Cat Seeing Double by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page B

Lee. But as the kit settled down on the front seat beside her friend, extravagantly purring, neither she nor Wilma imagined thatthe day’s events would not be the last ugliness to twist this weekend awry and leave its ugly mark.
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    Descending the great eucalyptus tree, Dulcie and Joe Grey backed precariously down the slick bark below the branch line, slipping, dropping the last six feet, and headed directly across the street to the long buffet tables set up in front of the village shops.
    At the center table where bottles of champagne were being popped, Max and Charlie stood cutting the cake, exchanging bites, smearing white icing across each other’s faces as the occasion was duly recorded by a dozen flashing cameras. The cats glanced at each other, purring. A gentleness filled the crowd, a gentleness in people’s voices and in their slower movements, an extra kindliness washing over the village, born of the near-disaster.
    They saw Ryan and Dallas coming up the street, returning from the station where Ryan must have had a look at the young bomber. As she joined Charlie at a small table, Dallas stood conferring with Harper, then headed away toward the church to oversee the bomb team. And Harper himself headed quickly for the station, leaving Charlie to the first of the endless separations and delays that would accompany her life married to a cop. The cats trotted near them, to listen, settling down on the sidewalk between some potted geraniums.
    Ryan sat down, touching Charlie’s hand. “You look pale.”
    â€œI’m fine. Was it the same boy?”
    â€œSame kid. Dallas knows him; he’s Curtis Farger.”
    â€œSon of the guy Max and Dallas busted?” Charlie said. “He’s supposed to be down the coast with his mother. Maybe she’s not too reliable.”
    The trial of Curtis’s father had ended just three weeks before. Gerrard Farger was doing six years on the manufacture of an illegal substance, and two years each on three counts of possession. The meth lab he’d put together had been in the woods below Molena Point, a shed behind a two-room cabin, the property roped off now with warning signs, and stinking so powerfully of drugs that it would likely have to be destroyed. Though the chemicals and lab equipment had been removed, the walls and floor and every fiber of the building still exuded fumes as lethal as cyanide.
    â€œI had a look at him through the one-way mirror,” Ryan said. “When I was sure it was the same kid, Dallas took me on in. Kid looked at me like he’d never seen me. I told him I’d cleaned up my truck, found the cracker crumbs and Hershey wrappers in my tarp.”
    â€œI’m missing a beat, here.”
    Ryan laughed. “I didn’t know what had happened in my truck, only that someone had been in it. That had to be on my way down from San Andreas, or that night after I got home. But then when I saw the kid…well, it fit. I asked him if he’d hitched a ride down from the mountains. He just stared at me. When I pushed him, he said, ‘What of it, bitch? I don’t weigh nothin’. How much gas could it take?’”
    Ryan shook her head. “Not a bit like the nice, polite, innocent kid he let me think he was, hanging around the Jakes job.”
    â€œYou’re sure it’s the same boy?”
    â€œThe same. Same straight black hair, with a cowlick—big swirl on the left side. Same big bones, square-cut dirty nails. Same coal-black eyes and straight brows with those little scraggly hairs.” Ryan gave Charlie a wry smile. “He was so eager and polite when he and his two friends showed up around the trailer.
    â€œAnd just now in jail, underneath his hateful stare and rude mouth, I think the kid was scared.”
    â€œHe should be scared,” Charlie said. “He’s in major trouble.”
    â€œDallas called Curtis’s mother. She said the boy wasn’t there