The Unscratchables Read online

  I stared at his dainty little digits.

  “Shake?” he said again.

  Part of me wanted to crunch every bone in his scrawny frame. But another part of me wanted desperately to obey. It was like a trance.

  “Shake?” he said again.

  So—woozy, without any sense of control—I shook his velvety little paw. But I wasn’t happy about it.

  “That’s a good dog,” he said, and turned to the chief and Chesty White. “It’s perfectly all right, gentlehounds, I can take over from here. But first of all Detective McNash and I will require a word together. In private, naturally.” He looked back at me with twinkling eyes. “Shall we go for a walk, Detective?”

  Shall we go for a walk?

  Again there was that strange feeling inside—a real meat salad of emotions. Half of me had to stop my jaws from closing around his skull. But the other half had to fight to keep my tail from wagging.

  WHEN HE LED me down the street it was still dark and our breath was rising in clouds. I was walking at Lap’s heel; behind me was Bud Borzoi. When Lap noticed the uninvited company he turned.

  “And your name is?”

  Bud licked his chops. “Officer Borzoi.”

  “I’m sure you appreciate why we need to be alone, Officer Borzoi—please return to the station.”

  Bud looked at me. “But I—”

  “But nothing.” Lap pointed down the street. “Back.”

  “He can join us,” I said. “Bud’s no harm to anyone.”

  “I said back.” Lap wasn’t fielding any arguments. “Home. Now.”

  There was no doubting the steel in the cat’s voice. And so—gulping, quivering—Bud slithered away, looking back for a second or third chance. But Lap, icy as a popsicle, was already striding down Duty Street.

  “You have a regular eating place around here?” he asked. “Some place where police dogs congregate?”

  “Right here,” I said. “Butch’s Greasy Dish Diner.”

  “Excellent,” said Lap. “Then we know where to avoid.” And he kept striding.

  I caught up to him. “Got something against cops, nutmeg?”

  “It’s more a case of having a penchant for privacy, Detective.” He gestured to a bar-and-grill across the street. “What about that establishment there?”

  “Pedro’s? That joint’s for ’wowers.”

  “Then we’ll be needing an extra-large table,” he said, without missing a beat.

  The place was lit with red and green lanterns and smelled of salsa and frying plantains. There was an old mariachi record on the turntable, a gopher-sized piñata hanging from the ceiling, and everywhere candlelit paintings of St. Bernard. A couple of hairless ’wowers were huddled into their ridiculous little chairs: when we passed they looked up with snarling eyes—in this sort of place a bullie was no more welcome than a cat.

  “Help you, señors?” The bartender was wearing a sombrero that almost swallowed him whole.

  “A large booth, as private as possible,” Lap said. “A dish of frijoles, no salsa, no cream. And a cup of soy milk, room temperature.”

  “We have nothing soy here, señor, ’cept the beans.”

  “Then a Perroquet will suffice.” He turned to me. “Detective?”

  “A mescal straight up,” I said. “Hold the worms.”

  Lap raised an eyebrow—drinking tingle-water on duty was strictly off-limits—but fang regulations: I was going to show him who was boss.

  We squeezed into a midget booth under a poster for Poco and the Subwoofers. “If this all seems a little theatrical,” Lap began, “then I must apologize. Circumstances sometimes dictate the necessity of discretion.”

  “Cut the cat-speak,” I snapped. “I ain’t got time for it.”

  Lap’s whiskers twitched. “Officially Chief Kessler was informed that Humphrey MacFluff is tied up with another case—a cat was murdered in the Katskills—but off the record he’s not yet been told of the developments here. It’s only a matter of time before he finds out, of course, and tries to insinuate himself into the investigation. But it’s my hope that we can achieve significant progress before then.”

  I squinted. “I don’t get you. You’re saying you don’t trust MacFluff?”

  “You’ve worked with him, have you not? You must agree that his methods are questionable?”

  “He gets the job done.”

  “The definition of ‘job done’ has many variations, Detective.”

  I still didn’t like it—stinkmouthing a colleague was a cat hobby, not a dog’s—so I sniffed. “Well, how about getting to the point, pajamas? And no pussyfooting around either. You saying MacFluff is on the take?”

  “I’m saying MacFluff’s methods are worthy of investigation, certainly, but there are official channels for that. And I never pussyfoot around, Detective, let me assure you. And please allow me to prove it. From now on I want you to report directly to me. No one else. Just me. I’ll decide what is to be passed on to the chief, to the press, to the rest of the Slaughter Unit. In fact, it’s not a request—it’s an order.”

  “Oh yeah? And what makes you think—”

  But Lap put up his paw to silence me—an old feline mind trick. “Stop,” he said. “Stay. That’s a good dog.”

  And for all my energy I felt sapped again. I couldn’t even raise a whimper.

  Lap paused while the little waiter dealt out our orders—“¡A su salud, señors!”—before moving on.

  “I’ve read your profile closely, Detective. And I’ve already witnessed your temper in action, as it were. But it’s not for nothing that I majored in canine psychology. I know you’re practically incapable of concealing an emotion. Equally, I know you’re almost congenitally indisposed to deceit. I even know of your personal experience in the Siamese war.” His eyes hadn’t flickered. “So I know you don’t like me. Right now, in fact, I know a good part of you wants to rip the skin from my bones. But at the same time I’m supremely confident that you are, in your heart, a good dog. And I’m willing to stake this entire investigation on the notion that, minor infractions aside”—he glanced at my mescal—“you’re very conducive to following orders.”

  In my gutsack I felt such a bonfire of emotions—defiance, pride, anger—that I had to slam the drink down my throat, without even salt on my licker, just to snuff out the flames. “That a fact, kitty cat?” I wiped my snapper with the back of my paw. “Well, why don’t you try one now—an order—and see how far you get?”

  He leaned forward. “I want you to go home. Now. I want you to sleep. For the time being there’s nothing you can do. Over the next three hours I intend to comb assiduously through the existing evidence. You’ll need your energy for later.”

  “Oh yeah? And how is it you don’t need sleep?”

  “Through the powers of Zen I can exert total control over my circadian rhythms—my entire metabolism. I can forgo sleep, barring the occasional catnap, for up to three consecutive days. It’s not a gift I expect you to share, Detective.”

  “Then you don’t know anything about me at all, tiger testicles. I can go without sleep for a full week—just watch me. And you ain’t going anyplace without my sniffer up your butt. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust any cat, and never will.”

  He sipped his parrot water and looked at me with a maddening little smirk, like the cat that swallowed the canary.

  WHEN I WAS growing up in the ’Loin we believed all sorts of things about cats: that they ate their young, that they were in league with witches, that they had private torture chambers full of nine-tailed whips and moldy skeletons. Much of this I shed with age like an old coat—I no longer licked the nearest fence post when a black cat crossed my path—but even now it was too easy to believe that Lap was using magical powers on me somehow: he had a secret plan, he was up to no good. So I owed it to myself not to let him out of snaprange.

  But back at the cophouse he first tried to bore me to death by sniffing over old ground: inspecting the bodies, gri
lling the witnesses, and with mousehole-watching patience flipping through the forensic evidence like it was the latest potboiler by John Griffon. I think I was actually snoring when Bud Borzoi poked me awake and led me outside.

  “What’s going on, Crusher?”

  I jerked my sniffer at the office. “Puss in Boots in there thinks he can find things that us dogs are too stupid to see.”

  “Has he found anything so far?”

  “I’m not holding my bladder.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Nothing. You should be home snoozing.”

  “Gee, Crusher”—Bud looked nervously through the venetians at Lap—“I don’t want any cat making suckers out of us.”

  “Relax,” I said. “When’s the last time a pussycat caught anything larger than a pigeon? He’s just here to primp and prance, Bud—it’s a cat show, it don’t mean a thing.”

  “I don’t know, Crusher.”

  “Trust me,” I said, “we’ll go in circles for a while and then—” But I stopped, because Lap was getting up from the desk and heading our way. “Later,” I whispered, stiffening. “I’ll tell you later.”

  To get to the murder scene Lap insisted we take my unmarked tooter “to avoid attention.” Exactly what sort of attention he thought he’d be avoiding—a Siamese sitting muppetlike in the front seat of a Rover—seemed fizzypop to me, but I said nothing.

  “Find anything in those reports, succotash?”

  “My inspection was purely procedural—I didn’t find anything that wasn’t already apparent. But I’d be grateful if you do not discuss the investigation with others without seeking my permission, as we discussed earlier.”

  I looked back at the road. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I assure you that I’m not here for ‘a cat show,’ Detective. Nor am I intending to ‘go in circles.’ And I remind you, for what it’s worth, that the only creatures with more acute hearing than the cat are certain species of bat and moth.”

  I shifted. “That a fact?”

  “A biological one, beyond all notions of hubris. So please be vigilant about what you say, and to whom you say it.”

  He was getting more biteable with each minute.

  The storage facility—Rex’s Stash & Retrieve—was a dingy acre of shuttered sheds used mainly by dogs hiding their bones for hungrier days. But occasionally there were more valuable treasures: best-of-breed trophies, gold fangs, bronzed paw prints. The alarm system was rusty but reliable; the cat burglar had been chewing threw the wires with rubber teeth when the bells started clanging. Chalk lines marked the shape of the Dobie where he’d flopped in five pieces across the concrete—it looked like a beef map on a butcher’s wall.

  But Lap didn’t say much. He minced around the joint, peering, verifying, asking questions of the manager, making sure the SI beagles were hard at work. At one point he sniffed the air.

  I snorted. “Not trying to tell me cats got better noses than dogs, too?”

  “Smaller noses, certainly. But the olfactory prowess of most cats equals that of many dog breeds—falling well short, of course, of the scent hounds.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “And what’s your little sniffer telling you now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Course not.”

  He looked down at me. “The killer, if my suspicions are correct, has already escaped via the sewage system and the connecting branches of the Katacombs. Coincidentally, the odor of sewage serves to cloak his scent.”

  “Why not rooftops?” I growled. “Cats got a liking for rooftops, don’t they?”

  “Not second-generation ferals. Their first impulse is to go low, not high.”

  We drove three sprints west to the wharf at Fly’s Picnic, where Slinky Joe’s was belching sardine stink into the air. Here Lap spoke coolly to the cannery foreman, ignoring all the stink-eye from the floor. Someone flung a fish head at him and he didn’t even blink. On the wharf outside he prowled around like he was looking for a place to flop. He must’ve been shocked by all the flies—in Kathattan they scrub the streets like hospital floors—but not one of them landed on him, so I guessed his insect treatments were good. But when he went to the very edge of the wharf, to survey the shoreline, I could smell it, even from a distance—the fear scent of any cat close to water.

  He called me over.

  “There are divers out there.”

  “Water dogs,” I said. “Lookin’ for the cat the ’weilers whacked.”

  “Call them off.”

  “Say what?”

  “Order them back to the station. They’re wasting their time.”

  “Says who?”

  He pointed to a barfing sewer pipe about a hundred yards away. “The killer entered the sewage system right there. There’s an egress point close to the storage facility in Chitterling.”

  “You’re saying the killer got in there? But he’d have to jump into the water!”

  “That’s precisely what he did.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a cat. And cats hate water.”

  “Not second-generation ferals. Necessity makes them more than used to it.”

  I struggled for a protest. “That right?”

  “It’s exactly right. So what we should be doing now is engaging flushing dogs to trap him in the sewage system.” He pulled out his pocket jangler. “In fact, I’ll order it immediately.”

  I gnashed my teeth. “And why shouldn’t we be looking for a victim, anyway? Strays don’t matter to fat-cats, I guess?”

  He gave me a half-lidded look, like I’d just chewed his slippers. “There was never any victim,” he said.

  I tried to scoff. “What?”

  “The cat who was shot, the cat who left his blood on the wharf, the cat who killed the Rottweilers, and the cat who plunged into the water were all the same beast. Two gunshots, a dog cry, and a splash—I believe that’s how Mr. Lightning first described it. And that matches my scenario precisely.”

  “Flasha Lightning?” I blew out my lips. “You’re basing your theories on Flasha Lightning?”

  “And my own logical deductions.”

  “But Lightning’s a scumlicker! He changed his tune a hundred million times!”

  “He changed his tune because he was nervous. And that’s what we should be looking for. Not bodies. Not even the killer. But what makes a whippet nervous.”

  “What doesn’t make a whippet nervous?”

  But Lap, plowing through flies like a border collie through sheep, was already heading back to the Rover.

  I THOUGHT HE’D want to grill Flasha Lightning—but not a bit of it. In fact, for a moment he didn’t even want to get into my tooter.

  “Are you absolutely certain there are no bugs in this vehicle?”

  “Couple of fleas, maybe—why?”

  He took me aside. “I cannot overemphasize the necessity of caution. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Fish rots from the head’?”

  It was an old cat proverb. “Listen, whiskers, if you don’t trust the chief—”

  “I don’t trust anyone. And neither should you.”

  “—or if you’re saying that this case could go higher than that—”

  “Much higher.”

  “—then why don’t you just peel open the can? What’s going on in that pointy little head?”

  He didn’t answer directly. “Now that Cujo Potenza sleeps with the shankbones, as they say, who’s the principal packland boss in the Underworld? Is it Pompey the Gross?”

  “Either Pompey or Tugger Toscano.”

  “Is one of them approachable?”

  I chortled. “Not by the likes of you.”

  “But by you?”

  “Maybe—why?”

  “Sometimes the fastest path to the head is through the tail,” he said. “And what about the Upperworld? Who presides there? Is it still Don Gato?”

  “Last I heard.”
/>   “Then please drive me to the Cradles. I’ll seek an audience with the Don while you do your best with the Gross.”

  The Cat’s Cradles was a fancy spiderweb of catwalks strung between the tallest trees, monorail pylons, towers, and monuments high over the Kennels—far out of the reach of the highest-jumping dogs. Up there in the dizzy district lived all sorts of choleric kitties—Tom Does, thrill seekers, shaggies, Goths, wordcrawlers, pillsuckers, tax dodgers, and feline fundamentalists who believed cats had a right to flop wherever they liked. They trapped birds up there with nets, harvested rats, tossed their kitty litter across the rooftops below, and every now and then risked their bony frames by coming down to ground level and “running from the Yaps.” A whole subculture had risen up around it, with packs of hoondogs crouching every night near the jumping-off points and waiting for some furspitter to take them on. Many a mayor had won office promising to smoke the cats out of their nests, but one way or another nothing was ever done.

  “What’s the nearest access post?” Lap asked as we wrestled through a midday traffic snarl.

  “The Tomb of the Unknown Dog-Soldier.”

  “I’d prefer not to scale a war memorial.”

  “Doesn’t stop the rest of your lot,” I said.

  “I’m not a pack animal, Detective.”

  I pulled over at Patriot Place, right next to the WK9FM radio tower. High above, stretched like a skein of wool over the Flatear District, was the control center of the Cradles, the part where the gangster cats lived. This was the Upperworld, where Don Gato held court, safe in his cocoon of oriental rugs and feather pillows. This was where he dished out orders to his powder dealers and ratcatchers. This was where he flung the occasional stray to his messy death (from that height not even a cat could land on its feet). I told Lap I’d pick him up later and watched him straighten his raven tie, pop out his claws, and start scaling the rusty tower with that sickening second nature that, along with their conniving little minds, is all that saves cats from extinction.

  They said where the Upperworld and the Underworld met it wasn’t sparks that flew, but meat tickets. They said that Don Gato had “an arrangement” with Pompey the Gross that was never barked about out loud. And it was said that this arrangement was what really kept the smoke away from the Cradles—the arrangement the Don had with the Gross, the one the Gross had with the mayor, and the one the mayor had with the slinkers and shakers in Kathattan. It was all one big tangled ball of wool that the rest of us hopped through like fleas, hoping we didn’t get squeezed.