The Big Miaouw

by Adam Skye

  Schaeffer found the load even though it was wrapped tight in three layers of plastic, and buried. Whoever put it there had eaten pastrami before he buried it and that was how Schaeffer found the bag. Even if the bag hadn’t stunk like meat, the soil smelled all dug-up and fresh and Schaeffer had been sniffing for that first thing. The guy must have been real dumb to eat a sandwich that stank so strong and then bury the bag smelling of it in a place where you never smelled pastrami. Any good cop dog knew that if you wanted to hide something, you thought about smell first. Did it fit in, blend, sit natural with everything around it? Schaeffer could remember his first class at training college — OD 1: Olfactory Deduction — with a departmental legend dishing detail to the rookies. Captain Sam Gold, ‘The Retriever’, the most decorated Narco dog in BCPD history.

  "Where do you stash a steak when you boost a butcher’s? Answer: in his trashcan. Where do rats live? Answer: where it smells worst.

  Why do cats wash so much? Answer: ’cause they got somethin’ to hide.

  A good cop dog thinks with his nose. If the human you’re lookin’ for smokes, what do the butts smell like? If it’s dogs you’re lookin’ for, ditto...”

  They pulled into the plaza and took a long, slow circuit around, Fatso looking for dames to park next to. Schaeffer looked through the window, and saw some dogs who really should have known better than to be on his patch — a couple of bin-bag-worriers and Scotty Macdougall, looking respectable in a tartan waistcoat and fooling everyone but Schaeffer. Schaeffer had Scotty fitted out with a snitch jacket.

  Scotty Macdougall, aka ‘Smokie McDog’, but an aka from waaaay back. Schaeffer had Scotty’s smell filed in his memory next to his record: the white terrier was a one-time ankle-worrier who used to run with the westies, a distraction guy. He grabbed hold of the two-legs’ trouser-bottoms and drew all the looks with his comedy growling while the real crime went off — a hot steak/chop heist straight from the plate in broad daylight. The gang had gotten fat on it, running the scam all over town. They got cocky and did it on Schaeffer’s patch while he was on duty. Schaeffer had lost the jaws-guy, because he was real fast, but he picked up his smell and went back for Scotty who was sauntering around, making like he wanted to be in the plaza and not at the hide-out divvying up the loot. It took Schaeffer about five seconds to bark the little guy’s protests down to a whimper, another five before he rolled over and gave up the name of Zippo Whippet. Schaeffer memorised Zippo, and said, “I see you again, I’ll tear your throat out.” He figured Zippo would know to stay gone. And Scotty’d snitched: now he was Schaeffer’s.

  Fatso let Schaeffer out of the car. He stretched low and long, lengthening his muscles to drive the cramp out, breathing deep to get the smell of Fatso and the car out of his head. He barked at Scotty.

  “Mac! Get your butt here!”

  The westie’s tail dropped. He slunk over, looking at the floor.

  Schaeffer glowered at him, kept the growl down low but let the small guy know it was there, with the big bite sitting right behind it.

  “I been away, Scotty. Just a couple of days. Don’t tell me you figured it was a transfer and decided to get the gang together again.”

  The little westie shook his head.

  “Och, no, Officer Schaeffer. Ah’m a gud dug so ah am.”

  Schaeffer growled, “Oh yeah?”

  And frisked him anyway, sniffing head to tail for steak smells. Scotty stank, but not of anything incriminating.

  “You stink, Scotty. But legally, you’re clean. Better keep it that way too.”

  “Aye, aye, Officer. Likesay, ah’m no a bad dug.”

  “You seen Zippo lately?”

  Scotty shook his head, looked down, probably remembering how scared he’d been of Schaeffer when he’d been turned snitch.

  “Seen anybody new in the plaza?”

  “New dugs? Nay new dugs, but there’s been rats oot ’n’ aboot the night.”

  “Doing what?” growled Schaeffer.

  “Askin’ fae rat Louie. Thass funny tha’ is... Louie’s no broon an’ these wus broon rats.”

  “Yeah yeah. So what else?”

  Scotty shuffled.

  “A big gingey cat’s bin snootin’ aboot. Askin’ questions an’ that.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “Aboot a wee bird. A dead bird.”

  Schaeffer’s ears pricked up.

  “What does he look like?”

  “She. Yelly fairthers...”

  “The cat! Ya mutt.”

  “Oh. Likesay, gingey. ’N’ bits ay white ’n ‘is fur ’n’ that.”

  “Did you chase him?”

  “Och no, Officer, likesay ah’m...”

  “Yeah, yeah. A good dog. I heard ya the other times. ’Cept I wouldn’t have cared if you had chased him, Scotty. Dogs chase cats, right? It’s natural. So why didn’t you?”

  The little white dog nipped at a flea, uncomfortable.

  “Well, ah’m no a big dug like, an ah...”

  “... figured he’d shred your sorry ass?” Schaeffer offered.

  Scotty looked away, a long-distance stare back to better times when he’d run with the westies. Nobody messed with him then: he’d been big-time, a three-steaks-a-day top-dog, bitches all over him. Now he begged at tables by day, and nights he followed drunks home, hoping they’d throw up.

  Schaeffer looked down at the little dog and his grimy dumb waistcoat.

  “Beat it. I’m gonna give you ten seconds and then you’d better be gone from the plaza. Smokie.”

  The little dog yelped,

  “Ah cannae run that fast, it’ll take mair’n ten seconds tae...”

  “Nine... eight...”

  “Ah’m no built fae’t! Ye cannae run that fast if ye havnae got long legs!”

  “...seven, six...”

  Schaeffer heard, “Ah cannae change the laws ay physics...!” as Scotty scarpered.

  Schaeffer chewed the snitch-meat over. A dead bird in the plaza. Brown rats looking for a black rat. A ginger cat asking questions. His hackles prickled slightly. He figured he knew who the ginger cat might be. And if he was snooping round the plaza, Schaeffer wanted to know why.

  Fatso whistled. Schaeffer came to heel, wanting to bite.

  Out of sight, out of mind, thought Louie, curled tight at the back of his hole. If only. The brown rats hadn’t seen so much as a whisker of Louie since he overheard the MOONrats and Marcus on the terrace, and the longer it stayed that way, the better, because if they found him they’d kill him. Twice. That was the way it was between the brown rats and the black rats: brown rats ran the city and didn’t allow any competition. They went more or less anywhere they wanted and helped themselves to whatever they found. They robbed and killed whoever got in the way, and tribute and kickbacks went upstairs to Marcus.

  Make that downstairs: King Marcus lived deep down in the dark heart of the sewer. The city belonged to the brown rats, and had done for as long as anyone could remember. Black rats hid from brown. Black rats were too small, and too few. Brown rats were bigger, nastier, hungrier, and there were millions of them. Black rats hid from brown like they hid from everything else. There were scattered communities of black rats left, always hidden, high up, where the brown ones couldn’t climb.

  Louie flinched in the dark: the communities were in so much danger. He had to get out and tell them, warn them. The old death is coming back. We will be blamed, hunted down, destroyed... But he couldn’t move: he couldn’t go further into the underworld, nor up into the plaza. By day or night the plaza had a thousand eyes — dogs’, cats’, humans’ — all hostile: everything wanted to kill him. Wherever he ran he would be hunted. He had no friends to turn to up there, except one, and Sax would be southbound by now if he was smart.

  No, he wouldn’t: Sax wasn’t afraid, not like Louie. Sax was cool and Sax was fly. Sax had his voice and that made him Great, but Sax wasn’t afraid enough. Louie’d warned him, told him, “Get out of the city, Sax, things
’re gonna get nasty,” but Sax had just looked blank, and Louie hadn’t had time to spell it out to him. How could he? Only a rat would have truly understood.

  He’ d had to get off the roof, lose his pursuers. He’d came up with the crazy idea of hiding right under their noses where the smell was so bad it levelled the odds. Louie’d had nowhere else to go: anybody suspected of helping him would make an enemy of the brown rats, and that was the very worst enemy you could have. Any bolthole he might have had would be watched. Only here, in a hole in a wall near where the sewer met the world, did Louie think he was safe.

  But it wouldn’t last forever: he was hungry and thirsty, and the air felt like mild poison, building up.

  Sitting at his reading desk in the apartment that had been prepared for his brief stay in the city, Sai found that he was too distracted to concentrate on the book before him.

  In the rat’s mind, the shrill imagining of slaughter and destruction was a din over which he could barely hear himself think. He could not read. He looked out of the window, down onto the plaza. He saw complacent humans walking in the sunshine, unaware their lives would become pure horror in a matter of days. He saw a policeman with a police dog — representatives of human authority that would soon be obsolete.

  Domus wants to take over the world, to build tyranny on the foundations of death. Domus is planning to unleash a death which, by its very nature, has no limits. Pasteurella pestis. This death, this ancient, terrible power; its origins uncertain, its lifespan... indefinite? Who would wish for its reappearance? Sai wondered.

  Yet he knew the answer: somebody who had imagined how to harness its power to his own ends. Domus, thought Sai, he whom once I admired is my enemy now.

  He returned to his book, his mind a little clearer, his will a little stronger. He felt pangs of hunger but ignored them, just like he ignored the food that had been brought to him. Other deliciousness awaited: Sai had before him Boccaccio’s introduction to his Decameron, a description of Florence in the grip of the Black Death.

  The bite marks bothered me, because I’d seen that kind of bite before, though only ever on a pigeon, never a canary. The bites weren’t post-mortem as the beak was open. She’d died screamin’. They weren’t bite marks a cat would have left: the punctures were on the back of the neck, curvin’ inwards like a cat’s teeth do, but the holes weren’t circles. They were fine slits, two of them, and so close together they looked like one wound. But I looked real close and I could see that the middle of the gash was ragged, and the wound profiles were for sharp, squared-off flat teeth, not round. Incisors, not fangs.

  Only one animal could have done that: a rodent. And I figured it wasn’t no hamster or mouse. Which put a rat in the frame. Motive? Hell, who knows anythin’ about rats and their motives? Food wasn’t a dead cert because I’d found the canary and she hadn’t been bitten about the body: no attempt had been made to eat her. A lot of rats like to kill for the hell of it; a lot of cats too. I seen some frenzied killings in my time — dogs doin’ it to cats, cats doin’ it to birds an’ rats, rats doin’ it to anything small enough or, if there was enough of them, takin’ down the bigger guy. This was no frenzy. The bites were quick and clean.

  I turned it over in my head, trying to see all the angles.

  So what was she doing on the plaza floor and not in the cage? If she was out of the cage, why didn’t she fly? I couldn’t figure anythin’ out so I went back to the corner of the plaza where I’d found the bird. She’d been taken away. I looked up at the building she’d lived in. I’d need to take a prowl up there, and soon, but there were things I could do down on the ground.

  I started askin’ questions. Cats I talked to — the ones who lived around the square and who I saw every day — had all heard The Miaouw and most of them remembered what they were doin’ on the night. Nobody knew anythin’ about the bird, though. Some hadn’t even known there was a canary on the fifth floor in that corner of the plaza. A couple of cats gave the impression that if they had known, there wouldn’t have been any evidence of a crime. Hell, they wouldn’t even have seen it as a crime, just what you gotta do when you gotta eat. I could see it in their eyes. I could see they were thinking, A bird lives, a bird dies: what’s it to you?

  I guess I’m a pretty strange cat for the thing I got about canaries.

  I never tell cats what put it there.

  I made my way round the plaza and the pigeons got out of my way, flappin’ off and givin’ me the bird-eye, which means, Watch your fur when I’m in the air, pal! The pigeons weren’t to know I was strictly a fish kind of cat, an’ I wasn’t about to tell them in case they started getting fresh. They’re slow an’ pretty easy to catch, leastways in the city they are: probably all drowsy cos there’s always plenty to eat scattered round the plaza floor an’ it’s nice an’ warm. Maybe it’s breathin’ traffic-fumes in the sun makes ’em so dopey. Whatever, lottsa cats lunch out that way, so there wasn’t a whole lotta love lost between fur and feathers. I figured nobody on the ground had seen anythin’ so I was lookin’ for anybody who maybe’d been up on the roof or in the air about the time the canary got murdered.

  Which meant I gotta talk to the birds if I couldn’t find a cat who got somethin’ for me to go on.

  I prowled, headin’ out of the plaza into the alleys around it.

  All I wanted was the name of the cat who put out the shout on the dead canary, but cats is cats and cagey about sayin’ too much. I asked trashcanners and a couple of housecats from the neighbourhood. No-one remembered exactly who the shout came up from, or, if they did, they weren’t about to just let it go without a paw gettin’ greased.

  It took me most of the rest of the night to get the name: ol’ Blue Eyes, Siamese Chi, honked it up. Sam. I should have known. I should have gone to him first.

  Sam was a big Persian who lived in an alley off the plaza, fat an’ jolly an’ comfortable, with a big family around him. He was dark grey, double-fluffy, an’ a lot of cats had made the mistake of thinkin’ they could walk all over him cos he looked like a rug. Big mistake: his fur wasn’t so thick that insults just bounced off it, and flat-faced Sam had a southpaw that came out of nowhere. His best street-fightin’ years were over, but you could still see the occasional cat from his past, a quarter of an ear lighter for not havin’ watched out for Sam’s left hook. He owned a couple of humans which meant his address was basically Cream Street, but he still got around.

  In his day he’d been tough, charmed a lotta ladies, an’ proved he was cat enough to defend his own. Sam was gooood company: lots of times we’d prowled together up to the roofs to hear Zoot an’ the crew croon. He knew what my thing about canaries was, even if I didn’t ever tell him why. When I found him, he looked as if he’d been expectin’ me. When I came down his alley he stopped lickin’, shooed a coupla grandkittens off to play and got up to greet me.

  “Frankie...”

  “Hey, Sam.”

  We rubbed noses. Sam sat back.

  “Figured I’d see you soon enough. Ya heard about the canary on The Big Miaouw, right?”

  I couldn’t jive Sam. I nodded. He scowled. He respected me even if he thought the canary thing I had was weird for a cat.

  “This a case? Is there, like, any fish in this for you?”

  I shrugged.

  “No, I didn’t think so. Not witchoo. It’s purr-sonal, ain’t it?”

  He shook his head. I felt defensive. I said, “Just curious,”

  Sam looked me real hard in the eye, a reminder of what every cat gets taught before he even gets off the tit: what curiosity does to cats.

  I said, “I hear ya, Sam.”

  Sam lightened up, batted me gently round the chops with a paw.

  “Funny kinda cat you are, Frankie.”

  He told me what he’d seen. He was sidlin’ roun’ the plaza after a day spent nappin’ when a canary dropped to the ground a few paces ahead of him, like a gift. He didn’t touch it though. Figured it was another cat’s supper.
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br />   “Did you look at her, Sam?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. Somebody’d’ve thrown a shoe at me if they’d seen me next to a dead birdie.”

  I told him what I’d seen; what there’d been on the tweetie’s neck. I told him to let other cats know, but not to put it out on The Miaouw. He told me to be careful. I prowled.

  I didn’t have a whole lot to go on, and, to tell the truth, I didn’t even know why I was lookin’ into the canary’s murder. A rat killed her. There were about two million rats in the city and my contacts in Ratsville were zero. Odds of makin’ the case? Same as meetin’ a dog with nice breath. Or a nice rat. I was thinkin’, Why do I wanna get any nearer to rats than I have to?

  I’ll tell you how it is with cats and rats. Cats teach their kits: Never hesitate. Never play with a rat: it ain’t no mouse. Just kill it. That is it. That is how it is and always was. No way can they be allowed to even dream about sharing territory with us: any alleyway encounter gets bloody. Cats start kits off with mice, just practice for the real thing... then take ’em out into the alley one night when they’re big enough, show them what they gotta do and teach ’em. Leave the body in the street, that way the rats get the message.

  I came across plenty of rats in the alley late at night, and did what a cat gotta do. Rat an’ cat, paw to paw? Rat got no chance. Rats in numbers is when you find out how tough you are.