The Unscratchables

by Cornelius Kane

  I didn’t mention my pig-hunting with Spike.

  “One thing’s for certain, though,” said Lap, “we’ve not yet heard the last of Q. Riossiti—I can promise you that.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t want to help?”

  “Riossiti was acting and so was I. It’s not for nothing that I left my contact details with the Cattica warden. Mark my words—Riossiti will attempt to contact us. My only hope is that it’s not too late when he does.”

  I shuddered. “Well, don’t expect me to hold back next time. There’s only so much stirring a bullie can bear.”

  “I’ll warn Riossiti to be cautious,” Lap said, but I could tell he had his licker lodged in his furry little cheek. I unleashed a whopper, just to irritate him, but he pressed a little button and the windows purred down.

  BACK IN MY office Lap was fussing over his patterns, still trying to find the thread that made everything plain. His survey map of the Kennels now had colored pins all over it showing the murder scenes and all the places the killer had been sighted. Looped around these pins he had lines of red and yellow wool, crossing the map, intersecting, turning at sharp angles, so that altogether it looked like some modern art tapestry. He had cards, too, each holding scraps of information he was trying to piece together: the riddles of Quentin Riossiti, the responses of Phineas Reynard, the clues of Don Gato and Pompey the Gross. And meanwhile he was getting up-to-the minute reports on everything from the employment record of Corky Farr-Fetch (once with the United Boxing Federation), to the movements of Zeus Katsopoulos (on his way back to Greece by private jet), to the latest from SI and Dr. Barnabus (a new report on the Katsopoulos hair Lap had picked up in the limousine).

  “A chemical analysis shows trace elements of somatotropin and sildenafil citrate,” Lap said, looking pleased with himself.

  “Bark like a dog.”

  “Somatotropin is a common growth hormone. Sildenafil citrate is injected into feline erector muscles to make them engorge when under threat. Both have been known to be exploited in combat sports. You’ll recall the way Mr. Katsopoulos doubled in size when the fight began?”

  “So Katsopoulos is a hypohero?”

  “That’s an issue for other authorities,” said Lap, “but it seems highly probable that he’s been groomed in the same way. But by whom, exactly? And to what ultimate end?”

  Working three janglers at once—his pocket unit, his hotline, and my bone-colored dialer, so old you had to shout into it—he peeled open a sardine can and dropped a little fish down his gutchute, so pressed for time he didn’t even have time to chew.

  “Mr. Lightning,” he said to me between conversations.

  “Say what?”

  “I believe you said you were hunting Flasha Lightning.”

  I spluttered. “That’s right…last night…that’s exactly what I left to do. To chase Lightning. Why?”

  “I’d very much like to speak to him again.”

  “Good luck. I couldn’t pick up his trail.”

  “I thought you said you had a good lead?”

  “Seemed like a good lead. Turned into a frayed string. But I’m still gonna round him up—you can bet your whiskers on it.”

  He got distracted for a few seconds, talking to someone on the jangler, but before I could sneak away he put a paw over the squawker.

  “Detective,” he whispered, “if you’re heading outside then I insist you wear a bulletproof vest.”

  “You gotta be kidding?”

  “I wish I were. But all my instincts—and all my logical faculties—are urging caution.”

  “I ain’t never needed a bulletproof vest,” I said. “Never have and never will. Slugs just bounce off my hide.”

  And it was true. I could’ve ripped off my shirt and shown him the divots. I could’ve told him about the time at the police academy when I chased a wayward Frisbee across the firing range. I could’ve mentioned that night in Siam when I’d sprung out of the pit with guns woofing at me—they might as well have been using peashooters. I could’ve done all that, but I didn’t want him using command words on me again. So I just left, finding Bud in the corridor, chewing his toothpick.

  “Where you goin’, Crusher?”

  “Out to find Flasha Lightning, that’s where.”

  “Too late, Crusher—ain’t you heard? The whippet was found dead this morning.”

  “What?” I said. “Murdered?”

  Bud shook his head. “The mutt put a leash around his neck and threw himself off a porch.”

  I remembered Flasha’s quivering flanks and curled tail, his dodgy eyes and dry nose, but I couldn’t quite match it with a suicide. Flasha was the sort who’d do backflips around the world before he’d top himself. Unless, of course, he was under more stress than I’d ever guessed. Or unless he’d been given no choice.

  “This ain’t good,” I breathed.

  “Talk about it with the chief, Crusher?”

  “That what the chief wants?”

  “He’s been waitin’ to get you alone.”

  “Sure thing.” I grunted, making the best of it. “It’s about time we had a bowwow, anyway.”

  But in his office the chief was looking out-of-sorts: ungroomed, watery-eyed, and his ten o’clock shadow was hitting midnight. He ordered Bud to shut the door and spoke in a low growl. “I need you to make a judgment call, McNash.”

  “‘Bout what?”

  “About the course of this investigation. About Special Agent Lap.” The chief glanced at Bud and lowered his voice even further. “Is he making progress? Any progress at all?”

  “Depends what you’d call progress, Chief. I couldn’t tell you if we were going forward or backward. Mainly seems sideways, though.”

  “Then you’re officially registering dissent?”

  “I’m registering confusion, if there’s a difference.”

  The chief squeezed the words from the side of his snapper. “Bud here tells me you think Lap should be taken off the case.”

  A buzz ran through me. “That possible?”

  The chief sighed. “Already I’ve submitted a report to Commissioner Gordon Setter. I’ve told him how Lap is performing. Very authoritative. Very thorough. But at the same time I’ve had to admit that nothing’s happening—would it be fair to say that?”

  “You could say it.” I felt my pumper throbbing.

  “So we’ve got a mad killer on the loose and an investigator more interested in insulting Phineas Reynard?”

  “You heard about that?”

  The chief shifted. “Reynard jangled the governor. The governor jangled the commissioner. The commissioner jangled me. And the bottom line is they’re gunning for a change, and sooner rather than later. But I don’t want to do anything until I know for sure. I’m not delegating responsibility here, McNash, but I want your opinion. Should we show the cat the door?”

  I thought of everything Lap had hinted about—great conspiracies, higher forces wanting the truth suppressed, corporate and government interference. And I wondered if I could be the one who’d flush him down the gurgler. But at the same time I was sick of all his hints, sick of running in circles, sick of not being in charge. At the side of the room, meantime, Bud Borzoi was nodding like a dashboard toy, so keen to get back on the case he was practically slobbering.

  “How long will it take?” I asked.

  “Give me the word and I’ll jangle the commissioner. Humphrey MacFluff will be here in an hour.”

  “MacFluff?”

  The chief squinted at me. “MacFluff will assume complete control, of course. I expect he’ll engage you as second-in-command as usual. Why? Does that rub your fur the wrong way?”

  In a flash I sized them up together, seeing Lap’s tapestry map and fussy notes, seeing MacFluff throwing around his full cream gut. I heard Lap’s mind-twisting philosophies, I heard MacFluff gobbling a custard doughnut. I smelled Lap’s high-price colognes, I smelled MacFluff’s fishy cat scent. And I wondered if a change, now, wou
ld just be robbing Rover to feed Ralph.

  But before I could answer the jangler sounded. The chief answered, spoke for a second, and hung up looking like he’d just swallowed a Christmas decoration.

  “What’s the meat?” I asked.

  The chief was toneless. “Reynard Studios…just an hour ago…on the set of The Unscratchables.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Jack Russell Crowe was bitten in half by a giant feral cat.”

  I DIDN’T MUCH care for the flickers anymore. In the good old days they were lean and mean and as hard as a concrete slab. Where Beagles Dare; Dirty Harrier; The Good, the Bad, and the Mexican Hairless. Movies where mutts were mutts, pussies were pussies, and everyone knew what you scraped off the sidewalk. But nowadays they were all bark-and-flash, bark-and-flash, born in yap rooms, manufactured in buzz-boxes, and rolled off the churn belt like Chump’s.

  Lap didn’t seem to care for them either.

  “Riossiti himself wrote of popular entertainment—the ‘catnip of the masses’ he called it. Tranquilizing fantasies essential to the pacification of volatile populations. Yet nowhere will you find the Mighty Lamb more conspicuous. An obsequiousness to the mass consciousness justified by the profit motive and the need to recoup enormous costs by enormous consumption. A world where the most successful flavor is the spiciest and most attractively packaged, regardless of nutritional value; where the lowest common denominator, like a lobby group of stupidity, wields a truly exorbitant power; where success feeds upon itself and the Mighty Lamb becomes ever more powerful and voracious—until it crosses the line where the sheep begins to control the sheepdog.”

  “All part of the great conspiracy, is it?”

  “Not if the phenomenon is purely market driven. But what if high-ranking social engineers, at a governmental level, decided that it’s in the interest of the ruling elite—or indeed the greater organism itself—to keep the public intelligence at a pliant and highly impressionable level? To celebrate the undemanding? To promote the inane? And simultaneously encourage the higher arts to mutate into irrelevancy? Why, if that were the case, fully grown hounds might be playing with toys meant for pups, reading books meant for whelps, and listening to music snarled by junkyard dogs.”

  We were speeding through traffic in the Jaguar and I could tell Lap was excited in his quiet catlike way—not with the new murder, exactly, but with the chance to see a pattern: something he could pin on his wacky map and fit into his messy puzzle. Of course, I didn’t mention that I’d been a second away from turning nose on him, but it gave me a good feeling anyway, knowing he was at my mercy whether he knew it or not. I had dominance. Now all I needed was the excuse to use it.

  Reynard Studios was on the riverside of Ribeye next to the disused Wagtail Park with its sagging roller-coaster tracks. We flashed our tags and got ushered through some half-built fairy-tale sets to the scene of the crime—an elaborate mock-up of a disused fun park. At the rear was a painted backdrop of some sagging roller-coaster tracks. Wind machines stood ready to blow away the fog so they could pump in the dry ice. There was a crumbling ticket booth, an old sheep carousel, and a House of Horrors made up to look like a veterinary surgery.

  “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen—in real life or the movies,” said Brian DePuma, the film’s chief leash-puller.

  “What happened precisely?” Lap asked.

  “I was directing a scene in which Tom and Jack are about to kick open the House of Horrors to arrest a powder dealer. Suddenly there was an almighty squeal and this huge…presence… sprang out of the building into the middle of the street, staring left and right.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “It was all over in a flash…a feral, I think…monstrous…he looked directly at me, he looked at Tom, then he looked at Jack…and it was almost as if he recognized him, Jack…and he opened his jaws like a steel trap…and, forgive me.” DePuma shivered. “I’ve never seen so much blood anywhere, even on the screen.”

  “He targeted Jack Russell Crowe, you say?”

  “He seemed to pick him out.”

  “Because he was a star, or because he was a dog?”

  “I can’t say, Inspector.”

  “And you were about to shoot a scene, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then did you happen to catch any of the attack on film?”

  “If only we had,” DePuma moaned, like he’d missed out on a money shot. “But it all happened so unexpectedly…just between the alarm for silence and the roll of the cameras…seconds before I was about to shout ‘Action!’”

  We wandered over to have a look-see at the body. Lying in two neat pieces in the middle of a pool of blood, the actor looked a whole lot smaller and less fearsome than he did on the big screen. I knew Crowe was popular in the Kennels. He’d played poodles and huskies and blue heelers and Labradors—even a bull terrier in S.B. Confidential—and always got the wags and twitches just right. Even I’d paid to see him in his famous role, as the bullmastiff gladiator who takes on the tigers of the Coliseum, and I joined in the howling when he died at the end. He’d won a Best in Show for that.

  “I know something about ferals, of course,” said the actor Tom Manx—he’d played one in Forest Runt. “But I’ve never seen anything like this. If I didn’t know better I’d say he was less cat than special effect, but special effects don’t kill your costars. Not after the guild got its act together, anyway.”

  “Did you notice which way he went?”

  “He bounded over the green screen and disappeared into the amusement park. Do you have any idea who he is?”

  “We’re trying to ascertain that,” said Lap.

  “Is he in the trade?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Does he have an agent?”

  I was never sure about Manx—whether he was on the level or just a trickster. He’d once played buddy to a dog in a muttonheaded cop comedy, but the woofer was such a slobbering imbecile that even the critic in the Daily Growl had snarled for blood and the picture got virtually chased out of the Kennels. Since then Manx had fallen over himself getting photographed with high-profile pooches—even playing packhounds and gun-dogs, heavily fluffed up and padded out, in a movie or two. And now he’d agreed to share the screen, if not the billing, with a famous dog star in a big-biscuit gangster flick. And his partner was getting loaded into the back of a meat wagon.

  “He was so…sociable,” said Manx, making with the watery eyes. “I know he had a reputation as a feisty little fellow, but to me he seemed so…well behaved…happy…such a friendly dog.” He shook his head. “He didn’t deserve to go like this.”

  “A quick death is a good one,” I said.

  For the first time Manx seemed to notice me. “Are you assigned to this case, Detective…with the inspector?”

  “We’re assigned together.”

  “How about that?” Manx grinned. “Dog and cat together…just like in The Unscratchables.”

  I was about to ask if he wanted my paw print but Lap called us over to a video monitor. By great good luck a documentary crew had left its camera on long enough to record the murder. So for the first time we actually saw our killer in all his glory: a bearlike forest cat wearing nothing but a natural doublecoat, bigger even than Zeus Katsopoulos and twice as scary. In a mad whirl of movement—even in slo-mo it was a blur—he snapped Jack Russell Crowe like a breadstick and tossed him aside much as Quentin Riossiti had done to the mouse. Then he looked directly into the lens—eyes bulging, irises like slits, fangs dripping, hair waving—like he was staring straight at Lap and me, like he was challenging us.

  Then static as he bowled everything over on his way past.

  Brian DePuma shook his head. “He looked at the camera…”

  “He’d need to be trained,” muttered Manx.

  “Perhaps he already has been,” said Lap, though he didn’t explain himself.

  “WHAT’S THAT MEAN?” I asked. We were out of the
studios, slipping away from a presspack and some buzzing publicists, and heading down Festive Street to Wagtail Park. “He’s ‘already been trained’?”

  “Did you not notice on that video footage,” said Lap, “how the feral made a quick check of the cast and crew before settling on Jack Russell Crowe? Before identifying a recognizable dog? Almost as if he’d been trained to kill dogs and dogs alone?”

  “By who?”

  “Most likely by the same facility that trained Zeus Katsopoulos.”

  “Zeus didn’t kill.”

  “Given enough time, and bared claws, I’ve no doubt he would have come close. But even so, it’s possibly because our killer was too good at his work that he needed to be put down in the first place.”

  My head was spinning like a circus-ring spaniel. “You’re saying these two cats were groomed to take out dogs?”

  “The efficacy of their work suggests a highly trained regime, requiring subjects with untainted instincts. Ferals would suit the need perfectly.”

  “The UBF?”

  “Much higher. Which is why none of us—you, me, even the killer himself—is safe. And why it’s imperative to unearth the full truth before it’s completely buried.”

  The gate of Wagtail Park was chained shut, but Lap squeezed himself under the fence and then popped up at the top, paw down, to help me over. I didn’t much care to be seen in such a pose—being assisted over a fence by a Mog—but there didn’t seem to be anyone around, thank the Master. I landed inside near the old ticket booth and took a quick scope.

  The joint was riddled with weeds, cracked asphalt, and scattered garbage. The roller coaster looked like a half-eaten ribcage. The whole place stank of rotting wood, peeling paint, and stagnant rainwater. I’d been here a few times in better days. On weekends you could hardly move, the concourse was so jam-packed, dogs nose-to-tail like slaughterhouse bulls. But there’d been too many scandals for the place to survive—mutts on the Big Dipper getting brained by the support posts, mating couples getting locked in the Tunnel of Love, dirty old mongrels using the Great Slide to clean out their scent-sacs. When the health inspectors gave the food stalls the official stiff-tail—the candy apples weren’t the only things that had worms—the whole place buckled under the bad publicity. They should’ve chopped it up and tossed it in the furnace years ago. But the rumor was the government wanted an even bigger fun park in its place.