The Big Kitty by Claire Donally Page B

body.
    “Gotcha, ya little—” He tried to pull the cat loose, but his captive dug in his claws and held on for dear life. “Come on!” Gordon gave a mighty heave … and brought down the cat, the drapes, the curtain rod, and even the brackets that held it to the wall—all in an even bigger cloud of dust and plaster.
    Alternate sneezes and disconsolate yowls came from under the downed curtains, which humped up as the cat tried to escape the heavy folds.
    Gordie lay on his back, wheezing and hacking.
    “Are you all right?” Will Price asked.
    “By bask iz fudd uv stodt,” Gordie hoarsely replied.
    “What?” Sunny asked.
    “His mask is full of—” Will broke off, shaking his head. “You don’t want to know.”
    The cat finally appeared from under the fallen velvet, streaking across the living room and up the stairs.
    Sunny and Will got Gordon back into the kitchen and helped clean him up. Gordie took off his sodden mask and threw it away. As soon as he did, he began sneezing. Sunny pressed a dish towel into service, soaking it in hot water and using some dish detergent to clean his scratches. Then she switched to cold water to bring the bleeding down. Will Price stepped out to his truck and returned with a small first-aid kit.
    Gordie was almost pathetically grateful. “Aw, man … jeez, thanks,” he said yet again, punctuating his barely coherent words by sneezing into several sheets of paper towel clutched in his uninjured hand. “You’re really good, coming over to help my mom. Most of the neighbors around here wouldn’t care whether she lived or died.”
    “People got into fights with her,” Sunny said.
    “The damn cats got Mom into fights,” Gordie corrected. “A bunch of chicken farmers way out—” He gestured vaguely toward the town line with his wad of towels and then down at them. “What was their name? Towle? No, those were the people with the dog. Ellsworth, that was it.”
    He sat like a little kid as Sunny squeezed some antibiotic cream on the scratches, then covered the whole thing with a gauze pad and some tape. “And then there’s the big boss lady of the neighborhood, Mrs. Yarborough. She toldMom she wanted this place bulldozed.” He sneezed, hawked, and spat in the sink. “Not to mention that lousy Barnstable pretending to make nice—and then showing what a turd he really is.”
    “I think you’d better take it easy,” Sunny told him, rinsing the sink.
    “Or at least get yourself thicker gloves before you tackle the upstairs,” Will added, trying to keep a straight face.
    Gordie cast a worried glance around. “You don’t think there are more of them, do you?”
    “Just be careful,” Sunny said as she and Will decided it would be best to say good-bye and left through the front door. As they went around to the driveway, the constable glanced sidelong at Sunny. “Very impressive, the amount of information you pumped out of him while playing Florence Nightingale.”
    “Well, now we know that Ada had at least three ongoing disputes in the neighborhood,” Sunny replied. “Four, if you count Ollie Barnstable.”
    “Just the kind of false trails a trained investigator might expect from the prime suspect—if this were an actual crime.”
    “We certainly didn’t find any proof, one way or the other,” Sunny admitted. “Especially with the way Gordie’s been all over the place.” She looked at the constable. “But is that enough to promote him to prime suspect?”
    He stopped in his tracks, staring at her. “I don’t know how far you’re going to get in this investigation if you didn’t even notice that Gordon Spruance is a tweaker.”

5
    “What?” Sunny turned around to look at Will Price. He definitely had his cop face on, grim and dead serious.
    “You know—meth? Crystal meth? Methamphetamine? He’s using the stuff.”
    “How do you know?” Sunny asked.
    “How could I not?” Will burst out, then quickly turned to check the windows. All the ones on