they approached it, they

could hear cars and trucks up above them competing with the sound of the river and its

little waves slapping up on the bank.

Doug looked up at the concrete pillars that supported the bridge and his already

overtaxed brain went into overload. How on earth were they going to get up there, he

thought.

“How on earth are we going to get up there?” said Meaper, drawing a double take

from Doug.

“That’s not a problem,” Mingles said. “Follow me.”

Mingles’ reckoning might have been off earlier, but he hadn’t been bluffing. He did

know the area, as the other cats soon found out. He led them around the concrete

abutment jutting from the riverbank and up to an opening in the thicket where the woods

began.

Here was the pathway they would have been on if Mingles had paid better attention

earlier. He led them up a steep and winding trail of clay littered with decaying leaves,

sticks and an occasional beer can.

 61

When they reached the top, the thicket of bushes and trees petered out and they

emerged on the shoulder of a busy street that gave onto the bridge over the river. The

sounds of the cars and trucks whizzing by had all of their tails flared out, and for a

moment, Doug thought he was going to retch, he was so scared.

Jack took a long look at the bridge they were supposed to cross and scowled. It was

not a wide bridge by any means, and there was a narrow raised curb separating the

roadway from iron railings lining either side of the bridge. Jack judged the curb to be

wide enough for the cats to walk across single file. But that wasn’t what worried him.

It was the steady stream of cars and trucks whizzing by that troubled Jack.

The lanes on the bridge were barely wide enough for some of the trucks that crossed it.

Their tires were nearly rubbing up against the curb, and that was too close for comfort for

Jack.

And it was loud. Even Jack, the king of the alley cats, the sultan of the strays, had

never ventured this close to an active thoroughfare, never mind a bridge over a river.

He looked at Mingles dejectedly.

“There’s no other way?” It was almost a rhetorical question.

“Not really.”

Suddenly they all found themselves back in the woods again. Some person in a

passing car had seen them standing at the foot of the bridge and had screamed out

something that even Buttons couldn’t decipher. That sent them all scurrying back behind

the thicket, where they found a level landing wide enough for all six of them to squat

comfortably, once their tails had unfurled.

 62

Their hasty retreat turned out to be just as well because the bushes muffled the sound

of the passing traffic a bit and it gave them a chance to think more clearly.

“This isn’t looking real good, Ming,” Jack said. Mingles nodded; he didn’t think a

verbal response was necessary.

“I’ll say,” Meaper said gruffly. “I don’t feel like becoming roadkill today.”

“Yeah, let’s turn back,” said Buttons. “Zeus and Yoda will turn up sooner or later. I

got a lot of faith in that gray. I bet she and Zeus are back at the Spot right now, looking

for us.”

“Buttons is right,” Mingles said finally. “I should have known this was too risky.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as the six cats squatted glumly, scratching an ear

here, a chin there.

“You guys can go back if you want to,” Doug said. “I’m going ahead.” Doug’s

statement after being silent so long caught the rest of the group by surprise.

“What do you mean, you’re going ahead?” Jack snapped. “Of all of us, you probably

got the least chance of making it across the bridge on that curb with that belly of yours.”

This drew some snickers from the other cats, a bit of welcome comic relief. But Doug

was neither amused nor embarrassed.

“I won’t be walking on that curb,” he said.

Jack was intrigued to the point of irritation.

“Well, what do you aim to do, fly across?”

“No,” Doug said matter-of-factly after the laughter died down. “I figure my best

chance is on top of the railing.”

 63

“What railing?” Jingles said, figuring he better chime in so they all remembered he

was still there.

“Let’s take another look,” Doug said, and he crept off through the thicket again,

leading the way.

When they emerged at the foot of the bridge, Doug looked up at the iron railing that

served as a fence on either side of the bridge. It was about the height of the cars that were

whizzing by, but its advantage, in Doug’s admittedly feeble mind at least, was that it had

the width of the curb below as a buffer between the passing vehicles. Earlier, Doug had

been game to give the curb a try, but he had noticed the railing and wondered if that

wouldn’t be safer. Now that it appeared he would be the only one going, he decided he

might as well trust his own instincts.

“You gotta be kidding,” Jack said. “Why, the wind from these passing trucks will

blow you right off, and that’s a mighty long drop.” He let that observation hang there for

a moment. “I’d hate to see the splash you’d make.”

They all looked off to the side of the bridge. They could see the riverbank below

where they had been only minutes earlier. It was a long way down.

“Turn back if you want to,” Doug said, resuming his earlier conversation as if it were

never interrupted. “Mingles, I’m going to need some directions from you on how to get to

that man’s house once I’m on the other side.”

Jack was livid. Here was this newcomer, not even an official member of the club,

showing him up in front of the others. He was making him look like a fraidy cat. That

generally didn’t sit well with Jack.

 64

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “I never said we were turning back. I said it didn’t look

good.”

He turned to Meaper, his second in command, and looked him right in the eye, his

only eye.

“What do you think, Meaper?”

“I say let’s take a vote.” Meaper said it like he was confident of the outcome, and he

gave Doug a look that told him to mind his place. Meaper was soon to find out, as did

most cats—and people, for that matter—that Doug was a cat who was often

underestimated.

“Before you go on and take your vote, I’d appreciate it if Mingles would give me

those directions.” Doug said. He wasn’t looking at Mingles when he said it. His eyes

darted between those of Jack and Meaper. “I guess if you vote to come you’ll catch up to

me soon enough.”

Jack bristled again. There wasn’t much to argue about, and that vexed him plenty. He

stepped aside to let Mingles by, avoiding eye contact with the other cats. He’d coughed

up two hairballs before the sun had risen this morning. He’d known right then that he was

in for a tough day.

After a brief conference during which it appeared that Mingles was licking Doug’s

ear, Mingles returned to the group. Doug gave them all a last look, then turned and made

a leap that astounded even Meaper. It was like one of those scenes on a program about

Africa on Animal Planet that the people thought animals were incapable of
 65

comprehending, much less enjoying. He looked like a lion, pushing off with his rear legs

as his front paws stretched regally out before him.

His feet found purchase atop the railing as if he’d done it a thousand times before.

16.
What was it Jack had said? “You gotta be kidding.” The words echoed in Doug’s mind as

he stood on the railing, the roiling river below him on his left, the whir of passing cars

and trucks on his right. After standing still for a few moments, he realized he was

shaking. But it wasn’t fear that was making him shake. It was the vibrations on the bridge

from the passing cars and trucks.

Doug soon realized that he better get moving; between the vibrations of the bridge, the

blowing wind and the wind generated by the passing vehicles, he was just as likely to get

tossed off standing there as he was if he started moving.

And move he did. There was enough room for him to take normal steps; he didn’t

have to put one paw in front of the other like he was walking a tightrope. Nevertheless,

he felt like he was walking the wire. He started off slowly, one step at a time, then picked

up the pace until he was actually doing a mild trot. His shoulders were slunked down and

he looked like a pudgy game cat stalking his prey.

He didn’t feel like that, though. About a third of the way across the bridge he actually

thought about turning back. The only reason he didn’t was he was afraid he’d lose his
 66

balance trying to turn around and end up falling off anyway. In fact, he was even afraid to

look back as he scooted toward the midpoint of the bridge.

But Doug did take a look back, just in time to see Jack’s front paws grabbing onto the

railing. After much hurrumphing about what a crazy plan it was, Jack had come to the

conclusion that Doug’s idea was, in fact, probably the most sensible.

After Jack came Mingles, then Jingles and finally Buttons. Jack had convinced

Meaper, with some difficulty, that they needed somebody to go back to the Spot, on the

off chance that Yoda and Zeus really had gotten away and somehow made it back. In

fact, the real reason Jack didn’t want Meaper to go was the risk factor. He believed a one-

eyed cat’s chances of making it across the bridge were slim indeed, but Jack knew

Meaper would have had none of that if it were presented to him that way.

Doug felt reassured when he saw that the other cats were joining him, so he turned and

resumed his journey. A minute later he stopped dead in his tracks. He had come to the

middle of the bridge, and for some reason there was a gap in the railing. A big, five-foot

gap. Doug stood there at the edge of it, staring incredulously at the air in front of him. He

noticed there were orange cones placed on the curb below for the length of the gap in the

railing. Behind the cones a temporary metal guardrail had been put in place. There was

also a long piece of yellow tape with words on it stretched from his end of the railing to

the other side where it picked up again.

Doug looked across the street and saw, in between the passing cars and trucks, that

there was no gap in the railing on that side. Not for the first time in his life (or this day,

for that matter), the big cat was dumbfounded.

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One of the many things Doug didn’t know was that there had been a terrible accident

on the bridge earlier in the week. A truck ended up crashing through the railing and

falling into the river, killing the driver. But even if Doug had known it, it wouldn’t have

mattered. What mattered was getting across that gap. The problem was that there was

very little space between the edge of the bridge and the temporary guardrail. And the curb

on the other side of the guardrail had the orange cones sitting on it.

By now, Jack had walked up behind Doug and he, too, was befuddled.

“Now what, Ace?” he said, sitting and scratching his ear with his hind leg, something

he did often when posed with a difficult problem.

Doug shrugged. “Have to jump, I guess.”

Jack stopped scratching. “Jump down, you mean?”

“No. Across.”

“What are you, nuts?” Jack said. “You’re gonna jump across that?”

“You have a better idea?” Doug snapped.

Apparently Jack didn’t, for he didn’t reply. Now the other cats were right behind them,

but they were unable to see the gap in the railing.

“What’s the holdup?” Mingles said.

Jack turned his head around and gave Mingles a look that translated to “shut up.” Then

he turned back to Doug.

“You know, you could try just jumping down and jumping back up on the other side,”

Jack said.
 68

“If that’s what you want to do, fine,” Doug replied. “I’ll take my chances this way.” It

appeared Doug was determined to do it.

Jack and the other cats backed up a few feet to give Doug some space. But Doug

didn’t need space. He squatted for a second, like he was doing a pushup, and then he

leaped.

17.
Yoda was in a quandary. On the one hand, her life would be a lot easier without Zeus

around. And if he had just decided to run away, that would have been fine with her. On

the other hand, she felt like she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t at least try to help

him out of the mess he was in.

After Basil Macauley’s truck had peeled out of the lot, Yoda began casing the trailer,

circling it and looking for possible ways in. The dog next door stopped barking and went

back into his doghouse once she made her way to the back of the trailer and was out of

sight. On her second time around, she spotted Zeus, who was looking down at her keenly

from a window beside the door. Any other cat might have taken the look on his face for

that of brave determination. Yoda knew differently. Zeus wanted to get out, all right, but

not because he was a captive. It was because Yoda was outside and he wasn’t; she had

something he didn’t, and it irked him.

Yoda watched his little cat lips moving and didn’t have to hear him to guess what he

was saying. It’s not that she could read cat lips; she could not. It was the expression on
 69

his face, the look in his eyes, those deep, blue eyes that only Siamese cats have, that told

her he was pleading for her to let him out. As if she had a key.

In the end, it didn’t matter what Zeus’s reasons were for wanting to get out. The fact

was that Zeus had been abducted, and there was no telling what his fate would be if Yoda

couldn’t figure out a way to get him out of that trailer before the guy in the truck got

back.

If only Doug and the rest of the gang from the Spot were here, Yoda thought. Then she

thought about that some more and dismissed it. What could they do that she could not?

Besides, that harrowing ride in the back of the truck had left her absolutely clueless as to

where she was. So the idea of doubling back and getting them to come help her was out

of the question.

Yoda sat and scratched the back of her ear with her hind leg. Like Jack, this helped her

think in times like this. While she was scratching, she noticed something that she hadn’t

on her previous inspections of the trailer: a small gap in the aluminum skirt that covered

up the underside of the trailer.

Of course, Yoda didn’t know this, but trailers are exactly that: mobile homes on

wheels that get dragged from place to place by trucks from time to time. When a trailer is

permanently placed in a lot, an aluminum skirt is installed around the undercarriage to

make it look as much like a real house as possible.

Yoda walked over to the place where the gap was and did a long stretch—front paws

way out, shoulders slunked down. Then she sat a moment and looked at the gap. What

she was looking at was one side of a removable piece of aluminum that allowed access to
 70

the crawlspace under the trailer. It had not been put back in place properly; otherwise,

Yoda would never have seen it.

She contemplated what it meant for a little while, then decided in her cat way to paw

at it a little. She found that when she pawed at it, it jiggled. That meant it was loose.

Yoda looked around to make sure no one was watching her. The dog next door was

still in his doghouse. That was a piece of good luck. Yoda now stuck her paw into the gap

in the aluminum skirt and yanked at it. She felt it give a little bit. She yanked at it again

and it gave a little more, enough for her to get her head and shoulders in at the bottom.

She pushed her head and shoulders forward in one final push and suddenly she felt the

piece of aluminum shift sideways before falling down flat. The sudden clang sent Yoda

flying under the trailer, her tail flared out worse than a midday tussle with Zeus. It also

apparently awakened the dog next door, whose barks were now echoing off the walls of

the two trailers.

Yoda peered outside to see if the sounds of the dog barking or the piece of aluminum

falling down had drawn any attention from neighbors. They hadn’t.

Now what, Yoda asked herself, looking around as her eyes adjusted to the darkness

under the mobile home.

Zeus, meanwhile, was going berserk. He had lost sight of Yoda when she found the

way under the trailer, and he went into his usual routine when he got upset at home. He

literally began bouncing off walls, running from room to room to look out different

windows faster than his feet could negotiate the doorways and furniture. He was frantic

to find out where Yoda had gone.

 71

Yoda could hear the racket he was making above her, and she knew the sound well.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed a bucket sitting on the ground down

toward the back end of the trailer. As she approached the bucket, she began to hear the

reason for it: a slow, steady drip.

She looked up and saw a round hole in the floor above the bucket. She put her paws on

the rim of the bucket and pulled herself up to look into it. It was about half full of water.

Dirty water. It had a stench about it.

Yoda looked up again at the hole above the bucket. It was a black hole; no light came

from whatever part of the trailer was above the hole.

She peered around again and decided the hole was her best bet. It was about three feet

above the ground, but that wasn’t what troubled Yoda. The hole was less than a foot in

diameter. She would have to make a really good jump; if she didn’t, she was sure to end

up in that bucket of nasty water. And she had gotten her share of nasty water this morning

when she fell off that tree limb into the creek in the woods.

She listened as Zeus continued his frenzied rampage, his unclipped nails making

scratching sounds as he ran around the inside of the trailer. It was now or never.

Yoda thought about the way Zeus crouched just before he leaped up and ended up

hitting the button that opened the garage door at home this morning. She did the same

and jumped. Her front paws landed inside the hole, but the one thing she hadn’t counted

on was the surface being wet. She felt her paws slip as her body dangled above the

bucket. With sheer force of will, Yoda dug her nails into the wood and propped her
 72

elbows on the edge of the hole. She was determined not to fall into that bucket, and at last

was able to pull herself up into the dark, dank crawlspace.

After a moment her eyes adjusted again and she was able to see that a leaky pipe was

what was causing the drip into the bucket and the slick floor in the crawlspace. Then she

noticed a thin line of light on the wall on the other side of the pipe. She crawled under the

pipe, careful to not get dripped on, and sat and looked up at the source of the light. It was

faint, but it was there. She stood up on her hind legs and reached out toward the line of

light. As her paws touched the wall, it suddenly gave way and she found herself standing

halfway into a room. The “wall” was not a wall at all, but rather a small closet door. She

was in a bathroom. She had emerged from the vanity under the bathroom sink.

18.
I’m in, Yoda thought with glee. After a quick glance around the room, that glee began to

fade, especially when her eyes fell on the bathroom door. It was closed.

Why do people always keep their bathroom doors closed, she thought, although she

knew why the People at her house kept them closed—namely, to keep the cats out of

them. Did this person have a pet, besides Zeus, she wondered. No matter. She would have

to find a way to get it open.

“Zeus,” she called out in a loud whisper. In a heartbeat she heard cat feet scrambling

down the hallway outside the bathroom and Zeus’s patented “Oodly-ooh” meow. Soon

Yoda saw Zeus’s little pink paws jutting in under the door.
 73

“Zeus, it’s me,” Yoda said.

“Yode?”

“Yeah, it’s me. You okay?”

“Of course I’m okay,” Zeus snapped. “What are you doing in there?”

Yoda rolled her eyes and scowled. “What do you mean, what am I doing in here? I’m

trying to get you out of here, stupid!”

“Well, the way out is out here, Yode.” Zeus said it like a parent talking to a child,

which infuriated Yoda all the more.

“Zeus,” she said, clenching her teeth, “do you want to get out of this place or not?”

“Sure I do.”

“All right. Then just let me think for a minute.”

Yoda checked out her surroundings. It was a small bathroom with the usual amenities:

the sink with the vanity underneath that she just emerged from; a medicine cabinet above

the sink with a crack in the mirror; a toilet (one look convinced her she would have to be

awfully thirsty to ever drink from it); and a filthy bathtub with an even filthier shower

curtain liner that was hanging loose from a couple of the hooks.

There was a frayed towel hanging from a hook on the bathroom door. Yoda studied

the door for a moment and then it came to her.

“Zeus,” Yoda said.

“I’m here.”

“Remember this morning when you got locked in the closet?”

“Yeah, like I’m gonna forget that sometime soon,” Zeus said with a smirk.
 74

“Well, we’re in the same boat, kiddo. We’ve got to open this door the same way, and

neither one of us can do it alone.”

Having said that, Yoda pushed a paw under the door and pulled at it, just to make sure.

As she expected, it wouldn’t budge. Before Yoda could pull her paw back from

underneath the door, she felt Zeus nipping at it. He was playing with her paw. Yoda

rolled her light blue eyes again.

“Zeus, remember what we did this morning?”

There was a long, silent pause.

“You mean in the garage or at the Spot in the woods?”

Yoda cringed.

“No, Zeus,” she said patiently, her teeth clenched again. “Before that. In the closet.

Remember the closet, Zeus?”

Again, there was a long pause.

“Oh, yeah, the closet. The door, you mean.”

“That’s right, Zeus. The door. Very good.” Yoda was thinking about how much she

would like to wrap her teeth around Zeus’s neck. This was all his fault, she reminded

herself.

“What about it?” Zeus asked, seriously.

Yoda struggled to stifle a cat curse that was so vulgar it would not even translate into

English.

“Zeus, just shut up and listen. Remember when you were in the closet, all weepy and

alone in the dark?”

 75

There was no answer.

“Do you remember, Zeus?”

“You told me to shut up,” Zeus said.

Yoda felt like she was about to burst into flames, she was getting so mad. She did a

long stretch and a cat back arch to compose herself.

“Yes, Zeus, but if I ask you a question, you can answer me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. Now remember being in the closet?”

“Yes.”

“Remember how I asked you if you had tried to push against the door?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s try that on this door. Okay, Zeus?”

“Yeah, sure, but it won’t work.”

“Just humor me, okay, Zeus?”

There was no answer this time, only the sound of cat paws and nails on the other side

of the door.

“Nothing doing, Yode. I told you. The door’s locked.” Zeus sounded almost defiant

when he said it.

“It isn’t locked, Zeus. It’s just closed, just like that closet door was closed.”

Yoda paused to think. Was this exactly the same situation as they faced this morning?

Suddenly it came to her. No, it wasn’t. She looked up at the top of the vanity and without
 76

hesitation jumped up on it, nearly slipping into the sink, which was streaked white with

soap scum, shaving cream and toothpaste splatter.

From the edge of the vanity, Yoda could with effort reach out and touch the doorknob.

“Hey Zeus!” she said, forgetting for the moment how mad she was at him.

Zeus was startled, hearing the voice from beyond the door suddenly coming from

three feet above him.

“What?” was all he could manage.

“Look, just lean up against the door like you were just doing. I’m going to try

something.”

When she heard Zeus’s paws on the door again, Yoda put her front paws on the

doorknob. After a brief wobble in which she thought she might fall, Yoda found her

balance between the sink and the doorknob.

“You still leaning on the door, Zeus?” she asked.

“Of course I am.”

“All right, just keep leaning on that door.”

“Okay.”

With that, Yoda slowly began shifting her weight to her front paws. She felt the

doorknob move slightly as she pushed forward with her hind legs.

“Okay, push hard, Zeus.” As she said it, Yoda heaved forward again, her paws curled

down to keep a grip on the knob.

Suddenly the door burst open, sending Yoda to the floor so fast she didn’t have time to

land on her feet.

 77

Zeus walked in, sat down and started licking the fur on his shoulders and front legs.

When he was finished he looked at Yoda, who was sitting there looking back at him with

“the face.”

Zeus knew “the face” all too well. Yoda’s eyes were squinty. Whenever her eyes got

squinty, Zeus knew it generally meant she wasn’t in a good mood. He never understood

why but at least he recognized it for what it was.

“Well, I guess we’re even now, Yode.”

Yoda just sat there, looking at Zeus. “What do you mean, ‘we’re even?’” she said,

dreading the answer.

“You got me out of the closet, I got you out of the bathroom.”

“The face” became grimmer. Yoda felt more like pouncing on Zeus than responding.

Instead, she did neither.

“Follow me,” she said, and hopped through the open closet door into the vanity.

19.
Basil Macauley was just finishing up his least favorite part of his job—waxing the floors

in the meat and seafood preparation areas of the supermarket’s backroom—when he

noticed the light was off in the store manager’s office down the end of the hall. He had

been planning to take a cigarette break outside in the back, but he decided to mosey on up

the hallway to take a closer look. If the computer on the desk in the office was off, that
 78

meant Nelson, the store manager, was gone for the day. Nelson was usually there until at

least five-thirty or six o’clock, but sometimes he had meetings outside the store.

Basil looked at his watch. It wasn’t quite four o’clock yet. He looked around as he

approached the office. There was no one in sight. He stuck his head inside the doorway

and, as he suspected, the computer was indeed off. Basil walked back down the hall and

grabbed a duster and some rags out of the utility closet, then returned to the store

manager’s office, closing the door behind him. If anyone happened to come by, he could

say he was cleaning the office, which didn’t really fall under his responsibilities, but it

would hardly draw attention.

He sat down behind the desk and booted up the computer. An idea had come to him

during the afternoon as he was slaving away mopping the floors. Instinct told him the cat

in his trailer was pedigreed, but he didn’t know it for sure. When he left the message on

the owners’ phone, he said they’d get the cat back if they were willing to pay. But what

price would they pay?

The PC finished its startup routine and Basil’s eyes scanned the computer desktop.

There it was: the Internet Explorer icon. He went to grab the mouse and found it on the

wrong side of the keyboard; Nelson apparently was a lefty. Basil unplugged the mouse

from the left-hand port and plugged it in on the right side of the keyboard. He double-

clicked the mouse and watched the browser go into action. Google was under the

Favorites menu, and Basil proceeded to do a search for “cat associations.” After surfing

through the search results he came across the CFA, the Cat Fanciers’ Association. That

rang a bell.
 79

He found a phone number on the CFA’s site and dialed it, and within a few minutes a

grin appeared on his face. After identifying himself as Mr. Katz, the owner of Zeus, he

was able to find out that he was indeed in possession of a purebred Siamese cat—a

chocolate point, to be exact.

Basil shut down the computer and dusted off the monitor and the top of the store

manager’s desk. The grin was still there as he left the office and headed out back for that

cigarette.

20.
As it turned out, Doug made an even bigger splash than Jack had imagined he might. At

first, Doug thought he had made it across the gap in the railing. His front paws landed

firmly, but his hind legs didn’t fare so well. His right hind foot got a good hold, but the

left one missed, causing him to slip off the railing on the river side. He caught himself

with his front paws for a moment, but he knew it was no use. He looked over at Jack and

their eyes met for a moment—and then Doug slipped off.

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Jack and the other cats watched in disbelief as Doug fell, seemingly in slow motion,

and finally hit the river. It looked like Apollo 11 hitting the Pacific Ocean, a huge splash

that would not have gone over well with the Olympic judge from Ukraine.

The four cats watched from the railing for what seemed like minutes, hoping to see

Doug resurface, but there was no sign of him.

Jack was stunned. If someone had asked him, he couldn’t honestly have said whether

he thought he would sink or swim if he suffered the same fate. He had never been in

water, and he never intended to be. Nevertheless, Doug’s apparent demise made him

more determined than ever to press on.

Mingles, Jingles and Buttons were making motions to turn around and head back, but

Jack would have none of it.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he said to the other cats. “We’ve still got a job to

do, and we’re gonna do it. But we’re gonna get across this bridge my way.”

With that, Jack hopped down onto the curb beside the railing, landing between two of

the orange cones. Jack felt vindicated when he found that it was relatively easy to

maneuver his way around the cones on the railing side. He leaped up onto the railing on

the other side of the gap with ease and looked back at the other cats. With a nod, he

beckoned them to follow him, then turned and continued along the railing.

When Doug realized he was alive, he was surprised. He had hit the water on his least

vulnerable side—his ample belly—which knocked the wind out of him, and that might

have been what saved him. As he floundered underwater, not knowing which way was
 81

up, he tried to breathe but couldn’t. Luckily for him, it was because he belly-flopped that

he didn’t sink very far, and when what wits he had returned, he saw daylight above him,

and he started paddling for the light.

As Doug’s head emerged from the water, he caught his breath—a big, deep, satisfying

breath—and he immediately began paddling for the riverbank he was facing. He would

later admit reluctantly that he had no idea which way was the right way; he merely

headed for the bank he was facing.

The current drew Doug down the river aways as he paddled toward the shore. On his

way a beaver heading downstream squawked at him but Doug paid him no attention. He

was fixated on the riverbank.

He pulled himself ashore about a half-mile downriver from the bridge, and as he crept

up the muddy bank, he felt wet and cold for the first time. In the water, all he had felt was

fear.

Doug did a good, brisk body shake, sending freshets of cold riverwater spraying in all

directions. That helped some. He did it again and that helped some more. Normally he

would now begin to ritually lick himself clean, but instinct told him he had no time for

that. He had to get moving, back toward the bridge. The directions to the abductor’s

house that he’d gotten from Mingles were from the bridge. From where he was now, he’d

definitely be lost. He also hoped to catch up with the other cats, assuming that they had

made it across the bridge. Or had even tried.

He did one more body shake and then started heading up the riverbank in the direction

of the bridge, walking at first and then breaking into a slow trot.
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Doug was about halfway up to the bridge when he came upon a big concrete pipe

jutting out from the woods. The end of the pipe was about a foot above the river surface

and there was a steady stream of…something pouring out of it into the river. He was

about to hop up on the pipe when he heard sounds. He listened harder. They sounded like

voices. He couldn’t make them out over the sounds of the river and the stuff pouring out

of the pipe, but they were definitely some kind of voices coming from the other side of

the pipe.

Doug crawled into the brush at the edge of the woods and waited, listening closely and

watching the top of the pipe. If they were people coming, he could probably get away

with staying still in the brush; they would pass on by. If they were animals, he might be

in trouble. Animals can smell things people can’t, Doug knew, being an animal himself.

He might have to run for it.

Doug watched the pipe and noticed that the voices had gone silent. He wondered if the

owners of those voices had gone away in another direction. Then a figure appeared on top

of the pipe. Doug couldn’t quite make it out so he moved his head to get a better look.

His heart leaped. It was none other than Jack, checking to see for himself what or who

was on the Doug’s side of the pipe.

Doug nonchalantly walked out of the brush, saying nothing, not knowing what to say.

Jack, whose eyes were peering down the riverbank, didn’t see Doug until he was

standing just below him by the pipe. When he did see Doug, with his dirty wet coat all

matted, it scared Jack so badly his tail flared out and he sprayed all over Buttons, who

was sitting below him on the other side of the pipe.

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Jack’s reaction, in turn, startled Doug as well. They both sat there staring at each other

for a moment, and then Jack began to laugh.

Doug rarely laughed. In fact, Doug rarely showed any emotion, but this instance was

an exception, and after a moment, Doug began to roar. He bared his teeth and hissed as

he rolled around on the sandy, wet riverbank. I must be sick, or dreaming, he thought,

knowing full well that he would never even think of doing such a disgusting thing of his

own will in normal circumstances.

Finally the shock of the moment wore off for both of them, and the laughter began to

subside.

“Never fear, boys,” Jack said to his comrades behind him, still stifling a chuckle. “It’s

our long lost pal, Tarzan himself. Jump on up here, Doug.”

It was an easy leap, for a change, and Doug performed it with relish.

The other cats didn’t believe it was really Doug at first when they saw the wet muskrat

of a cat staring down at them. Then, one by one, they began to cheer as recognition set in.

“We thought you’d had it, Doug,” said Buttons, whose face was still wet from Jack’s

discharge.

“You look like you’ve had it yourself,” Doug replied, drawing another hardy laugh

from Jack. A moment later the rest of the troop joined in, even Buttons. It wasn’t so much

what was said, but who said it, that prompted the laughter.

“‘You’ve had it yourself,’ ho, ho!” Jack said. “You said it, Doug!”

Mingles, Jingles and Buttons chuckled along, but inside all of them were marveling at

the scene before them. They were seeing a side of Jack—and Doug—they had never seen
 84

before. All three of them were glad that Meaper wasn’t there. He wouldn’t like the idea

of Jack apparently taking such a liking to this newcomer. He hasn’t paid his dues, Meaper

would say. But then again, Meaper wasn’t on the bridge when Doug took that leap.

“Well, anyway, glad to see you made it there, Doug,” Jack said. “I hate to say I told

you so, but…”

Doug nodded humbly.

Jack nodded back.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to the bridge and get on with this escapade. Lead

the way, Ming.”

“We don’t have to go back to the bridge,” Mingles said.

Jack eyed him skeptically. “Why not?”

“Because once we were over the bridge we would have come in this direction

anyway,” Mingles said. “I figure we can cut through these woods right here. There ought

to be a path or a trail that will bring us out onto a road I’ll recognize.”

Jack still looked skeptical. “You sure, Ming? It seems to me your reckoning was a

little off earlier today, and that was a lot closer to home.”

“It’ll be fine, Jack,” Mingles said, trying to sound convincing.

Jack looked back up toward the bridge. The afternoon was getting old; the trees in the

woods on the west side of the river, the side they were all on now, were leaving long

shadows on the water. It would be nice to not have to trudge all the way back up the

riverbank if they didn’t have to, Jack thought.

“Okay then. Like I said, lead the way, Ming.”

 85

21.
Yoda ended up in the bucket after all, sort of. Later, she and Doug would argue about

who got the grossest drenching.

Zeus was the first to go down the hole in the crawl space, and afterwards Yoda

reasoned that the only reason he didn’t end up in the bucket was that he never gave it a

thought. He was so anxious to get out of there once he realized there was a way out of

there that he just leaped, clearing the edge of the bucket by a cat hair.

Yoda, of course, did know it was there, and that was the problem. To her, peering

down from the edge of the crawl space floor, the bucket looked like Lake Superior. She

fidgeted on the edge, looking more like she was trying to keep her balance than trying to

jump. Then finally she took the leap. Her front paws cleared the top edge of the bucket,

but her belly hit it square, causing the bucket to turn over, splashing her from tail to head

with its funky smelling contents.

Zeus was just standing there, looking at Yoda with that expression that said, “Why did

you do that?”

He didn’t have to say it out loud to draw “the face” from Yoda. She did a couple of

good body shakes, making sure she got Zeus with a little of the flotsam, and then silently

beckoned Zeus with a nod of her head to follow her out the opening in the skirt.

The second they emerged from beneath the trailer, they realized the dog next door was

still on high alert.

 86

“RURR, RURR, RURR, RURR!” The dog was straining at the end of his leash,

slobber dripping from his jowls.

In a way, it was a good thing, because it forced the cats to move. And move they did.

They took off like thoroughbreds out of the gate in the direction that Macauley’s truck

had left: out toward the entrance to the trailer park.

As the sound of the dog barking faded, a new sound replaced it: It was the sound of

cars and trucks. A lot of them.

The entrance to the trailer park was on a busy highway—a very busy highway—with

lots of cars and trucks whizzing by at high speed. And Yoda and Zeus wanted no part of

it. Even though Yoda remembered that that was the way they got there in the truck, she

knew there was no way she could retrace the route the truck had taken.

So they turned tail and headed back through the trailer court, ignoring the sound of the

dog barking as they passed Macauley’s trailer.

Ahead of them, the gravel road that was lined on either side with mobile homes, some

of them more shabby-looking than others, gradually came to a dead end. Beyond were the

woods, which by now looked like home to Yoda and Zeus. Yoda had no illusions that

these woods were the same woods where the Spot was. Where Doug was, and where

Buttons and Jack and Meaper and Mingles and Jingles were, most likely. Where she

wished she was. But she figured there was a good chance these woods would lead her and

Zeus in the right direction.

Suddenly an old shoe came from seemingly nowhere and hit Yoda in the side,

knocking her off her feet.

 87

“Scat! Go on, get out of here, you nasty beasts!” It was a man in a guinea T-shirt

standing in the doorway of a trailer, smoking a cigarette and snarling at them.

Yoda and Zeus didn’t hang around to hear what else he had to say, or throw. They tore

off down the road and didn’t stop running until they were well into the woods. Then they

stopped and looked back, listening for sounds of anyone following them. The only

sounds were those of the birds in the increasingly leafless trees.

22.
“You okay, Yode?” Zeus said.

“I’ll live. But it hurts.”

They began walking again and soon happened upon a path that seemed fairly well

traveled. Wherever this thing leads, I hope it’s in the direction of home, Yoda thought.

Zeus was thinking the same thing, and soon both of them realized how homesick they

actually were. They trudged along, thinking about home: how soft the bed was upstairs

and how good it would feel to be there now, curled up together, all three of them, as they

would be at this time of day if hadn’t been for Zeus accidentally discovering the thing on

the wall that opens the garage door.

“It should have been me,” Zeus said.

“Should have been you what?”

“That got hit with that shoe, I mean.”

“Why do you say that?”

 88

“I don’t know. I guess it was me that got us into this mess.”

Yoda looked at Zeus as they walked along the path, hopping over an occasional log.

Zeus wasn’t just saying that because he wanted to be let off the hook, Yoda realized. He

would have looked back at her if he did. Instead, he just looked straight ahead.

“Well, next time I see a shoe come flying at me, I’ll duck,” she said. Now Zeus did

look at her briefly, and there was a hint of a smile there.

Then both cats froze in their tracks. There was a noise coming from up ahead, off to

the side of the path. It was a buzzing sound.

They crept forward slowly, silently, letting their instincts kick in. As they got closer,

they realized it was the sound of flies, lots of them, buzzing around something on the

ground. Zeus ran up toward the thing, thinking his approach would scare the flies off. He

was wrong. If the flies were even aware of Zeus’s presence, they didn’t show it.

They were eating.

Zeus stopped about two feet short of the thing on the ground, and soon Yoda joined

him at his side. At first they didn’t know what they were looking at. Then recognition set

in: It was a cat. A dead cat. It had probably been dead for days. There was a big hole

where its belly should have been. Something bigger than a fly had done that. The flies

were merely finishing the job. Its eyes were long gone, and its ears were full of holes.

Suddenly the wind shifted and the smell hit Yoda and Zeus like that shoe in the trailer

park. That got them moving, swiftly, along the path again. Neither of them said anything.

It wasn’t necessary. Seeing that dead cat reminded them both that until they got home,
 89

they were in danger, and it heightened their senses. They were more aware of the smells

and the sounds of the woods.

And there were many of those, especially sounds. Every minute or so they would hear

something rustling and they would stop, and so would the rustling. They would proceed

again and something else would rustle the leaves in the underbrush on the opposite side.

A bird somewhere above them unseen would caw. An acorn would fall and hit the ground

with a soft thud.

The sounds were startling, and as the sun began its afternoon plunge, the trees were

leaving longer and longer shadows. The cats were getting so jumpy, the touch of a falling

leaf would send them scurrying for cover.

It went on that way for another two hours, and the cats were beginning to wonder if

there was any end to these woods at all. Then Yoda started to hear another sound. She

stopped to listen and so did Zeus. It was coming from somewhere up ahead of them, an

intermittent sound she couldn’t identify. It was shrill, and it wasn’t being made by any of

the residents of the woods. She heard it again and beckoned Zeus to follow her.

Five minutes later they emerged from the woods and found themselves once again in

civilization, this time on the edge of a large grassy property. The cats didn’t know it but

they were in the backyard of a high school. The sound Yoda had been hearing was a

coach’s whistle. The high school varsity football team was practicing on the school

gridiron.

Yoda was happy to be back in civilization, but she was smart enough to know that

whatever those people with the helmets on their heads were up to, it was no place for a
 90

couple of lost cats. She motioned to Zeus to follow along the edge of the woods. In the

distance she could see a parking lot about half full of cars.

“Let’s head over that way, Zeus,” Yoda said. “Where there are cars, there are roads.

Maybe we can find the road home.”

23.
Martin and Mary Katz spoke little for the first ten minutes of the train ride home. They

had met on the platform at the usual place, sat in their usual seats. In a way it had seemed

like a normal night, except that the 5:45 was an unusually early train for either of them to

be catching on a Friday night. Oddly enough, neither of them knew what to say tonight.

Martin held Mary’s hand, and Mary held his back, and for a while that was enough.

Martin stifled the temptation to mention to Mary that a “catnapping,” if that was a

term, was not on the same scale as a kidnapping. Zeus, after all, was a cat, not a child.

Martin had almost blurted something to that effect on the phone earlier that afternoon, but

he caught himself in time. He held his tongue because he believed that Mary did feel a

kinship, a maternal bond, with these cats, as weird as that sounded when he ran it through

his head. And if that made her happy, he was content.

“How was your day, dear?” Mary finally said, deadpan. It was their standard bogus

line for breaking a silence brought on by a day that they both knew had not been a good

one. He squeezed her hand tighter for being enough of a sport to say it.

“Fine, how was yours?”

 91

They both smiled and almost managed a laugh. Then Mary looked out the window of

the train at the auto body shops and gas stations and veterinarian offices and traffic lights

passing by on the roads beside the railroad, and Martin could see she was just putting up

a strong front. She was troubled. Deeply.

“I called Phil Hanley this afternoon.” Martin let the statement hang in the air a

moment.

“Marty, I asked you not to call the police.”

“Let’s just say it was a personal call. I called him at home.” Martin could see in

Mary’s face that it was an inadequate answer.

“First of all, Phil’s a Jamestown detective, which makes this technically out of his

jurisdiction, and what’s more, he’s a friend. It was a friendly call.”

Mary was still unimpressed.

“Look, I did him a favor last year. His daughter was getting married and I…” Martin

became tongue-tied. “Let’s just say I cut him a deal on the gown. The bridal party’s duds,

too.”

“Well, what did you tell him?” Mary seemed more fearful than angry.

“I told him I didn’t want to make it an official police matter yet. I said our cats were

missing and I told him about the phone call.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he said he’s working the night shift these days. He said what he could do was

have the phone company monitor the activity on our phone tonight. According to Phil,
 92

even if the guy calls from a pay phone, they can trace where the pay phone is if the guy

stays on the line long enough.”

Mary didn’t look any more relieved. She was wringing her hands like she usually did

when she was anxious.

“Look, Mare,” Martin said. “Phil told me he’ll only act if we ask him to. If the guy

says he wants a hundred bucks, maybe we just give it to him and that’ll be that. If he

wants a lot more, I think we’re talking about a real crime here and I think the police

should get involved.”

Mary looked out the window as the train began to slow down, approaching the stop

before theirs.

“Okay, Marty,” she said finally. “If you think that’s best.”

“I do,” he said.

It was half-past six when the train pulled into their station, uncharacteristically right

on time. They would be home in plenty of time for that phone call. Martin was looking

forward to hearing what this character had to say.

24.
Meaper liked to mumble and grumble to himself. He mumbled and grumbled all the way

back to the Spot. Mostly he was grumbling about all the fuss being made over this little

pipsqueak Zeus. So what if he’d been kidnapped? It served him right, Meaper reasoned.
 93

Zeus had been warned about those guys at the market, he reminded himself. The cat had

nobody to blame but himself.

He took a different route back. He figured it would be difficult to find the place where

they had emerged from the woods on the riverbank. And besides, Mingles had said he’d

gotten off track. Meaper opted to take the path that began right inside the woods by the

Plainfield Road bridge. It not only took him directly to the Spot but it got him there about

a half-hour quicker than the other way would have.

He was about to step inside the front door to the shack when he realized it had been

way too long since he’d had anything to eat. He walked over to the bushes at the edge of

the woods and peered out at the Dumpsters and garbage cans behind the supermarket.

There was no sign of anyone, so Meaper ventured out to see what there was to eat. He

had just leaped up onto the side of one of the Dumpsters when Basil Macauley stepped

out the back door for his cigarette break. Basil was about to light up when he saw Meaper

pawing at a brown paper bag that happened to contain about twenty dollars’ worth of

lunch meat and canned goods that Basil had pilfered earlier in the day. He had planned to

grab the bag on his way out tonight after punching out and bring it home with him.

The sight of the cat pawing at the goody bag sent Basil into a rage. He looked around

him and found a good-sized rock, picked it up and flung it at Meaper, hitting him in the

side and knocking him into the Dumpster. Meaper scrambled to his feet and leaped up

onto the edge on the other side of the Dumpster when he felt another rock hit him in the

back of the head. He jumped and hit the ground stumbling, his head swimming from the
 94

impact of the rock. He staggered across the lot toward the woods and another rock just

missed him as he crept through the underbrush.

“Next time I’ll kill you, sport,” Basil said with a vicious laugh. Meaper didn’t know

what he said, but he had no doubt that he meant it. He entered the shack through the front

door and proceeded to lick the wound on his side. There was a big welt there where the

first rock hit him. The one that hit him in the back of the head had drawn blood, and there

was a nasty lump forming there.

Meaper cursed himself for being so careless. Hadn’t he just been remarking to himself

that Zeus had no one to blame but himself for being kidnapped? He lay down on his

favorite shelf and thought about that. What had this nasty person done with that cat, he

wondered. Had Jack and the gang found Zeus and the girl cat? Or had they all perished

trying to cross that stupid bridge? Maybe I can find a way to foil this guy’s plan, Meaper

thought, standing up and foolishly attempting a back arch.

“Ow!!!” he said aloud to the walls. Then he hopped down onto the floor and ambled

out the door. Meaper crept up to the bushes at the edge of the woods and lay down. There

was no sign of Basil now but Meaper didn’t dare try scrounging again. I’ll just wait here

a while until he leaves for the day, he told himself. And he drifted off to sleep.

25.
 95

Once again, Mingles proved himself quite the scout leader. After trudging through the

woods for about ten minutes, he and Jack, Doug, Jingles and Buttons stepped out onto the

shoulder of a busy road.

“We need to get across this street,” Mingles said.

“That ought to be fun,” Jack replied. “You do this a lot, Ming?”

“Not really. Not anymore. I used to live around here.”

Jack knew what that meant. He decided to let it drop. “Where do we go after that?”

“There’s a road up ahead that is a shortcut to the place where that guy lives. Let’s just

get across the street first.”

That proved to be a difficult task. They were on Gladstone Avenue, which took its

name from the Gladstone River. The road was only one lane each way but it was a major

thoroughfare running parallel to the river, and cars were whizzing by in either direction at

a fast clip.

“You go first, Ming,” Jack said. “Show us how it’s done.”

Mingles did just that. He swung his head back and forth in jerky moves for several

minutes as he watched the cars pass, gauging their speed in his head. Finally he made his

move, bolting right behind the rear wheels of a northbound car and crossing the other

lane just seconds before a car going in the opposite direction whizzed by.

“That’s what you’ll have to do unless you get very lucky,” Mingles yelled.

Jack began looking back and forth for an opening.

 96

“Come on, Doug, let’s try this as a team,” he said. “Here, you look up this way and I’ll

look the other way. Holler when you see an opening. If I see one at the same time, we’ll

go for it. Got it?”

Doug nodded his head, then turned it northward. There was a steady stream of cars

coming his way.

“Buttons, Jingles, you’ll be next after us,” Jack yelled to the cats behind them. “Watch

what we do. If we end up roadkill, do it better.”

Jack and Doug kept watching as the cars kept coming. Then Jack noticed a gap behind

a truck that was barreling up the road toward him.

“I think we got a shot coming up on my side, Doug. How’s it looking that way?”

“I see the same thing,” Doug said. “Five more cars and then there’s a gap.”

“Sounds about right. It’s gonna be close. When I count to three, go after the truck that

passes you at that instant.”

Doug watched and listened as Jack counted one, then two, then shouted, “Three!”

A big truck lumbered by and Jack and Doug closed their eyes and tore off across the

street. Doug never moved so fast in his life, and still he barely made it. The front tire of

the car on the opposite side of the street just missed his tail. His heart was jackhammering

in his chest and his lucky tail was flared out to the max.

“Bravo!” Mingles said. Doug and Jack exchanged glances that acknowledged the

close call. Then all three of them looked over at Buttons and Jingles. Jack had a bad

feeling about them. He didn’t consider either one of them particularly bright, or brave, for

that matter.
 97

Jingles watched in the direction Doug had been watching while Buttons watched the

other way. After about a half-dozen cars passed in each direction, there were no more

cars and Buttons and Jingles casually walked across the street as their three brethren

watched in disbelief.

“You two ought to be horse-whipped,” Jack said with disgust. Doug merely blinked.

“We better move on,” Mingles said. “It’s getting late.”

It was indeed getting late. The sun had gone down behind the trees on their side of the

street, and cats knew that darkness wasn’t far off.

Mingles took the lead and they trotted single-file up the shoulder of the road they had

just crossed for about a half-mile. They turned right onto a street lined with houses on

either side. There were pumpkins with painted faces and jack-o’-lanterns on most of the

porches and front lawns of the houses. The cats found these curious, but none of them

made any comment. The street went uphill for what seemed like an hour, and the cats’

trot quickly became a fast walk and then a not-so-fast walk.

At the top of the hill the road came to a T. Across the street was a fence that bore a

sign with writing on it. Mingles looked to the right, then to the left, then to the right

again. He looked perplexed.

“Hey Ming, you sure you know where we are?” said Jack, ever the faithful leader.

“Sure I am,” Mingles said. “Just trying to decide the best way to go.”

It wasn’t a totally satisfying answer but it was hard to argue with. As the cats sat there,

they could hear the sound of people’s voices in the distance, coming from across the

street beyond the fence.

 98

“This way,” Mingles said finally, turning right and again leading the way. Whether he

did an eenie-meenie-minie-moe or he really knew where he was going, the other cats

didn’t know, but he set off with such conviction that no one questioned him.

The single-file march began anew, double-time now that they were on level ground

again. For a while they had a sidewalk to take advantage of, but that soon ended when

they came to the last of the houses on the street. Once again the street was lined with

woods. Across the street the fence continued. There were trees on the other side of the

fence that obscured the view of what was beyond it for the most part, but every now and

then there was an opening and the cats could see grass—cut grass, like a lawn—on the

other side.

The traffic on this road wasn’t nearly as bad as it was on the road where they emerged

from the woods, but there wasn’t much of a shoulder and the passing cars seemed much

too close for comfort.

At last they came to an intersection with a traffic light.

“Come on, let’s cross,” Mingles said. The traffic light was green crossing the road and

cars were roaring across. Mingles went first, followed by Jack, Doug, Buttons and

Jingles. Luckily, none of the cars coming toward them was turning right, because it

would have been touch and go whether the driver would have seen them—or even cared.

Halfway across the street, Jingles hesitated as the last car coming toward them went

through the light. Mingles, already on the other side, looked quizzically at his brother and

beckoned him to hurry up. Which he did.

 99

None of them had paid any attention to the car in the intersection that was waiting to

make a left turn onto the road the cats had just crossed. When the last oncoming car had

passed, the driver of the car turning left stepped on the gas. Jingles never had a chance.

The other cats watched in horror as the car sped off and traffic on the road they had

crossed resumed as if nothing had happened.

Mingles made an instinctive move toward the road but Jack jumped on him and held

him down with his teeth around his neck.

“Let it go, Ming,” Jack said after a moment. “You can’t help him.”

Several other cars ran over what remained of Mingles’ little brother. Mingles struggled

feebly for a moment, but he knew Jack was right.

For Doug, any illusions that this was some cockamamey wild goose chase ended with

the sound those tires made when they ran over that hesitant cat. Jingles’ lifeless body

lying on the road was a brutal reminder that they were in danger, that Yoda and Zeus

were in grave danger and that it was up to them to rescue them.

They were about to leave when a sanitation truck passed by and abruptly pulled over,

its hazard lights blinking. A man got out of the passenger side of the truck and with a

shovel scooped up Jingles’ remains and tossed them in the back of the truck. He got back

into the truck and it sped off. All in a day’s work.

26.
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Basil Macauley punched out at precisely 7 p.m., like he did any other evening. Except

this wasn’t any other evening. He stepped out the back door, lit a cigarette and grabbed

his goodie bag out of the Dumpster. He didn’t see the beady little eye of Meaper staring

at him from the edge of the woods. There was a full moon out tonight; Basil took it as a

good omen as he walked up the alleyway alongside the store toward the parking lot.

Meaper slowly followed him, keeping his distance: There were plenty of rocks around,

and Meaper remembered how accurate a thrower Basil was.

Basil stopped at the front of the store and dropped some coins into a pay phone

hanging on the wall. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, looked at it, then

punched in a phone number and put the handset to his ear.

Meaper watched him as he began speaking into the phone, calmly at first, then more

and more heatedly. He was looking through the storefront window—not at anything; just

in that direction.

Meaper made a snap decision and scurried past Basil while he had his back turned.

Meaper had decided he better try tagging along with this guy to see what he was up to in

case the others had been unsuccessful in tracking down what had become of the

newcomers.

“You better have it, and in cash!” Basil was saying as Meaper skulked by. He crossed

into the parking lot, listening as Basil’s tone sharpened by the word.

“Just get it, or your sweet little Zeus’ll get it,” he sneered. “Listen, mate. This isn’t a

joke. Do what I say or you’ll never see that cat again. At least not alive, you won’t.”
 101

With that, Basil slammed the phone into its cradle and stormed off toward his truck in

the parking lot. Climbing behind the wheel, he didn’t see the ball of fur that was Meaper

curled up in the darkest corner of the truck’s bed.

Basil started the ignition, backed the truck out of the parking space and screeched off.

27.
Yoda didn’t want to admit that they were lost, but she knew they were. The school

parking lot had led them out to a street, all right, but Yoda had no idea which way to turn.

They ended up turning left because Zeus saw a chipmunk and he took off after it in

that direction. The chipmunk lost Zeus in no time, and in no time they felt lost

themselves.

There had been a brief moment of hope when they emerged from the woods near the

football field. Yoda at first had a hunch that they had stumbled upon their neighborhood

by sheer luck.

Luck, Yoda mused. It seemed there had been nothing but bad luck ever since the day

the People brought Zeus through that front door. She could have just let him go. Have a

nice life, Zeus. She and Doug could have gone back to the way it was BZ—Before Zeus.

And yet here she was, trying to get him home.

Yoda thought about Doug; she wondered where he was right now. Had he gone home?

She wished they were home with him, and that this day had never happened.
 102

The sun had gone down shortly after they left the school grounds. Now Yoda and Zeus

were wandering the streets of some neighborhood she didn’t recognize, helped only by

the light of the rising full moon. There were pumpkins on the front porches and front

lawns of most of the houses. Some of them were illuminated with candles or lights. Yoda

and Zeus didn’t know what to make of the orange things, but they didn’t seem to be

moving, so the cats paid them little heed.

They were walking on the sidewalk when suddenly they heard the sounds of running

feet behind them. People’s feet.

“Quick, Zeus, follow me!” Yoda said, and they tore across the front lawn of the house

they were passing and hid under a large rhododendron that sat in front of a picture

window. They got to cover just in time to see three people who had been running come to

an abrupt stop on the sidewalk where the cats had just been. At first Yoda thought she

and Zeus might have been spotted, but these people didn’t seem to be looking in their

direction. They had their hands on their knees and were panting and giggling, and Yoda

now could see that these were not grown-up people.

“We lost ’em,” Yoda heard one of them say. “Joey, you got ’em good.”

Then they all began giggling again. When the laughter subsided, it looked like the

three were about to move on. Then one of them turned in the cats’ direction.

“Look!” he said, prompting the other two to look toward the house. “That’s a big

one.”

If Doug had been with them, Yoda might have panicked, but neither she nor Zeus

would ever be described as a big cat. It was soon apparent that they were talking about
 103

something else. Yoda looked off to her right and immediately saw what they were talking

about. It was one of those orange things, but it was the size of a garbage can. The

pumpkin was sitting on the porch between the rhododendron and the front door, bathed in

a yellow haze from the porch light.

“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” one of the three snickered, and they all

giggled again. “Come on. We gotta get this one.”

With that they crept up the front lawn, looking for any sign of movement in the house.

There appeared to lights on in the house, but the curtains were drawn and there were no

cars in the driveway.

“Don’t make a sound,” Yoda whispered to Zeus. She could feel him shaking beside

her.

When the three people got to the front of the house, they immediately took positions.

One of them knelt down in front of the rhododendron and wasn’t more than two feet

away. But he was facing the street, obviously a lookout. The other two knelt down on

either side of the front door, listening for sounds inside the house.

After a moment, one of the two flanking the front door pulled a knife out of his jacket

pocket and quickly cut a fist-sized hole in the top of the pumpkin, holding on to the piece

the cut out. He then reached into the pumpkin, pulled out a handful of muck and smeared

it all over the glass in the storm door. As he did so, the other person by the door pulled

something out of one jacket pocket and a lighter out of another. He lighted the lighter and

held the other thing out and lit it. Then he dropped the lighted thing into the hole in the

pumpkin while the other person replaced the top.

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“Let’s go!” one of them yelled and all three of them tore off again across the lawn and

down the sidewalk.

Yoda didn’t know what to make of what they had just seen. She and Zeus watched as

the three people ran off into the shadows of the street. They looked at each other and

shrugged.

Then the pumpkin exploded, and Yoda and Zeus found themselves running off into

those same shadows, their ears ringing painfully. As the cats tore down the sidewalk, they

were oblivious to the people who had come out of their houses and were now standing

out on their front lawns, yearning to know what had caused the big boom. They didn’t

even notice that the people who saw them tearing down the sidewalk were backing away

in horror, unsure of what they were seeing.

The sound of the explosion was so loud that it had scared the cats out of their wits,

which normally would have told them to hide from people. Right now they just wanted to

get as far away from that house and that pumpkin as possible.

Soon enough it dawned on them, however, that it was impossible to get away from

that pumpkin. They were wearing it. When the M-80 went off, the pumpkin disintegrated,

spewing pumpkin muck and pits all over the cats’ coats even as they attempted to flee.

After the shock subsided and they had gotten far enough away that there were no

longer people standing in front of the houses, Yoda led Zeus off the sidewalk onto a thick

lawn in front of a dark house. There they began to roll over and over on their backs,

wiping as much of the muck off their fur and onto the grass as they could. They then
 105

went into a full-fledged lickfest, first working themselves over and then licking each

other in places they couldn’t reach themselves.

“People sure can be mean,” Zeus remarked when they were almost presentable again.

He was still licking Yoda’s ear and wasn’t looking at her when he said.

“Figured that out, did you?” Yoda replied. “Maybe I misjudged you, Zeus. Maybe

you’re a genius after all.”

Zeus didn’t know whether Yoda was serious or not, so he merely shrugged when she

looked at him. Yoda thought Zeus looked reasonably clean, and she assumed she did, too.

“Come on. We better get moving,” she said.

The street they were on soon came to a T and it was decision time again. Right or left.

A big oak tree sat on the corner on the left side and Zeus immediately ran over to it to

sharpen his nails on the bark. Yoda joined him. Sometimes even Zeus had a good idea.

When they stopped scratching they sat a moment, and Yoda noticed something

strange. They had stopped scratching, but the sound of nail scratching continued. Zeus

heard it, too.

They slowly crept around the tree and Yoda suddenly heard a sharp hiss.

It was another cat. In fact it was a number of other cats, doing the same thing they

were.

All of their tails were in full flare, and Yoda was ready to hear that guttural moaning

sound that precedes a cat fight, even though she had never even been in one or seen one.

Instead she heard a familiar voice.

“I don’t believe it.”

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“Doug?” Yoda said.

“Yode?” Doug didn’t usually address her by name, and it sounded odd hearing him

call her by the name that Zeus had always called her. Yet it was unmistakably Doug. And

Jack. And Buttons. And Mingles.

Yoda was almost purring, she was so elated. They had come to rescue them. What

other answer could there be?

“So you found him, did you, girl?” Jack said. He had that look in his eye, like he did

when they first met. That was this morning but it seemed like years ago now. “That took

some guts. How’d you do it?”

“It was nothing,” Yoda said.

“Sure it was,” Jack said, still giving her the eye as Doug walked over and licked his

sister’s ears.

“And what’s your story?” Jack said, his eyes shifting to Zeus. “You look like you’re

still in one piece. You okay?”

“Sure I am,” Zeus said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Jack looked at him with contempt. “Why you little buffoon! You know how much

trouble you were in, or how lucky you are?”

Zeus just blinked. It sufficed for “no.”

“You’re lucky to be alive. That guy hates cats. Why he didn’t just cut your head off

right there and then, I don’t know.”

There was an uneasy silence that lasted a moment or two.

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“I think I know why,” Buttons said finally. “He didn’t want to spill all that precious

pure blood. Figured he could get something for it.”

They all sat there looking at Zeus. He was the only purebred among them, that was

obvious, and the looks he was getting were not looks of admiration or even envy. It was

disdain. He was not like them, and yet he had the effrontery to not know it, or appreciate

it.

“Besides that,” Jack continued, “ask Mingles here how lucky you are to be alive out

here. His brother was with us trying to find you, only he ain’t with us anymore.”

Zeus didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

Yoda’s eyes were question marks.

“Car,” Mingles said. “About an hour ago.” They all observed a spontaneous moment

of silence at that.

It was Yoda who finally spoke.

“You guys have any idea where we are?”

“I don’t exactly know where we are, but I know how we got here,” Jack said.

“Mingles here led the way. I guess we can find our way back.”

“That’s out,” Mingles replied. His statement stunned Jack and the others.

“Why not?” said Jack.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel much like crossing those busy streets again

anytime soon, but besides that, I definitely don’t want to cross that bridge again. Not in

the dark.”

That got their attention.

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“What bridge?” Yoda said.

“A big one,” Doug said. “Over a river.”

“You crossed a bridge over a river?” Yoda said.

“He didn’t cross it,” Jack said. “He fell off and swam across. We crossed it.”

Yoda and Zeus blinked at this news.

“Well, what alternative have we got?” Jack said to Mingles.

“Take the long way.”

“Wait a minute. Before we crossed that bridge I asked you if there was any other way

and you said no.”

“I said not really,” Mingles said. “And that was not really true. I lied, I guess.”

“Why?” Jack said after an exasperated sigh.

Mingles looked very tired. He didn’t look like he had the energy to be acting smug.

“As I said,” he said, “it’s the long way. A very long way.” Mingles did a long stretch, his

front paws reaching out as far as they could go, his nails extending into the grass that

surrounded the big tree. Then he rested his body on the ground, Sphinx-style.

“If it’s that far,” Buttons butted in, “why don’t we just call it quits for the night and

head back in the morning?”

No one challenged that idea for a minute or so. Then Mingles did, sort of. He stood up

as leisurely as he lay down.

“If that’s what you want to do, fine. I’m heading back now. The other way.”

“Wait,” Jack said. “What’s the rush? Will the long way get us back that much sooner

than waiting till morning and taking the short way?”

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Mingles hesitated. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted.

“Then let’s stay here.”

“Have a good trip. Be careful.” Mingles turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Jack’s question wasn’t really a question at all. Mingles

looked back, quizzically.

“Home? The Spot? The long way, remember?” Mingles’ answers weren’t really

questions either.

“There’s something you’re not telling me. Us. What?”

The others were observing this with varying degrees of comprehension. Zeus was

oblivious, playing with an acorn with his agile front paws and overgrown nails. Doug was

yawning, waiting for something to happen. Buttons was still trying to figure out why his

idea hadn’t won instant approval.

Yoda was beside herself. She, too, had a feeling Mingles wasn’t telling all.

Mingles moved closer to Jack and Yoda.

“Here it is,” he said, almost whispered. “The people. They say we cats get nine lives.

My brother Jingles, he used up…maybe four. Five, tops.”

Yoda and Jack were entranced.

“I figure I’ve used up seven, maybe eight. And I’m scared.”

Jack felt at last he understood. Mingles was older, after all. In fact it was an open

question who was older, Mingles or Meaper.

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Jack and Yoda could see the fur on Mingles’ tail was flared a bit. Mingles scratched

the back of his right ear with his hind leg awkwardly, as though it wasn’t a move he was

used to making.

“This long way,” Jack said. “Aren’t we still gonna have to cross that river again

somewhere?”

“Yes, we will,” Mingles allowed, “but there’s a tunnel upriver with catwalks on the

sides.”

“How far to this tunnel, Ming?” Jack said.

“Couple hours’ walk, I guess, give or take a few.”

Jack considered the implications.

“That’d mean another couple hours’ walk back downstream on the other side, just to

get back to where the bridge we crossed is, right?”

“Well, we wouldn’t go down the river again. There’s a more direct route from the

tunnel to the Spot. But yeah, it’s still a haul.”

Jack considered the implications again.

“Let’s do it,” Doug said suddenly, drawing stares from the other cats. Doug had a flair

for the dramatic when he decided to break his silence.

“Well, you heard him,” Jack said with a smirk. “Let’s do it.”
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28.
The newly reconstituted sextet of cats set out, ironically, retracing Yoda and Zeus’s steps

all the way back to the school. But they didn’t veer off into the woods at that point.

Mingles led them past the school, where the lights of the empty classrooms continued to

blare out onto the school’s front lawn as janitors mopped and waxed the floors.

After they passed the school they noticed that the houses that had otherwise lined the

street began to give way to storefronts and fast-food joints. They were coming into the

commercial area of Jamestown, although the cats didn’t know that.

But Mingles did know a couple of things about the area. One was that if they were

going to find something to eat somewhere in the next couple of hours, this was the place

to do it. The other was that they would have plenty of competition to contend with from

local strays.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I could go for some pizza right about now,”

Mingles said.

Yoda’s stomach suddenly, audibly rumbled. It sounded like a cow mooing. She hadn’t

really even thought about food since the morning, but Mingles’ comment had her

thinking about it now.

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“What’s pizza?” Zeus said, drawing surprised stares from the others.

“You know what pizza is,” Yoda said. “It’s that stuff the People get in the white

boxes.”

“Oh, that,” Zeus said apathetically.

Mingles looked at him, amused. “I can see that the people you guys live with don’t

like anchovies. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

With that, Mingles set off with a new spring in his step, and the others followed suit.

Jack trotted up alongside Mingles as they cruised the sidewalk in front of a clothing

store that was closed for the night.

“What do you got in mind, Ming?”

“There’s a place up here a block or so. Out back is a Dumpster that’s usually full of

paper pizza plates. If we’re lucky, maybe a bunch of the people who ate here didn’t like

the anchovies either. In any case, there’ll be plenty of scraps.”

Up ahead there were cars parked along the street and they could see people milling

about on the sidewalk. Up above, leaves blowing around in the streetlights looked like

bats in flight.

Mingles slowed down and then signaled for the cats to stop. Two storefronts up ahead

was a shop with a lighted sign out front with red and green writing on it. That was

obviously the place he had in mind, but he decided to head down the alley beside the

shop before it, beckoning the others to follow.

It was a nasty alley. Beat-up metal trashcans overflowing with cans and bottles were

scattered about, and the concrete walkway was sticky and filthy.
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“There better be a good reason for being here,” Jack said.

“If you find out what it is, let me know,” Mingles replied.

“I mean here here. In this dingy alley.”

“Shhh!” Mingles stopped when he approached the back of the store. He peered around

the corner. As he suspected, there were a couple of cats milling about the back door of

the next shop. He waited a moment to see if any others came into view. None did.

“Here’s the deal,” Mingles whispered, turning back to the others. “There are a couple

of strays there but they seem to be alone. I think they’ll take off when they see us coming.

We got them outnumbered three to one.”

“Wait. There’s six of us,” Zeus said. The others just looked at him, like he was some

kind of bug.

“Right. So then what?” Jack said.

“First we wait here until there’s something worth going after,” Mingles said. “The fact

that those cats are hanging around the door tells me there’s not much to be had in the

Dumpster right now.”

Jack took a turn peering around the corner. The two strays were there, all right, licking

their paws and cleaning their faces.

Suddenly Zeus and Buttons were after a moth. They squatted on their hind legs,

batting after the moth with their upraised front paws. After a couple of misses, Buttons

clocked the moth, sending it to the pavement between two trashcans. Zeus bolted after it,

making a loud clang as he banged into one of the cans.

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“Shhh!” Mingles said again. “Idiots!” He peered around the corner. The two strays

were looking in his direction, but Mingles didn’t think they could see him. One of them

began taking a couple of steps toward them when suddenly the back door of the pizza

shop opened.

“Get ready, you guys,” Mingles said. He peered around the corner. The two strays had

hidden behind the Dumpster. A man carrying two plastic bags emerged from the back

door and tossed them into the Dumpster. Then, to Mingles’ chagrin, the man pulled a

cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He looked up at night sky as he puffed away,

apparently marveling at the full moon.

“Come on,” Mingles muttered, eyeing the man with contempt. He was afraid other

strays might come by if they had to wait much longer. The man took a few more puffs

and then dropped the cigarette on the ground. He crushed it out with his heel and went

back into the shop through the back door.

When Mingles heard the door shut, he motioned with his head for the other cats to

follow him.

Slowly they crept, hugging the wall of the back of the store next to the pizza shop. As

Mingles silently skulked along in the lead, he saw the two stray cats leap up onto the

closed half of the Dumpster.

“I smell anchovies,” Mingles whispered to Jack, who was right behind him.

“I smell trouble,” Jack replied.

As it turned out, they were both right.

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Mingles eased into a trot when he saw the two strays jump into the Dumpster, and his

five followers did the same.

When Mingles reached the alley beside the pizza shop, he let out a bloodcurdling howl

the likes of which Doug, Yoda and Zeus had never heard. A moment later, Jack and

Buttons joined in. Instantly the two strays were back up on the closed side of the

Dumpster, their tails in full flare as they checked out their challengers. Yoda saw the fear

register in their eyes as they counted their foes, and a second later they were scampering

up the alley.

“Let’s go!” Jack cried and to a one the cat pack hopped up into the Dumpster.

“They even did us the favor of tearing open the bags,” Mingles said with satisfaction,

pawing through the trash with the skill of a cat that had obviously done this many times

before.

“A ha!” he said at last, grasping a paper plate between his teeth and pulling it out of

the bag.

“What do you got there, Ming?” Jack said, sifting through the trash in another bag.

“Them’s what you call anchovies,” Mingles said. He indicated the black strips that

seemed to be piled onto the greasy paper plate. “Somebody in that place don’t know what

he’s missing.”

Jack considered himself a worldly wise cat, but even he had never eaten an anchovy.

The five cats watched in fascination as Mingles scarfed a couple of them down. Yoda

was appalled. Doug was intrigued. Zeus was just confused. He still didn’t really get the

pizza thing.
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“Come on, try it,” Mingles said to no one in particular.

Doug went first. He had never met a meal he didn’t like, and he didn’t want this to be

his first. He pawed at one of the little black strips on the plate, as if he half expected it to

slither away.

“It ain’t gonna bite you, Doug,” Jack said, like he was some kind of anchovy

connoisseur.

Doug finally plunged in and scarfed down two at once. Immediately his eyes widened

and he sucked down two more. Then they all dug in, polishing off the plateful of

anchovies in no time.

In their zest for satisfying their hunger, none of them thought to post a sentry on top of

the Dumpster. If they had, the sentry would have seen the two strays coming back down

the alley—with about ten of their friends.

Yoda was the first to hear it.

“WRAYOWWHH!!”

It sounded like a cross between an air-raid siren and some living thing exploding in a

microwave oven.

It was, of course, the alley cats’ serenade, a response to the harangue that Mingles,

Jack and Buttons had given the two strays minutes before. Only in this case, instead of

three cats howling in unison, it was more like ten.

Jack and Mingles were up on the Dumpster’s lid in a shot, tails flared, nails bared.

They glared down at the intruders, assessing the threat without showing any fear.

“Come on, the rest of you,” Jack said. “Up here. Let ’em see the whole gang.”
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Zeus, Yoda, Doug and Buttons jumped up on the lid, walking up beside Jack and

Mingles. What they saw below was troubling, in a number of ways. Yoda had never seen

such a mangy looking group of cats in her life. In fact, she had never seen this many cats

in one place since she left the cattery at an age too young to remember.

These were clearly the less fortunate breed of strays. It was the look in their eyes that

struck Yoda especially. They looked alien, unfeline. Jack and Mingles and Buttons were

street cats, strictly speaking, but they were relatively well fed, having the supermarket as

an unknowing benefactor. These cats were true scavengers, and it was clear that they

were unhappy about having their pantry raided.

That didn’t seem to matter to Jack. Up until now, Yoda and Doug and Zeus had heard

a lot of tough talk out of Jack. Now they would see just how tough he really was.

“You interrupted our dinner,” Jack said gruffly. “What do you want?”

“Not your dinner. Our dinner,” one particularly scruffy looking calico answered. “This

is our turf. You’re not welcome here.”

With that, Jack burst out laughing.

“You gotta be kidding! Your turf. A garbage can?”

“Get out, now,” the scruffy looking cat demanded.

“You’ll get your ‘turf’ back when we’re good and ready,” Jack said. Yoda watched as

Jack’s tail continued to flare out. It looked like one of those duster things the People used

to clean the ceiling fans in the house. Yoda could tell Jack was hoping he could bluff

these cats away, but he was ready for a fight. And he didn’t have long to wait.
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Three of the cats, including the impudent calico, immediately hopped up onto the lid

of the Dumpster. Jack knocked the tough talker off the lid with one swipe of his right

paw. He’d had his nails fully extended and had taken some fur off the cat with the blow.

Doug leaped onto a gray stray and immediately bit its ear off, prompting it to scream

as it leaped back off the Dumpster faster than it leaped on.

Meanwhile, a tailless Manx had its jaws around Zeus’s throat. Momentarily. Seconds

after it put the bite on Zeus, Yoda put a bigger bite on its neck. Yoda had never bitten a

cat in a real fight before, so she decided to go all the way. The cat’s neck snapped and it

went limp, releasing Zeus from its grip.

When the apparent leader and the now one-eared gray stray came flying down off the

Dumpster in terror, the others fled up the alley. They didn’t stick around to find out what

had become of the Manx. It would have been a long wait.

By the time Yoda realized they had won the battle, Mingles was already back inside

the Dumpster, pulling out paper plates with decent scraps.

“That may have been it for the anchovies,” Mingles said, as if nothing had happened.

“But there’s plenty of other stuff here. Look, here’s half a pie right here.” Mingles

dragged the cold, stiffening pizza slices out of the bag with his teeth and laid them on top

of a flattened cardboard box. He immediately dug in, but the others had lost their

appetite. Even Doug. He had never been in a real fight before either. That ear left a bad

taste in his mouth.

29.
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“I guess we better move on, Ming,” Jack said finally. “We’ve got some distance to

cover.”

Jack didn’t say it but his voice conveyed it nevertheless: He was shaken. He wasn’t

one to back down from a fight, but he’d avoid one if he could every time.

So off they went, hopping down from the Dumpster lid one after another, with

Mingles (reluctantly) leading them up the alley beside the pizza shop. Jack followed

closely behind him, knowing there was a slim chance the strays might be lying in wait for

them out on the street. It turned out they weren’t, and once out on the sidewalk, Mingles

stepped up the pace. He would have preferred to have had more time to sample the

leftovers in the Dumpster, but he took some solace in the fact that he did get something to

eat; more than most of the others, in fact.

They resumed their single-file march, double-time now, and before long the

storefronts once again gave way to homes on either side of the street, soft lamplight

spilling from the windows onto the dark front lawns. Again there were pumpkins on the

lawns and front porches of most of the houses, which gave Yoda and Zeus the creeps

again.

Soon even the homes disappeared along with the sidewalk and the streetlights, and

they were once again traipsing the narrow dirt shoulder between the road and the woods.

Instinctively the cats knew that in the dark their chances of becoming roadkill rose

dramatically, especially when cars passed other cars signaling for a left turn, which

happened a lot, or when a car was turning onto a side street on their side that they had to

cross. So every time they sensed that a car approaching from behind was slowing down
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and there was no street ahead of them on the right, the cats had to hole up in the woods

and wait for the car to make the left turn before heading out again.

Fortunately, as the night moved on, the traffic on the road decreased, and soon the car

traffic virtually ceased.

They were in what people would call the boondocks, and they knew it. Sensed it. Now

it wasn’t the sound of tires and the motor hum of oncoming cars that haunted them. It was

the silence that was unpredictably interrupted by the sounds of the night in the world

where people weren’t. An owl hooted here. From over there came the sound of a possum

or a raccoon rustling around in the leaves beyond the bushes. More disturbing than the

sounds was the feeling that they were being watched. They could sense unseen eyes

peering at them from every branch, from behind every bush.

Here Jack, Mingles and Buttons had nothing on Doug, Yoda and Zeus. It didn’t matter

that they were veterans of the streets or the woods. In the boondocks, all cats were

chickens, and the parade of flared-out tails told the story. Their double-time march

slowed to a near crawl.

Suddenly they heard a scream. It was not a human scream, although any human might

have taken it for one. The cats knew better. It was a cat. Or at least a member of the cat

family.

“I bet it’s an ambush,” Yoda offered. She was the third in line, just behind Jack.

“Those strays aim to get us back yet.”

“I don’t think so,” Jack grunted without looking back at Yoda. “None of them cats had

the moxie to make that sound.”

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Yoda turned around and looked at Doug, who was right behind her. Doug shrugged.

“What do you mean, ‘moxie’?” she said.

“You know. Cohones,” Jack replied in a tempered whisper, then realized Yoda had a

better chance of knowing what moxie meant. “This was a big cat. A lot bigger than young

Doug there, or even Buttons.”

The scream came again, this time louder, sounding closer to the edge of the woods.

Mingles stopped in his tracks and the troop came to an abrupt halt. The cats peered

into the woods between the branches of bushes that preceded the trees, but could see

nothing. Still, they knew they were being watched—and not just by the owner of that

scream. They could feel the eyes on them, hundreds of them maybe. They heard the

sound of feet scrabbling through the leaves and twigs. They couldn’t tell how many

animals were making those sounds. It could have been five, or fifty, or five hundred.

“Let’s go,” Jack whispered.

Without comment, Mingles crept forward again, like a mule that’s just been lightly

nudged. The others followed—for a few steps.

“Wait!” someone hissed.

They all turned and saw it was Buttons who called the halt.

“It’s Zeus,” he said. “He’s gone! He must have run into the woods!”

Yoda scowled. “What do you mean, ‘he must have run into the woods’?” She was

whispering as loud as she could. “I thought you were behind him.”

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“I was for a while,” Buttons said. “Then he stopped to scratch behind his ear. I told

him to hurry up, and he did. Then after we stopped here a second ago, I looked back and

he was gone.”

They all fell silent again, listening in the dark as headlights appeared in the distance

ahead of them. They listened intently for the sounds in the woods, for they knew those

sounds would soon be drowned out by the noise of the tires on the pavement and the

drone of the motor that would be passing by.

That stupid cat, Yoda thought. She looked at Doug, and in the reflection of the

oncoming headlights she could see in his eyes that for once their minds were in synch.

Just before the sound of the approaching car or truck became too loud, they heard the

scream again, this time followed by a sound all too familiar to Doug and Yoda: It was

Zeus’s snarl.

The two of them often quarreled about that snarl. They would hear it whenever Zeus

was in a “playful” mood, as Doug would put it. It was Yoda’s contention that Zeus didn’t

know the difference between playing and fighting. When he had extra energy to burn, he

wanted to fight, not because he was mad at either of them, but because that was what he

was programmed to do.

Doug always countered that if that were the case, why didn’t he bite to kill? Surely he

had to strength in those jaws to inflict wounds, even life-threatening ones. Why would he

back off?

To which Yoda had no answer, except that the cat seemed to get no joy out of

attacking them without provocation. It seemed to be a need.

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Whatever prompted it, the sound of that snarl jolted Doug and Yoda into action. They

bolted into the woods just as the sounds of the approaching vehicle’s tires and motor

were reaching their peak.

They leaped headlong into the thicket, blinded for the moment by the bushes and the

dark. Behind them they heard a cacophony of sounds: yelling, hissing, the sound of glass

breaking. But they couldn’t think about that now. Doug and Yoda were again united in

the same single purpose that had gotten them into this fix in the first place: finding Zeus.

It didn’t take long. Zeus’s white coat caught what little moonlight there was trickling

through the trees. It was too dark to see his tail, but Yoda didn’t have to see it to know it

was in full flare.

Zeus was face to face with a bobcat, a relatively rare beast in these parts, but not

unprecedented. The bobcat had to be twice Doug’s size, which made him roughly four

times Zeus’s size. Any other cat would have been running for its life, but not Zeus.

That stupid cat, Yoda thought again. He doesn’t even have brains enough to be scared.

The bobcat was pretty riled himself. He was emitting a low moaning sound now and

was holding his left front paw out in front of him, using it like a boxer to fend off Zeus’s

attempts to swipe at him with his paws. The bobcat’s tail was whipping back and forth.

Zeus’s brazenness had taken the bobcat aback, and so far he gave no indication he was

aware that Doug and Yoda were there, which was to their advantage. It gave Yoda time

to think. Their only chance, she figured, was for all three of them to attack the big cat at

once, and she tipped Doug off on that plan with the cat equivalent of a wink. She wished

she could summon the others to help, but there was no time for that now.
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Zeus snarled again and jumped at the bobcat’s neck, only to be swatted down like a

pesky moth.

It didn’t matter to Zeus; he got right back up and tried it again, this time slipping the

bobcat’s paw and actually managing to get his paws around the big cat’s shoulders.

Instinctively his jaws went for the bobcat’s neck, but Zeus soon found himself on the

ground with his head basically inside the bobcat’s mouth.

With that, Doug and Yoda pounced.

Yoda, being the jumper, arrived first, her nails fully extended, blinding the bobcat in

the right eye instantly. The big cat let go of Zeus’s head and then let go a scream that

made the earlier ones they had heard sound like a sigh. Yoda dug her teeth into the back

of the bobcat’s neck and held on for dear life.

Because Yoda’s nails had blinded the bobcat’s right eye, he never even saw Doug,

who just barreled into the big cat like a football linebacker hitting a quarterback. The

impact not only knocked the bobcat over but it knocked the wind out of him as well. The

impact also sent Yoda flying, right into a nearby birch tree.

Their blood up, Doug, Yoda and Zeus attacked, exercising some savage instinct they

didn’t even know they possessed. Doug chewed off a piece of the animal’s left ear (he

was getting good at this) while Yoda clenched her teeth down on the bobcat’s hind leg,

all the while kicking at its neck with her powerful hind legs, nails out, of course.

Zeus had his jaws locked on the bobcat’s left front paw, the one that it had been using

to swat him around moments before.

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Before he knew what hit him, the bobcat was a mangled, defeated beast, but he

summoned all of his strength and rolled over, breaking the cats’ hold on him and enabling

him to run away.

And run away he did, never looking back. At least not as far as Doug, Yoda or Zeus

could see. They didn’t stick around very long to check.

Doug and Yoda inspected young Zeus. They could see in the faint moonlight his neck

was bleeding a little below the ears where the bobcat’s teeth had held his head. His fur

was matted and dirty, but otherwise he appeared to be okay.

“You’ll live,” Yoda said. Doug nodded and the three of them trotted off toward the

street.

30.
Cats’ eyes are like magic at night. You can spot a cat from a hundred yards or more if

you shine a light at it. A cat’s vertical pupils, which ordinarily are open wide in the dark,
 126

suddenly close to narrow slits when light hits them, and their corneas reflect the light

right back where it came from.

The vehicle that was bearing down on the cats when Doug and Yoda went into the

woods was a Ford Bronco. The two men in the sport utility vehicle had seen the cats’

eyes from about a football field away. They evidently didn’t think much of cats. As the

truck approached Mingles, Jack and Buttons, it slowed down, and the cats could hear the

men’s voices. They were yelling something, but even Buttons couldn’t make out what

they were saying.

As the truck passed, the two men tossed the beer bottles they were sipping from at the

cats. The one the driver threw hit the pavement right in front of Jack and shattered,

sending shards of glass into the fur on his belly and his legs. The man in the passenger

side of the truck had tossed his bottle from his window over the roof of the Bronco. The

bottle was overthrown, but it hit a tree square just inside the woods and it also shattered,

raining down glass and half a bottle’s worth of warm beer on Mingles. The cats could

hear the men laughing as the truck sped away.

“I hate people,” Buttons said, watching the taillights fade into the night.

Jack fared the worst in the incident. He was able to remove the bigger pieces of brown

glass that had pierced the skin on his belly with his teeth and paws, but the wounds they

left were bleeding, forcing him to lick and lick. That ordinarily wouldn’t have been a

bother, but the bottle had had beer in it, and it all splashed onto Jack. As he licked his

wounds, he tasted the beer, and it made him want to retch.

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Mingles had a few cuts on his ears from the shattered glass, but nothing on the order

of the wounds Jack received. He also got splashed, and that was his chief complaint. The

smell of it was repulsive, and he was going to have to lick it off as well.

When Doug, Yoda and Zeus emerged from the woods, Jack had his wounds pretty

well cleaned, although they were still oozing blood.

“What happened to you?” Yoda said to Jack.

“People,” Mingles said with contempt. “Threw stuff at us. Jack got nailed pretty

good.”

Yoda walked over to Jack and licked behind his ears, which he apparently didn’t mind

at all.

“Of course, I got a few nicks myself,” Mingles said with a note of envy. Yoda gave

Mingles a lick behind the ears as well. He looked satisfied.

“Where’d you wander off to?” Buttons said to Zeus, sounding a tad annoyed.

“Oh, just in there a ways.” Zeus nodded toward the woods. He was still shaking a

little.

“Well, I hope you had fun,” Buttons said.

“He had fun, all right,” Yoda said. “Almost got himself killed, and us with him.”

“What happened?” Jack asked.

“We’ll tell you later,” Yoda said. “We better get moving again. Jack, you figure you

can travel okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll manage,” Jack said. “I just hope nobody starts following us. I’m afraid I’ll

be easy to track.”
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None of the others felt a need to respond to that, so they headed on down the road

again, with Mingles again leading the way.

Mingles knew what Jack meant, and the others following behind Jack soon found out

what he meant. He was leaving a trail of blood.

In the distance the cats could see a traffic light where the road they were on came to a

T. The road they were approaching was obviously a lot busier. They could see headlights

passing by in either direction: trucks, cars, buses. Yoda didn’t know if that was a good

thing or a bad thing.

“We’re turning right up here,” Mingles yelled as they approached the intersection.

“Stay right behind me. The shoulder of this road is really narrow.”

That turned out to be an understatement.

“What shoulder?” Jack said, shuddering as a tractor-trailer thundered by, mere inches

away.

“Get used to it,” Mingles replied.

They never did. With each truck, bus or SUV that rumbled by, the fur on their backs

and bellies stood out straighter. The wind generated by the passing vehicles kicked up

dust and sand that got embedded in their fur and made them blink.

Up ahead Jack spied a sign with writing on it beside what looked like a big driveway.

“Hey Ming, let’s take a breather at this place coming up here.” Jack sounded really

stressed out and Mingles figured he probably wanted to lick his wounds again.

“Okay, but this is going to seem like déjà vu to some of our gang.”

“What do you mean?” Jack said.

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“You’ll see.”

The six cats were greatly relieved when they stepped off the highway just beyond the

sign and put some distance between themselves and the speeding cars and trucks, this

despite the fact that they were now walking on gravel. They were at the entrance to a

community that suddenly looked very familiar to Yoda and Zeus. They looked at each

other in disbelief.

“Look familiar?” Mingles said. He could tell by the looks on their faces that it did.

They were right back where they started: the trailer park where the man who kidnapped

Zeus lived.

“What are we doing here?” Yoda said.

Mingles shrugged.

“This place is on the way, that’s all. Jack wanted to take a breather, and so did I,

frankly.” Mingles sat down and licked his chops as Jack began licking his wounds. The

dust from the highway had worked its way into them, and they smarted.

Yoda was tempted to tell Mingles that if she had known that they had to pass by this

place to get where they were going, she knew a shortcut through the woods. But then she

remembered that dead cat with the flies all over it. And then she thought about the woods

themselves, and how creepy they were in the daytime. How much creepier would they

have been at night? And could she have found her way back in the dark? She didn’t think

so.

Instead, she was about to say they ought to at least find some cover rather than sit

there near the entrance to the trailer park when something caught her eye. It was an
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animal coming toward them in the dark shadows of some trees. A single eye shone at

them from the darkness, and when the animal emerged from the shadows into the

streetlight, the eyes of all six of the cats bulged.

31.
All Mary Katz could do was wring her hands. That and pace back and forth between the

kitchen and the den, where Martin sat on the sofa beside the phone, looking at the TV but

not watching it. They were waiting for a call from Phil Hanley on the results of the trace.

Either that or a second call from the kidnapper.

The man who claimed to have their “cat,” not cats, had been quite prompt with his

first call. The phone rang at three minutes after seven, and as planned, Mary answered it.

Her part of the conversation had been short, but it kept running through her head:

“What do you want?” she said after she picked up the phone.

“Whoa! No hello? No ‘Katz residence’? No greeting at all? Is that nice?”

Mary ignored the insolence. “I said, what do you want?”

“Well, I think this is more about what you want, wouldn’t you agree? You would like

your charming friend Zeus back, I’m assuming.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Well, I’ll be glad to accommodate you, if you’ll just accommodate me, mum.”

Mary didn’t respond right away.

“You still there, mum?”

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“How much?” she said.

“A thousand dollars.”

“You must be joking!” Mary blurted it out, despite Phil’s advice to not react to any

ransom sums.

“I’m afraid this is not a joking matter. Here I’ve gone to all the trouble to make sure

Zeus is nice and safe and this is the thanks I get. He’s a grand-looking cat. I don’t think a

grand is too high a reward. Think about it.”

Mary was bristling. “I haven’t got that much cash.”

“Get it. There are ATMs all over town.”

Mary looked at Martin, exasperated, and held out the phone. Martin grabbed it.

“Listen, whoever you are. Even if we had that kind of cash we wouldn’t pay it.”

“You better have it, and in cash! Just get it, or your sweet little Zeus’ll get it. Listen,

mate. This isn’t a joke. Do what I say or you’ll never see that cat again. At least not alive,

you won’t.”

There was a loud bang as Martin heard the caller hang up. An uneasy silence followed

as Martin and Mary looked at each other. Phil had told them to try and keep the caller on

the phone as long as possible.

“Oh Lord, what have we done?” Mary had cried finally, and then began sobbing.

Afterward, Martin had tried his best to console her, assuring her that the man would

call back—that it was in his interest to call back. It was sound logic, and he almost

believed it himself. But then an hour passed, and his confidence began to wane. He was
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getting mixed emotions on how he should feel at this point. On one hand, he’d like to be

rid of the cats. On the other hand, he knew that would devastate Mary.

Suddenly the phone rang, jangling their nerves.

“Hello,” Martin said evenly.

“Hi Marty, it’s Phil.”

Mary saw both relief and disappointment register in Martin’s face.

“Hi Phil,” Martin said. “What’s the word?”

“Good news and bad, Marty,” he said. “The good news is we were able to trace the

call, despite the short duration.”

“Where was he calling from?”

“That’s the bad news. It’s a pay phone in front of a supermarket not too far from your

house. You probably know it. The Foodtown on Perrine Avenue?”

Martin was silent for a moment.

“Of course I know where it is, Phil. Why is that bad news?”

“Because anybody could have made that call, Marty.” There was a touch of edginess

in that reply.

“I’m sorry, Phil. You’re right.”

“Look, I’ve spoken with the Worthington cops and they’ve arranged to have a patrol

car regularly monitor that supermarket, and the officers have been instructed to keep an

eye on the phone booths outside. This guy might be stupid enough to use the same phone

if he calls again. I doubt it, but it’s possible. Plus, we know he’s got an accent. British or

Australian, the latter more likely. That’ll help.”

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Marty and Mary’s eyes were locked together.

“Thanks, Phil,” Martin said. “Keep us posted if there’s any news.”

“Marty,” Phil said. “Keep your head straight, all right? We’ll get this guy. Besides, it’s

a cat. It’s not the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

Phil regretted saying it the moment it came out of his mouth and tried to apologize, but

he heard a dial tone before he could speak.

Mary guessed the gist of what Phil had said from the look on Martin’s face as he hung

up the phone. He managed a wry smile, and she almost managed one back.

32.
Basil Macauley had never been so mad in his life. All the way home in the truck he was

muttering to himself out loud, cursing out the woman who had been on the other end of

the phone before she handed it over to her husband, who tried to sound so tough.

Meaper, hiding in the bed right behind the cab, could hear Basil ranting and wished he

understood people talk.

“I’ll show them who’s tough,” Basil growled, pulling into the trailer park at a reckless

speed. He stopped the truck abruptly in front of his trailer and slammed the door to add

an exclamation point to his rage.

Imagine the nerve of those people, Basil thought. All he was asking for was a grand. A

lousy thousand dollars and they could have their little kitty back. He just needed some
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extra dough to make ends meet. That dog Basil had read about in the paper had earned

somebody twice as much as he was seeking.

As if it read his mind, the dog in the backyard of the trailer next door began to bark,

but Basil yelled something incomprehensible and the dog shut up.

Basil was so mad when he entered the trailer that he didn’t even think about the cat

right away. He grabbed a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator and plopped himself down

on the sofa, wincing as one of its springs poked him through the slipcover.

He thought about lowering the reward money. (He didn’t like to think of it as ransom;

that was extortion. He felt this was an act he should be rewarded for.) But he dismissed

that idea after a few sips of beer. If he came down on the amount, that might be seen as

an act of desperation. He had to keep his cool.

Basil’s eyes shifted to the trophy case on the wall.

“So they won’t pay, eh?” he said out loud. “Then maybe Mister Zeus will.” He walked

over to the kitchen counter near the door and pulled the sharpest steak knife he had out of

the silverware drawer. It was then that he remembered the bag of pilfered goods he had

packed and brought home from the store. He had left the bag in the truck. Among the

contents of the bag were a couple of cans of Nine Lives cat food. He usually used pet

food as a lure.

“Here, kitty,” he said, looking around the kitchen as he headed out the door.

“Where you at, cat?” Old Zeus must have found himself a nice place for a catnap,

Basil thought. “Better not be on my bed, mate,” he said out loud, grinning.

He trotted back out to the truck and grabbed the bag off the front seat.
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He didn’t see Meaper, who was hiding under the stairs that led into the trailer. Meaper

had hopped out of the truck as soon as Basil went in the first time. He had circled the

trailer twice, hoping he would get a glimpse of Zeus or Yoda, or both, in one of the

trailer’s windows. No dice.

Then he’d heard Basil’s voice inside and he ducked under the stairs in the nick of

time.

One thing did catch Meaper’s eye as he made his way around the trailer: a piece of

aluminum lying on the ground beside a small opening in the skirt around the bottom of

the trailer.

Meaper eyed that with interest as Basil mounted the stairs again, bag in hand.

When Basil got back into the trailer, he put the bag down, tossed the meat into the

freezer and pulled out the cat food cans. The cans had fliptops, so he opened one, figuring

the smell of the food might wake Zeus up before he even found him.

Then Basil began his search in earnest.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” he said in a phony, sing-song voice that had a better chance of

scaring an animal off than attracting one. He was brandishing the can of cat food in one

hand like a would-be child molester with a piece of candy and held the knife behind his

back with the other hand.

He went all the way down the hall to his bedroom. No sign of the cat. He looked under

the bed, then in the closet. The closet door was slightly ajar, but there was no cat inside.

That was when Basil began to get uneasy.

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“Here, kitty, kitty,” he said again, thinking that if he were that cat, the bedroom is

where he would be.

Basil walked back down the hallway, glanced briefly in the bathroom and then came

back into the kitchen, which gave onto the small den/living room where he’d just been

sitting. There was no sign of Zeus.

“Zeus?” he called out, as if calling the cat by his name would work better than “kitty,

kitty.”

“Zeus!” he said, much louder this time. Silence answered him. He walked down the

short hall to the other side of the trailer. There was a utility closet and another bedroom,

which he used for storage. Both of the doors were closed. He looked inside anyway.

Nothing.

Then Basil turned around and looked back across the kitchen, down the hallway on the

other side.

The bathroom. He always kept the door to the bathroom shut, but that door was open

when he walked past it, he now recalled. Keeping the door closed was a habit that dated

back to when he was married, when there was a cat in the house. One of the reasons he

hated cats so much now was because his wife loved them so much. They had always kept

the bathroom door closed to keep the cats from drinking out of the toilet.

He walked slowly toward the bathroom, but he didn’t call out to the cat. Something

told him not to bother. In fact, he closed the lid on the cat food can as best he could and

put it in his jacket pocket. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be needing it.

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He pushed the door all the way open. It creaked a little bit, as it always did, but it

sounded creepier now. He flipped on the light. The shower curtain was pulled back as

he’d left it in the morning. There was no cat in the tub; not that he’d expected to find it

there. It wasn’t hiding behind the toilet either, or freshening up in the sink.

The only thing out of place in the bathroom was one of the doors to the vanity under

the sink. Basil pulled it wide open and saw nothing—and yet saw it all.

And that was when he lost it. He kicked the vanity door so hard it split in two as its

hinges separated from the vanity. In his rage he picked up one of the broken pieces of

wood and threw it at the bathroom wall full force, only to have it bounce back and hit

him in the face, cutting his big nose.

That was when he began to scream, which Mingles took as a cue to start making

tracks. He figured whatever elicited that scream inside the trailer couldn’t be good, and

he bolted, at first toward the back end of the trailer. Then he stopped, thought it over for a

second and turned around, high-tailing it for the darkness underneath the truck.

That turned out to be the perfect place to watch what happened next. The door of the

trailer burst open and slammed against the side of the trailer, and out came Basil,

flashlight in one hand, a knife in the other and a scowl on his face visible even in the

dark. He turned immediately to that opening in the skirt and kicked the piece of

aluminum lying on the ground beside it.

The dog next door began to bark again and Basil silenced it with a shout.

Meaper moved back behind one of the truck’s rear tires when he saw the beam of the

flashlight begin to zigzag in every direction. The one-eyed cat didn’t have to understand
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people-talk to know what Basil was muttering as he scoured the area with the flashlight

beam.

“Come back here, you little rat!” he scowled, looking first underneath the trailer

through the opening in the skirt and then around the weedy yard that surrounded the

mobile home.

“Come here, little Zeus,” Basil said in his sing-song voice again, puzzling Meaper.

He’s got to be kidding, the cat thought. Even if the little punk were hiding in the yard,

he wouldn’t respond to that.

“You little rat!” Basil shouted as he disappeared behind the trailer.

That’s more like it, Meaper thought, taking Basil’s move behind the trailer as a cue to

get moving himself. He ran out from behind the truck and tore off down the gravel road

toward the entrance to the trailer park. Suddenly he stopped in the shadow of some trees.

Up ahead, under a streetlight, he saw a pack of frightened but decidedly familiar-looking

cats. He approached them deliberately, slowly emerging into the streetlight. Then he sat

down before them.

There was an uncomfortable silence that seemed to last longer than it did. It was

Meaper who ended it.

“What in the hell are you doing here?”

With one-eyed Meaper it was always hard to tell who he was looking at if he was

facing more than one cat. In this case it didn’t matter, Jack reasoned. He was asking all of

them.
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“I might ask you the same question, Meaper.” Jack’s tone of voice gave no indication

of how glad he was to see his old friend, never mind the circumstances.

“Well, the answers will have to wait. There’s a mean man looking for you—us—and

we’re sitting ducks under this streetlight.”

Then came a shout from the direction of Basil’s trailer, and all of the cats could see the

flashlight beam waving in the distance.

“Who’s that?” Zeus cried in the loudest whisper he could manage.

“You ought to know,” Meaper said. “You got pretty well acquainted this afternoon.”

“Let’s beat it,” Jack said, and they did—but he forgot to say in which direction. So

they all scattered this way and that. Zeus actually bolted in the direction of Basil’s trailer

at precisely the moment Basil pointed his flashlight toward the trailer park entrance.

“There you are, you little rat!” he shouted and began running toward Zeus. Zeus

turned tail and tore off toward the entrance from the highway, spewing gravel with each

footfall.

Jack did the cat equivalent of whistling, which caught the attention of all of the cats

and got them all heading in the same direction as Zeus. The young Siamese turned the

corner at the trailer park entrance and galloped down the narrow shoulder of the highway

in the same direction they had been heading before. Mingles was striving to retake the

lead but Zeus was moving too fast.

Doug and Yoda were in the back of the pack. Yoda could hear Basil hollering behind

them and his feet tramping through the gravel as they got back on the highway, this time

oblivious to the cars and trucks whizzing by.

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“I’ll get you! Don’t you think I won’t!” Basil yelled. Yoda looked back and saw that

Basil had stopped running and was standing there at the trailer park entrance, shaking his

fists. “I’ll get you, all right!” he said, and then disappeared.

Basil headed back to the trailer, only to find he’d left his keys inside and had locked

himself out. Basil’s rage now knew no bounds and he put his fist through the trailer

door’s louver window. He opened the door from the inside with his bloody hand and

grabbed the keys off the counter, not even bothering to close the door.

Basil jumped into the truck, started it, put it in reverse and backed up all the way to the

trailer park’s entrance, then peeled out onto the highway without even looking to see if

there was an opening in the traffic.

Out on the highway, Zeus began to run out of gas and he slowed to a trot, which was

fine by most of the other cats. It wasn’t fine by Yoda, though. She had heard what the

man said, and she took him at his word.

Mingles and Jack retook their lead positions, followed by Buttons and Meaper, then

Zeus, Yoda and Doug.

Yoda ran up to the front of the pack, behind Meaper.

“How did you get here, Meaper?” Yoda said, raising her voice over the din of the

passing traffic.

“Same way as you,” Meaper yelled back. “In the back of the truck.”

“I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of that truck,” Yoda said, not only to Meaper

but to Jack and Mingles as well.

“You really think he’s gonna come after us?” Jack said.
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“Not us. Zeus.” Yoda nodded toward the back of the pack. “He wants him for some

reason.”

“Nice job springing him,” Meaper said. “And a good thing, too. Man is that guy mad.”

“That’s why I don’t think we should be out on this road.”

The three leaders considered this for a moment.

“Is this road the only way to get to that tunnel?” Jack asked Mingles.

“Pretty much,” Mingles replied.

Then another tractor-trailer rumbled by just a little too close, making the fur on

Mingles’ back stand up straight.

“There’s a road up here just ahead,” Mingles said. “We can try that and see if there’s a

side street that will take us in the same direction for a while.”

They all nodded in agreement, and a few minutes later they were off the highway and

trudging down the sidewalk on a dark street with houses lining either side. Compared to

the highway, this seemed like heaven. For all of five minutes.

Then the growling began, and they all froze. At first it could have been mistaken for

thunder in the distance, it was so low and subtle. But steadily the volume grew, and with

it the texture of the sound, which is not like any other sound in the world—to cats,

anyway.

Even worse than the growling, though, was the smell. They could smell the dogs, and

they knew from the smell that they were near. And Jack knew the dogs could smell them,

especially him, with his oozing belly wounds.

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All seven tails were again in full flare mode. They couldn’t see the dogs, but Jack

knew they only had seconds, and his eyes scanned the dark street for options. There were

two cars parked on the street ahead of them.

“On my signal,” he whispered loud enough for all to hear, “head for that first car.

Chances are they’re too big to fit underneath.”

The growling stopped abruptly.

“Now!” Jack said.

33.
Jack had been right about the car; it was an effective refuge from the dogs. Unfortunately,

not all of the cats were able to get under it in time. There were two dogs: a Doberman and

a Rotweiler, both apparently from the same house. Why the dogs weren’t tied up never

even occurred to the cats.

The dogs had been lying on the driveway near the garage door, perhaps waiting for

their owners to come home, when they sensed the cats skulking down the sidewalk. They

immediately started growling and were just waiting for the right moment to pounce. That

moment came when the cats suddenly bolted for the car.
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Zeus’s white coat made him an attractive target, and the Doberman went straight for

him, locking his jaws around the cat’s already sore neck. The Rotweiler seemed to just

open his jaws and clamp down on the first piece of cat that came along, which happened

to be the tail of Mingles.

Doug and Yoda, fresh off their experience with the bobcat, instinctively leaped onto

the Doberman, nails out. Doug bit into one of the dog’s pointed ears while Yoda went

straight for its throat. The attack so unnerved the Doberman that he let go of Zeus, who

ran underneath the car to join Jack and Meaper, who had made it safely. Buttons had

made it safely under the car as well, but when he saw the Rotweiler latch onto Mingles’

tail, he ran out to help him.

The Doberman, with one quick shake of his head and upper body, sent Doug and Yoda

flying, which was fine by them, since he sent them in the direction of the car. With Zeus

already safely under the car, they quickly joined him, narrowly avoiding the Doberman’s

snarling nips at their hind legs. The dog tried to follow them under the car’s chassis, but

he was too tall and his upper body was too thick for him to get more than his head under

the car. The dog was incensed now, and he began to bark ferociously. He ran around to

the other side of the car and tried to squeeze under there, again to no avail. His jaws were

mere inches from the five cats, but they might as well have been yards away.

Mingles and Buttons were not so lucky. The big Rotweiler had snagged Mingles by

the tail, but then he dropped his big meaty paws on the cat’s back, and soon he had his

jaws locked on the cat’s neck. Mingles was already almost dead when Buttons leaped

onto the dog’s back and sunk his teeth into its neck. The Rotweiler let go of Mingles and
 144

attempted the same move the Doberman used to fling Doug and Yoda off of him, but

Buttons held on tenaciously, his teeth clenched deeply into the dog’s flesh. The big cat

was flopping back and forth like a rag doll on the much bigger dog’s back and neck.

This eventually caught the eye of the Doberman and he abandoned his attempts to get

the cats under the car. He leaped up and literally pulled Buttons off the Rotweiler with his

front paws. The Doberman was so incensed with the insolence of these pesky cats that he

began to actually devour Buttons. The Rotweiler then proceeded to finish off Mingles, to

the horror of the cats under the car.

Suddenly, headlight beams shone underneath the car as another car slowly approached

from the direction that the cats had come. The car slowed down further as it got closer to

the house they were in front of. As the car turned into the driveway, a light came on over

the garage and the garage door began to open.

The two dogs immediately abandoned their prey and ran into the garage.

“Let’s go!” Jack said. All of the cats under the car except Zeus tore off across the

street. Zeus couldn’t take his eyes off the mangled bodies of Mingles and Buttons lying

there on the sidewalk.

When she saw that Zeus was missing, Yoda told the pack to wait and ran back.

“Come on, Zeus. Let it go,” she said when she found him shaking under the car.

Zeus looked at her. “How?” he said.

“Find a way,” Yoda replied. “Let’s go.”

With that, they loped off to join the others across the street.
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34.
Basil Macauley realized almost immediately after peeling out onto the highway that he

was going too fast if he wanted to catch those cats. His foot let up on the gas and his eyes

canvassed the shoulder of the highway. As he did so, he opened the glove compartment,

tossed the knife inside and grabbed a wad of McDonald’s napkins and pressed them

against his bleeding hand.

After five minutes without seeing any sign of the cats, he realized they must have

turned off the road.

He made a right on the next turnoff, glaring at the empty shadows left by the trees and

bushes blocking the streetlights.

“You’re around here, you little rat! I can almost smell you!” Basil muttered under his

breath. He meant it, too. He had always prided himself in being able to smell a rat. Most

of the time, he was the rat he smelled, but he didn’t know that.

It began to dawn on him that some of the cats that Zeus was with at the trailer park

looked familiar. Very familiar. In fact, didn’t one of them look a lot like that one-eyed cat

he’d caught sticking his nose into his goody bag in the Dumpster this afternoon? He

thought it did. And that big black cat had looked familiar, too. But how could that be?

They were miles from the supermarket.

“Has to be a coincidence,” he muttered as he approached a stop sign. There were no

cars coming from either direction. Or cats, for that matter. He went down two more
 146

blocks and saw that the road he was on became a dead end on the other side of the street

he was stopped at.

“It’ll be a dead end for you, Zeus,” Basil said. He turned right onto Warwick Road,

which ran parallel to the highway he’d left behind him.

“I’m crediting these cats with way too much brains, but this is where I’d be,” he said

to himself.

Basil was on a through street now; cars on the streets he passed had the stop signs. Yet

he stopped at each one, looking each way. He proceeded slowly after the second street he

passed when something in his rearview mirror caught his eye. Something white crossing

the street behind him. Basil slammed on the brakes and threw the truck into reverse, tires

screeching as it lurched backward.

The five remaining cats had just cut across the front lawn of a dark house on the next

corner and decided to turn left. Jack was in the lead now, with Meaper behind him,

followed by Doug, Yoda and Zeus. A pickup truck had just passed by, but otherwise Jack

saw no cars coming, so the cats proceeded to cross the street.

Just then they heard the sound of tires screeching. They all looked back and saw the

pickup truck heading toward them. In reverse.

“That’s that guy!” Meaper said with astonishment.

“He must have seen us cross the street,” Zeus said.

“No kidding,” Jack said with a scowl. “More likely he saw you cross the street.”

“Come on, let’s scram!” Meaper said.

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And scram they did. It looked like the opening leg of a horse race, with an every-cat-

for-him-or-herself scramble replacing the orderly single-file march that characterized

most of the day’s traveling style. Jack was still in the lead and he opted to make a right at

the next street, again cutting across the front lawn of a house on the corner.

As it turned out, it was a good thing for the cats that none of them could read writing,

for they might have passed this road by. There was a yellow “DEAD END” sign near the

curb just before the house’s driveway.

Basil, meanwhile, had seen them tear across the lawn and stepped on the gas, still

traveling in reverse. When he got to the street, he turned the wheel and backed onto the

street on the opposite side so the front of the truck faced the dead end. He saw the sign

and ignored it, slamming the truck into drive and flooring the accelerator.

It didn’t take Basil long to get to the dead end; there were only four houses on each

side of the street, which ended abruptly with a guardrail that had yellow and black square

reflectors mounted on it. Beyond the guardrail was woods. And cats, he was sure.

Basil slammed on the brakes again and uttered a curse before getting out of the truck.

Woods or no woods, he was going to find that cat. For Basil Macauley, there was a

definite use for having a Zeus. He reached into the glove compartment and grabbed the

steak knife, wrapping it in the McDonald’s napkins.

As he stepped out of the truck, he put the wrapped-up knife in his jacket pocket and

subsequently he felt the can of Nine Lives, the one he’d been using to attract Zeus when

he was looking for him in his trailer. His first instinct was to just take it out and toss it,
 148

but he decided to hang on to it instead. He didn’t know what good it might do him, but he

kept it in his jacket pocket anyway.

He walked over to the guardrail with the reflectors on it and stood still, listening in the

moonlight for the sounds he wanted to hear: rustling in the leaves; twigs snapping.

Instead he heard nothing. Nothing but the sound of autumn in suburbia at night: a

stubborn cricket unconvinced that the summer was over; the muffled din of a stereo

blasting in some kid’s bedroom down the street; cars and trucks rumbling along on the

highway a few blocks behind him. That and the pounding of his own heart.

“They’re too far into the woods by now to hear,” he said aloud. And then an idea came

to him. Maybe they weren’t.

“It’s too bad,” he said, a little louder this time. “All I wanted to do was to give the

poor little things a little something to eat. I’ve got this yummy can of food here, and I

sure ain’t got no use for it. Not anymore, anyhow.

“Guess I’ll just leave it here for them, in case they come back this way. Or some other

hungry cat comes along.”

With that, Basil took the open cat food can out of his jacket pocket, wincing as he

placed it on the ground at the base of the guardrail. Some of the contents of the can had

leaked into his pocket and was smeared all over his hand. He tried hard to stifle a curse

but failed.

Just then a light came on over the garage door of the house across the street from

where Basil’s truck was parked.

 149

“Hey, you,” a man said from the front door of the house. “Who are you and what are

you doing there?”

Basil was caught off guard.

“Why, I, um,” he stammered. “Sorry, mister. I’ve had a long drive and, well, you

know how it is, mate. Nature was calling, right?”

The man looked him and the truck over for a second.

“You tell nature to call somewhere else. Now go on and get out of here, before I do

some calling myself. Like calling the cops.”

Basil cursed the man under his breath but the man apparently heard him anyway.

“What was that?” the man said.

“Nothing!” Basil yelled. He got back into the truck and slammed the door.

The man watched him as he started the truck and threw it into reverse. He backed it all

the way up to the cross street and turned there, stopping for a second to put the truck in

drive. As he did, he looked down the street. The man was still standing there, watching

him.

Basil cursed the man again and stepped on the gas, spraying gravel.

It was a dramatic exit, designed for the man on the porch, but Basil didn’t travel very

far. He went about half a block and then parked the truck on the side of the road between

two properties in a dark patch away from the streetlights.

Basil sat there awhile, giving that nosey parker a chance to lose interest in what, after

all, was none of his business anyway. He wasn’t on his property, was he? No way.

“Chump,” Basil grumbled.

 150

When a few minutes had passed, Basil grabbed a small flashlight out of the glove

compartment and put it in his jacket pocket, again wincing as he felt the cat food leakage

smearing his hand. He got out of the truck and walked as nonchalantly as he could back

to the corner, then slowly crossed the street so he could get a good look at the house

down at the end.

The light over the garage was out. That was a good sign, Basil decided. He took a few

steps toward the dead end and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that the man indeed

had gone inside and closed the front door.

Still, Basil kept his eye on the house all the while as he walked slowly toward the

guardrail, pausing now and then in the shadows to make sure he wasn’t being watched.

When he reached the guardrail, he quickly ducked behind the first big tree in the

woods. He watched the house and saw no signs of anyone looking out the windows. He

listened intently for sounds in the woods. There were none, except for that stubborn

cricket.

After a few minutes, Basil began to grow impatient, and doubtful that his hunch was

correct. He thought the cats might have just holed up a few yards inside the woods, with

the intention of waiting him out. Then after he’d apparently left, they’d come back out,

attracted by the smell of the cat food.

The cat food. Basil had walked right past the can without even looking at it. He

glanced at the house again and then crept over to the guardrail. The can was still there.

But it was empty. Licked clean.

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This was more than Basil could endure. He let out a yell that could have awakened the

dead, then cupped his hand over his mouth and ran back behind the tree, shaking with

anger and self-loathing for letting himself be duped. He looked back at the house and was

satisfied that somehow no one inside had heard him. He crept back out to have another

look at the cat food can, just to make sure his eyes hadn’t deceived him, and they hadn’t.

But then he noticed something he hadn’t before. At first he thought it was drippings from

the moist cat food. But there was too much of it.

There was a trail of it, in fact. Basil followed it, spot by spot, and realized when he

was directly under the streetlight in front of the house that it was blood. Cat blood. The

trail led onto the lawn between the house and the woods. He pulled out his flashlight and

followed the trail, which led him through the backyard of the house and into the backyard

of the house behind it.

35.
Basil thought he had stolen back to the dead end unobserved, but he was wrong. Norm

Collier, the man who had challenged Basil earlier, had a hunch that he might be back.

After he watched Basil back the truck up and drive off, Norm went back inside the house

and shut off the light over the garage, but he decided to sit in the rocking chair in his dark

living room for a little while to see if anything happened. And something did.

As it turned out, Basil’s instincts were right about those cats. They had run into the

woods, but they hadn’t gone far. Jack had no intention of traipsing through some woods
 152

in the dead of night without knowing where he and the cat troop would end up. Mingles

was gone now, but he had been leading them on a route that would get them home. Jack

planned to return to that route as soon as he could, trucks or no trucks.

When the cats had gotten about ten yards into the woods, Jack told the other cats to get

down and to keep quiet. They heard the truck pull up and the engine go quiet, and then

they heard Basil talking. Yoda did a quiet translation in Jack’s ear. Doug and Meaper

weren’t particularly interested in what Basil had to say. Zeus wasn’t at all interested; he

was too busy trying in vain to lick his wounded, bleeding neck.

One thing they were all interested in was the smell of that cat food. Ordinarily Doug,

Yoda and Zeus would have turned their noses up at Nine Lives, but it smelled pretty good

now. And that’s just what this guy is counting on, Jack thought.

When they heard the truck start up and pull away, all five of them started creeping

toward the edge of the woods. After the truck disappeared on the cross street and the cats

saw the man on the porch go inside, they made a beeline for the can of cat food.

Norm Collier watched with fascination from his rocking chair as the cats darted out

from the woods and devoured the can of food in less than thirty seconds. So that’s what

that guy was doing, Norm thought. He was trying to lure those cats out of the woods.

Why, he wondered.

After the cats polished off the food, Norm watched them scurry off across his lawn

and disappear around the side of the house, presumably heading for the backyard and

beyond. A couple of them appeared to be limping a little. He thought for a moment about

going to the back door to see what they were doing, but then he saw Basil skulking along
 153

in the shadows. Norm was watching him through sheer curtains, which had a kind of one-

way mirror quality. Norm could see Basil, but Basil couldn’t see him.

When Norm saw Basil yell in exasperation, he decided he’d seen enough. He went

into the den and picked up the phone.

36.
Mary and Martin had been staring at the phone on and off for so long that when it finally

rang, it startled them. This time Martin answered it.

“Marty, it’s me again,” Phil Hanley said.

“Oh, hi Phil,” Martin said, watching the enthusiasm drain from Mary’s face.

“I take it he hasn’t called back.”

Martin sighed. “No, Phil, he hasn’t. I think I really blew it.”

“Listen, Marty, this may have nothing to do with any of this, but then it just might,

too,” Phil said.

“What is it?”

“We just had a call from some guy in our neck of the woods reporting that a

suspicious character was lurking around his house. Apparently the guy is chasing a pack

of cats.”

“Where does this caller live?” Martin asked, clearly intrigued.

“On John Street, the Jefferson Park section. You know. Off Route 15?”

“All the way over there?”

 154

“That’s what I’m saying, Marty, it probably has nothing to do with your situation, but

I dispatched a patrol car to check it out.”

“Thanks, Phil.”

“No problem. Call me the moment that character calls back.”

“Will do. Thanks.”

Martin put the phone back in its cradle and told Mary what Phil told him.

“Honey, I’m out of cigars. I’m gonna run down to the store and get some before it

closes,” Martin said. “You need anything?”

“Just a little luck. See if they’re selling that,” Mary said, smiling faintly.

37.
The cats emerged onto another dead-end street after cutting through Norm Collier’s yard

and that of the house behind his. They’d all managed to get a share of the cat food, and it

made them realize just how hungry they were.

All the running after their escape from beneath the car and the chase by the pickup

truck had undone any healing of the wounds on Jack’s belly. Zeus was pretty well banged

up, too. He didn’t know it but that Doberman’s jaws had come pretty close to severing a

major artery, which would have meant so long, Zeus. As it was, blood was oozing from a

couple of puncture wounds, which smarted now that the cats had had a chance to catch

their breath.
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Jack knew they were leaving a trail, but he figured that wouldn’t matter much at night.

He would soon find out he was wrong about that.

“Let’s cut through to the next street,” he said, leading the troop across the dead-end

street and into the backyard of the house that bordered the woods.

This backyard ended with a tall wooden fence, which Jack hadn’t counted on. He

uttered the cat equivalent of a curse at the sight of it. Normally this wouldn’t be much of

a challenge, but in his tender state, he dreaded the leap.

Yoda sensed his unease.

“Want to try the next house over?” she asked.

“No. I don’t hear anything here, which tells me there’s probably no dogs on the other

side, at least. We might not be so lucky next door.”

“Then again we might,” Yoda said.

“We’re wasting time. Let’s go.”

With that, Jack leaped and his paws found purchase on a horizontal two-by-four near

the top of the fence that the slats were nailed to. Making the leap had hurt, but not as

much as he feared it would. Jumping down would probably be worse, he thought.

He peered over the fence and was happy with what he saw. He was looking at the

backyard of the last house on yet another dead-end street, and he had guessed right: There

were no dogs in sight. In fact, the property looked abandoned. There were no lights on in

the house, and the faint light from the streetlights out in front of the house showed the

grass in the backyard to be overgrown and rife with clumps.

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That was all right by Jack. He looked back to signal the others to follow him when out

of the corner of his eye he saw the beam of a flashlight zigzagging on the dead-end street

they had just crossed.

“Hurry up!” he hissed and leaped down into the backyard on the other side of the

fence. The others didn’t need to look back to know that trouble was coming. Yoda and

Zeus leaped first, being the fleeter of the four. They wasted no time balancing on the two-

by-four, instead opting to springboard off the wooden brace for the leap into the next

yard. Meaper followed, barely reaching the two-by-four and struggling to pull himself up.

Doug’s effort was nearly identical, and he felt embarrassed, knowing Meaper was his

senior by at least the equivalent of seven or eight people years. Meaper made a

hurrumphh sound when Doug pulled himself up, and then they both leaped down to the

other side, where they found Yoda and Zeus huddled around a prostrate Jack.

The big black cat had landed by chance on a cinderblock, invisible in the dark and

under the overgrown grass. The impact would have been bad enough if he wasn’t already

hurt, but with his belly wounds, Jack was in agony.

Faintly in the distance, from the other side of the fence, they could hear a voice

muttering something unintelligible.

“You guys go ahead,” Jack said, wincing with pain. “I’ll try to stall him.”

“Like hell you will” is the closest one could come to translating what Yoda said in

response. “Come on, Zeus. Let’s get him up on Doug and Meaper’s shoulders. They can

carry him.”
 157

And just like that, that’s what they did, with no back talk from Meaper, or even Jack

himself.

The two bigger cats hunkered down on their bellies while Zeus and Yoda helped Jack

climb onto Meaper and Doug’s shoulders. Then off they went, slowly trudging through

the tall grass.

Suddenly it occurred to Yoda that with Jack riding on the two big cats’ backs, the only

blood trail they would be leaving would be from Zeus’s neck wounds.

“Zeus,” Yoda whispered.

“What?” Zeus shouted out loud, sounding almost annoyed.

“Shhhh!”

“What?” he whispered.

“I want you to head off in that direction,” Yoda said, nodding toward a big oak tree on

the dead-end side of the gravel driveway next to the house. “Go around that tree and into

the woods for a bit and then come back out onto the lawn on the other side of the street.”

“What for, Yode?”

“Don’t ask questions; just do it. It might just get us out of this mess. Go on, now!”

Zeus looked at Yoda suspiciously for a moment, then took off in a high-stepping trot

through the overgrown lawn.

38.
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Ronny Metzger had been dreading this night for about a week. He hated working the

swing shift on principle, but he especially hated working the swing the night before

Halloween. The patrolman knew things could be worse: He could be working in Camden,

for example. Or Detroit. In those cities, they didn’t call it Mischief Night. They called it

Devil’s Night, and for good reason. Murder, arson and rioting were the order of the day

in those places.

Still, the Jefferson Park and Vineyard Village sections of Jamestown had their share of

punks, and Ronny knew he had better have his wits about him this night. He also knew

that there had likely been a run on toilet paper, eggs and Ivory soap at the supermarket in

the past couple of days. Those kinds of pranks weren’t what concerned him. Ronny had

egged a few houses and cars himself when he was a kid. It was the mean kids he worried

about: the ones with the cherry bombs and the M-80s. And the ones who threw rocks.

Ronny was just turning off Route 15 when he heard the radio crackle.

“Roger, Dispatch, this is Charlie two-two. I copy you, over.”

“Charlie two-two, we’ve had a report of a suspicious character trespassing on private

property in your vicinity,” the dispatcher said. “The address of the individual who called

in the report is 442 John Street. The caller said he last saw the suspect, an adult male

Caucasian, cutting through his backyard, which if he continued in that direction would

have him coming out on Taylor Avenue. Both are dead-end streets, Charlie two-two.

Please proceed to that area. If you find anyone fitting that description, orders are to bring

him in for questioning, over.”

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“Roger that, over,” Ronny said with a smirk. This ought to be a pip, he thought. Then

he punched the button on the radio again. “Dispatch, this is Charlie two-two again, over.”

“Go ahead, Charlie two-two, over.”

“Dispatch, did the caller say what this adult male Caucasian appeared to be doing?

Over.”

“Roger, Charlie two-two, the caller said he appeared to be chasing a bunch of cats,

over.”

Ronny rolled his eyes. “Roger, Dispatch. Proceeding to the area. Over and out.”

Martin Katz was also proceeding to the area. It had taken him about fifteen minutes to

drive over to that section of Jamestown. Martin was somewhat familiar with the area,

having gone to school at Kennedy High, which was nearby. Once he got into the

neighborhood, he made the first left turn he saw off the highway, and by sheer luck that

turned out to be John Street.

Martin cruised up the street slowly, stopping for an extra long time at the cross-street

stop signs. The Charmin and Ivory brigade had already hit this street. The windows on

many of the cars parked on the street were soaped up, and toilet paper was dangling from

the telephone wires and trees.

At the third stop sign, Martin realized that ahead of him was the dead end. The phone

call to the police came from one of the houses at the end of the street. He drove slowly

across the street, parked his Grand Am in front of a house with no lights on and got out.

Martin figured he might have more luck seeing something on foot than in his car.
 160

He didn’t see any point in visiting the house where the man was first spotted because

he knew the guy had already left there. Instead he walked along the cross street, figuring

maybe he’d get lucky and spot the cats—or the guy chasing them.

Martin had stopped at a couple of ATMs and had about five hundred dollars on him.

He still didn’t know what he would do if he found this guy and it turned out to be same

one who had stolen their cat. He didn’t even have a clue what the guy would be doing out

here chasing cats if he was already holding one for ransom. What would the guy do if

Martin offered him money to hand the cat over? Maybe he’d panic and kill him. Martin

wished he had a paper clip to twist.

About halfway between John Street and the next street that ran parallel to it he came

upon a pickup truck parked in the darkest part of the street, between two houses. Martin

found that a little odd, but he didn’t give it much thought.

He came upon Taylor Avenue and looked down toward the dead-end guardrail for any

sign of activity. There was none, so he moved on. He reached the corner of Devon Road,

the next street, which was yet another dead end. He gave the street a cursory glance and

was about to move on again when he thought he saw something move. Martin realized it

could have been anything, or nothing, but he decided to take a closer look and began

walking down the street toward the guardrail.

Suddenly there were bright headlights behind him and Martin heard a car slowly

motoring up beside him. It was a police car.

“How you doing, there?” the policeman driving the car said through the open

passenger door window.

 161

“I’m doing fine, officer.”

“You look a little lost,” Ronny Metzger said. “Do you live around here?”

Martin felt a little flustered but he didn’t know why.

“Actually, I don’t,” he said, “but it’s not me that’s lost. It’s my cats.”

That was all Ronny Metzger needed to hear. He stopped the car, put on his flashers

and got out of the patrol car.

Martin blinked.

39.
When Zeus disappeared behind the tree by the guardrail, Yoda crawled in between Doug

and Meaper to help carry Jack. She didn’t know where they were headed, but she wanted

them to get to cover fast. She looked around the house’s backyard and her eyes fixed on a

big object on the patio.

Yoda nudged Doug and nodded toward the patio and Doug nodded back. A minute

later the three of them slipped underneath the canvas cover of a gas grill and nestled

behind the propane cylinder. They listened intently in the dark for the sound of their

pursuer.

They didn’t have to wait long.

Basil had been scowling and muttering to himself as he patiently followed the trail of

cat blood with his flashlight. When he came to the fence that the cats just encountered,

the muttering turned into a moan.

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“Not a fence!” he whined, shining the flashlight beam on the wooden structure. Jack’s

belly had left quite a splash on the top of the fence, which dashed the faint hope Basil

was harboring that the cats might have balked at leaping the fence.

There was a two-by-four brace at the bottom of the fence much like the one at the top,

and by stepping onto it, Basil was able to see over the top into the backyard on the other

side. He was hoping he’d been closing the gap between him and the cats, but he saw

nothing moving anywhere in the dark backyard.

Basil cursed under his breath as he leaped up and got a decent foothold on the top of

the fence. When he pulled the rest of his body up, he crouched briefly on the upper brace,

then jumped.

The sound that followed made the fur stand up on the backs of the cats hiding under

the gas grill. Basil had landed on the same cinder block that Jack had hit, and Basil let go

a scream that didn’t sound human. In fact, the cats might have taken it for some kind of

siren had it not been followed by another of Basil’s patented curses.

“What did he say?” Jack whispered to Yoda.

“Something about his mother,” Yoda shrugged. She sneaked a peek out from beneath

the canvas grill cover. In the faint glare from the streetlights in front of the house she

could see Basil’s silhouette writhing on the ground. He appeared to be holding his ankle

and his head was twisting about, as someone in agony might.

“Come on, here’s our chance,” she whispered. The others heard her but didn’t exactly

snap to attention. Yoda looked at Doug and Meaper, then at Jack, searching for answers

in their eyes.
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“Can’t we rest a little? We just got here,” Meaper said. The others said nothing, but

their eyes told Yoda they were in agreement.

“No, we can’t wait here!” Yoda hissed. “He’s distracted right now. Looks like he’s

hurt. Now’s our best chance.”

Without waiting for a reply, Yoda slipped out from under the canvas grill cover on the

back side and assumed the position to let Jack rest across her shoulders. After an

awkward moment, Doug and Meaper came out and did the same, followed by Jack, who

crawled reluctantly out from under the grill and splayed himself across the upper backs of

the three cats. Yoda had them pointing away from the streetlights near the driveway.

They were going around the other side of the house, the dark side, which felt like it might

as well be the dark side of the moon to the three cats carrying Jack.

Oh, if only I were back home on the bed, Doug thought. Yoda was thinking about the

top of the recliner herself, but it was the same idea. Jack and Meaper were fighting it out

for the same shelf in the shed, although they didn’t know it.

When they got to the far end of the back of the house and turned the corner, Yoda

called a halt. Doug and Meaper remained standing while Yoda scrunched down and

backed out from between them. She peered around the corner toward the fence and saw

that Basil had managed to get to his feet but was far too engrossed in his own pain to

have resumed the hunt.

They appeared to have regained the edge. Now if only the Zeus ruse would work,

they’d be in business, Yoda thought.

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Zeus, meanwhile, had had his own share of excitement. As he trotted toward the big

tree near the guardrail, he also was pining for the comforts of home, and cursing himself

for ever dabbling with magic buttons on the garage wall.

Sometimes Zeus got scatterbrained—(sometimes? Yoda would scoff)—and now he

was having trouble remembering what Yode had asked him to do. Go into the woods and

come out…where? He had to sit down and think about it, and he did, just inside the

fringe of brush behind the guardrail. That was when he saw what he first took to be a

bird.

Zeus saw wings flopping about in the brush behind the tree, and he immediately began

licking his chops.

The question of what a bird would be doing flopping around on the ground at this time

of night didn’t even dawn on him. But it should have. Zeus was well aware from his

nights at home sitting by the screen door in the kitchen or on the windowsill in the

bedroom that the birds stopped their chirping and flying about when the sun went down.

Of course, in fairness to Zeus, he wasn’t exactly at his sharpest tonight. He was tired,

hungry and his neck hurt badly. Still, those flopping wings piqued his interest, and he

pounced, snaring one of the wings with his nails.

The next thing he knew he was in a tug-of-war with something in the brush, and the

thing playing the part of the rope in their tug-of-war was no bird. It was a bat.

Zeus tugged harder at the thing’s wing, and suddenly he heard a guttural sound he’d

never heard before. Then he heard another snarl and a raccoon’s head emerged from the

brush, its teeth clenched on the bat’s other wing.

 165

Meanwhile, the bat’s head was thrashing back and forth and his teeth were bared as he

made eerie squeeky screams.

Zeus was terrified—but mesmerized at the same time. He wanted to let go and scram,

but somehow he couldn’t. He wanted that bat. Badly. And that raccoon would have to do

more than snarl to dissuade him.

Which he did, of course. First the raccoon thrust his head forward and took a real bite,

chopping the bat’s head clean off and leaving Zeus with a piece of bat wing and a coat of

bat blood on his head and side as souvenirs. The raccoon eyed Zeus with wary disdain as

he chewed up the bat and swallowed it.

Zeus found it hard to meet the raccoon’s steely glare, so he looked down again at what

was left of the bat: the piece of wing that his nails still held tenuously, and the hideous

head lying on the ground. Then the raccoon snarled again, louder, and this time Zeus got

it. He turned tail and fled.

By sheer luck he went in the direction that Yoda told him to go, and soon he found

himself in the backyard of the house across the street from the one where he’d parted

ways with Yoda, Doug, Jack and Meaper. He looked back in the direction of the guardrail

and the big tree, but he need not have worried. That raccoon had no interest in chasing

after Zeus, and he was long gone back into the woods when Zeus started to retrace his

steps, still terrified and intrigued in equal measures by what he’d just witnessed. Zeus

was getting ready to slowly approach the front yard of the house again to get a better look

when he heard a hiss from the dark patio. Zeus didn’t have to see her to know it was

Yoda.
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He scurried over to the patio and found Yoda, Doug and Meaper sitting underneath a

wooden picnic table. Jack was lying behind them on his side, panting.

“How’d you guys get over here, Yode?” Zeus whispered.

“Never mind about us ‘guys,’” Yoda said. “What was that fracas all about?”

“What fracas?” Zeus said.

Yoda blinked, then rolled her eyes. “That racket over there in the woods. Where you

came running out of a minute ago looking even whiter than you usually do.”

Zeus wasn’t ready to tell the bat story yet, and he began licking his paws and cleaning

himself as a stall tactic. That was when Yoda noticed that Zeus looked wet. She decided

to take a closer look and at once the smell of the bat blood hit her.

“Zeus!” she hissed. “What happened to you?”

“You should have seen the other guy,” Zeus said, echoing a line from Buttons earlier

in the day. Nobody laughed.

“What happened?” It wasn’t Yoda’s voice this time. They all looked at the dark figure

lying on the concrete under the table. “Well?” Jack said impatiently.

“I got into a food fight,” Zeus said sheepishly.

“What kind of ‘food fight’?” Jack said, slowly rising to his feet.

Zeus gulped. “Let’s just say I lost. The food, that is. Not the fight. I didn’t stick around

for the fight. This guy was too big.”

Under other circumstances, any of them would have pressed him for more details, but

they were still being pursued, and there wasn’t time.

“How did you guys get over here?” Zeus said, changing the subject, just in case.
 167

“We came around the other side of the house,” Yoda said.

“And that guy didn’t see you?”

“No, he was a little distracted.”

“He’s not likely to stay distracted for long,” Jack said.

That was when Yoda realized Jack was standing under the table.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m okay,” Jack said thinly, not sounding all that okay to Yoda.

“Yeah, right,” Yoda said. “You better keep riding on our backs.”

“That’s over,” he replied, firmly this time. “We’ll make better time with me on my

feet. And we better start making time.”

From the street in front of the house they could hear Basil muttering in a pathetic,

sobbing kind of way. He was limping badly; his right ankle had swollen up like a water

balloon. But he was still following the trail of blood that Zeus had left, and he was

approaching the guardrail.

“Now’s our chance,” Jack said, and he retook the lead. The cats trotted single file

across the backyard of the house and then crept toward the front of the house on the other

side. Yoda crawled under a hedge in front of the house and looked down toward the

guardrail at the dead end. She saw the flashlight beam scanning the grass and weeds near

the edge of the woods. Basil was still grumbling as he limped along, heading toward the

big oak tree.

“Let’s go,” Yoda whispered, and the cats took off down the street in the opposite

direction. After passing the first house they broke out into a sprint until they got to the
 168

first cross street, where they stopped and looked back. They could barely make Basil out

but they could still see the flashlight beam flaying about.

40.
Basil’s rage was growing with every second that passed. A stupid cat had put him in this

position. Here he was, who knows where, chasing after a group of cats, one or more of

whom were bleeding but nevertheless were more mobile than he was. His ankle ached

like nothing he’d ever experienced. At best it was a bad sprain. At the worst, it was

fractured. No matter. He had to find that cat.

“He’ll pay for this, all right,” he muttered for the umpteenth time. The droplets of

blood were getting farther apart, but he was still on a hot trail, which led him behind the

guardrail at the end of the dead end.

Then he saw what was left of the bat.

“Stopped for a little snack, did you, mates?” Basil said. He marveled at the

resourcefulness of these cats in the way they must have dispatched the bat. Then doubt

began to set in. These were hunted animals; some of them were wounded. It wasn’t very

likely they’d stop to pick a fight with a bat, even if one happened to just be in their way.

Basil looked around and almost began to panic when he didn’t immediately see the

continuation of the blood trail.

 169

“Maybe somebody made a snack out of you, mates,” he whispered. Then he saw it: a

tiny drop of blood on the concrete base of the guardrail. Whatever kind of wounds these

cats had, they were healing fast.

The location of this drop had him heading toward the house across the street. He found

one more tiny droplet on the sidewalk to the right of the house’s driveway. Then…

nothing. Basil swept the lawn on the side of the house with his flashlight, but if there

were any more drops of blood there, they were too small to make out in the thick autumn

grass. He limped around in a circle on the grass, desperately searching for some sign of

which way the cats had gone. But there was none. He’d lost the trail. He cursed again and

stamped his foot in anger. The pain he felt after that eclipsed anything he’d felt before,

and he screamed like a peacock before passing out and falling flat on his back on the

grass.

When he awoke, his ankle was on fire, but Basil pulled himself together and began

limping down the sidewalk toward the cross street, where he would have to turn left and

walk the three or four blocks back to where his truck was parked. His ankle now felt like

it was the size of a bowling ball, and he wondered what he wouldn’t do for a pair of

crutches right now. But it was time to get back to the truck. Maybe he would have more

luck behind the wheel, he thought.

As he turned onto the cross street, Basil heard the sound of a car approaching from

behind him. Maybe I can get a lift to the truck, he thought hopefully.

Basil moved to wave at the car but then stopped when he saw that it was a patrol car.

The car slowed down anyway and Basil squinted as a beam of light caught his face.
 170

41.
When Phil Hanley came through the door, Martin Katz looked away, staring at an empty

ashtray on the table in front of him. Part of it was humiliation, part of it was anger, but

the fact was, he just couldn’t look his friend in the face right away.

Phil closed the door behind him and took a seat behind his desk. If Martin was

humiliated, Phil was embarrassed. Here was his friend of ten years sitting in his office in

the police department headquarters building, having just been run in by one of Phil’s

cops.

“Marty, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry,” Phil said genuinely.

Martin looked up and met Phil’s gaze for a moment, then looked down at the table

again.

“What was the guy supposed to think, right?” Martin shrugged. “I guess I fit the

description.”

Phil leaned back and felt the tension ease. That was what he was going to tell Martin,

and Martin had saved him the trouble.

“Officer Metzger sends his apologies. He was pretty upset when he found out you

were a friend of mine.”

“Tell him there’s no hard feelings,” Martin said, although he wasn’t sure that was true.

“What possessed you to drive over here anyway?” Phil said.

 171

Martin’s eyes rolled. “It’d be easy for me to say it was at Mary’s request, but it wasn’t.

I just had this weird hunch I might be able to find these cats—or this guy.”

“That’s our line of work, Marty,” Phil said amiably.

“I know. I just… I don’t know.”

“Metzger’s back out there now. Haven’t heard anything from him, though.” There was

an awkward pause in the conversation as Phil tapped his fingers on the table. He looked

at his watch. “My shift is over in ten minutes. I’ll give you a ride back to your car.”

“Thanks, Phil,” Martin said. “Mind if I use your phone?”

“Go right ahead,” Phil said, stepping out of the office.

When Martin picked up the handset, it felt like it weighed a ton.

42.
Ronny Metzger felt like an idiot, and it wasn’t just because Lieutenant Hanley had called

him one. Here he was, back patrolling the same dark streets where he picked up a guy on

suspicion of kidnapping a cat, feeling all proud, thinking he had nabbed the perp, only to

find out at the stationhouse that it was one of the detective’s friends.

This time Ronny had decided to go all the way down to Standish Avenue and then

double back on Warwick Road. As he cruised down Warwick, he kept looking to the left

at the cross streets; they were all dead ends. He’d caught one cat chaser here tonight;

maybe he’d luck out and catch another.

 172

For a split second he thought he saw something move on the front lawn of one of the

corner houses, but it turned out to be a leaf. As he moved on toward the next cross street,

he saw something more substantial. It was a man on foot, either staggering or limping

badly as he turned the corner onto Warwick. As Ronny eased the patrol car up alongside

the man, he turned and appeared to wave at him. When Ronny pointed his door-mounted

spotlight at him, the man flinched and covered his face with his outstretched hand.

“How you doing tonight, sir?” Ronny said politely. He decided he was going to go

about this slowly this time.

“I’m fine, officer,” Basil said. “Just twisted me ankle a bit. On me way to get me

truck, down the street here.”

Ronny watched the man walk. He felt pretty confident now that it was a limp, not a

stagger.

“Can I give you a lift?” As soon as Ronny said it, he saw the man’s face brighten a bit.

And he saw something else in that face as well.

“Sure you don’t mind, mate? I mean, it’s okay and all?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Ronny said. “Come on. Hop in.”

The man hesitated a moment, then nodded and ambled around the front of the car and

got in the front seat on the passenger side, wincing as he pulled his right foot up into the

car.

“Appreciate it, mate,” Basil said, slamming the door shut.

Ronny proceeded up the street slowly, stealing glances at the man every few seconds.

“So you said you’re going to get your truck.”

 173

“Yeah, it’s up here on the left, a few blocks down.”

“That’s a long way to go on that foot of yours. You live around here?”

Basil was caught off-guard.

“No. No, I’ve… well, the truth is, I’ve been soliciting business. I hope that isn’t a

violation of the law.”

“Depends. What kind of business?” Ronny was intrigued.

“Subscriptions. Newspaper subscriptions. For extra cash, you know, mate?”

“I see,” Ronny said, giving him another once-over. “That’s pretty tough work on a

foot like that.”

“Oh, this?” Basil said. “That just happened. Stepped off a curb the wrong way, I

guess. One more block, mate.”

Ronny slowed down as he crossed Taylor Avenue. Up ahead, he could see a pickup

parked in the shadows between the streetlights.

“How’s business tonight?” Ronny asked.

“So-so,” Basil said.

“Yeah, I know how that is. I did that myself as a kid. I found people were more

receptive on weekends. During the day.”

“This is it, mate,” Basil said, changing the subject and nodding toward the truck.

Ronny slowed to a stop beside the truck. He extended his hand to the man beside him,

giving him one last close look as he did so.

“Good luck with your subscriptions, sir. And get that foot looked at.”
 174

“Many thanks,” Basil said as he got out of the patrol car. He felt the policeman’s eyes

on him as he limped around the front of the patrol car and gingerly climbed into the

pickup truck.

“Have a good night,” Ronny said and slowly drove off.

Basil gave a faint salute, watching the policeman’s face in the patrol car’s sideview

mirror as it moved away. He continued watching until he saw the patrol car turn right and

disappear around the corner on John Street. Then he started the truck and drove off,

muttering curses. Someone had lightly soaped up his windshield.

Shortly after Ronny Metzger turned the corner, he pulled into the first driveway he

saw and turned around, shutting off his headlights. He picked up the radio receiver and

called in to the dispatcher.

“Roger, Charlie two-two? What is your twenty? Over.”

“I’m on John Street in Jefferson Park, Dispatch. I just had an encounter with an

individual who bears a resemblance to the police sketch I saw of the suspect in that

Exxon gas station robbery last night. He just got into a Ford pickup truck. I’m going to

observe the individual for a while, Dispatch, but in the meantime I’d appreciate any vital

stats we have on file on that suspect. Approximate weight, height, hair color—any

information would be most helpful, over.”

“Roger, Charlie two-two. Will do, over.”

When Ronny turned back onto Warwick, he could see Basil’s taillights in the distance.

Wherever he was going, he wasn’t in too much of a hurry.

 175

Ronny proceeded slowly, leaving his headlights off. And I thought Jefferson Park was

dull, he thought, wondering just what this character could be up to.

He closed the gap to within two blocks when the radio crackled.

“Charlie two-two, I’ve got that data you requested, over.”

“Go ahead, Dispatch, over.”

By the time the dispatcher had finished reading the information, the truck was

approaching Standish Avenue when suddenly the driver slammed on his brakes and threw

the truck into reverse.

Ronny was about to turn on his headlights as well as his flashers, but when he saw the

truck stop and go into reverse, he decided to just stop and watch what happened.

It had been Jack’s idea to stay on the first cross street they hit as long as it would take

them in the same direction as the highway did. How he knew whether or not this street

was going in that direction, the others had no idea.

“You want to be out there dodging those trucks before you need to?” Jack had said

after Yoda suggested they get back on the highway. Nobody had a good answer for that,

so on they trudged. And for a while it seemed to Yoda that things were going all right.

Zeus’s neck apparently had scabbed up nicely. Jack was walking better and his belly

wounds seemed to have stopped oozing as well. In fact, Jack had assumed the lead role

again, which was fine by her and the others.

That is, it was fine until they heard the pickup truck’s motor behind them as they

traversed the last cross street before the road ended in a T ahead. They were on the left
 176

side of the street, and Jack immediately beckoned them toward a big bush on the front

lawn of the house on the corner.

When Basil’s truck passed, Zeus freaked. “That’s him!” he cried, and reflexively he

tore off across the lawn, drawing the others with him.

Zeus’s streaking white coat caught Basil’s eye and he slammed on the brakes, then

threw the truck into reverse.

The cats had no choice but to high-tail it up the cross street. They could hear Basil

hollering as he threw the truck into drive again and stepped on the gas in pursuit. They

could see and hear cars and trucks whizzing by on the highway in the distance. One of the

cars turned onto the street they were on, its bright headlights making them squint.

“Quick, let’s hide under this van,” Jack said, nodding toward a big, black van parked

in a driveway on the right side of the road. “Those headlights will give us away for sure.”

After Ronny Metzger saw the pickup truck turn left and burn rubber, he decided

enough was enough. He flipped on his lights and his flashers but decided not to use the

siren in this quiet bedroom neighborhood. Basil got the message without it, seeing the

flashers in his rearview mirror. Ronny stepped on the gas and as he closed the gap

between his car and the truck, Basil’s tires were spewing pebbles and dust onto Ronny’s

windshield.

Basil floored the accelerator, even though it was only a block, a long one, to the

highway. Ronny followed suit, making sure to keep well to the right; there was a set of

headlights coming at them from the opposite direction. Basil wasn’t being so polite. He
 177

was practically in the middle of the road and screaming his head off because stepping on

the gas hurt his ruined ankle so much.

The oncoming car swerved up onto grass between the road and the sidewalk as first

Basil’s truck and then Ronny’s patrol car whizzed by.

To the cats hiding under the van in the driveway, it was sheer lunacy. The roar of the

truck’s racing engine paired with Basil’s maniacal scream sounded like some kind of

devil train going by. A moment later, the police car roared by in pursuit. Then the cats

saw the other car heading in the other direction come to a screeching halt in front of the

house next door to them. Someone got out of the passenger side of the car, and then the

driver made a three-point turn and took off toward the highway in pursuit of the truck and

the patrol car.

43.
Phil Hanley didn’t know what to make of the two sets of headlights barreling toward him,

so he swerved up onto the grass off the shoulder of the road to let the vehicle go by.

That’s when he saw the patrol car’s flashers and suddenly it all became clear. He stopped

the car abruptly when the patrol car had passed.

“Martin, that’s Metzger in that patrol car. I’ve really got to see what’s going on.”

“That’s okay, Phil,” Martin said, opening the door. “I can find my car all right. It’s just

a couple of blocks away. Good luck.”

 178

“Thanks, Marty.”

After Martin shut the door, Phil turned his 1997 Firebird around and sped off. Martin

watched with fascination as the car paused briefly at the stop sign at the end of the road

and then peeled out onto the highway. What he didn’t know was that he was being

watched with equal fascination.

The cats couldn’t really make out any of the man’s features in the darkness, but they

were intrigued by the way he stood there for a moment, looking in the direction the cars

had gone.

When he finally turned and began walking in the other direction, Jack nudged Meaper.

“Come on, you guys,” Meaper whispered. “It’s time to get going.”

The cats emerged from underneath the van and resumed their single-file march out

onto the road, with Jack and Meaper leading the way. Zeus was in the rear, and he paused

at the end of the driveway, looking back at the man walking down the road in the other

direction.

“Oodly-ooh,” he said, drawing a scowl from Yoda and the other cats.

The man stopped and slowly turned around, looking in their direction.

“Come on, Zeus!” Yoda hissed. “We’ve got to go.”

Zeus continued to look at the man for a moment, then reluctantly turned and followed

the other cats.

Martin thought he saw some movement at the end of one of the driveways, but the

nearest streetlight was behind him and it was just too dark to tell what, if anything, he had

seen. Still, he knew what he thought he heard. It was a cat’s meow, and it sounded an
 179

awful lot like Zeus. He thought about walking down that way, but then decided he had

better get back to the car. He would come back this way, and if the cats were around, the

headlights would find them.

44.
Even at 10 o’clock, Route 15, where it runs through the Jefferson Park section of

Jamestown, is a bustling artery alive with cars and trucks on their way somewhere else

fast. Basil Macauley considered that to be in his favor as he blew off the stop sign at the

end of the street and peeled out onto the highway without bothering to look for an

opening. It turned out there wasn’t one, but an alert tractor-trailer driver swerved into the

left lane just in time to avoid hitting the Ford pickup.

The blast of the truck’s horn was lost on Basil. He was still screaming bloody murder

as his mangled foot pressed the accelerator to the floor. Swerving in and out of lanes,

narrowly missing car bumpers, he was desperately trying to put some distance between

himself and that nosy cop.

 180

Basil cursed himself now for not lamming out of that neighborhood when he had the

chance. He had seen the way that cop was looking at him. He also cursed himself for that

brilliant decision to knock off the Exxon station. He figured the amount he got from that

job would hold off that bookie for maybe a week. He knew it was a dangerous move, and

now he was paying for it, too.

His only chance was to lose this cop in the traffic, and he could see in his rearview

mirror that he wasn’t succeeding yet. The red flashers remained steadily on his tail,

maybe three or four car lengths back, and now he could hear the roo-roo-roo of the siren

over his own demonic screams. Sometimes as he glanced in the mirror, he thought he saw

another car behind the cop car also giving chase, but he hoped he was wrong.

Basil was aware that he was fast approaching the end of the freeway portion of the

highway and would soon be hitting traffic lights. He passed a bus on the right in the slow

lane and just missed the front end of it as he swerved again into the left lane to pass

another eighteen-wheeler. Up ahead in the distance he saw a traffic light turn from green

to amber, and the traffic ahead of him began to slow, brake lights glowing bright.

With the sound of the police siren wailing behind him, he decided to place the biggest

bet of his life. He swerved back into the right lane in front of the truck, then crossed over

to the shoulder of the highway as the traffic eased to a stop at the red light ahead. Basil

closed his eyes, stomped on the gas and screamed.

45.
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“Dispatch, this is Charlie two-two,” Ronny Metzger said into the handset, breathing

heavily. “Am proceeding north on Route One Fiver in high-speed pursuit of the suspect I

requested data on. Suspect is driving a late-eighties-model blue Ford F-150 pickup truck,

in-state tags but I do not have numbers as yet. I’m just past the Jefferson Park area

heading into the Vineyard Village section and approaching the Park Avenue intersection.

Requesting backup in that vicinity, over.”

“Roger, Charlie two-two, we copy you. Two black-and-whites are in the vicinity and

should be able to roadblock the suspect at Park.”

There was an uncharacteristic pause from the dispatcher.

“Charlie two-two, FYI. Detective Sergeant Hanley just phoned in and is right behind

you, in case you were wondering who was chasing you, over.”

“Roger that, Dispatch. Over and out.”

Ronny Metzger had indeed been wondering about that, but he decided not to mention

it over the air. Now he was glad.

Ronny would never take his patrols through Jefferson Park lightly again. The rookie

cop was just getting to the point where he didn’t feel like a rookie anymore, like he’d

gotten into the routine of suburban police work and had found that it was just that:

routine. Now he knew different.

The guy in the pickup has to be a madman, he thought, watching him fishtail right and

left as he swerved through the maze of cars and trucks in the late-night traffic. Ronny

winced when his car sideswiped a sedan that was cut off by the pickup truck and ended
 182

up in a fishtail trying to regain control. In his rearview mirror he half-watched the car

shoot across the right lane onto the shoulder and screech to a stop.

Ronny lost sight of the pickup truck momentarily but he guessed it was in front of a

bus a few vehicles in front of him in the left lane. They were approaching the end of the

freeway and Ronny knew his best chance of stopping this guy was at the Park Avenue

intersection. Instinctively he shut off his flashers and siren and slipped into the right lane.

As he sensed the traffic beginning to slow, Ronny pulled off onto the shoulder and

stealthily began creeping past the cars and trucks that had been ahead of him in the right

lane. He felt rather than saw Detective Sergeant Hanley’s headlights behind him, and

tried to put that out of his mind. This wasn’t a drill. This was real.

In the distance he could see the traffic light at Park Avenue turning red.

That was when he saw the pickup truck lurch out into the shoulder ahead of him. What

an imbecile, Ronny thought, snapping his flashers and siren back on and flooring the

accelerator. The truck was only about three car lengths in front of him and pebbles and

dirt were dinging off his windshield again. Ronny knew the backup patrol cars, if they

made it there on time, would have Route 15 blocked on the other side of the light, forcing

the guy in the pickup to either turn right, left or give up. In any case, he’d be easy to stop

on Park Avenue, a single-lane-each-way thoroughfare that was dotted with traffic lights

and not particularly well suited for high-speed getaways.

But it suddenly dawned on Ronny that this guy had no intention of making a turn at

the light. Instead of slowing down, he was accelerating as he approached the intersection.

Ronny wished he could think of a prayer.

 183

Patrolman Joe Adamo was leaning back on the driver’s side door of his police cruiser

with his arms folded, waiting and watching the line of cars and trucks queued up across

the street at the traffic light. His car was parked sideways across the double lines of Route

15. Another patrolman, John Cook, had parked his car the same way a block away,

effectively sealing off the road.

Joe Adamo considered himself a veteran, and he wasn’t worried about this situation a

bit. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes had passed since he got the call. Luckily it just

so happened that he was passing through the intersection when the radio crackled. John

Cook had shown up about a minute later.

The deal was this: If the suspect turned right, John would take primary pursuit. If he

turned left, Joe would lead the chase, given that his car was pointing in that direction.

Suddenly Joe noticed headlights coming at him from across the intersection in a place

where there weren’t supposed to be headlights coming at him. Someone was driving on

the shoulder, fast, and heading straight toward him. Then Joe noticed the police flashers

behind the oncoming vehicle.

“Guess it’s showtime,” Joe muttered, reaching through the open car door window to

flip on his flashers. That ought to slow him down a little, Joe thought with a grin.

The grin didn’t last long.

Basil Macauley’s truck was doing seventy miles an hour when it entered the

intersection, just missing the back of a Greyhound bus that was passing from his left to

right. As the pickup truck crossed Park Avenue it clipped the rear bumper of a Lincoln
 184

Navigator traveling in the other direction, sending the sport utility vehicle slamming into

Joe Adamo’s flashing cruiser. Joe leaped to his right just in time, looking like a soccer

goalie making a valiant effort to block a free kick.

Basil wasn’t even watching what was happening. When he saw the flashing lights

across the intersection, he shut his eyes and floored the accelerator, screaming in

harmony with the sirens in front of him and behind. He was vaguely aware of being

bounced about, but when he opened his eyes, he was still barreling ahead and was staring

at Patrolman John Cook, who looked like he was dancing in front of his police car, trying

to figure out what to do. Finally John pulled out his service revolver for the second time

in his ten-year career, but by then it was too late. The pickup truck slammed into the side

of the patrol car just in front of the front wheel, making it spin like a top in the middle of

the road. John Cook got whacked in the back by the spinning rear of the car.

When Ronny Metzger saw John Cook go flying through the air, he slammed on his

brakes, bringing his patrol car to a screeching halt and forcing Phil Hanley to do the

same. Ronny got out of his car and ran over to the lawn of the public library on the corner

where he found John Cook semiconscious in a big bush.

Phil Hanley was livid. He slammed his car door behind him and trotted over to the

corner.

“What are you doing?” he asked Ronny heatedly.

Metzger was bewildered. “Attending to a fellow officer, sir,” he said.

“Get back in your car, mister, and get after that pickup truck! You’re letting him get

away! I’ll tend to the scene here.”

 185

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Ronny said sheepishly.

“Don’t sorry me. Go!”

Ronny got going.

46.
Joe Adamo’s patrol car was totaled, but the radio still worked. When he saw the pickup

slam past Cook’s car, he radioed in for backup. A few minutes later there seemed to be

sirens screaming from every direction.

Basil, meanwhile, after hitting the police car, swerved to the left, making the turn onto

the cross street on his right two wheels. If the crash hadn’t slowed him down, he would

have flipped over, and he knew it.

Despite the pain in his foot, the disorientation and the fear gripping him, Basil knew

where he was, and he had an idea of what he had to do to get out of this mess. He went

two blocks and turned right from Grove Avenue onto James Street, a residential street in

the midst of what constituted downtown Vineyard Village, which he entered when he

bulldozed his way across Park Avenue.

It was time for Basil to place another bet. He turned off his headlight (one of the two

surprisingly was still working), and scanned his rearview mirror for signs of flashers.

There were none…yet. Something had slowed down the cop who had been chasing him.

He continued another block, and as he approached a house on the right side, he placed

that bet, the kind that only the desperate make.

 186

The house was dark; it appeared that no one was home. He pulled into the driveway

slowly, quietly. There were no cars in the driveway, which led up to a detached garage.

Basil pulled all the way up the driveway and then swung the pickup to the right into

the backyard behind the house. He put the car in park and shut off the engine. Then he

sat. And waited. It was less than a minute before he heard it: the sound of the sirens.

If there is more than one police, fire or EMS siren wailing at once, it doesn’t matter if

there are two or two hundred. For most people, it is the sound of bedlam. For Basil, that

sound meant the hunters were near. It was the baying of the hounds to a fox.

Basil was quite used to being hounded. As he sat behind the wheel of the truck, he

cringed, torn by the question of whether to flee on foot (“foot” being the operative word,

since he only had one good one) or sit it out and hope they weren’t the very best hunters,

that they would miss something.

Basil wasn’t a praying man, but what he was doing behind the wheel of the pickup

truck could have fooled the casual observer. He had his chin down on his chest, his eyes

shut tight and his hands clasped tightly together in front of him on the steering wheel. He

was dangerously close to unintentionally blowing the horn.

The intermittent roo-roo-roo, ooo-wee-ooo-wee and arnt-arnt-arnt sounds were

building into a row-row-row-your-boat tiered crescendo, driving Basil closer and closer

to madness. When it got so loud he had to cover his ears, Basil opened his eyes and could

see flickering light from a vehicle’s flashers on the trees behind the house. One of the

hunters was on the street out front. He could see the beam of a door-mounted spotlight
 187

flitting to and fro. The vehicle that was searching for him continued to slow as it

approached the front of the house.

Ronny Metzger, who was the driver of that vehicle, didn’t know why but something

had told him to turn onto James Street. When he did, he saw no taillights. In fact, nothing

was moving. Still, something had told him his prey was near. He proceeded slowly,

methodically, searching the driveways with his spotlight, hoping the pickup truck driver

had been stupid enough to think he could just blend in and not draw attention.

As he approached a Cape Cod with a driveway that ran up the side of the house, he

stopped. The house was dark; there were no cars in the driveway. The door of a detached

garage at the end of the driveway was closed. For a moment, Ronny thought about

pulling into that driveway and having a look around.

Don’t sorry me. Go! The words echoed in his mind.

Then he heard Joe Adamo’s voice crackle over the radio.

Basil held his breath as he felt the spotlight combing the front of the house. He could

tell the police cruiser had stopped. But why? What had given him away? Had a piece of

smashed grillwork fallen off the front of the car? He knew he hadn’t left any skid marks

when he pulled slowly into the driveway.

It could be anything, he finally acknowledged. Or nothing. A hunch, maybe. A cop’s

instinctive hunch.

Basil did the closest thing to praying his constitution was capable of: He cursed.

Quietly. And it worked.

 188

He watched the searchlight go out, and suddenly the flashers moved off quickly. The

patrol car had sped away.

Basil sat there for the next twenty minutes, which felt like hours, listening, watching,

not daring to move. He heard sirens wailing in the distance, sometimes loud, sometimes

faint. Then they finally ceased altogether. And as they did, Basil’s eyelids began to

flutter.

47.
It was Jack’s idea that the cats should take a rest, and although he said it was for all of

their benefit, Yoda sensed that Jack was still hurting badly. Not that anyone voiced a

complaint. As much as they all wanted to get home, or what they called home, all five of

them were dog tired, which is saying a lot for cats.

One-eyed Meaper was ironically the one who spotted the truck. They’d been trudging

along the highway for only five or ten minutes now, but they were frightened out of their

wits by the constant flow of speeding cars and trucks and buses rumbling by. The

shoulder of the highway was probably six feet wide, but it felt like six inches to the cats.

They kept to the wooded outside fringe as much as they could, but the vehicles still felt

like they were going to blow them off their feet. Those five or ten minutes felt like hours.

“Something in the way ahead,” Meaper said absently. Jack looked up and saw a

pickup truck, which he at first feared was the one that had been chasing them. It sure

looked a lot like it. Jack came to an abrupt halt, signaling the others to do the same.
 189

“Zeus,” Jack yelled over the din of the traffic, “Yoda tells me you’re one good

jumping cat. Hop up on the back of that truck and see if you see anybody in it.” Jack

didn’t even look at the cat as he said it.

“Why me?” Zeus cried.

Yoda rolled her eyes.

“He already told you why,” she snapped. “Just do what he says.” Oddly enough, Yoda

could not remember telling Jack anything about Zeus’s jumping prowess.

Zeus scowled, but he didn’t protest any further. He knew he was already in hot water

for getting them all into this. He went into his familiar crouch and then leaped up onto the

rear bumper. From there he stood up on his hind legs and peered over the tailgate.

The bed of the truck was strewn with empty beer cans but there was no sign of the

owner. Zeus hopped into the bed and sniffed at one of the beer cans. He immediately

made a face and uttered the cat equivalent of “P.U.” Then he walked slowly up toward

the front of the bed. He got up on his hind legs again to look through the rear window of

the cab. He gave the dashboard a cursory glance. There was nobody sitting up there. Zeus

trotted back to the tailgate.

“All clear,” he yelled, peering down at the other cats.

“Good,” Jack said. “Looks like a good place for a nap.”

Seconds later they were all curled up together in the front corner of the truck’s bed. It

wasn’t as comfortable as the people’s bed back home, Yoda lamented, but it did provide

an effective windbreak, and also shielded out some of the noise from the busy highway.

They were all sound asleep in minutes.

 190

What Zeus failed to notice during his inspection of the front of the truck was Jimmy

Demarest, who was lying on the front seat taking a snooze of his own. Jimmy had been

driving for 18 hours on a trip up from Jacksonville, Florida. He was on his way to Lodi in

North Jersey, and earlier, when he had been passing through the Baltimore area, he

realized it was time to get gas again. He also noticed that it happened to be Miller Time.

Jimmy pulled off the interstate, picked up a case of beer while he filled up his tank and

hit the highway again, knocking off can after can of Miller Lite and tossing the empties

into the back.

Jimmy liked to use Route 15 as a shortcut from Interstate 95 to I-80, but shortly after

getting onto Route 15, he realized he’d better take a nap. The white lines on the road had

started to move around side to side, and he figured he had better pull over before a cop

pulled him over.

About an hour after the cats went to sleep, Jimmy woke up. He glanced at his watch

and sat bolt upright. It was after eleven o’clock, and Jimmy was behind schedule. He

started the truck and peeled out onto the highway.

48.
 191

Martin Katz could not shake the sound of that meow. All the way on his walk back to the

car, that sound played over and over in his head. How many cats in the world made that

sound? Oodly-ooh. It couldn’t be that many.

Before he left Phil’s office, he had called Mary. She was understandably upset when

she found that he had gone out for more than cigars, but what was more upsetting to her

was that he had picked up no additional information about the cats for his trouble. She

was clearly grieving over the thought of losing these cats.

Until Martin heard that lonely cat cry in the night, or imagined that he had, he didn’t

think he was capable of feeling grief for the loss of these cats. He had never been a big

fan of pets, either as a kid or an adult. He could appreciate others’ affection for the furry

things, but he could always take them or leave them.

Now, as he approached his parked car on a dark street of his neighboring town, that

cat cry echoing in his mind, he realized that, despite himself, he had grown attached to a

pet. Three of them, come to think of it.

He started the Grand Am and headed back to where Phil dropped him off. He drove

slowly with his high beams on, hoping to spot a pair or three of cats’ eyes along the side

of the road or on someone’s lawn. When he reached the spot where he thought he had

heard the sound, he slowed almost to a stop, scanning the driveways and yards for a sign

of movement. He lowered the windows to see if there were any sounds to be heard. There

was nothing. Nothing but the sound of the cars and trucks passing by on Route 15 just

ahead of him beyond the stop sign.

 192

“So much for that,” he said to himself, pulling out onto the highway. Martin was so

preoccupied with looking for the cats that it took him a few moments to realize he was

heading north on Route 15. To get home he would either have to get off the highway and

get back on the southbound side or else continue north and cut through Jefferson Park to

get to the tunnel. Opting for the latter, Martin stepped on the gas.

49.
The cats all woke up to find themselves sliding down the bed of the truck toward the

tailgate. The sudden acceleration had sent them flying, and the truck was now moving

way too fast for them to be able to jump out. Still, when the truck reached its top speed,

all five of the cats got up on their hind legs and peered over the tailgate at the mass of

headlights behind them. Zeus was fascinated by the white lines that seemed to be zipping

out from underneath the back of the truck toward the cars behind them.

Yoda noticed the white lines, too, but she was able to figure out what they were. She

also noted from the irregular way they were coming out that the truck was beginning to

weave from side to side. That can’t be good, she thought. She turned around and trotted

up to the front of the truck bed and looked up through the rear window at the driver. His

eyelids were fluttering and he was moving the steering wheel back and forth erratically.

Jimmy Demarest’s catnap apparently hadn’t been long enough. His eyelids felt like

they had weights tied to them, and in between blinks he was still seeing two of

everything. He sensed right away that it had been a mistake to resume driving, but he had
 193

to get home tonight. He had important business to take care of tomorrow, and it couldn’t

wait.

For Jimmy there was only one thing to do. He grabbed another Miller Lite, popped the

top and drained the can in one big chug, sideswiping a car in the next lane as he did it.

The driver of the car yelled something unintelligible, all the while working hard to keep

control of his vehicle. Yoda watched all this with morbid curiosity, knowing without

knowing why that something worse was coming.

Thirty seconds later Jimmy stuck his head out the window and threw up. All of the

cats in the back of the truck bed got hit with some of the spray, and they weren’t happy.

Yoda was spared by virtue of being up in the front, but she was nonetheless appalled. She

watched as the driver of the truck followed up his retch by spitting out a big wad of beery

phlegm. Doug took the brunt of this as the truck veered to the right. The wad hit him right

in the back of the head, but it might as well have hit him in the face, it smelled so bad.

Jimmy felt better immediately. There was a sign up ahead that read, FREEWAY

ENDS. TWO-WAY TRAFFIC AHEAD. Jimmy could read it perfectly, and that told him

he had done the right thing. Yoda felt the weaving of the truck begin to abate as it slowed

down gradually.

A few minutes later the truck was approaching the Park Avenue intersection, where

traffic was backed up considerably. Jimmy could see the flashing lights of police cars on

the other side of the intersection, and he didn’t want any part of whatever that was about.

He pulled out onto the shoulder and drove up a little ways and turned right onto a side
 194

street. He followed this road for a few blocks until he reached a stop sign, then turned left

onto Elm Street, which led right up to Park Avenue.

When Jimmy got to the stop sign at Park, he looked to his left, where he had a good

view of the Route 15 intersection. As he expected, Route 15 was completely blocked off

on the other side of Park by police and fire department vehicles. Jimmy was hoping that

Elm Street continued on the other side of Park Avenue, but it did not.

The cats, meanwhile, were debating among themselves whether to jump out of the

truck here. In muted whispers, Yoda argued in favor of bailing out now. They’d be better

off on foot, in her book. Jack, still cleaning off particles of puke from his coat,

maintained that they were better off stealing a ride. Besides, they had no idea where they

were now, he argued. Maybe things would look familiar if they rode along for a while.

Suddenly Jimmy saw high-beam headlights in his rearview mirror. At first he thought

it was a cop, but then he realized it was a Grand Am. The car he’d sideswiped on the

highway.

50.
Shortly after he turned onto Route 15, Martin moved into the left lane to pass a tractor-

trailer. That was when he saw a pickup truck ahead of him weaving back and forth.

Martin shook his head as he passed the truck, noticing that the driver was guzzling a beer.

Then all hell broke loose. The truck’s weaving turned into a wobble and it sideswiped

Martin’s Grand Am, sending it banging into the concrete divider.

 195

“What’s the matter with you, you drunk!” Martin yelled, struggling to keep control of

his car. The rear end of the car fishtailed a few times before he got it to settle down. The

driver of the pickup truck apparently had no intention of pulling over, so Martin fell in

behind him. He wasn’t about to let the guy get away with this.

Martin was memorizing the license plate number when he noticed four pairs of

glowing eyeballs peering at him from just above the truck’s tailgate. He blinked, thinking

maybe he was just seeing things, but they were still there: four pairs of cats’ eyes. Then

all of a sudden his windshield got hit with something wet. When the smell hit him, Martin

didn’t have to guess what it was.

This guy’s in bad shape, Martin thought, switching on his wipers. When the

windshield was clear, he looked up at the back of the pickup again and the cats’ eyes had

disappeared.

Up ahead, the freeway was ending and traffic was beginning to slow down. Martin

decided to wait until the driver of the pickup had to stop and then he would try to get the

driver to relent.

Suddenly the pickup veered onto the shoulder of the highway and turned onto a side

street. Martin followed him at a safe distance as he turned left at a stop sign and

proceeded a few blocks before stopping at another stop sign.

Martin decided he’d better act now. He turned on his high beams and stopped behind

the pickup truck. Before getting out of the car, he reached around on the back seat for

something he could use as a weapon in case the guy got rough. A cheap umbrella was all

he could find.
 196

Martin held the umbrella like a sword, which must have looked ridiculous. But he, for

one, wasn’t laughing. As he approached the back of the pickup, he feared more and more

that he might have to use it.

“Hit-and-Run Driver Whacked With Umbrella” the headline would read. Or better yet:

“Stop or I’ll Bumber Shoot.”

Martin winced at the thought. He needn’t have worried, though. When the driver saw

him in the sideview mirror, he tore off into a squealing right turn onto Park Avenue.

Martin felt a weird combination of relief and anger wash over him. Without even

thinking about it, he ran back to his car and peeled off after the truck.

He only got about a block down Park Avenue when he saw flashing lights in his

mirror. He pulled over, expecting the cop car to do the same, but it didn’t. It passed him

right by. It apparently was after the pickup truck.

It wasn’t until this moment that Martin even connected this truck with the one that had

been cruising the streets of Jefferson Park, looking to pick up cats. That truck had taken

off with Phil Hanley and that other cop car on its tail when Martin still had a ten-minute

stroll back to his car. He wasn’t able to get a very good look at it when it forced Phil to

pull off the street, but he didn’t think it could have been the same truck. Or could it? And

what about those four pairs of peepers he’d seen peering over the tailgate?

Martin thought about these things as he watched the flashing lights disappear down the

road ahead of him. Now what do I do, he thought.

He didn’t get to make that decision. In his rearview mirror he saw another set of

flashing lights, and this time the patrol car did pull over behind him.
 197

Martin rolled his eyes. What a night! He fumbled for his wallet, feeling a vague sense

of déjà vu; it wasn’t the first time he’d had to show identification to a cop tonight.

In his sideview mirror, he watched the officer get out of the car and cautiously

approach the driver’s side door. Martin lowered the window.

“License and registration, please.”

Something about that voice was familiar. As Martin handed the two cards to the

policeman, he found out why.

“You!” Ronny Metzger said incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

Martin fought back the urge roll his eyes; instead, he greeted his old acquaintance with

the sincerest fake smile he could muster.

“I’m afraid it is me, officer, and I honestly don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Ronny gave Martin’s license and registration a brief glance and handed them back,

then leaned down on the car door. Ronny was chewing gum, and the smell of Juicyfruit

was pungent. Martin hated Juicyfruit.

“I’m gonna ask you again. What are you doing here, sir?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“Well,” Martin began, “you see, I was driving along—“

“You’re in cahoots with that pickup truck driver, aren’t you, Mr. Katz?”

“Who? What—“
 198

“What do you got going with this guy, sir? You know what he’s wanted for? Armed

robbery, multiple counts of vehicular assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, fleeing

the scene. What’s a guy like you doing mixed up with him?”

“Am I under arrest, Officer…” Martin had forgotten his name.

“It’s Metzger. And no, sir, you are not. Not yet, anyway.”

“Good,” Martin said emphatically. “I don’t know who this guy was except that he

sideswiped my car out on the highway. He got off the highway and tried to run. What

was I supposed to do, let him go?”

“Where’d he sideswipe you?”

“On the passenger side.”

Ronny gave Martin an uncertain look that bordered on a smirk, then walked around

the front to other side of the car. The light from his patrol car flashers was enough to

show Ronny that the car was indeed banged up. He sauntered back around, this time

behind the car, inspecting the license plate as he did so.

“Your car’s overdue for inspection, Mr. Katz.”

Martin was flabbergasted. Here he was, the victim of a crime, and this cop was busting

his chops about getting his car inspected.

“What are you gonna do, write me a ticket?”

“Maybe,” Ronny said evenly. “You get a good look at the driver of that truck?”

“No,” Martin said, truthfully. “But I got a good sample of the contents of his stomach.

They’re all over my hood and windshield. The drunk hurled out the window.”

Ronny inspected the hood of the car.

 199

“He also had what appeared to be four cats in the back of his truck.”

“Cats? Again?” Ronny said. “You better come with me. I suspect our man’s been

apprehended down by the tunnel. But you could be useful as a witness if all you said here

is true.”

“Terrific,” Martin said. Why didn’t I just stay home, he thought miserably.

He got out of the car, locked it and followed the policeman to the cruiser. He took

some comfort in the fact that he got to ride in the front seat this time.

51.
When Jimmy Demarest saw the driver of the Grand Am brandishing something in his

hand, that was all he needed to see. He floored the accelerator and turned right onto Park

Avenue, tires screaming for all the world to hear.

Among those who heard those tires was Joe Adamo, who along with Phil Hanley was

supervising the cleanup of the accident scene left by Basil Macauley, who was still at

large. Adamo heard the tires screech and saw the taillights of a pickup truck two blocks

away and jumped to the obvious conclusion.

He ran to his battered patrol car and radioed into headquarters that he had seen a

pickup truck heading east on Park Avenue.

Jimmy had his F-150 doing seventy-five by the time he passed Maple Street, where

Patrolman Jerry Jackson sat in his cruiser monitoring Joe Adamo’s call into the
 200

dispatcher. He immediately put on his flashers and peeled out onto Park Avenue, right

behind a Grand Am that also apparently was pursuing the truck.

“Dispatch, this is Charlie four-four,” he said into the receiver. “I’m in pursuit of that

vehicle heading east on Park Avenue. Am proceeding from Maple Street onto Park at this

time. The vehicle fits the description of the truck that ran the roadblock. Over.”

Jerry was about to ask the dispatcher if there was an officer in pursuit of the truck in a

personal vehicle, but the car pulled over as soon as the driver saw Jerry’s flashers in his

rearview mirror. The driver of the pickup truck was showing no such intentions and in

fact appeared to be accelerating. Jerry reached for the radio.

“Dispatch, this is four-four again. A late-model Grand Am was following the pickup I

am pursuing, but he pulled over when he saw my lights. Request a backup check him out.

Also Dispatch, please alert Worthington Township police to try to roadblock the tunnel

on their side.”

“Roger, four-four, wilco. Over and out.”

Jerry stepped on the gas gingerly. He didn’t want to let this guy lose him, but he didn’t

want to get too close either. He’d been in a few car chases before. Usually the drivers

were car thieves, sometimes they were drunk, but they all were desperate. It wasn’t wise

to push desperate people too hard, Jerry had found.

When the pickup truck successfully ran a red light at County Avenue, Jerry wasn’t

surprised. He slowed the patrol car down as he approached the light but he kept his eye

on the pickup.
 201

Jimmy Demarest was indeed desperate. It was bad enough having some guy in a car

chasing him, but when he saw the lights flashing in the rearview mirror, he panicked. He

already had ten points on his license, and if he got pulled over now, he’d lose that license

for sure.

Jimmy kept his foot planted on the accelerator, his eyes searching the street frantically

for a sign that would tell him where to go.

He blew through a red light and hoped he didn’t hit anything. He didn’t, and he got

another break because the cop behind him did slow down. That gave Jimmy an extended

lead, but he knew that the policeman chasing him had the advantage of knowing the area.

The road was leading him up a long hill, heading out of town. No longer were there

houses and small businesses lining the street. Now an occasional factory or a lone office

building was all that interrupted the woods that lined Park Avenue. Then Jimmy saw a

sign: TUNNEL AHEAD. HEADLIGHTS ON.

He didn’t know why, but Jimmy took that sign as a bad sign. He put the pedal to the

floor again, eyeing the flashing lights behind him in the rearview mirror. Jimmy figured

he had a lead of about two football fields over the cop behind him as he climbed toward

the crest of the hill.

When he reached the top of the hill and started down the other side, he could see a

wide swath of deep, black nothingness running from left to right at the bottom of the hill.

The dark swath was lined on the near side and the far side by streetlights. He was looking

at a river. Not huge, as rivers go, but not small either. Big enough that they built a tunnel
 202

under it. The entrance was dead ahead at the bottom of the hill on the other side of a

traffic light.

Jimmy couldn’t see the flashing lights behind him yet; the cop car was still on the

other side of the hill. He also didn’t see any flashing lights across the river in the vicinity

of where he reckoned the tunnel came out. If that cop had radioed for another car to block

the other side, it hadn’t gotten there yet, Jimmy figured. He was about to floor it and just

go for it when a Drake’s Cakes van rounded the corner of the cross street at the bottom of

the hill and headed down into the tunnel.

Jimmy Demarest wasn’t ordinarily what one called a quick thinker, but then this

wasn’t any ordinary night. The van’s taillights in the tunnel turned on some lights in

Jimmy’s head. He made a sharp right at the light at the bottom of the hill, shutting off his

headlights as he did so. He spotted a closed auto body shop on the right, pulled into the

lot, shut off the motor and lay down on the front seat to hide, hoping he didn’t doze off

again.

Patrolman Jerry Jackson saw taillights disappearing into the tunnel when he came over

the top of the hill, and he floored the accelerator. The traffic light at the bottom of the hill

was red but he didn’t anticipate much traffic.

Jerry flipped on his siren and slowed down enough to make sure no vehicles were

approaching from the right or left, then stepped on the gas again, flying down into the

tunnel.

Now I gotcha, Jerry thought with a grin.

 203

The McClellan Tunnel makes a wide left turn as it descends under the Gladstone

branch of the Delaware River, then it bends to the right and straightens out. When Jerry

reached the straightaway, he was startled by some oncoming traffic. After a bus and two

cars had passed, he briefly caught sight of taillights in front of him before they

disappeared again where the tunnel bottomed out. He gunned the engine again and soon

the vehicle came into view again.

Jerry’s eyes nearly fell out when he got a good look at the vehicle in the bright lights

of the tiled tunnel. He was looking at the back of a cupcake truck. Where was the pickup

truck? Could it have passed the Drake’s truck? He didn’t think so. Not with that

oncoming traffic. But Jerry would soon find out; there were flashing lights at the end of

the tunnel.

A Worthington black-and-white was parked sideways in front of the mouth of the

tunnel, and Jerry watched a policeman wave the Drake’s truck through.

Jerry pulled his car up slowly toward the mouth of the tunnel. When it came to a stop,

the policeman who had been standing guard approached the car with his arms out and his

palms up, the universal sign for bupkus, nada, zilch. No gots.

Jerry cursed.

52.
 204

“Let’s go.” Jack said it in the loudest whisper he could muster a few seconds after the

truck came to a stop outside the auto body shop. He didn’t need to say it again. The cats

bounded over the tailgate and didn’t look back.

By this point they were all pretty shaken up, and as they approached the corner where

the truck had turned, they heard a siren screaming, and that didn’t help. It was the police

car that had been behind them. They watched the car fly through the intersection and into

the tunnel entrance, its flashers painting the walls red as it went in. The cats’ tails were

now in a permanent state of full-flare.

“This has to be the tunnel Mingles was talking about,” Yoda said.

When the sound of the police car’s siren gradually went away, they all sat down and

took a hard look at the tunnel opening.

“So we’re going in there,” Meaper said. It sounded like a statement, but it was really a

question.

“Well, we could just walk down the river and find that bridge,” Jack said.

“Funny. Very funny,” Meaper said. With that, a truck and a couple of cars emerged

from the tunnel and proceeded up the hill they had just come down.

The cats sat there awhile, staring at the sign over the tunnel entrance, partly stalling for

time, partly just trying to enjoy a moment of peace and quiet in the night. Zeus scratched

his ear tenderly. Jack licked his sore belly.

Suddenly the silence was shattered with the sound of an engine starting. It was Jimmy

Demarest’s pickup truck. The cats quickly hid behind a public mailbox and watched

Jimmy pull out of the auto body shop, his headlights still off. He proceeded slowly
 205

toward the traffic light in front of the tunnel and stopped. The cats watched the driver’s

head turn right, looking into the tunnel for outbound traffic. Then he looked to his left

and suddenly he stepped on the gas. Instead of turning left and heading back the way he

had come, he sped across the intersection.

That’s when the cats heard another siren. A police car came roaring down the hill, its

tires screeching as it turned left at the traffic light in pursuit of the pickup truck. The cats

watched the taillights and the flashers speed away into the night as the sound of the siren

faded.

“Good riddance,” said Meaper, who was still grossed out by the beer vomit.

“Come on,” Jack said, and they crossed the street.

53.
Ronny Metzger obviously reveled in being a cop. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight when he

pulled out onto Park Avenue, yet he just had to turn on his flashers and his siren. This

time Martin Katz did roll his eyes.

When the police car reached the top of the hill, Ronny was driving so fast the wheels

of the car actually left the road for a moment. When they came back down (with a bang),

Ronny and Martin saw a pickup truck dart across the intersection at the bottom of the hill
 206

in front of the tunnel. Ronny floored the accelerator, and Martin thought he saw him

salivating at the sight of the truck.

The car took the turn hard, blowing through the red light. Martin heard the tires

screeching and braced himself; he felt like the car was in a skid. It wasn’t, though. Ronny

did apparently know how to drive.

Martin suddenly felt like he was watching the “World’s Wildest Police Videos.” The

pickup truck was bashing into the sides of parked cars, knocking over garbage cans,

driving up on people’s lawns, narrowly missing trees, all at better than seventy miles an

hour in a partly residential, partly commercial area.

When Ronny pulled within fifty yards of the truck, he got on the loudspeaker. This

ought to be good, Martin thought.

“DRIVER OF THE TRUCK. PULL OVER NOW. THIS IS THE POLICE.”

Martin’s eyes rolled all the way back in their sockets as he thought, “What’s the guy

going to suddenly do, think, ‘Uh-oh, I guess he really means it’?”

And, in fact, the pickup driver only reacted by speeding up. Martin bit his tongue,

knowing it wasn’t his place to be giving a cop advice. At last, Ronny did a smart thing:

He picked up the radio receiver.

“Dispatch, this is Charlie two-two. Am in high-speed pursuit of a pickup truck fitting

the description of the vehicle involved in tonight’s roadblock activity. Heading north on

Gladstone Avenue approximately two miles north of the McClellan Tunnel. Request

backup to intercept vehicle north of my twenty. Can you comply, over?”

 207

Affirmative, Dispatch replied, there were two cars on the way. Martin breathed a sigh

of relief and he suspected Ronny did, too. The policeman put a little more pressure on the

accelerator, hoping to narrow the gap between him and the pickup truck. He didn’t want

to give the suspect any room to turn around once the backups cut him off.

He didn’t have to worry. Jimmy Demarest ran his last red light at the intersection of

County Route 517 where a Hess gasoline tanker had just made a delivery and was

heading to the next stop on his filling station route. Either Jimmy didn’t have time to stop

or he just didn’t try. The impact ignited a fireball that could be seen from miles around.

Once Ronny screeched to a stop, he had to back the patrol car up two blocks, the fire was

so hot.

When the two of them got out of the car, Ronny shook his head. “I told him to pull

over.”

54.
At the tunnel entrance, the cats stopped. They heard a sound coming from inside that was

growing louder. There were a couple of movable signs with writing on them off to the

side of the tunnel entrance, and the cats quickly hid behind them. Moments later a bus

and then two cars emerged from the tunnel. The second car was Jerry Jackson’s police
 208

cruiser, which turned right once it exited the tunnel and sped off, its lights flashing, its

siren screaming.

While they had been waiting for the bus and the cars to emerge, Yoda noticed stairs

that gave access to a raised catwalk leading into the tunnel. After the cars went by, she

nudged Jack and nodded toward the stairs. His eyes immediately brightened. He hadn’t

been relishing the thought of walking the length of the tunnel. After all, the highway was

bad enough, but at least it had a shoulder.

Yoda took the liberty of climbing the stairs first, followed by Jack, Meaper, Doug and

Zeus. After the first couple of minutes that they were in the tunnel, the cats were

convinced that this was going to be a breeze. The air smelled and the lighting was harsh,

but it was warmer than it was outside.

Then the first truck ambled by. The sound of the truck echoing off the tiled walls of

the tunnel made their teeth rattle. And after it passed came the fumes. All five of them

began to sneeze, and their eyes welled up with tears at the stench of the truck exhaust.

They were lucky they didn’t try this six hours earlier, during the rush hour, because if

they had, they would have turned back. But at this hour, approaching midnight, the traffic

in the tunnel was light. After the exhaust dissipated, they stopped sneezing and their eyes

began to clear.

“Let’s pick up the pace,” Jack said to Yoda in front of him. “Who knows how many

more of these are going to come by?”

 209

Jack got his answer a moment later when a bus rounded a turn ahead of them in the

tunnel and came into view. They could see black plumes of smoke behind the bus as it

barreled toward them.

“Get ready,” Yoda hollered. The sound of the bus’s motor grew louder by the second.

When it passed them, they were at the point where the tunnel bottomed out, and all five

of the cats felt like their spirits had bottomed out, too, as they waited for the cloud of

exhaust to hit them. When it did, it was worse than they expected. Suddenly all five of

them were retching. It looked like some kind of hairball contest.

Yoda thought her throat was on fire. Doug felt like he’d coughed up his tail. Meaper’s

one eye shed two eyes’ worth of tears. Jack was alternately sneezing and puking, and

then wincing with the pain it caused his sore belly.

Zeus had thrown up so many times that he passed out for a few moments, and had

fallen way behind the others, who through it all kept trudging forward. When he realized

he was alone, he mustered up the strength to run in spite of the pain in his lungs and

throat. He ended up crashing into Doug’s butt; his eyes were so teary from the exhaust,

he could barely see.

“Hey, what gives, Zeus?” Doug half snarled, half coughed.

“I couldn’t see!” Zeus cried. He suddenly thought: What I wouldn’t give to be locked

in that closet again, only to find this was just a bad dream.

“Well, keep your eyes open. We’ll be out of this soon enough,” Doug said, sensing

that even Zeus knew better.

If he did, he kept his mouth shut about it.

 210

When they rounded the bend where they had first seen the bus, they couldn’t see the

light at the end of the tunnel, since it was dark. But they did see lights—flashing lights—

at what looked like the end of the tunnel in the distance at the top of a long rise.

The cats approached the mouth of the tunnel uneasily. There was a policeman standing

in the middle of the road. His patrol car was blocking the entrance, and the lights on the

roof were flashing.

“Go ahead, Yode,” Jack said. “He’s not looking for us.”

Yoda sensed the same thing as she crept slowly forward on the catwalk. The cop was

twirling a baton, looking into the heart of the tunnel for any sign of headlights. The police

force wasn’t paying him to be on the lookout for five dangerous felines. Still, Yoda didn’t

plan to lollygag around when they got out into the fresh air.

The cop didn’t appear to see them at all when they reached the stairs at the tunnel exit.

The cats soon found out why. There was a car approaching from behind them.

“Let’s go!” Yoda cried, and all five of them sprinted down the steps and around a

corner into some bushes. They could hear the sound of brakes squeaking as the vehicle

came to a stop, and then they could hear the policeman talking. The cats peered through

the bushes’ branches and saw the cop wave the car through. It made a right turn and

vanished into the night.

“Which way do we go now?” Yoda whispered to no one in particular.

“I was thinking about that very thing,” Jack said. “Let me think. We got three choices.

Go left, go right or go straight,” he said, nodding toward a road that began across the

street on the other side of the traffic light.

 211

“We ain’t going left,” he continued. “If we go right, we would eventually hit that road

that the bridge was on. But Mingles said we wouldn’t have to walk all the way back

down along the river. He said there was a more direct route.”

They all looked across the street.

“I vote that-a-way,” Meaper said.

“Me, too,” Jack said. The others all nodded, and when they were sure the policeman’s

attention was on the tunnel again, they crept across the street.

55.
Basil Macauley woke himself up with his own snoring. I better watch it or I’m liable to

really fall asleep, he thought. Then he realized he really had: the luminous face of his old

Timex said it was twenty-seven after five.

Basil’s head jerked up and he looked around him. It was still dark, barely, but he could

see details of the backyard he couldn’t see before.

How could I fall asleep, he wondered. And then he remembered the dream.

It was a familiar one. Like many people, Basil was a slave to a recurring dream, one

that was about as welcome as a migraine:

He was back in Australia, and he was running through the streets of Sydney—running

for his life. Only there were no people on the streets. There never were. Only cars and

trucks, deserted, doors open, radios playing in some of them. Nobody was in sight. And
 212

yet he kept running. He could feel his chest heaving, a chilly river of sweat running down

his back. Someone was chasing him. Someone was after him, had been after him for so

long. He had to keep running, had to keep moving. They were after him. He never saw

them but he knew they were there, relentless in their pursuit. They always wanted the

same thing, and it was always something he didn’t have. They were gaining on him. He

could hear their breath, their footfalls echoing off the empty buildings. He couldn’t see

them but he could feel them coming, faster, faster, he had to move faster…

Basil felt his eyelids fluttering again and he slapped himself on the cheek to wake

himself up. He had to think.

On the bright side, it was still pretty dark, and he hadn’t been caught. On the dark side,

it was about to get light, and people would be getting up. He couldn’t stay where he was.

Basil muttered a favorite curse. There was no true bright or dark side to his situation.

His truck would stick out if it were the only vehicle on the road and yet it would be

instantly recognizable in the daylight from far away.

He had to go now. He opened the door of the truck slowly and gingerly eased himself

out onto the lawn. The nap had allowed the pain in his ankle to subside, but it came

roaring back as he stood up. He purposely left the door open and limped as stealthily as

he could around the truck, remaining in the shadows that the house provided from the

streetlights out front. He was still reasonably sure there was no one in the house.

Basil peered around the side of the house. He saw, heard nothing. Then he turned

around and gimped his way across the backyard and peered around the other corner.

Again, nothing. Still unconvinced, he crept out along the side of the house and got behind
 213

a big rhododendron. His eyes scanned the street in front of the house. Nothing to see but

an occasional parked car and one or two garbage receptacles whose owners had neglected

to bring back in after Friday morning’s pickup. Not a creature was stirring…yet.

Basil felt relief wash over him like a tropical breeze, which was an odd feeling on an

early Halloween morning, but welcome nonetheless. He stole back across the backyard,

checking out the front of the pickup for the first time. It was hard to get the full picture in

the dark, but Basil could tell that the damage could have been much worse, given the

beating the front end took plowing through the roadblock. He picked some loose broken

shards of glass out of the right headlight and tossed them into a bush beside the detached

garage. There was no smell of antifreeze or gas. The truck looked drivable.

He heaved his way slowly back into the driver’s seat and quietly closed the door. Then

when he started the truck, the engine backfired loudly. Basil muttered a curse under his

breath as a light went on in the house next door. He decided he’d better get moving. He

slowly backed the truck onto the driveway, leaving the headlight off.

Seeing no traffic coming from either direction, Basil eased the truck out onto the street

and proceeded in the direction he had been heading before. He had no intention of

returning to the scene of the crime.

Until that moment, Basil hadn’t really thought about what he would do next. He

decided he’d had enough excitement for one night. The cats be damned; he was going to

head home. But he would take the long way.

56.
 214

Onward the weary troop of cats trudged through the dead of night. It had been hours now

since they left the tunnel behind them. There was almost no shoulder at all to this road,

but now that didn’t matter. There were no cars now. Only the sounds one hears when

midnight has long since passed—sounds that Doug, Yoda and Zeus had never heard

before. And one other sound—one that Yoda knew only too well.

It was Zeus. He was dreaming. Even though he was on his feet and walking, it was

unmistakable. He was dreaming.

At home, on the bed or the couch, when Zeus dreamed, he chattered. It was the same

sound Yoda made when she saw a bird out in the backyard.

Richita-richita-richit-rich.

In his dream, Zeus was laying on the people’s bed, licking turkey-flavored baby food

from a spoon. One of the people, the nice one, was holding the spoon and smiling down

on him. The other, the normally not-so-nice one, was scratching his lower back in just the

right spot.

Richita-richita-richit-rich.

“Who’s making that ruh-racket?” Jack said.

“It’s zuh-Zeus,” Meaper replied. It was only then that they realized how cold it had

gotten. They were shivering.

“He’s in druh-dreamland,” Yoda said. Her toe pads were starting to feel numb from

the cold.

“Well, wake up, Zeus!” Jack said, loudly enough. “This is nuh-no time to be

sleeping.”
 215

“Huh? What?” Zeus said.

“I said wake up. That’s all,” Jack said.

“I’m awake,” Zeus snapped, annoyed.

“Glad to hear it,” Yoda said snidely.

Truth was, Yoda was feeling pretty sleepy herself. So were all of them. The catnap

they’d grabbed in the back of the truck had been canceled out by the harrowing ride that

followed and that creepy, nauseating trip through the tunnel. The fact was, they would all

welcome a few passing cars or trucks right now; that would help keep them alert. For as

much as they all would love to lay down and take a snooze, they didn’t dare. Not here, on

a dark, sparsely lighted road bordered on each side by thick woods, home to who knows

what. Or whom.

One thing that had been working in their favor most of the night was the weather. It

had been a cloudless night earlier, and a full harvest moon had been shining down on

them. But that was changing now. Clouds had moved in along with a chilly breeze, and

all of them had felt a few raindrops.

“What’s that up ahead, Jack?” Doug said, the sound of his voice once again shocking

the troop.

They all looked up and saw an aura of light above the trees beyond an upcoming bend

in the road.

“It’s something, that’s for sure,” Zeus said.

 216

Jack stopped, halting the troop, and turned around and looked at Zeus. So did Meaper,

Yoda and Doug. Nobody said anything. Then Jack turned around again and the cats

moved on.

When they rounded the bend they could see the “something” that Zeus had alluded to

minutes before: It was a lighted parking lot.

Cat minds were racing, turning thoughts into hopes.

“You think that might be the market, Jack?” Yoda was almost whispering as she said

it.

“We’re gonna find out pretty quick.”

As they got closer to the lights, their hopes became brighter as well. They could make

out the outlines of a few cars in the parking lot, which was in keeping with the market.

Even in the wee hours, there were always cars parked out front. Most of them belonged to

the employees on the night shift.

“I’ve got dibs on the big shelf in the back,” Meaper said, referring to one of the primo

nooks to sack out on at the Spot.

But Meaper spoke too soon. It wasn’t the market they were approaching. It was an all-

night diner. The cats didn’t know it was a diner, or even what a diner was; they just knew

it wasn’t the market.

None of them said anything as they crept past the parking lot. None of them had to.

Their disappointment went without saying.

They were almost past the parking lot when one of them broke the silence.
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“I’m hungry,” Zeus cried. Jack stopped in his tracks. Just as he heard Zeus’s

anguished whine, the smell of fish—cooked fish—wafted across Jack’s nostrils.

“Hey,” he said to the others. “Smell that?” The others lifted their heads and sniffed

deep.

“Yeah!” Yoda said.

“Oh, baby!” Meaper said.

“I do, I do!” Zeus cried.

“And how!” roared Doug.

“Come on, follow me,” Jack said. And follow they did. Jack led them across the

parking lot, in between a couple of parked cars and around the side of the diner. Jack

smiled as he turned the corner and peered into the diner’s backyard. Sitting there in the

darkness were two big, familiar-looking oblong masses. They were Dumpsters.

57.
“Marty, where are you? I’ve been so worried!”

“Mare, don’t worry, I’m fine,” Martin Katz said into the pay phone. “I’m sorry I didn’t

get a chance to call earlier.”

“Where are you, Marty?”

“I’m with a policeman on Gladstone Avenue, over by the tunnel. Look, it’s hard to

explain. There was an accident and—”

 218

“An accident?” Mary said. “Are you all right?”

“No, it wasn’t me. I mean, yes, I’m fine. I wasn’t involved in the accident, although

the guy who was involved sideswiped my car.”

“So you were in an accident.”

“Yes, but not this accident.”

“Mar-teeee!” Mary whined.

“I’ll explain it all later, Mare. Look, this guy that was in the accident. He might have

been the guy who called you.”

“Does he have an accent?”

“I don’t know, Mare,” Martin said. “And I never will. He didn’t make it.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Mare, are you still there?”

“What did you mean when you said he didn’t make it? What kind of accident was it?”

“It was bad, Mare.”

“How bad?”

Now the silence was on Martin’s end.

“Marty?”

“The guy’s pickup truck hit a gas truck. Big fireball.”

“Marty, tell me. Were the cats in that truck?”

Martin held the phone away and pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment.

“I don’t know, Mare. I don’t know if we ever will. But…”

“But what?”
 219

“There were cats in the back of the truck earlier tonight, when the guy sideswiped me.

I don’t know if they were our cats, but there were cats in the truck. I saw them.”

Silence again.

Ronny Metzger had gotten back into the patrol car and was looking impatiently at

Martin. He raised his arm and tapped on his watch repeatedly.

“Listen, Mare, I gotta go. I have to go with the policeman and give a statement at the

stationhouse. I’ll be home in a little while. We’ll talk.”

“Okay,” Mary Katz said, and hung up.

58.
“I knew it!” Jack cried, looking at the Dumpsters behind the diner. “Anyplace people sell

food, they always got garbage.”

As if on cue, a back door to the diner opened and a man came out with a big plastic

bag in his hand. He tossed the bag into one of the Dumpsters and went back inside.

“What are we waiting for?” Yoda said. With that, the cats hopped up into the

Dumpster like a pack of crazed wolves. Nails and teeth tore into plastic Glad bags,

ripping them open like tissue paper.

To Luis Rivera, head cook and chief garbage officer on the graveyard shift at Ruby’s

Diner, it sounded eerie, like vultures having at it with a corpse. The screen door had shut

behind him but it hadn’t shut out the sounds of the carnage taking place in the Dumpster.
 220

“I swear,” Luis said, although he didn’t. He pushed the screen door open gingerly,

trying to avoid making the hinges creak.

Jack and Doug hit the mother lode on the first shot. The bag they ripped into was

chock full of paper plates loaded with hunks of breaded fish and cheese sticks and

marinara sauce stuck to them.

Ordinarily, Yoda would turn up her nose at such dreck. She was tempted to do so now,

so embarrassed was she at becoming so destitute, so utterly downtrodden, that she had to

scavenge garbage bins for food. Even so, scavenge she did, scarfing up pieces of fried

people-food that didn’t have a chance of making it down to her stomach without coming

back up again.

Zeus was all the way inside the bag. As soon as Doug and Jack ripped it open, Zeus

bolted through the hole in the bag, drawn by the smell of…something. He didn’t know

what it was, but he had to have it.

“Aye, aye, aye!” Luis Rivera said, peering into the Dumpster at the cats. “Vamanos,

maricon!” he yelled, banging his broom on the side of the Dumpster.

The cats didn’t need a translation. Doug took one last chomp on a piece of potato skin

and leaped out of the Dumpster, careening off Luis’s shoulder as he did it. Jack and Yoda

hopped out the opposite side, hitting the ground with an echoing thud and scampering off

the way they came.

Meaper took his time climbing up to the ledge of the garbage bin.

Luis looked at him with an astonished glare. Meaper looked back with a sneer. And

burped.
 221

“Aye, carumba!” Luis cried, catching the brunt of Meaper’s burp face first.

He went to smack the cat open-handed but he missed, and Meaper nonchalantly

hopped down and trotted off after the others.

When the cats rendezvoused at the front of the diner, they thought they were in the

clear, but they were wrong. A couple of men walked out of the diner. Staggered out

might be more like it. One of them spotted the cats right away. All ten of them. The cats

had no way of knowing that this was the diner all the drunks came to after the bars in

town closed.

“Hey, Charlie, look at all them cats!” Yoda heard one of them say.

“Yeah, I see ’em, Luke. I don’t like cats much.”

“Me neither,” Luke said. “Whaddya say we kick us some cat butt?”

“Sounds good to me!”

It was dawning on Yoda how good she and Doug and Zeus had had it all this time in

their house. All too quickly she was being introduced to the dark underbelly of the human

race.

“Run! Quick!” she hissed, and the five of them scattered in all directions. Yoda didn’t

have time to translate what the two men had said, and it wasn’t immediately clear that the

threat was the two people who just emerged from the diner. For all the other cats knew, it

could have been the guy with the broom from the back chasing them.

Consequently, Jack took off in the direction of Luke and Charlie, meaning to bypass

them and hide underneath one of the parked cars.

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He didn’t make it that far. Luke’s right foot caught him fat in the stomach—his sore,

sore stomach.

The kick not only sent Jack flying about ten feet; it also knocked the wind out of him.

“Good one, Luke!” Charlie howled.

“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?” Luke was quite proud.

“I’m gonna get me one,” Charlie said, and he set off looking for the others, who by

now had gathered at the edge of the road, about where they were when the wafting smell

of seafood grabbed Jack’s attention.

Charlie squinted his eyes, looking in vain between parked cars for a sign of the furry

things.

“Hey, where’s Jack?” Zeus said as the troop prepared to resume its journey, double-

time. Yoda, Doug and Meaper looked around. Then all of them looked back at the

parking lot. One of the men was walking between cars, bending over now and then to

look underneath a chassis. The other was standing next to something on the pavement. It

was moving a little. The man was looking down on it, making sounds. Then he kicked it

for the second time. Hard.

“That’s Jack!” Yoda cried and bolted toward him. Without thinking, the other three

followed her, not even noticing that the other man had heard Yoda’s cry and was

shambling toward them.

Doug was the closest behind Yoda, and he believed she was running to Jack. But once

again, Doug was wrong. Yoda was heading for Luke.

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Luke was standing there laughing out loud, watching Jack writhe in pain from his

second kick.

“That had to hurt!” Luke said, laughing all the louder. He was having such a good

time that he didn’t even notice the gray blur in his peripheral vision.

Yoda had a lot of experience jumping up onto people’s shoulders. But this was no

jump. This was a perfectly timed leap, one that owed to pure instinct, not practice,

although she’d had some practice in the last twenty-four hours. Her unclipped nails were

at their sharpest and fully extended when all four paws found purchase on the flesh of

Luke’s shoulder. Her jaws were wide open and when she landed, she sank them deep into

Luke’s neck.

Luke wasn’t far away from tipping over to begin with, but the surprise, the force of the

impact and the pain knocked him down. The pavement did the rest. Luke’s head hit hard,

and Yoda could tell right away she wouldn’t be having any more trouble from him.

Charlie was another story. He saw Luke fall and he stopped in his tracks.

“Great googly moogly!” he said, rubbing his eyes, as if that would help him see any

straighter.

Zeus saw Charlie first. He was third in line behind Doug, and he had the line to see the

movement out of the corner of his eye better than Doug or Meaper.

Zeus watched Charlie stop, then attempt to run in a zig-zaggy trot that didn’t bode

well for Yoda or Jack. Zeus stopped in his tracks long enough for Charlie to get too far

past him to see him. Then Zeus set off, slowly at first, then building to a sprint. For Zeus,

his experience at back-jumping on people definitely did pay off. He leaped up onto
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Charlie’s back, sinking his nails into the skin on the back of his neck, and then let himself

fall back and ride like a cowboy. It wasn’t a long ride.

Charlie shrieked and wheeled around, thinking somebody might have lashed him with

a whip. The move sent Zeus flying, and although he was cat enough to land on all fours,

he ended up in a patch of rough gravel, and it smarted.

“Oodly-ooh!” Zeus cried. Charlie heard him and wheeled back around, wincing in

pain from the gashes on his back.

“I’ll get you for that, you little—UMPHH!” Charlie didn’t get to finish whatever it

was he was going to call Zeus because Doug picked that moment to join the People

Jumpers of America Club. He was only able to hurl his eighteen-and-a-half-pound

carcass as high as Charlie’s groin, but that was enough. Charlie doubled over in pain, and

then tipped over and fell on his side, his hands covering his privates.

With that, Doug, Zeus and Meaper were all over him, scratching and biting, snarling

all the way. By the time Charlie was able to get up and stagger away, he was a tattered,

bloody mess in dire need of a tetanus shot, some stitches and another drink.

Doug, Zeus and Meaper watched him go, leaving his unconscious buddy Luke behind

without a thought. Then they turned and walked over to join Yoda, who was sitting

beside Jack. Like Luke, Jack wasn’t moving, but the cats knew he wasn’t unconscious.

One of his front legs was twisted backwards underneath his body. His eyes were open but

he wasn’t looking at anything. Jack was dead.

“There’s nothing you could have done, Yoda,” Meaper said.

“He’s right, Yode,” Doug said.

 225

“I know,” she said, still looking at Jack’s broken body. “I know.”

They all sat there for a minute, silent, not really thinking about anything.

“We better get going,” Meaper said finally. “But let’s move Jack somewhere where he

won’t get run over by these cars.”

It was a gruesome task. Using their teeth, they dragged Jack away to the edge of the

parking lot and laid him to rest in some bushes. They all looked at him again one last

time, then set off without a word. Almost.

“Oodly-ooh,” said Zeus.

59.
The sun was just peeking over the horizon when Basil Macauley turned onto Route 517,

so he didn’t even have to turn his headlights on. He only made it about a block and a half

when he was greeted with a red stream of brake lights ahead of him.

Traffic? At this hour? On a Saturday? It didn’t make sense to him. Ahead in the

distance, Basil could see a plume of white smoke rising high into the air. It looked to
 226

Basil like whatever was burning was about where he was headed: the intersection of 517

and Gladstone Avenue.

He was planning to take either the tunnel or the bridge, whichever looked safer, but

now he could see he would have to find another way to get there. Where there’s smoke,

there’s fire, he reasoned, and where there’s fire, there’s usually the law.

Basil waited for a couple of oncoming cars to pass, then made a K-turn and headed

back the way he came. He turned left back onto James Street and slowly motored up the

street, eyeing the house where he had spent part of the night. The house was still dark, but

there were lights on in some of the other houses that hadn’t been on before. A new day

was under way.

He made the left turn onto Grove Avenue and as he approached the stop sign at Route

15, Basil remembered why he hadn’t come this way in the first place. He was now only a

few blocks from where the roadblock had been. What was that old saw about the criminal

always returning to the scene of the crime? Basil wondered: Do police really believe that?

He looked both ways, saw an opening in the traffic and eased the truck out into a slow

left turn onto Route 15. He could see the traffic light at Park Avenue now. It looked

normal. The police cars he’d bashed through appeared to be gone. Basil gave the motor a

little more gas.

If things were normal and he was just going home, he’d have gone straight on Route

15 and he’d have been home in fifteen minutes. But he knew things were not normal,

even as he turned left at the light onto Park without incident.

 227

He turned on the radio, mentally kicking himself for not thinking of that before. Preset

button number four gave him AM 1430, which was good for traffic, local news and

weather, and not much else. But that was all he needed this morning.

A commercial about the latest cure for hair loss was on, and Basil scowled. Traffic

was light on Park Avenue, which it should have been at this hour. Basil kept his eyes

peeled for any sign of a patrol car. He would have to see the cop before the cop saw him

or he was sunk. But what else could he do? He couldn’t have stayed where he was, he

reasoned, the 800-number for the hair-loss cure ringing in his ears. He also couldn’t have

gone the way he originally wanted to go because of the apparent fire on Gladstone

Avenue. This was his only choice.

Then Basil heard the familiar bell and jingle that said the radio news at the top of the

hour was beginning. It was 7 a.m.

“Topping our local headlines this morning, investigators say they still don’t know if

the pickup truck that collided with a fuel tanker earlier this morning was the same one

that barreled through a police roadblock in Vineyard Village last night. The 2 a.m.

collision caused a spectacular explosion and fire that lit up the sky for miles and is still

burning at this hour, although officials say it is under control. The driver of the tanker

escaped with minor burns and is being treated for smoke inhalation at St. Elizabeth’s

Hospital in Bridgeton. The driver of the pickup truck was killed—in fact, burned beyond

recognition, police said, and so apparently was his truck. Forensics experts are expected

to—”

Basil clicked off the radio and a wide, goofy grin slowly appeared on his face.
 228

“This is too good to be true, mate,” he laughed. “If that don’t beat all! They think he’s

me! Hah!”

No wonder he didn’t see any police cars, he thought. They had other fish to fry, and a

right good fire to fry them on. He snickered at that image.

“Poor lad,” he said aloud, wincing as he pressed harder on the accelerator.

Basil had been strongly considering taking the bridge, since he’d be better able to see

what was going on, on both sides, from the Gladstone Avenue approach. But now he

changed his mind.

The traffic light in front of the tunnel was red when he crested the big hill on Park, but

it turned green when he got about halfway down the other side. Again, there were no

police cars, not even any traffic in sight. The Macauley luck was coming through again.

Still, Basil was skeptical cruising into the tunnel. There was a minivan in sight ahead

of him at first, but then it rounded that first bend. Basil half-expected to come around that

bend and see nothing but the taillights of stopped cars. End game. If that was the case and

one car got behind him in the tunnel, he’d be trapped, and he knew it. But when he

rounded the bend, the only taillights he saw were those of the minivan disappearing in the

distance where the tunnel bottomed out.

Basil’s eyes brightened like a child’s on Christmas morning. When he reached the

bottoming-out spot—which is hard to discern when one gets to it since the bottoming-out

is much more gradual than it looks from afar—the minivan’s taillights were still the only

ones he could see. The van was still quite a ways in front of him, but…

The taillights were brighter now. Basil was looking at brake lights.
 229

Suddenly Basil’s eyes weren’t so bright anymore. The van hadn’t even reached the

last bend in the tunnel and the driver was already hitting the brakes. That meant traffic.

Significant traffic.

Basil’s mind started racing even as his truck slowed down, approaching the back of

the van. What if they had set up a checkpoint just outside the tunnel to screen vehicles?

Were they still looking for him after all?

To Basil’s relief, he soon noticed that the minivan and the other cars ahead of it

weren’t stopped dead. They moved a few car lengths, then stopped; moved a little more,

then stopped again. It was frustrating and reassuring at the same time.

After Basil’s truck made it around the last bend, he could see sunlight streaming in

through the mouth of the tunnel in the distance. He hoped it wouldn’t take too long to get

out. He had developed a bad case of gas cramps, but he didn’t want to open the window

in the tunnel.

About five minutes later, Basil’s eyes brightened again. Now he could see the source

of the traffic: A bus was sitting just outside the mouth of the tunnel, its front end hitched

to the back of a tow truck. Macauley’s law had held true again. When a bus decides to

break down, it usually does it in a tunnel or on a bridge.

There was also a police car parked outside the tunnel, which startled Basil when he

saw it on his way out. But this cop was only interested in the bus driver, who was

standing next to the cop in front of the tow truck, apparently explaining what happened.

The cop never even saw the pickup truck amble by. As Basil passed him, he opened his

window and let one fly.

 230

He went straight at the traffic light on River Road. He had decided to head to the store

before going home. But first he needed something to eat, and Ruby’s Diner was just up

the street a little ways.

When he rumbled into the parking lot, he put his hand into his pocket and pulled out

some bills. “That ought to be enough,” he said to himself.

Inside, Basil grabbed his usual end seat at the counter.

“Well, look what the cat has dragged in,” said Marisol, the waitress who worked the

counter in the morning.

“Don’t talk to me about cats, love,” Basil said, lighting a cigarette. “Two eggs over

easy, hash browns and coffee.”

“Jou better have cash. Boss say no more credit for jou.”

“Aye, I’ve got cash,” Basil said, flipping the bills on the counter.

Marisol smiled as she wrote down his order on the guest check. “Speaking about cats,”

she said, “we had some excitement with those ones here last night.”

“How so?” Basil said, feigning interest.

“Luis, the cook who work in the nights, he say he chased some cats out of the

Dumpster.”

Basil covered his mouth to hide a big yawn.

“Then these two guy who were eating here, jou know, when they are leaving, they see

the cats in the front and they start to go after them, jou know, kicking them.”

“The poor little things,” Basil said.

 231

“Oh jeah? The ‘poor little things’ fought back,” Marisol said, smiling as she served

Basil his coffee. “Jou know guys name Charlie and Luke, they drinkers? I think maybe

one of them works with jou, no?”

Basil shook his head.

“Anyhow, they both went to the hospital. These cats, they tear them up!”

Basil’s ears perked up at that. “How many cats were there?”

“Luis, he say five. But now it four, I guess. One of them die.”

“Who died?”

“One of the cats. Luis find it this morning, when his shift ends.”

“What did the cat look like?” Basil’s interest was piqued.

“It was a big black cat, I think. Very bad luck, that one.”

Basil stood up, left a dollar on the counter and gimped out of the diner as fast as he

could.
 232

60.
Martin and Mary Katz were listening to the same radio newscast Basil Macauley had

heard in his truck. They were sitting at the kitchen table. Both of them looked awful.

Neither had gotten any sleep all night, yet sleep was the last thing either of them was

thinking about.

“They said they still weren’t able to confirm that it was the same truck,” Mary said

dully.

“That’s true,” Martin replied, snapping off the radio when the announcer moved on to

the next story.

A heavy silence fell upon the room then. Mary picked up their coffee mugs and

refilled them with what was left in the Mr. Coffee pot on the counter.

“Want me to make another pot?” she asked.

“No, I’m good, hon.”

She turned and looked at him, although he didn’t know she was looking at him.

“You’re good, all right.”

Martin craned his neck back slowly and glared at her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, plopping his coffee mug down in front of him.

“What were you thinking, chasing that guy around in the middle of the night? If you’d

just left him alone, those cats might be alive this morning. Still lost, maybe, but alive.”

Her voice was cracking with fatigue, grief, anger, you name it. “Besides, you left me
 233

sitting here all night by myself, not knowing what was coming. That guy had our phone

number. He could have had our address. I was all alone, Martin.”

Martin was caught flatfooted, if that is possible for someone who is sitting down.

“I told you on the phone at the police station what happened,” he said. “How was I

supposed to know what was going to happen on the way home? I expected to be home

twenty minutes later.”

“I was expecting you, too.”

Martin was flabbergasted.

“Okay, I guess I should have ignored the sight of those shining eyes peering over the

tailgate of the truck. I’m sure that’s what you would have done, right, Mare?”

“I don’t know what I would have done.”

The heavy silence returned, and Mary sat down and put her face in her hands.

That was when the phone rang. Mary made no move to pick it up, so Martin did.

“Marty!”

“Phil? I didn’t expect to hear from you. What are you doing up?”

“I could ask the same of you. Metzger briefed me about your exploits last night. You

don’t know when to go home, do you?”

Martin sighed heavily. “It’s a long story, Phil.”

“Listen, I thought you might want to hear this. I left word with the desk sergeant to

give the manager of that supermarket a call the first thing this morning and ask him if he

had any employees with British or Australian accents. And guess what?”

“What?”
 234

“Bingo. A custodian. From Australia. It’s probably a coincidence. The caller could

have even been putting on that accent. Then again, this guy might just be stupid.

Anyway, I’m taking a ride down there now to talk to the manager. I’ll let you know what

I find out.”

“Anything I can do, Phil?”

“Get some sleep, Marty.”

“Okay, Phil.” Marty hung the phone up quietly.

“What was that about?” Mary said.

“That was Phil.”

“I know it was Phil, Marty. What did he have to say?”

“He said he’s still working on it,” Marty said. “Hey, let’s go to the store.”

“Now? Why?”

“I’ve got a hunch.”

61.
Doug was lost. Lost in a nightmare that would have sent him into the garage for half a

day if he were home. But he wasn’t home.

Only in the nightmare he didn’t know he wasn’t home. He only knew that he was

afraid. Things were around. Things he couldn’t see, but he could smell, feel. Hear.
 235

The fact was, in his dream, Doug was in the garage, as was his wont. He liked his

solitude there in the dark. He liked to be out there, contemplating…what? Well, he never

got around to figuring out what to contemplate, but that never stopped him.

In the dream, Doug’s attention was on this very subtle point of light, coming from the

middle of the garage door. This point of light had Doug’s attention because it had always

been there, but never this big. Doug’s pupils widened in fascination as he watched the

point of light turn into a spiraling fireball. He backed up on his haunches against the

barred cat hatch in the kitchen door.

“No!” Doug screamed in his dream. “No!” he screamed again, this time out loud, out

in the cold early morning.

“What’s the matter?” Yoda expected no answer and got none.

Doug was trembling; if cats could sweat, he’d have been sweating.

“You had a nightmare, that’s all,” Yoda said.

“What’s going on?” Zeus yawned, stretching his legs out straight.

Meaper growled and rolled over.

Fatigue had finally claimed victory over the troop of four sick, exhausted animals.

There was a clearing off to the side of the road where something, maybe a hot dog stand,

used to be. And they had crashed there, one upon another. If anyone had seen them,

they’d have looked like a cat train at the turnaround. Now Doug’s outburst had awakened

all of them.
 236

It was light out, and the number of cars passing by on the street was picking up. Doug

stood up and did a big Halloween back arch. That got them all on their feet. The back

arch is contagious for cats. It’s like yawning for people.

“We must have been out for hours,” Doug said, looking around. Sunlight was

reflecting off the brown leaves at the tops of the trees around them. “Let’s get moving.”

“Listen to Mister Boss Man,” Meaper snickered. “Who died and made you king?”

Doug, Yoda and Zeus all looked at him, incredulous. It had only been hours since Jack

was killed, and just a few hours before that that they had lost Buttons, Mingles and

Jingles.

“Sorry,” Meaper said finally. “You’re right; we ought to get going.”

With that, they hit the road again, with Doug taking the lead, followed by Yoda, Zeus

and Meaper. The cats were conscious of the fact that they were much more visible now in

the daylight, which was good or bad, depending on how you looked at it. They were less

likely to be run over by a car unintentionally. On the other hand, they were an easy target

for bad people, and Doug, Yoda and Zeus had gotten a crash course in how bad people

can be in the last twenty-four hours. Meaper had already known, but that didn’t make it

any less scary for him either.

After about an hour of silent marching drudgery, the shoulder of the road began to

widen and the cats began to see signs that they were coming into a more populated area.

They scurried across the outer island of a gas station where an attendant stood watching

them with some amusement.

 237

Just past the gas station was a McDonald’s, where a lot of cars seemed to be going.

The cats had to be very careful crossing the entrance and exit driveways. Beyond

McDonald’s was a car dealership, then a storage place. After they passed that, they came

to a traffic light with an Exxon station on the corner. Two cars were stopped at the light,

waiting for it to turn green. A few cars whizzed by on the cross street.

“Heads up here, fellas,” Meaper said, drawing a silent scowl from Yoda. “This can be

tricky.”

Yoda felt like saying “no kidding,” having seen Jingles become roadkill the night

before, but she let it pass. After a while, the light turned green and the cars sitting there

moved ahead. There was car across the street waiting to make a left turn.

“Wait till that one makes his turn,” Meaper said. “Then run for it.”

Which is what they did. They passed a Meineke muffler shop on the corner and

followed the road around a sharp curve to the right, after which the road straightened out.

“Look!” Meaper suddenly cried.

They all stopped in their tracks and peered ahead. In the distance they could see a big

sign atop a high pole beside a big parking lot. Doug, Yoda and Zeus could not read, but

even they recognized the sign in the distance. It was the one in front of the store where

this long, stupid nightmare had begun.

“We made it!” Meaper said. “We’re here!”

Yoda almost wept, she was so happy to see the sign, but she didn’t have time. Because

Doug started trotting, and she followed suit, with Zeus and Meaper behind her. Soon they

were at a gallop, traffic be damned.

 238

“Hold it,” a puffing Meaper said as they reached the edge of a clearing beside the

parking lot. The others did as he said, bowing to Meaper’s superior knowledge of the

area. Meaper walked up beside Doug, visibly winded. He peered around a telephone pole

at the edge of the gravel clearing next to the parking lot and surveyed the scene with his

one good eye.

“I’ve had my tussles with these birds that work here,” he muttered. “Can’t be too

careful.”

“Birds work here?” Zeus said.

The others looked at him and scowled, then looked back at the parking lot.

“Looks quiet enough,” Meaper said, satisfied. “Still, keep your eyes open. We’ll go

one at a time. Be less conspicuous that way. Zeus, you were the first one out of here. You

be the first to return. Head to the right side. The alleyway will lead you right back to the

Spot. On with you, now.”

Zeus looked at the others and trembled a bit.

“Oodly-ooh,” he said.

“Oh, don’t give us that, Zeus. Go ahead,” Yoda said. “It’ll be all right. We’ll be right

behind you.”

Doug nodded in agreement, and that seemed to satisfy Zeus. He crept off across the

gravel clearing toward the parking lot, which still wasn’t crowded with cars yet, it being

early. The sun was rising just above the trees behind the store, and most of the cars there

were still in the store’s shadow.

 239

Zeus stuck out like a sore thumb, his mostly white coat catching the sunlight as he

skulked across the gravel like a lion on the scorched plains of Kenya.

“Hurry up, Zeus!” Yoda hissed after him. Zeus turned and looked at her, then trotted

off toward the alley.

“All right, Yoda. Your turn,” Meaper said.

Yoda nodded and crept off, slowly at first, then easing into a trot. She stopped to join

Zeus, who was peering around the tire of a car parked in the first spot of the first row on

the right side of the lot. Then they both scooted into the alleyway.

“So far, so good,” Meaper said to Doug. “Off with you now. I’ll be right behind you.”

The two cats’ eyes, all three of them, met for a moment. Doug looked like he was

going to say something, but no words would come.

“Go on, get going. Time’s wasting,” Meaper said. Doug nodded.

There was something like a grin on old Meaper’s face as he watched Doug waddle off.

There was a grin on Basil Macauley’s face as well. It was a long shot that the cats

Marisol mentioned were the same cats he was looking for, but heaven knew Basil was a

sucker for long shots. His hands fidgeted on the wheel as he waited at the traffic light by

the Exxon station. He put the overhead visor down; the sun had risen above the trees

across the street and the bright light made his bloodshot eyes squint.

He eyed his gas gauge. The needle was pushing E pretty hard, but Basil didn’t want to

stop for gas. Besides, he only had enough money for a couple of gallons of gas. When the

light turned green, he stepped on the gas, wincing once again.

 240

Basil passed the Meineke shop, then rounded the bend he knew only too well. As he

approached the parking lot, he thought he saw something disappear around a telephone

pole at the edge of the woods. He eased his foot off the gas, letting the truck coast slowly

toward the clearing. As he turned in just past the telephone pole, he could see two cats—

one big, dark one, almost at the alleyway beside the store, and another gray stray heading

that way across the gravel clearing.

“Well, I’ll get you, anyway!” Basil snarled, stepping on the gas.

“Run, Doug, run!” Meaper yelled, his old flea-bitten legs trying to do what he was

telling Doug to do.

Doug stopped and turned to see Meaper frantically trying to muster up some speed in

the gravelly dirt as a big pickup truck rushed toward him from behind, spewing a cloud of

dust and gravel behind it. At that point, Doug let instinct take over and he tore down the

alleyway faster than he had ever run in his life, which was a good thing, because the truck

wasn’t slowing down either.

When Yoda and Zeus saw Doug coming, they knew there was trouble. All three of

them made a dash for the woods behind the store and hid behind the shed. Soon they

heard the sound of a vehicle rumbling down the alleyway toward the Dumpsters. Doug

could tell the truck had slowed down considerably. They all trembled as they heard the

engine shut off and the door slam.

62.
 241

Fifteen minutes earlier, Martin and Mary Katz were waiting in Mary’s Corolla when Phil

Hanley pulled into the Foodtown parking lot. They had decided to skip showers and just

threw on sweatshirts and jeans and baseball caps and jumped in the car. Phil didn’t

recognize them at first as they met him at the entrance.

“Marty? Mary! What are you guys doing here?” There was an annoyed edge to Phil’s

voice.

“I know it’s a long shot, Phil, but I—we—had to come. I can’t explain it.” Marty

knew it sounded weak, but it was the truth.

“All right, but look. I’m here on official business. Do me a favor and browse around

the store, do your grocery shopping, whatever, while I’m talking to this guy. When I’m

finished I’ll brief you on what I found out. Okay?”

Marty and Mary exchanged glances, then nodded.

“Good. Now if you’ll excuse me,” Phil said, walking briskly through the automatic

door. It was only then that Marty noticed Phil also was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans.

Gerry Nelson was staring quizzically at his computer when Phil knocked on the

molding around the open door to his office.

“Mr. Nelson?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Detective Hanley, police department,” Phil said, showing his badge.

 242

“Oh, come in, come in,” the store manager said, standing up. He was a fat guy, and he

also was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. He extended a sweaty hand to Phil. “Gerry

Nelson.”

“Good to meet you,” Phil said, shaking his hand, then wiping it on his sweatshirt.

“The cop, er, the officer on the phone told me someone might be by, but I didn’t think

anyone would be out so soon. I guess I was expecting a uniform, too.”

“Well, my normal uniform is a jacket and tie these days, but technically I’m off duty.”

“Have a seat, detective,” Gerry said. “I was just about to look up the personnel file on

the employee you’re interested in when I found my mouse on the wrong side of the

keyboard.”

“Janitors will get you every time.”

“This wasn’t just moved. Somebody unplugged it and moved it to the other side of the

keyboard.” Gerry was obviously miffed as he plugged the mouse back into its rightful

port. “If I ever find somebody playing with this computer, there will be hell to pay.”

“Does this happen often?” Phil said with interest, pulling a small notebook out of his

back pocket.

“First time that I know of,” Gerry said. “Not too bright, whoever it was.”

“Anything sensitive on there?

“Nothing that isn’t password protected,” Gerry said. “Now let’s see.”

Phil jotted some notes down in his notebook while the store manager clicked and

typed away.
 243

“Here we are. Macauley, Basil Ulysses. Custodian. Hired last March. Unremarkable

sort. Except for the accent, of course. No major black marks on his record. Let me make a

printout.” Gerry hit the button and the printer behind him went to work.

While they waited, Phil was scratching his head.

“Something on your mind, detective?”

“Yeah. That computer thing. The more I think about it, the curiouser and curiouser I

get.”

Gerry shrugged. “Probably nothing.” The printer finished printing, and Gerry grabbed

a single piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy paper. He started to hand it to Phil, then

pulled it back. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”

Phil mulled the question for a moment. “To use your words, it’s probably nothing. But

somebody with or feigning an English or Australian accent made a phone call from the

pay phone in front of your store last night for the purpose of extortion, which as you

probably know is a felony.”

“And you think somebody who works here did it?” Gerry looked amused.

“Highly unlikely, but we have to rule it out.”

The amused look on Gerry’s face slowly faded and he handed the printout to Phil.

“For what it’s worth, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree with this guy.”

“Why?” Phil said, glancing at the sheet of paper.

“I don’t think this fellow could extort his way out of paper bag. Between you and me,

my take is he has a one-track mind, if you know what I mean.”

“Come again?”
 244

“One track. As in Monmouth Park.” Gerry winked.

“Ponies?”

Gerry nodded slowly.

Phil pondered that for a moment. “Compulsive gamblers can be desperate men. Why

do you think I’m barking up the wrong tree?”

Gerry shrugged again. “Call it a hunch. I just don’t give this guy that much credit.”

“Is he working today?”

“Should be. Usually works ten to six. Let me check.” Gerry clicked and typed away

again, retrieving a work schedule file. “Yes. He’s due in today at ten.”

Phil looked at his watch. It was a quarter after eight. That presented an awkward

predicament. It was a lot of time to wait, yet if he took a ride out to the address listed on

the printout, Phil might miss him.

“I guess I’ll stick around, if you don’t mind.”

“Knock yourself out,” Gerry said, forgetting for a moment who he was talking to. “I

mean… fine.”

Phil stood up and was turning to leave when a thought struck him. “Mr. Nelson?”

“Gerry,” Gerry insisted.

“Gerry, when was the last time you used the computer before this morning?”

“Yesterday afternoon, about three o’clock. I had to leave early yesterday. Why?”

“So whoever switched the mouse around did it after three o’clock yesterday?”

“Had to be.”
 245

Phil scratched his chin. “Do me a favor. Launch your Web browser and check your

History file.”

Gerry eyed Phil suspiciously but did as he was asked.

“Don’t worry. I’m not prying into what sites you’ve been visiting,” Phil said with a

wink. “I just want to see if you recognize the most recent ones.”

When Explorer was ready, Gerry used his pull-down menu to open his History.

Suddenly a puzzled look came over his face.

“This is weird. The most recent site is the Cat Fancier’s Association. Of which I am

definitely not a member.” Gerry gave Phil a quizzical look. “That makes no sense.”

Phil smiled. “Yes it does. You mind showing me around a little bit?”

63.
Basil Macauley had already forgotten the brief glee he felt when the front tire of the F-

150 pickup crushed the cat he was chasing. There had been another cat ahead of it, and it
 246

apparently had gotten away. Or so it thought. Basil had other ideas. He thought he hated

cats before, but now he really hated cats. Cats were the reason he was in the shape he was

in, and he planned to take it out on the nearest cat at hand.

But he needed some help. He went to the back door of the store and, as expected, it

was unlocked. Basil opened the door slowly and shuffled down the hall with his wrecked

foot.

He was hoping he was early enough to get into the meat department and grab a meat

cleaver before the morning shift came in. He limped past the bulletin board plastered with

shift schedules and assorted personnel memos and turned the corner slowly. He peered

through the portal-like windows in the swinging doors to the meat department and found

it was empty at the moment. Then he glanced the other way, down the hall where the

doors to the deli and prepared foods departments were. No one was in sight there either.

Basil was about to push the door open when he heard footsteps behind him.

“Mac?”

Basil froze in place, which left him tottering on the linoleum. Finally he put his hand

against the wall beside the door to the meat department to steady himself.

“Mac? That you?”

“Aye, Jose, it is,” he said, addressing his supervisor, Jose Mejia, without even looking

at him.

“You’re in kind of early, aren’t you? And what happened to you?”

 247

“Twisted me ankle, mate,” Basil said with a grunt. “Happened this morning. I wanted

to go to the clinic but I couldn’t find me insurance card. Thought maybe it fell out of me

pocket here somewhere.”

“Well, let me help you look for it,” Jose said. “Here, put a hand on my shoulder and

I’ll walk you over to a chair. You really shouldn’t be putting any weight on that thing.”

Jose walked Basil over to a chair against the wall opposite the meat department.

“Many thanks, Jose,” Basil said.

“No problemo, amigo,” Jose said with a grin. “Now where do you think you lost the

card?”

Basil stifled an urge to laugh. In Grant’s Tomb, he thought.

“Well, let’s see. I finished up me shift down the hall there last night, near Nelson’s

office. Might try there, mate. That’s where I was going to look.”

“Okay, man. Now don’t go away. Let me take a look.” Jose gave Basil a wink and a

nod and off he went. Basil didn’t waste any time. He pulled himself up with the help of

the back of the chair and limped across the hallway to the door to the meat department.

He put his hand on the wall to steady himself and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he

pushed the door open.

When he entered the room, right there on the counter to his left was a gleaming meat

cleaver. He was about to reach for it when movement across the room caught his eye. The

wall on the opposite side of the room was glass from waist-height up and gave onto the

store. It was designed that way so shoppers could watch the butchers preparing the fresh

meat. There was a woman in the store looking at the meat case. At first he thought she
 248

was looking at him, but she wasn’t. It was just some little wifey shopping for meatloaf.

Gingerly, Basil grabbed the handle of the cleaver and slipped it into the side pocket of his

jacket. Then he backed up through the swinging door quietly. He felt elated.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing, man?”

Basil was so startled he nearly fell down. Jose had come from seemingly nowhere.

“I, um,” Basil said, stalling. “I thought I heard someone calling. I saw the lady in the

store through the window. Looked like she wanted some help, but I guess she found what

she needed.” He held his breath and nodded toward the door to the meat department. Jose

went over and looked through the portal windows in the door. The woman in the store

was still picking up packages of ground beef and reading the labels.

Jose looked at the woman, then turned and looked directly into Basil’s eyes.

“I told you to sit still, Mac. You got to keep your weight off that foot, man.”

Basil let the air out slowly in a silent sigh of relief.

“You’re right, mate. Silly of me.”

“I didn’t see no sign of your insurance card, Mac.” Jose lent Basil his shoulder again

and walked him back toward the chair. “Know where else it might have fell out of your

pocket?”

Basil thought a moment and stopped before they got to the chair. He really didn’t want

to sit down again. He furrowed his brow for a moment and then he snapped his fingers as

his eyes opened wide.

 249

“I know where it is!” he said. “It’s in me other pants pocket. I had it out yesterday

cause I needed to recite the group number to a pharmacist. I just stuck it in me pocket for

the moment and forgot about it clean.”

“You sure, man?”

“Aye, sure I am, mate. Here, help me out to me truck and I’ll go home and get it and

head right over to the clinic.”

When Jose had helped Basil into the truck, he looked at him doubtfully.

“You okay to drive that truck with that foot, man?”

“Got here, okay, didn’t I, mate?” Basil regretted saying it as soon as the words were

out of his mouth.

“Looks like you drove here with your eyes closed, man,” Jose said. “What happened

to your truck?”

“Found it like that yesterday, mate. Happens a lot in my neck of the woods. Hit-and-

runs.”

“I hope you have your car insurance card handy, too.” Jose smiled as he helped Basil

into the cab of the truck. “Sure you’re okay?”

Basil swung the door shut and managed his best fake smile. “Sure am, mate. Thanks

again.” He started the truck and pulled it forward, then backed it up and turned it around.

He waved to Jose as he slowly eased into the alleyway, stifling a curse.

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64.
“Let’s beat it,” Zeus said as soon as the cats heard Basil go into the store.

“Wait,” Doug said. “Let’s find out what became of Meaper first.”

“Didn’t you see what happened?” Yoda said.

“No. No, I didn’t.” Doug’s mind was made up and he trotted out of the woods into the

clearing behind the store without waiting to see what the others did.

“Come on, Zeus,” Yoda said, stretching her hind legs dramatically. “He’s right.”

“Oodly-ooh,” Zeus sighed, reluctantly following Yoda .

Doug was already in the alleyway when Yoda and Zeus came out of the woods. Yoda

warily eyed the pickup truck parked behind the store. She had no intention of ever being

aboard that contraption again. There was no one in sight, so they scurried on into the

alleyway after Doug. When they got to the edge of the parking lot they could see Doug in

the distance, sitting in the middle of the gravel clearing. About twenty-five yards beyond

him was Meaper, or what was left of him. He was dead. Doug was looking at his crushed

body the way a cat looks through a window at the branches swaying on a tree: with

complete, utter incomprehension.

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Yoda and Zeus walked up beside Doug and sat down on either side of him. None of

them needed to get any closer to Meaper. They all sat there silently for a moment and just

looked.

“It’s our fault,” Doug said at last.

“What are you talking about?” Yoda said, knowing all too well what he was talking

about.

“They’d all still be alive if it wasn’t for us. If we’d a just stayed home and never

showed up here, they’d be snoozing in that shack, the lot of them. Instead, they’re all

gone, and we’re still here.”

That irrefutable statement of fact hung in the air for a while. Zeus was expecting both

Doug and Yoda to turn their steely eyes on him at any moment, but they didn’t.

“Let’s go home,” Yoda said softly.

Doug said nothing, but after a moment he stood up and turned around. Presently all

three of them were walking back toward the alleyway, suddenly in no particular hurry.

When they got about halfway down the alleyway, they heard an engine start up. And it

definitely wasn’t coming from behind them in the parking lot. Their worst fears were

realized when they saw the front end of the pickup truck pull into the alleyway. Zeus’s

tail went into full flare when he saw the maniacal face of the driver smile. Then the

engine roared.

All three of the cats turned tail at once, and unlike Meaper, they could still fly when

they wanted to. Doug could hear the truck’s tires spewing dust and pebbles behind them,
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but he and Yoda and Zeus stayed focused on one thing: making it into the parking lot,

where at least they could take cover underneath parked cars.

They hopped up onto the sidewalk that fronted the store just as Basil Macauley’s

pickup made it to the end of the alleyway, where he had to slow down in case a car was

passing. The cats used that delay to dash into the parking lot, where they spread out, each

choosing a different car to hide under.

Basil was cursing heaven and earth now, and whoever heard him be damned. They

won’t get away this time, by God, he thought, crossing from the alleyway into the

parking lot. He decided to get methodical about it and chose to cruise slowly between the

rows of parked cars until one of the cats cracked under the pressure and bolted.

65.
Gerry Nelson was giving Phil Hanley a grand tour of the backroom area of the

supermarket when they ran into Jose Mejia, who had just come in through the back door.

“Jose, I’m glad I ran into you,” Gerry said. “This is Detective Hanley.”

“Glad to meet you, sir,” Jose said.

“The detective has some questions for Macauley. He is going to be in today, correct?”

“He was supposed to be but I don’t think so now. In fact, you just missed him. He’s on

his way to the doctor. Bad foot.”

“When did he leave?” Phil asked.

“Just now. His truck was out back.”

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Phil ran like the wind down the hallway, past Gerry Nelson’s office and through the

double doors into the store. He dodged shopping carts and shoppers browsing the produce

aisle, running full tilt toward the automatic door at the front end. He was about to proceed

through the door when he spotted the pickup truck cruising the parking lot. He stifled an

urge to charge after it. Instead, he stayed just inside the door and pulled out his cell

phone.

“Dispatch, this is Detective Hanley. I am off duty and on my cell. Please call me back

immediately to verify. Out.”

Phil pressed “end call” on his phone, all the while watching the pickup truck roaming

the aisles of the parking lot. Seconds later, his phone rang.

“Thank you, Dispatch. I’m at the Foodtown supermarket on Perrine Road in

Worthington and am requesting a black-and-white be dispatched here immediately. I

believe I have the pickup truck that ran the roadblock last night in my sights. Get a car

down here ASAP because I got a feeling this bird may fly any time.”

Phil knew that piece of news would send the stationhouse into a tizzy, and he allowed

himself a brief grin.

“Roger that,” the dispatcher said. “Car’s on its way.”

Outside, Phil could see the pickup driver’s head swiveling left and right as he slowly

drove between the second and third rows of cars. His lips were moving as he scanned the

lot, looking intently for something.

Suddenly the truck stopped with a jerk and the door opened. The driver—Macauley,

Phil surmised—got out of the cab slowly. He held on to the door with his left hand and
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tried to squat down to see something underneath one of the cars. That was when Phil saw

he had something in his right hand. It gleamed in the sunlight.

“Damn,” Phil muttered to himself, watching through the automatic door. “I hope it’s

not a gun, cause I ain’t packing.”

Martin Katz had seen Phil Hanley come running through the backroom doors, but it

took him a few minutes to collect Mary. He found her in the pet food aisle, oddly enough

browsing around the cat toys.

He grabbed her hand without saying a word and they headed for the front of the store.

Martin knew she’d want to see whatever it was they were about to see.

66.
Instinct had told the cats to spread out. None of them had time to formulate a plan, much

less call it out to the others.

Now they were hiding under cars in three different rows in the parking lot. Zeus was

under a Mazda Miata in the first row, which was opposite the store’s automatic doors.

Doug was under a minivan in the next row. Yoda, ironically, was under Martin’s Grand

Am in the third row, although she did not know it was their car.

The cats could see each other, and they could also see the tires of the truck slowly

patrolling each row.

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Yoda was formulating a plan to bolt toward the alleyway again, rallying the other two

to follow as she went. She figured the best way was to wait till the truck got to the far end

of the parking lot and was in the process of turning to come back toward the store down

the next row.

Yoda watched underneath the cars in the row Doug was in and saw the truck’s tires

slowly rolling along toward that far end of the lot.

Then Zeus did something stupid. Instead of staying put where he was, he got scared

when he heard the tires approaching and he ran underneath the next car up.

And the truck stopped abruptly. The driver had seen him.

Yoda cringed as she watched the driver’s feet touch down on the asphalt.

That stupid cat, she thought. What did he have to go and do that for?

Yoda could see Basil’s left knee nearly touching the ground, and she guessed correctly

that he was trying to look underneath a car. She could see Zeus’s flared-out tail sticking

out from behind the rear tire of the next car up. Doug had stayed put and was watching

from underneath the minivan.

None of this was sitting well with Yoda. It wasn’t that she thought this guy had much

of a chance of catching Zeus. She just had an aversion to being around, inside,

underneath or even on top of cars. They creeped her out. They didn’t appear to be alive,

yet they moved and stopped, turned, backed up, made noises—did a lot of the things that

living things did. Being underneath one for any amount of time was too long. Who could

say when they would start to move?

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Suddenly there was a loud thump and the sound of an engine starting. Yoda was so

wound up she bolted without thinking.

“Doug! Zeus! Follow me!” she snarled.

The three cats tore across the parking lot like they were on fire, emerging from under

the first car in the first row of the parking lot and flying into the alleyway beside the store

faster than they’d ever run before.

A split second later, Phil Hanley stepped through the automatic doors onto the

sidewalk in front of the store. He heard loud cursing and saw the pickup truck begin to

move. Backwards.

Basil Macauley had been too consumed with rage to think of the consequences of his

actions now. Once he had managed to get back into the truck, he put it in reverse and

floored the gas, his face the picture of pain and outrage as he stared into the sideview

mirror.

Approaching the storefront edge of the parking lot, he moved his sore foot off the gas

and attempted to hit the brake, but his foot slipped off. The back of the truck crossed onto

the sidewalk in front of the store and bashed into a double column of shopping carts,

sending two of them careening through the one of the store’s plate-glass windows.

Basil scowled and cursed the world, throwing the truck into drive and flooring the gas

with the wheel turned toward the alleyway, howling in pain.

Phil Hanley at first didn’t know which way to turn, watching the driver’s maniacal

face for a hint of what he intended to do. Now joined by Martin and Mary Katz outside

the automatic doors, Phil had no choice but to lead them back inside.
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When he saw the truck tear around the corner heading for the alleyway, Phil ran back

through the produce aisle toward the back of the store, beckoning to Martin and Mary

with his hands to follow him.

Phil burst through the double doors to find Gerry Nelson and Jose running toward

him.

“Which way’s the back door?” Phil asked.

“Down this way,” Jose said. “Follow me.”

Jose and Phil ran down the corridor, past the meat, deli and seafood prep departments,

with Gerry Nelson and the Katzes in tow. When Phil saw an exit sign, he took the lead,

turning right down the corridor toward the back door. As he approached it, he slowed

down, and turning to face the others, he put his finger to his lips.

The door was ajar and Phil pushed it open slowly. The hinges creaked as it opened,

but that sound was soon drowned out by the whine of an engine that was running at a

super-fast idle.

Phil and company looked out and saw the back of the pickup truck sticking out of the

brush at the edge of the woods. Basil had crashed into a tree big enough to stop the truck.

But it hadn’t been big enough to stop him. He had just lumbered into the woods, his

bleeding head still visible above the thicket. He was cursing loudly, intermittently

swinging his hand at the brush before him. He was holding something in that hand that

glittered when the sun hit it. It was the same thing Phil had seen him holding out in the

parking lot. And it wasn’t a gun.

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“I’ll get you, mates!” Basil rasped. “I’ll get you if I have to chase you all across the

bloody state, I will!”

He was breathing heavily now; his nose was broken and bleeding badly from the

crash, as was his forehead. It was getting so he couldn’t really tell what parts of him

didn’t hurt. Most of all he hurt inside, deep inside, where the sisters had said his soul was

supposed to be.

He hacked wildly at the thicket with the cleaver, knowing full well it would dull the

blade. It didn’t matter. He’d get the job done with a ping-pong paddle if he had to at this

point.

Suddenly, above the whine of the motor behind him, Basil heard a voice, and the

sound of a siren in the distance.

“Police! Stop where you are.”

Basil wheeled around and cursed Lucifer himself as he looked into Phil Hanley’s eyes.

“Stay back! Stay back, I tell you!” he snarled, brandishing the meat cleaver, as if he

posed a serious threat to anyone in his condition.

To Phil, Basil looked like a down-on-his-luck Mr. Hyde. His hair was all scraggly, his

face all bloody and contorted with rage, his clothes ripped and dirty, his legs twisted in

pain. Phil held his hands out to show he wasn’t armed.

“Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Phil assured him, even as a patrol car rumbled down the

alleyway and came to an abrupt halt beside the Dumpsters. “Just take it easy and hand me

that weapon.”
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“I’ll hand it to you, mate,” Basil muttered, eyeing the plain-clothes cop with a wicked

grin. He held the meat cleaver back as if he were about to throw it when suddenly he

noticed he was seeing two of the cop. In fact, there were two stores now, too. “Two

against one,” he said. “Not fair.”

Then Basil collapsed.

67.
Doug, Yoda and Zeus didn’t bother stopping at the shack this time. In fact, they didn’t

stop running till they reached the creek in the woods, and they only stopped then because

they had forgotten it was there, and it startled them. Yoda thought about searching for the

tree Buttons had told them about that served as a bridge across the creek, then changed

her mind and just waded right in. She started running again as soon as she got across the

creek. Doug and Zeus looked at each other for a moment, then splashed across behind

her.
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After about another twenty minutes, the cats stopped running, but they kept moving at

a brisk walk. They didn’t even stop to lick their wet fur. There was no sign or sound of

anyone following after them. A refreshing midmorning breeze was blowing the yellow

leaves off the trees with renewed force, but somehow the leaves no longer seemed like

gremlins to the cats anymore. They were just a part of the world, neither living nor dead.

Their first trip through the woods to the Spot had seemed like a long journey at the

time. And now that time seemed long ago, much longer than twenty-four hours. When

they emerged from the woods onto the street that connected to other streets that led to

their street, they took the occasional passing car or person on a bicycle in stride.

The adventure that was escaping from the house had grown old. They longed for the

comforts of home that used to be all they knew. And when they finally rounded the last

corner and crossed the library parking and saw the house, they began to run again.

“We’re home!” Zeus cried. “Home!”

Doug and Yoda didn’t feel the same need to state the obvious, but they shared Zeus’s

joy nevertheless. Some of that waned when they looked up from the edge of the driveway

at the closed garage door.

“I’m afraid there’s no magic black box out here to open that door,” Yoda said. They

all sat down on the driveway and thought about that. Then Doug and Yoda turned and

looked at Zeus.

68.
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Martin and Mary Katz watched with Phil Hanley as the EMS truck pulled away. They

were standing in the parking lot in front of the supermarket.

“We’ll get some answers, Mary,” Phil said. “I’m sure he’s our man. He matches the

description of the guy Officer Metzger saw last night, he had the accent like the guy on

the phone and the truck looks like the one we were looking for.”

“They’re not gonna let him walk out of that hospital, are they?” Martin asked.

“Not even if he could. He’s got a lot of questions to answer.”

Phil shook Martin’s hand and gave Mary a little hug, then told them he’d be in touch.

It was a pretty quiet ride home in Martin’s Grand Am. Mary mentioned that if Martin

hadn’t grabbed her when he did, she probably would have bought one of those catnip

toys. Martin patted her hand as he pulled into driveway.

Once inside the house, Mary went into the kitchen and checked the telephone

answering machine. There were no messages. She felt like she might cry if she didn’t do

something, so she began washing something in the sink. “Want some more coffee,

Marty?” she asked.

“Okay,” Marty said, flopping onto the couch in the den. He turned on the TV with the

remote. Ugh, he thought, looking at the screen. Saturday-morning TV. He watched

anyway but found that he was easily distracted by the sight of the vertical blinds covering

the sliding door in the kitchen. They were closed, but he could see through their

translucent vanes the shadows of the leaves blowing around on the patio and in the

backyard. It struck him then that those blinds ought to be open on such a bright fall

morning. He walked into the kitchen and grabbed the plastic bar that turns the slats in the
 262

verticals. He opened the slats and then swung them all to the far side. And then he looked

down.

“Mare?”

“Yeah?”

“Come here.”

Mary turned off the faucet, wiped her hands on a towel and walked over to the sliding

door. And her jaw dropped. Standing on their hind legs with their front paws on the glass

door were three dirty, hungry, weary Siamese cats. Before Martin opened the door, Zeus

looked at him and opened his mouth. Martin and Mary couldn’t hear him through the

glass door, but they had an idea what he said.

“Oodly-ooh.”

—The End—