1 The Big Kitty

by Claire Donally

  “It’s like there was a curse on us, right from the beginning, when the old biddy woke up and found me looking for her frigging ticket. I had to shut her up, and nothing’s gone right since.”

  “Well, you kept me fooled,” Sunny hastily said, trying to calm him down. She glanced at a big, cast-iron frying pan just beside her knee. If she grabbed that, maybe threw it at his face—

  Shays must have read something in her expression. “Don’t fool yourself, now. You’re too far away. I could put a bullet in you before you even get off the floor.”

  For the first time, he seemed to notice the pots around her.

  “You’re still looking?” the drug dealer burst out. “When I heard about you on the news, I figured you must have had some inside information from the old woman or Gordo.” His eyes skidded around the room, and Sunny could almost see the thoughts bouncing back and forth in his meth-fueled brain. Paranoia, low impulse control, and the coldhearted business acumen that had made him a successful criminal …

  Sunny could read it in his eyes. He’d decided to cut his losses.

  And that included her.

  “Get up!” Shays said, his voice hard. “Get over here!”

  Is this what happened to Ada? Sunny thought. Did she find him in here searching for the ticket? Did he try to get the location out of her?

  As Sunny slowly rose to her feet, a bloodcurdling moaning noise came up from the basement.

  “What the hell is that?” Shays snapped.

  Sunny had no idea. Ada’s ghost?

  The noise came closer, modulating into a deep, guttural growl.

  “Shut up!” Shays’s eyes were wild now, and he waved the gun at the door.

  It flew open with a wild screech, and a lean gray shape came rocketing into the room—seemingly aimed straight for Shays’s nose.

  The man tried to twist aside, then screamed as Shadow caught him. Claws raked across Shays’s face, his hand jerked, and his gun went off.

  Somehow Shays managed to shake the cat loose. Shadow landed on one of the pantry shelves, sending a row of cans cascading down, and bounced back at the killer.

  That was what Shays looked like now—a killer. His lips were twisted back in a frozen snarl, baring his discolored teeth. Blood dribbled down from a set of deep gouges just over his left eye.

  The claws on Shadow’s other paw must have caught Shays’s left ear. The lobe was torn, and blood poured down the side of his neck, soaking into his expensive coat.

  Hissing and growling, Shadow was all over the dealer, clawing at clothing and whatever flesh he could reach.

  Sunny snatched up the frying pan and tried to join the fight, but Shays saw her and snapped off a shot with his pistol.

  The bullet must have hit the skillet, because it was torn from her grasp, leaving her hand numb. Sunny dived to the floor as more shots rang out. Something crashed behind her, but she didn’t bother trying to look.

  The problem was, she had no place to go. Shays still stood in front of the only door out of this place.

  Using both hands, Shays finally managed to push Shadow away, screaming again as the cat’s claws pulled out of whatever they’d dug into.

  The dealer continued screaming, his lips writhing, as he tried to shoot Shadow. But the cat seemed to fly around the cramped quarters of the pantry, crossing back and forth between shelves, trying to get at Shays again.

  For a second, he hung on to Shays’s back, his claws embedded into the side of the man’s neck on the unbloodied side. Of course, it wasn’t unbloodied after Shadow was done.

  Shays twisted around, trying to aim his pistol over his left shoulder and between Shadow’s eyes.

  Sunny grabbed the nearest pot—good, old-fashioned, heavy stainless steel—and flung it at the dealer’s head.

  It hit with a satisfying clong! and knocked Shays off balance, his gun hand twitching. An instant later, the pistol went off. Shays staggered and spun, giving out his loudest scream yet. He stared at Sunny slack jawed for a moment. “Made me shoot myself!” he shrieked, barely audible over the ringing in Sunny’s ears.

  Then she heard something else. Approaching sirens.

  Ron Shays must have heard them, too. His face became a bloody, torn devil mask of pure malevolence as he raised his gun.

  Sunny flung herself toward the dining room in a hopeless leap.

  And Shadow made an incredible bank shot, springing up from the floor, rebounding off one of the shelves, and fastening claws and teeth onto Shays’s gun hand.

  The weight of the cat pulled his hand down, and the pistol fired into the floor. The gun flew loose, going one way, the cat flying in the other. Shadow landed in a heap—Sunny did, too, half in, half out of the kitchen.

  The pistol clattered on the linoleum floor.

  Sunny saw her only chance. If she could get the pistol …

  Ron Shays stood above her, his bleeding face contorted in pain, moaning and cursing. He’d clapped his left hand over the shredded flesh of the hand that had held the gun. But that must have aggravated the self-inflicted wound in his shoulder. He rocked back and forth, his face pale.

  She scrambled across the floor, trying to get the weapon. But her movement brought Shays out of his stupor. He swooped down, snatching the gun almost from under Sunny’s nose. Shays straightened, reeling on his feet, needing both hands to aim the pistol.

  It wobbled a little, but at this range it couldn’t miss Sunny’s head.

  “Outta lives,” he gasped. “Both you and that damn cat …” His hand steadied—

  And the door behind him almost tore off its hinges as it shrieked open, slamming into Shays’s back.

  It crashed against him—right onto his wounded shoulder. That sudden pain was just too much for the dealer to deal with. His eyes rolled up, and he collapsed to the floor.

  Will Price stood over him in the doorway, a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. His face was pale, with crusting blood smeared down one side. His eyes were wide and full of fear.

  “Sunny!” he yelled. “Are you okay?”

  She levered herself up. “Yeah!” she shouted back, her ears still ringing. “I thought he’d killed you!”

  *

  Shadow paid no attention as Will came in and hugged Sunny. All his attention was focused on the male on the floor. He wore a musky, spicy scent that should have been pleasant to smell. But under that, he was still marked with the poisonous stench, a hundred times worse than the Stinky One. This was the Other One, the one who had killed the old woman who had lived here, sheltering and feeding Shadow.

  Until this one came and sent her down the stairs.

  This was a Bad Place, a place of dread.

  But now it could be a place of revenge.

  With his battle song still rising from his gut, Shadow advanced on the form lying on the floor. His claws had done well, tearing one ear until the blood flowed—though even that stank with the Other One’s taint.

  But the killer had another ear. And Shadow knew he could make it bleed as freely.

  *

  A low moan snapped Sunny and Will apart. They looked down to find Shadow single-mindedly savaging Ron Shays’s undamaged ear. The pain must have brought the drug lord around. Will moved quickly, kicking the pistol out of Shays’s reach.

  He had a much harder time shooing the cat away from Shays. The cat wanted another piece of him … a bigger piece.

  Ben Semple burst in, gun drawn, followed by several other Kittery Harbor constables.

  “We got a report of shots fired—jeez!” He broke off, staring around at the carnage spread out before him. “What were you trying to do, reenact the gunfight at the OK Corral?”

  “The man on the floor is a drug dealer, Ron Shays,” Sunny said, lurching to her feet and pointing. She needed the other hand to hold on to the countertop. “He’s the one who shot those two guys that turned up dead yesterday.”

  Semple let his colleagues in blue have the job of stopping Shays’s bleeding while also getting h
im into handcuffs. “And what happened to you?” he asked Will.

  “Shays clocked me while coming in to try and kill Sunny,” Will replied. “I came to, heard shots, dug out my backup gun, and tried to get in here ASAP.”

  “You missed a real Wile E. Coyote moment,” Sunny told him. “Between Shadow and me, we managed to get Shays to shoot himself.”

  “But not before he shot the hell out of the place,” Semple said. “He even killed the telephone.” The constable shook his head.

  Sunny looked over her shoulder. One of Shays’s wild shots had indeed killed the old, 1960s-era phone hanging on Ada’s wall. Only the backboard remained in place, with a big hole in it. The receiver lay on the floor, its coiled cord stretching up to the shattered body of the phone lying on the countertop.

  And atop all the wreckage lay a piece of paper.

  Sunny had to look twice before she believed her eyes.

  It was a lottery ticket.

  And, luckily, the bullet hole punched through it hadn’t destroyed either the winning numbers or the date—which would expire tomorrow.

  24

  Ben Semple and the other constables quickly called two ambulances, one each for hauling Ron Shays and Will Price off to the hospital to be patched up. Getting Sunny down to the police station to explain what had happened turned into a much more ticklish job, however.

  Shadow had positioned himself between her and everyone else in the room, back arched, his openmouthed hiss showing his willingness to attack anybody who even approached her.

  It took a while for Sunny to calm the cat down. Finally she carried him down the stairs to the cellar, out to the backyard, and around the side of the Spruance house—to face what seemed like a wall of cameras and lights, all aimed at her.

  Sunny just shook her head as the reporters surged forward, asking all sorts of inane questions. Luckily, Ben Semple got their attention by holding up the winning lottery ticket, now encased in a clear plastic evidence bag.

  That’s the nice thing about the television media, Sunny thought. The cameras are so easily distracted.

  They arrived at the town police station at the same time as Sheriff Nesbit. He just sat quietly, running a finger over his silver mustache and shaking his head, as Sunny recounted her story.

  Nesbit was probably fuming. On the other hand, though, despite nearly getting herself killed, Sunny had also managed to close out that embarrassing double murder case in the sheriff’s supposedly crime-free county. And, of course, the perpetrator was a very nasty drug dealer—and an outsider.

  Will looked properly heroic when he arrived with a bandage around his head, joining Sunny to answer questions at an impromptu press conference. Nesbit got in front of the cameras, too, finding lots of ways to spin the situation to his benefit.

  Sunny was just eager for the questions to finally finish so she could put an end to this whole crazy adventure.

  Except it still wasn’t quite over.

  The sheriff’s office and the Maine lottery authority went to war over the ticket that had caused all the trouble in the first place. Nesbit said it was evidence, while the bean counters up in Augusta demanded that it be turned in to determine its authenticity.

  Luckily, the amount of publicity surrounding the big prize ensured that some sort of reasonable accommodation would be reached.

  That opened the way for an entirely different legal battle. Whose ticket was it? Obscure Spruance relatives whom Sunny had never heard of suddenly emerged to claim the prize—and argue with one another in front of the TV cameras. Mike Coolidge was delighted with the coverage, shouting abuse at the various contenders as they appeared on the screen. Sunny just shook her head, thinking, Where is Jerry Springer when we really need him?

  Maybe it was watching all those seedy people fighting over so much money, but Mike began to show signs of Lotto fever. He suggested that Sunny should put in a claim for the winnings; after all, he argued, she was the one who’d found the damned ticket. Then Sunny caught him on her laptop, checking prices on pimped-out fishing boats, and laid down the law. That ticket might be worth millions, but it had brought worry and death to everyone connected with it.

  Even though it might have made her life a lot easier, she told her dad that she didn’t want a penny of the prize money. It would probably give her angina pains.

  Maybe Mike felt he had to make up for that little episode, or maybe he couldn’t resist the idea of scooping up a bargain. But after lengthy whispered negotiations with her dad hanging up the phone whenever Sunny came into the room, Sal came driving up Wild Goose Drive one evening in the maroon Wrangler and presented the keys to Sunny.

  It still felt weird to drive around in an attempted murder weapon, but when Sunny asked her dad how much the SUV had cost, he’d just smiled mysteriously and said, “We can afford it.”

  Working in the office was a bit better, probably because all the free publicity for Kittery Harbor had led to a tsunami of interest from tourists. Apparently most of them were more interested in Lotto luck than mere murder. With Ron Shays’s admission that he’d killed Ada Spruance and his complaint that the meth lab deal had died for lack of funding, it became clear that neither Ollie nor his money had been involved in the case. Sunny wasn’t sure whether her suspicions about her boss represented paranoia or just a morbid wish-fulfillment fantasy.

  Ollie the Barnacle even apologized for his bad behavior. “I was having a little cash-flow problem. Sometimes these hiccups happen, and, well, I suppose I kinda went off the deep end.”

  He didn’t give her a raise, however.

  So, just as everything was returning to normal again, Sunny was not happy to find a letter from a lawyer. This one was different from the usual legal garbage that had been clogging the Coolidge mailbox.

  It was an invitation to attend the reading of Ada Spruance’s will.

  Fine, she thought. So Ada leaves me her undying thanks, and then the whole shebang goes to Gordie, who probably died without a will. Which means her estate will either go to the state or into court for as long as those vulture relatives have money to fight over it.

  Sunny appeared at the lawyer’s office, a place on Main Street in downtown Kittery Harbor. She was shocked to find Jane Rigsdale in the reception area, too. Maybe the veterinarian gets Ada’s thanks, too, Sunny thought. Wonderful.

  Jane reacted to the unexpected encounter pretty much the way Shadow had greeted the return of the Jeep Wrangler to the Coolidge driveway, by circling around suspiciously. At least Jane didn’t try to sniff Sunny.

  Finally Jane said, “After all I heard on the news, I guess I owe you an apology. Those guys really were after you.”

  “Let’s just say you didn’t pick the best time for a confrontation,” Sunny replied. “I was wound a bit tight—frankly at that point, I was wondering if my boss was trying to kill me.”

  Whoops, maybe too much information, Sunny thought, taking in the look on Jane’s face.

  “Anyway,” Sunny went on, “I hope we can be friends.” With just the occasional body slam and elbow in the eye when it comes to Will Price, she finished silently.

  Nobody else joined them in the outer office. Sunny and Jane kept glancing around, feeling weirder and weirder, until Peter Lewin, the attorney, came out, greeted them, and seated them in front of his desk with almost old-fashioned courtliness. “Mrs. Spruance came to me the day that the first story about her ticket appeared in the Harbor Crier,” he said. “She was feeling very optimistic about finding it—an optimism that, despite everything, turned out to be well-founded,” he added with a smile at Sunny.

  “The terms of the will are actually very simple, so, if you agree, I’ll just state them without the usual legal language,” Lewin said. “There was a small trust fund set up for Gordie, provided he stayed clean and sober. As that apparently didn’t happen, those funds go back into the main estate.”

  He turned to Sunny. “To thank you for your kindness and promise to help, Ada offers you your pick of any
of the cats living at her house.”

  Sunny couldn’t help laughing. “Actually,” she said, “one of the cats has already picked me.”

  “The remainder of her estate after taxes is to be invested into a foundation for the care of animals—especially cats. And Ada wanted you, Dr. Rigsdale, to run the show.”

  Jane looked as if she were about to fall out of her chair. “We’d talked many times about the specific problems that cats face—dogs get adopted much more often—and how Ada always hoped the town would have a no-kill shelter. But that was always pie in the sky!”

  “Well, now you should have the wherewithal to accomplish some of those hopes,” Lewin said. “I can hardly wait to hear the reaction from Ada’s so-called relations.”

  “And that’s it?” Jane asked. “It all goes to … me?”

  “There will be papers to sign—lots of them,” Lewin replied. “But that can be left to the future. I thought you should know the basic disposition of the estate.”

  Jane still looked a little shell-shocked as they stepped out onto Main Street. “It all seems just so … so unfair!” she burst out. “You not only found that ticket for Ada, you risked your life to find out who killed her and her son.”

  She broke off as a black pickup truck pulled up in the street and the window rolled down. Will Price stuck his head out. “Hey, Sunny!” Then he realized who was standing beside her and ducked his head. “Jane.”

  “You’re just in time to congratulate us,” Sunny told him, laughter bubbling up again. “We just heard the reading of Ada Spruance’s will. I inherit a cat, and Jane here gets the millions.”

  Might as well let him know now, she thought. Jane’s hit the trifecta. Looks, personality, and buckets of money.

  “Actually,” Jane broke in, embarrassed, “it’s a foundation to benefit animals.”

  “Huh,” Will said, looking a little shell-shocked now himself. He glanced over at Sunny. “Maybe we’ll get that no-kill shelter you were talking about—even if it is a New York kind of idea.”