The Big Miaouw

by Adam Skye

  One time, by the port, I got jumped by five ship rats. Rats jump you, the only way Out is In — no hesitation. I did the first two with teeth, opened up the third with claws, red-striped the fourth with a longshot swipe as he hauled tail, and missed the last one. But these were black rats, little guys compared to the brown rats down in the sewers. Brown rats are tough. Sewer rat’s life gotta be ugly, an’ it makes them mean an’ tough an’, most of all, hungry. Stick your face in a trashcan without sniffin’ first, you could find a full-crew rat pack. Four, maybe even jus’ three of them, an’ you could lose your whole nine at once for just a quarter second’s thinkin’ about what you need to do instead of just doin’ it... an’ y’ain’t permitted to run. Just thinkin’ about them made me want to wash.

  I couldn’t see how I could get the bird’s killer, but I kept on lookin’.

  I went to the building with the balcony that the canary fell off. I waited in the alley for someone to come out and then I slipped in the door as she closed it and made my way up the stairs. When I got to the fifth I found just one door. I pushed against it but it didn’t budge. I sniffed under the door, caught a strange perfume, sweet like flowers but none I’d smelled before, and a tiny whiff of rat. If it hadn’t been what I’d sort of expected, I’d’ve put it down to the fact that pretty much anywhere you can smell rat. They get everywhere and the smell lingers. I looked around for a window that would let me onto the balcony, but they were all shut. Dead end. I went back down, no questions answered.

  BCPD policy towards rats was to chase, apprehend and question any rodent wiseass enough to show its pointy face aboveground. Schaeffer’s inclination was to bite on sight, one he only just held in check: rats meant the underworld, and the underworld meant Marcus. Marcus was any cop dog’s Most Wanted guy. Figure the sewer rats as a gang of millions, with Marcus right at the top, and you had the name of a guy who ordered robberies, thefts and murders all over the city. Based on BCPD estimations, a quarter of the city’s stored foods were heisted by rats every year, with a ten percent kickback ending up in Marcus’s larder.

  Schaeffer wanted Marcus more than he wanted anything. Problem was, nobody ratted on him. Schaeffer couldn’t get solid evidence, but even if he’d had it, he could hardly go down into the underworld and arrest him.

  As he walked at Partner’s side around the plaza, he looked down at the drain covers, half expecting to see shining eyes gleaming back up at him, but the drains were just storm drains. The sewer, where the rats lived, was beneath the plaza.

  “Rats in the plaza,” Scotty had said. Brown rats looking for one Louie, who was a black rat. Schaeffer had already run the name by other police dogs down at the station but there were no outstanding warrants against anybody called Louie, so it looked as if the rodent was clean. As for the dead bird, it turned out that while Schaeffer had been away on sniffer detail, another police dog had been on patrol in the plaza: patrol dog Berger had discovered the body and done a preliminary forensic sniff-over of the victim and crime scene. Then he’d peed against a pillar to mark the area out as a crime scene off-limits to dogs.

  Berger said he’d smelled rat all over the bird, but cat all over the crime scene, and couldn’t say which one struck him most likely as the killer. Schaeffer asked if he had any ID on the cat smell, but Berger nixed it — the plaza fill-in job was a first for the younger cop. Berger was still cutting his teeth on Metro Patrol, hadn’t had much experience with the street and wouldn’t have a patch aboveground until, in the eyes of the Department, he’d made his bones. When Schaeffer pumped the rookie for wound profiles, he complained that his partner had been radioed before he could do the sniff-over thoroughly and he’d been pulled off the job. Schaeffer snarled silently at the chain of command. He pushed for more. Berger couldn’t say what made the wound on the back of the neck, but they were not post-mortem: there was blood on the neck feathers.

  Schaeffer chewed it over as he cruised the plaza: rats, a dead canary, and a cat asking questions...

  He padded along, worrying it over in his head, trying to find possible links. Fatso stopped to talk to a dame, all smiles and cap-touching politeness. Schaeffer waited, stayed vigilant, faked bored. He sighed, sat, noticed that the storm drain next to him was blocked: bunged up with paper and trash, it was starting to smell. Then he saw a cat come into the plaza from a side alley, making for the corner where the canary was found. Schaeffer stiffened, stared, made the ID. Ginger and white male, white paws: Frankie Frr.

  He watched as the cat headed for the door to the building, sat and started washing, looking natural. Then the door opened, and Schaeffer saw the cat stop licking, look round quickly, then slip into the building as the door closed.

  Schaeffer ticked off questions he wanted to ask the cat, then stood up and set off to do some police work. He got one pace before the leash pulled him up, and Fatso hauled him back.

  “***!”

  It was the nearest Schaeffer had ever come to cocking a leg to the chain of command. He felt like chewing Fatso out for his rank-pulling, but knew he couldn’t — insubordination meant back to training college. Schaeffer let it go. He licked his ass, and made a mental note to lick Fatso later, right on the lips.

  I knew things were gonna hot up when I saw Schaeffer eyein’ me from the other side of the plaza. I didn’t know if he knew I was wise to the surveillance. When I saw him tuckin’ his head down an’ tuckin’ in, I didn’t know if he was fakin’ natural, or doin’ it because he couldn’t help himself. But that didn’t really figure for me, not with Schaeffer. Most cop dogs were pretty dumb — none of them had been born on the street. They had procedure, trainin’ an’ discipline where they shouldda had instinct an’ a nose. An’ they went round with humans, which I figured did for good police-doggin’ what a leash’d do for a cat.

  It was a big city, but I covered a lot of it in those days. I knew a few BCPD dogs an’ I reckoned Schaeffer was better than all of them. Schaeffer kept the plaza in order, even cats gave him that, an’ he didn’t do it by sittin’ on his ass growlin’ at pigeon poop. He worked the plaza thorough as a cat, sniffed around, followed up leads an’ got collars. Problem was, he didn’t like me, or my kind of cat.

  Waitin’ to get in the buildin’, I watched him from the corner of my eye while I washed, seein’ him clear watchin’ me. I couldn’t work out whose case he was on — mine or the canary’s. And then I found myself thinkin’, just for a moment, that if I had my eyes and his nose, I’d have a whole lot better chance of trackin’ down the killer. I let it go.

  I didn’t feel like I had any leads worth chasin’. The apartment was where I wanted to look next but I had to figure a way to get in. I decided to take some time and think on it. I figured, go down the port, do some fishin’, clear my head, get away from the alleys, go breathe some fresh air.

  It was a sunny day. I felt good. I trotted over to Fat Sam’s to see if he wanted to come along. When I got there he was teachin’ some of his grandkittens how to box, jabbin’ out a paw and showin’ them guard an’ slash combos. He shooed them off to play when he saw me comin’ down the alley. They tumbled off, laughin’ an’ whappin’ each other round the head.

  “Frankie.”

  “Hey, Sam.”

  “Still on that case?”

  “Not today. Wanna come down the port, sit in the sun, maybe hook a fish?”

  Sam nodded, got up, said he could do with a day away from the noise, an’ a snooze. He’d been up all night. “Goddam rats all over the place,” he said.

  Louie was asleep or Louie was awake. Asleep, awake, asleep, awake... He couldn’t understand why he was sleeping so much, but he dozed off in darkness and woke up in it and the only colour in his life was in his dreams — golden cheese wheel suns and creamy stars, blue sky, clouds, red brick, green leaves and the dazzle of shimmering emerald neck feathers against the grey plumage of the world’s best singer and friend.

  Dreaming of Sax brought it all back... The terror: Louie crying and shaking and
Sax throwing a hug around him, the only living thing other than another black rat who would, and telling him, “Doan cry, lil buddy. Dr Toons is goan sing all that bad shit away: scoo bee doo...”

  Louie wanted to stay with Sax as much as he needed to take his next breath but THEY would come for Sax too, and they could kill birds when they wanted to. Louie begged Sax to fly away, but knew he wouldn’t, not with Zoot’s next show so soon. He knew he couldn’t make him understand. Louie told him why he’d miss the gig, where he’d be. Sax looked like he’d have given him his wings, and hugged him.

  “Be dancin’ lucky, Louie. Don’ know what this big death shit yo talkin’ up is but it ain’ goan happen in Sax’s city, y’hear me?”

  Louie hadn’t looked back when he ran off along the rooftops.

  Now he kept his eyes closed, sniffed very quietly, and shuddered.

  The air down here, said the Voice again.

  If there had been rats he would have heard them. There were none. He felt relief and anguish at the same time: he was still undiscovered, but the waiting was horrible.

  I hit the night alleys. I had spent the day by the port jawin’ with Sam. We fished awhile, caught nix, got splashed, hated it, gave up an’ dozed. After a nap, I asked Sam about action around the plaza — in particular, anything on the canary. An’ what was all this about rats coming out of the sewers?

  Sam gave me the lowdown on the night before: more rats out in the streets than he’d ever seen. Fight night: a long night spent marking out territory in red. Sam was slit-eyed with tiredness.

  “Funny thing was,” he said, “the rats didn’t seem like they was out for a fight. More like they were lookin’ for somethin’. Something’s goin’ on, Frankie. I’m tellin’ ya...”

  Sam wondered off home. I hit the streets an’ made for the plaza, dogged by a nagging sense of things not comin’ together, of something bein’ off. I decided to try take a look at the balcony. I had a kind of fur-rubbed-the-wrong-way type feelin’, an’ I wanted to run to burn it out. But I strolled: a runnin’ cat attracts attention, an’ I was tryna keep out of Schaeffer’s way. But the balcony kept drawing me, like her song used to....

  When I made the plaza, my luck must’ve turned: there was no dog on duty. An’ when I got to the apartment block where the canary’d lived, I was just in time to slip in past a guy with a bag of groceries in his arms, pushin’ the door in with his back. I got round him an’ scooted up the stairs to the fourth, my footfalls covered by the guy crashin’ doors and startin’ the lift. I crept up the last flight nice an’ quiet.

  Nothin’ had changed: the door and window were still shut. From under the door, inside the apartment, I caught the same flowers, the lingerin’ stink of rat. I turned to go, disappointed again. I was halfway down, between the fifth an’ the fourth, when the lift stopped on the fourth. The door swung open, the guy stepped out, put his groceries on the floor, went for his keys. I could smell fish in the bag, and tried to rate my chances. Then the guy pushed his door open, an’ I got a better break than fish: an open window givin’ onto the balcony, an’ a table beneath it. I saw my chance. I ran inside, leapt up onto the table, jumped onto the sill, clambered outside an’ jumped onto his balcony, one floor down from the canary’s last known address. The guy shouted at me, then shut the window.

  His terrace was tiled red an’ was big enough for any cat. Nice an’ private too. High walls on two sides — you couldn’t see the neighbours.

  On the plaza side there was a low wall with tall, pointed iron railings. The view of the plaza was good, but it felt like you were lookin’ out of a cage. The guy had a table and chairs, though, an’ I hopped up onto the table, leapt up for the top of the wall. I came up short but I got my claws into cracks, scrabbled with my back legs an’ hauled myself up. I looked across a line of walls an’ terraces. Where I was had the same layout as on the other side of the wall, but the humans had it different: no furniture this time, just a cleaned-out bird-cage standin’ empty in a corner of the terrace, door closed. The cage was at the top of a stand mounted on a round base, an’ it was cat-proof. I figured the cage had been moved. A few feet away there was a ring where the city dirt hadn’t reached, same size as the cage-base.

  I jumped down an’ padded over an’ put my nose to the stand. I smelled cold metal, canary an’ rat. I ran my nose up, sniffing rat-canary-rat-canary all the way. I followed my nose down the stand onto the terrace floor, let the smells lead me to the plaza-facing wall, up it, an’ along it. I followed it ‘til it came to the high adjoinin’ wall. I stood up as tall as I could on my back legs, but the scents went up further than I did. I looked around for a way onto the wall. There was nothin’ I could climb on. I sat down angry, swatted at a fly.

  The scent led to the next terrace. I needed to take a look, but I had no way of gettin’ there from where I was. I climbed the wall and jumped down back onto the neighbour’s terrace, and saw that my timin’ was still out. The guy had shut his window. I was spendin’ the night under the stars unless I did somethin’.

  There was only one thing I could do: I put aside my pride an’ miaouwed to be let back in through the window. He opened up eventually, but before he let me out he made me drink a saucer of milk, stroked me without bein’ asked, made dumb noises an’ tried to pick me up. I hated it. Finally he opened the door an’ I ran downstairs, my dignity rattled. I felt like I’d just swallowed a hairball, but another cat’s. I wrote the day off as a loser. Nothing new learned, no feet forward.

  Then I got to the bottom of the stairs, slipped through the door an’ stepped out into the plaza, and walked slap bang into the square’s favourite crime hound, pissin’ against a wall.

  Schaeffer knew Frr, and didn’t like him.

  Frr was trouble: the Moggytown private dick had no licence from the city PD, and conducted his investigations with a complete disregard for the law. That he’d tracked down cat-killers and apprehended a kitten-snatcher got him respect in the alleys and made him popular with the ladies, but it didn’t make him a saint in Schaeffer’s eyes. Canaries went missing in his neighbourhood — cage doors popped by night and the tweeties gone... No feathers, no blood — but still...

  At best, Schaeffer had Frr down as a trashcan vigilante with no respect for the law. What stuck most in Schaeffer’s craw, though, was that the cat had no chain of command round his neck and wasn’t worried by procedure. Nor did he have a dumb fatass partner.

  In Schaeffer’s book, ‘feline’ and ‘felon’ were close enough and Frr was both. To Schaeffer’s knowledge Frr had committed assault and cat-burglary and had once boosted a store for sausages with which to bribe a night watchdog into turning a blind eye to a Breaking and Entering. It was Schaeffer who’d busted the bent dog and he’d wanted Frr too, but Frr disappeared. Schaeffer knew he couldn’t make squat of the bribery and B&E testimonies now, but the canary thing was Murder One and Frr was always ears-deep in something. So Schaeffer had had the apartment door under surveillance from the moment he’d come on duty. Partner was with him, but he was talking to dames again and wasn’t bothering to patrol the square, which for once was what Schaeffer wanted. He needed to sniff the scene out; toss it for evidence that might link the cat to the canary.

  Schaeffer whimpered for a pee. Two-legs let him off the leash. He ran right across the plaza to the spot where Berger had discovered the canary’s body and sniffed the scene out to try and fill in the missing details from Berger’s report, but got nothing. It was two days old and the scent was faded, buried beneath a hundred everyday plaza smells.

  Schaeffer went round a corner, out of view of Partner, cocked a leg against a wall, was still going when the apartment block door swung outwards, and Frankie Frr appeared. Schaeffer tried to stop peeing, but couldn’t, even with somebody watching.

  Frr said, “Been drinkin’ on duty again?”

  And Schaeffer saw red. The cat laughed and made to saunter away just as Schaeffer was finishing up. Schaeffer went after him, headed him off.


  “Hold it a second, Frr.”

  The cat stopped, smiled and licked a paw.

  “Why? Ya forgot t’ shake it, by the way.”

  Frr played Cool-cat, kept licking his paw.

  “Thinkin’ about gettin’ a home, Frr?”

  “Just out for a stroll on a warm night, Officer. No law against that.”

  Eye contact: no fear in the cat’s eyes. Schaeffer bristled.

  “True enough. ’Cept this is an official police crime scene, Frr. Or can’t you smell?”

  The cat wiseassed him, “Cat don’t smell as good as a dog, Schaeffer. Or as bad.”

  Schaeffer lost it.

  “Against the wall, Frr!”

  “I’m clean.”

  Schaeffer sniffed him down for canary, got nothing, but still couldn’t hold back. Shake him down, he thought.

  “Two nights ago, Frr, there was a murder in the plaza. A little bird was bitten through the back of the neck. She lived in the buildin’ you just came out of, Frr, an’ you’re a cat... I’m takin’ you in.”

  The cat laughed at him.

  “What?! Kiss my pink-eye!”

  Schaeffer showed teeth, growled,

  “You’re under arrest, Frr.”

  Frr dropped the cool, hissed, “Arrest me for what?”

  “You’re a murder suspect!” Schaeffer barked back.

  “No chance, dog breath! You got no evidence, no witnesses! You don’t even have Probable Cause. This is ratshit an’ you know it!”

  Schaeffer barked him down.

  “So what were you doin’ in the building, Frr? Checkin’ to see if she’s been replaced? What, you figure they opened a take-away up there?”

  Keep nipping, thought Schaeffer. He could see he had the cat rattled.

  “Where were you two nights ago, Frr?”

  The kitty punched back, spat,