The Unscratchables Read online

  “Humphrey MacFluff?”

  The chief took on a stiff-tailed look. “Not him. A new agent. Someone we’ve never dealt with before.”

  “Who?”

  “Special Agent Cassius Lap.”

  “Lap?” I said. “What sort of name is Lap?”

  The chief got even stiffer. “He’s Siamese, they say.”

  “Siamese?” I repeated in a horrified whisper. “Did you say Siamese?”

  The wishbone that had been caught in my gizzards suddenly jarred loose and headed for the dogflap.

  WE DIDN’T KNOW any different, Spike and me. We were just a couple of young wags from the ’Loin. On weekends we played catch, raided trash cans, dug up flower gardens, and danced through wet cement. If we had enough meat tickets, we headed north for some deer hunting.

  But then a letter landed in the fencepot from the Department of Vigorous Defense. We were to report immediately to the local recruiting office. From there we’d be assigned to the appropriate attack-dog squadron. We were to be stripped of all our hearth-rug comforts and softpaw inclinations. We were to eat rice and oatmeal. We were to flop on cold cement. We were to snooze just twelve hours a day. We were to be poked, slapped, roared at, and dogwhipped. They were going to make us killing machines. They were going to make us dogs of war.

  And we were at war. We didn’t know why. It didn’t matter. President Willy Patton, a bullie like Spike and me, had assured us the North Siamese were threatening the free world. He had the support of half the United Breeds, mutts and moggies alike. And that was enough for us. What did us woofers know about such complicated things? For us, all that was important was knowing what to kill, and how to kill it.

  I did eight weeks of seize-and-shake training under the feisty little Sergeant Barkman. In no time I could cock a gun faster than I could cock my leg. I could burst through walls. I could bite through tin. You only had to shake a pajama leg at me and I’d smell cat. I’d charge over broken glass, hot tar, even fried chicken waste, just to get a taste of feline.

  I got noticed. There was a top-secret mission needing a gundog. A cat commander had gone rabid in the jungles near the source of the Shorthair River. He’d clustered around him a shaggy-coated army of filthy curs and impractical cats—grass chewers, the lot of them—and turned their brains to marrow-bone jelly. They sniffed jungle blossoms. They flopped flank to flank. They believed in everything and nothing. They obeyed no orders, answered to no commands, didn’t even get themselves registered.

  I considered it a great honor to take out the leader of such garbage.

  But things didn’t go well. I plowed up the Shorthair in a sputtering patrol boat with a crew of snarling sea dogs. The jungle closed around us like an invalid’s backyard. The fleas were the size of leeches, and the leeches the size of lawyers. One by one my crew died off—claimed by poison baits, dog traps, distemper.

  Near Seal Point I was dozing on the deck of the floater, alone and exhausted, when a clowder of North Siamese dropped out of a ban-ban tree, ripped off my dog tags, and snapped a collar around me before I had a chance to bite. They pinned me down and fanged a needle through my hide. The last thing I saw was a burlap bag closing around my bobble, so for a second I thought I’d been put down.

  I woke in a bamboo cage, like some sort of common animal. Through the bars a Siamese in a knitted jacket was prodding me with a sharpened stick. Others were standing around giggling. I thrashed and snarled, but I was chained tight. The kitties purred with delight.

  “You snappy snappy,” the green jacket laughed. “Snappy puppy, puppy snappy!”

  I vowed right then that one day I’d rip the smile from his sleek little Siamese face.

  They hosed me with ice-cold water, smashed me across the muzzle with a rolled-up newspaper, taunted me with live chickens and mouthwatering roast mutton. They fed me corks, toasted bones, and bubble gum, so that my insides clogged and swelled. They tortured me with a tennis ball on a rubber band. At night they clustered behind a fence and caterwauled like a thousand alley cats.

  They thought they could break me. But bullies never break—they only explode.

  I got my chance six months in.

  My best buddy, Spike from the ’Loin, got carted in one day, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. At first we pretended not to know each other—we didn’t talk, didn’t sniff, didn’t even look at each other. But then one night, when the kitties were setting off fireworks for some local feast, we hatched a plan in low growls like distant thunder.

  A week later we were leashed and muzzled and herded into the biggest of the straw huts. There was a deep pit in the middle with rows of cash-waving kitties crowded around the sides. They forced us to the edge, ripped off our restraints, and shoved us into the hole, thinking we’d go at each other’s throats at once.

  But we did no such thing. We circled each other. We snarled a little. Maybe we even gave a little nip or two. We were like two gray-whiskered Labs in the local park. And the kitties were getting itchy.

  They hurled fish skeletons down at us. Chicken claws. They hissed. They spat furballs. Anything to fire us up. But Spike and I weren’t biting. We were only waiting. Waiting with the patience of a cat.

  It didn’t take long.

  There was a hush, a gasp, and into the hole they tossed a third soldier, a huge pitbull covered in scars.

  It was exactly what we’d been waiting for.

  With the pittie’s head between us we immediately clanged our chests together. The pittie dropped like a sack of kitchen refuse. Spike jumped on his back and hunched himself—two dogs one atop the other like a stepladder, a springboard.

  I bounded onto Spike’s back immediately and launched out of the pit, hackles waving, fangs bared. The kitties looked dumbslapped.

  You don’t really want to know what happened next.

  But that’s how I got the name Crusher.

  SO THIS WAS me, late at night in the cophouse, waiting for the arrival of Cassius Lap. Thinking why does it have to be a cat? Thinking why, of all cats, does it have to be a Siamese?

  When I rotated back home after the war I just couldn’t deal with it—the very existence of cats. For my own good I was chained up in a hospital for mad dogs, but the tiniest scent of cat was enough to get me frothing. They put me through their detoxification program. Step-by-step they were going to suck the taste of cat blood from my brainpot. They were going to empty my gutsack and make me beg for my dinner. Then they’d make me associate food with reward. And then make me associate reward with cat-love.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  Six months later my doctor jumped the back gate in frustration. Desperate, they brought in a sadistic dancing-bear trainer, a husky from Siberia. By the end of his visit I was crackling with so much electricity that I wasn’t allowed under the hoses in case I sizzled everyone else in the yard.

  I learned to love cats at 350 v. Or at least how to pretend to love ’em. I learned to leash my impulses, which is another name for pretending.

  But I knew in my pumper that something wasn’t right.

  I wasn’t officially mad—because officially my mission hadn’t even existed—so I was allowed, when I got out, to join the Police Dog Force. I was drawn to the Police Dog Force. I did all the training, I passed all the exams, I swore with upraised paw to uphold the law. At the graduation ceremony the guest of honor was the mayor of Kathattan himself, a salt-and-pepper Ragdoll. I didn’t even curl a lip when he stood just a few whiskerlengths away and addressed me.

  “A fine-looking jaw you have there, Officer.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Those slash marks on your snout—nothing sinister, I hope?”

  “Just a tussle with some barbed wire, sir.”

  My taste for blood was gone, fried out, but in its place there was something even stronger—a secret taste for indignation. In my free time I found myself reading certain radical philosophies and underground texts: Cat-aclysm: How Cats Took Over the World; Das
Katipal; Cat o’ Nine Tails: The Serfdom of the Canine World; Beware of the Dog: The Drive to Revolution.

  These were books that could have got me added to a blacklist someplace. A few might have got me arrested, even deregistered. But I needed to read them, whatever the cost. I had an appetite in me, a hunger for buried truths. For disgust. For anger. For anything that made me feel like a dog.

  And I got plenty of that feeling. I read about the great feline aristocracy. The jeweled collars and mink-lined basket beds of Kathattan. The cans of pureed chicken breast and hummingbird tongues. The fancy mausoleums, bigger than most houses in the Kennels. And I learned about the shameful submission of dogs, who amazingly thought they were happier than cats—who were encouraged to buy into that propaganda—even while they were being beaten, tortured, scrap-fed, and worked to within an inch of their hides.

  I read all this, and I got so riled up that for a few months I felt like I was back in that pit, that I’d broken through the dark days in the madhouse—that I was a lean mean biting machine again.

  But then something strange happened. I went so far into my past that I broke through my war days, my drill-training days, my wild-running youth—I went right back to obedience school. And I got to thinking that the rules are greater than any single dog. That a mutt’s life is too grubby and short to be worrying about boundaries. That you can be happy with your fences if you don’t wonder too much what’s on the other side. That there’s no point whining or snarling or baying at the moon. Everyone knows a dog’s life is a dog’s life—nothing is going to make it anything more.

  I didn’t know if that was victory or defeat—I wasn’t even sure if it wasn’t a natural end in the whole brainwashing program—and I didn’t care.

  So this, like I say, was me that night. I still hated cats, and I loved hating them, but I didn’t need to taste their blood on my licker. I’d worked with Humphrey MacFluff, a bloated Scottish Fold, and I despised every minute of it. But even when he overruled me, even when he tut-tutted at me, even when he treated me like a dumb dog—even when he did all those things, I didn’t snap his tail off. It was enough to know that I could. But whether a Siamese would make me lose control—that was something I didn’t want to think about.

  I paced around the cophouse, trying to put everything in order before the cat arrived. I sat in on the Q&A with Charrière the cat burglar (you wouldn’t call it an interrogation) and tried not to lose my temper when he ordered—and got—a herring sandwich. At my desk, I clackered up some paperwork, a real dog shuffle through triplicate forms. I had a yap with Bud Borzoi, working his toothpick so hard it’d worn to a splinter. I jangled my ex, Missy.

  “Sorry I ain’t seen the pups.”

  “Mother has a word for dogs like you.”

  “I’m tipping it’s got four letters in it someplace.”

  She didn’t laugh. “When are you going to show your snout?”

  “Soon as I get a minute, lambchop.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  It was so hard to keep my mind fixed on the case. A buzzscreen in the corner of the yawn-and-stretch room was showing a late-night session of the United Breeds: the Afghan ambassador, wearing burlap robes and a dishrag hat, snarling and howling at a peke-faced Persian. But just when things started to get really tasty, they cut to an ad for Chump’s Roast Lamb and Mustard Special. And an election ad for Brewster Goodboy—“STAY the course.”

  Then I heard an engine growling somewhere—it didn’t sound like anything native—and I mushed over to the window. I looked down into the parking lot. And there, under the smoking sodium lamps, a sleek new Jaguar XJS was doing a perfect reverse park into the space next to my battered Rover.

  I straightened my collar and pumped out my chest. I flared my nostrils. If dog claws were retractable, I would have popped them out.

  Special Agent Cassius Lap had arrived.

  HUMPHREY MACFLUFF WORE a shiny serge coat with shaggy cuffs and cream-stained lapels; what breezed through the doors now was kitted out in a superbly tailored suit of panther-black, a bone-white shirt, and a silk tie that shimmered like a crow’s wing. MacFluff had tangled hair, a runny sniffer, and reeked of tuna sandwiches and Baileys; his replacement was brushed and blow-dried, bright blue-eyed, and giving off a scent that would make a civet swoon. MacFluff shuffled, waddled, and had to squeeze his great gut sideways through tight doorways; the new cat glided into the chief’s office as smoothly as a serpent, curled around the desk, and in one nimble movement extracted and flipped open his ID, as if cats showed up at the station all the time and we might not know who he was.

  “Special Agent Cassius Lap,” he purred. “Feline Bureau of Investigation.”

  He was slim, above average in height—taller than me—and as finely cut as a chess piece. He had needle-straight whiskers, long pointed ears, semislanted eyes, and marshmallow cheeks. He was cinnamon point, though with slightly rounded features—not a true pedigree, it seemed, but he sure acted like one, and that made him extra gut-churning.

  “A word about myself before we proceed,” he said, like anyone present—me, the chief, Bud Borzoi, or Chesty White—had asked for a biography. “I’m from Los Pumas originally, but I won a scholarship to the University of San Bernardo, where I earned my Ph.D. in canine-feline relations, graduating summa cum leonine and Phi Beta Katta, and devoting my first season at the FBI to profiling cat serial killers. I worked closely with Dr. Quentin Riossiti, the famous psychiatrist and sociologist, and later was instrumental in his conviction for murder. Since then I’ve been working in the Office of Interspecies Carnicide, side by side with Humphrey MacFluff, whom you know rather well in these parts. But if you have not yet heard of me personally, or read my work, it can only be because Agent MacFluff prefers, for his own reasons, to work without me.”

  He was speaking of MacFluff in a quiche-cutting tone, as if he, Lap, was already the leader of the pack. And as much as I didn’t care for MacFluff, I cared even less for bluff-barking amateurs—it would be like Bud Borzoi telling them in Kathattan that I was his flankyapper.

  “Very well, gentlehounds”—now he was dishing out orders—“I expect your full cooperation on this matter. As I understand it we have a bloodthirsty feral on the loose. We have three victims, possibly more. We have two murder scenes five sprints apart. We have a limited amount of time before our killer strikes again. We have a large and vastly differentiated territory to explore. And no powerful scent…can I assume that?”

  “Not until you walked in,” I snarled.

  Everyone looked at me like I’d just broken wind under the dinner table.

  Lap himself fixed me with his cut-diamond irises. “And you might be?” he asked, cool as a spoon.

  “I might be President Goodboy, but I’m not.”

  The chief suddenly cleared his throat. “Please forgive me for failing to introduce Max McNash, the detective in charge of the investigation. And please forgive McNash himself, for his impertinence.”

  I expected Lap to say something like “Think nothing of it,” but he only stared at me with his icy Siamese eyes.

  “Detective McNash,” he said, “I’ve read about you, of course. I’ll need you to fetch your reports on the case as soon as possible. I’ll need you to fetch as many maps of the area as you can. Sewer maps also. Plans of the Katacombs. And aerial photographs. And I’d like a printout of all murders in the Kennels in the last two months, coordinated precisely to the maps.”

  “That’s all?” I sneered.

  “I’d like a transcription of all witness statements. The forensics report. Anything from ballistics would be appreciated. And I assume Sensory Investigation has made an examination of the murder scenes? I’ll need to have a look at their notes. In fact, I’ll need to speak to them personally. And to the witnesses if they’re available. And the earliest arriving officers. It’s imperative to comb the evidence for the tiniest, most innocuous clue. A pattern needs to be established. The pattern is always the key.”
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  I snorted, like I couldn’t believe it. “What—you mean you haven’t already found one?”

  He stared at me. “You’ve already arrived at a conclusion, Detective?”

  “I have.”

  “Well, please avail us of your thoughts—that would be most helpful.”

  This was my big moment, but suddenly I had a tinfoil tongue. “Well, think about it,” I said. “A Tom Doe is shot, and his killers are ripped to pieces. A cat burglar—a dog who wants to be a cat—is about to be caught in the act of theft, and the guard is ripped to pieces as well…”

  He was still looking at me.

  I tried desperately not to sound stupid. “Well, work it out for yourself. We got two ambushes. We got two unusually messy murders. We got some huge squirrel-munching cat, either a feral or someone made up to look like a feral, swooping in to take revenge, then taking off—into the clouds, for all we know—before anyone can get a hook on him.”

  Silence from Lap.

  “So it’s clear, ain’t it? What we’ve got here is a cat enforcer. A cat avenger.”

  But Lap just kept staring at me, like I’d said the most boneheaded thing in the world. And eventually he nodded, as if he actually understood.

  “Superpussy?” he said.

  And that was it. Something snapped inside. I saw those sneering Siamese faces above the pit, I felt their vinegary cat spit on my snout, I tasted their blood like cod-liver oil on my tongue. And I couldn’t help it—I lunged across the room, pumper thumping. “If you’ve got a better—”

  But I hit a wall: the chief and Chesty White holding me back. I was just whiskerlengths away and—I’ll give him this much—Lap didn’t flinch an inch.

  “Detective McNash,” he said evenly—his eyes were half-lidded, like he was addressing a sloppy manicurist—“I would much prefer that we don’t begin our investigation by tearing each other apart. You and I will be working very closely until we bring this killer to heel. Personal hostilities will only be a hindrance to our effectiveness.” He thrust out a paw. “Shall we shake?”