Penny, apparently unharmed, crawled into Tonica’s lap and draped herself over one thigh, calmly grooming her paw with no sign of the hissing weapon she’d been minutes before. The three of them waited there, catching their breath and letting the others unravel what the hell was going on.
“You miserable bitch,” Roger said, and it wasn’t clear at first who he was talking to. Then he went down on his knees beside the cat, checking to see if it was still breathing, and the glare he shot the vet tech made it clear. “Este, stop gawping like an idiot, and call the cops.”
“But…”
“I don’t give a fuck about the bad publicity,” he snarled. “I want this bitch arrested. For animal abuse, if nothing else.”
* * *
It seemed that, once you’d had a dead body on your premises, a second call to the cops got quick attention, especially if you mentioned there was a wild, if currently sedated, animal involved. With the cops came an officer from the Seattle Animal Shelter and, surprisingly, Scott Williams.
It took the cops about thirty seconds to secure the scene, considering that nobody was in any shape to move. “Do we need a paramedic?”
“No, we’ve got this,” Williams said, and then, realizing that they were talking about the human injuries, flushed.
“We’re fine,” Roger said, clearly still angry, brushing off the officer trying to check his wounds. “How is the cat?”
Right after that, Ginny and Tonica were hustled out into the parking lot, where a patrolman took their statements and then seemed to forget about them. Alice was escorted to the first patrol car, her hands fastened behind her back, even though as far as Ginny could tell she hadn’t offered any resistance at all. She was crying and glaring at people all at once, which took some doing.
The ocelot was taken out on a stretcher a few minutes after that, Williams carrying one end, the animal control officer at the other, talking into a headset all the while. Este and Roger were nowhere to be seen, presumably still inside, giving their own statements. As owners of the shelter, they’d have some serious explaining to do.
“I wonder if Roger was telling the truth,” Ginny said, still a little dazed from the events. “If Jimmy was poking around in the books, Roger would’ve known; he’d be the only one who would’ve known. If he came back from medical leave and saw Jimmy’s notes… it would make sense to threaten him, maybe even plan to kill him. If he did have a heart attack because of Roger’s actions, does that make it manslaughter?
“I still don’t get… what the hell was all that? Keeping wild animals in the clinic? Why?” Tonica sounded bewildered, totally not listening to her.
“They’re in demand as pets,” Ginny said, switching gears. “I read something about it a while back, or saw some documentary, I don’t remember. Mainly by people with more money than brains. At a guess, she was smuggling them in using the shelter as a cover, or maybe just holding them for someone else to sell. The latter, probably.”
“Jesus.” Tonica was starting to focus a little more. “That’s illegal, right?”
“Very. I don’t know if that cat was an endangered species or not, but… at the very least, you’re supposed to have a license to handle wild animals, I’m pretty sure.”
“Jesus,” he said again. “I bet the gun was hers. If she was part of a smuggling ring… but then, why did it end up in the alley?”
“I don’t know. Talk about bad timing… If the money hadn’t gone missing, and Nora hadn’t called us in, nobody would have known, probably.”
“Yeah. We fixed everything, didn’t we?” Tonica shook his head. “For the first time in a very long time… I need a drink.”
“I need to get Georgie,” Ginny said, more worried about immediate concerns. “Do you think—hey!” and she accosted Williams, who, after helping to load the cat into an emergency vehicle, had come back to stand, staring at the wall of the clinic as though the faded graffiti would give him answers. “My dog, she’s inside, in the dog run.”
“I’ll let the cops know,” he said. “I think they’re going to close the shelter, at least for a couple of days while they go over the office again, but for now, everyone’s staying where they are, so she’s fine. Georgie won’t get put back in the kennel, I promise.”
Ginny didn’t much feel like trusting anyone, but she didn’t have a choice, right then. The cops weren’t letting anyone back into the building unless they actually worked there.
“It’s my fault,” Williams said finally, still standing there.
“What?” Tonica turned to look at him, frowning. “What was?”
“All of this, maybe.” He sighed, raising his hands and then letting them drop again, not looking away from the remains of the graffiti. “I knew something… I knew something wasn’t right. With Alice. There were supplies missing I couldn’t account for, things that didn’t feel right. And I knew the shelter wasn’t paying her enough, especially for the hours she put in. She was here too often late at night, and the clinic…” He shrugged. “You saw the graffiti. We were being hit by a group of… extremists, who wanted to shut the spay clinic down. I guess I thought she was part of that, trying to sabotage us from within? It didn’t make any sense, but all the pieces were there, and I was trying to put them together… .”
He laughed, the sound lacking any humor. “Right pieces, wrong shape.”
“Wild cats smell different from domestic,” Tonica said, and Ginny knew him well enough now to hear the click-click-click of things fitting in his head, too. “That’s why the animals reacted to you that morning; it wasn’t you, it was the gurney.”
“The gurney, and maybe my lab coat, too. Things that were left in the clinic… It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten those reactions, but I’d thought—I don’t know what I’d thought. I’m an idiot. But I didn’t have any proof that she was doing anything illegal, or even wrong. And I’d been the one to suggest her for the job. I felt responsible, I needed to be sure she was actually breaking the law, before I went to the police.”
Tonica nodded. “So that’s why you went to the ‘Right-to-Breed’ meeting, to find out if she was connected with them.”
“What? Um. Yeah. I was hoping I’d be able to get something out of them, so I could confront her… but they closed ranks. She wasn’t part of their group. People keeping wild animals as pets? Not their thing at all. They’d see her as even worse than us, I think. But they knew something was wrong—maybe they thought we were all in on it? I don’t know, they’re nuts.”
Neither of them could argue that point.
“So she was using the clinic to store illegal animals?” Ginny asked, looking to confirm her theory—and as a distraction from worrying about Georgie, who probably thought she’d been abandoned, by now.
“Yeah. Looks like she was hiding them in one of the cages we used to quarantine new animals before they were brought forward for adoption. Using the clinic as a front to smuggle exotic pets into the country. Stupid, stupid.”
She didn’t know if he was talking about the vet tech, or himself for not knowing, for not saying anything sooner.
“You were only here once a week,” Tonica said. “She had plenty of time to do… whatever she was doing, and then clean up, after.”
“Except you were here more often than that,” Ginny said. “Late at night.” For the sake of delicacy, she didn’t reference why he was there then. “So you knew something was going on.”
“Like I said, I had suspicions. And with the escalation of the extremists’ actions, I was worried… .” He laughed a little. “I was worried that they were close to getting violent. So I brought in a gun.”
That surprised both of them. “That gun was yours?” Tonica asked.
“Yeah. Legally registered, I’ve owned it for years. Never bothered for a concealed carry permit or anything, it was… I brought it in one night, and left it in the clinic. And then, last week, the day they spray-painted the clinic, it disappeared. I thought they’d gotten in, that she’d
let them in, and they’d taken it.” His eyes closed, and he exhaled, as though all the tension in him was just running out. “Maybe they did, maybe she did, and it fell out of her pocket when she was leaving, I don’t know. Does it matter, anymore?”
Ginny was going to go into a rant about the dangers of casual gun ownership and the actual wording of the Second Amendment, when a cop came up alongside them.
“Ma’am? I think this belongs to you?”
The cop was holding a pink leash, and at the end of it, Georgie looked up at her, blue-black tongue lolling as though today had been the Best. Playday. Ever.
Ginny sniffed a little and knelt down to hug her dog, getting a face-washing in return. “Yeah,” she said to the cop. “Yeah, she’s mine.”
* * *
The rooftop was always a good place to be. You could see everything there, and humans so rarely looked up. And even if they did, what would they see?
Penny groomed her left paw, and then gave her tail a once-over. In the end, she’d practically had to lead their humans to the problem—or, more specifically, lead the problem to them. But once she had, they’d dealt with it admirably. She knew that the whirling lights and confusion meant that the problem was being dealt with. They made noise when they figured things out, both humans and dogs.
She turned her head and studied the humans again, her whiskers flaring with satisfaction. Everything was just as it should be. No more dark-smells would be coming into the clinic.
15
After another half hour of standing around, the cops finally let them go. Ginny had thought that she should go find Nora, talk about settling up the bill, but Tonica’s reaction convinced her that now wasn’t the time or the place. They’d headed for Mary’s instead, leaving Georgie curled up asleep in her usual spot, with a black poodle for company.
Tonica walked in, and stopped dead, so that Ginny almost stepped on him. “Jesus, what a disaster.”
“The case?” she asked, confused.
“This bar,” Tonica said. He looked around Mary’s and shook his head.
Ginny couldn’t see anything particularly out of place or disastrous, but she wasn’t going to argue with him.
“Teddy!” Stacy looked relieved enough to break into tears. “Oh God, I didn’t want to call you but you’re here, and help!”
Apparently, Stacy thought it was a disaster, too.
“What happened to Jon?”
“He quit,” Stacy said. “And Patrick said he’d put an ad in the paper, that he was going to hire a bunch of people but none of that is useful now, and it’s trivia night and it’s going to get insane and help!”
Stacy was usually more put-together than this, but she was right, trivia night did get insane, with people coming in from all over the city to match their knowledge against other teams, and Berto, their trivia master.
“Did Seth come tonight?” Tonica asked, in a voice that suggested it would be best for the old man if he had.
“I called and yelled at him, and he came in. But he’s not happy. I think he’s going to quit, too.” Stacy didn’t wail, but her voice sounded like she wanted to.
“I got this,” he said, sliding under the break in the bar, and taking up position. “Finish up that order, and then we can split the load.”
* * *
Once he had order restored, Teddy worked his way down to Ginny’s usual spot at the end of the bar, where she was nursing her first drink and keeping an eye on Georgie, who was eating dinner. Either Ginny had been carrying a can of food with her, or Georgie was eating some of Seth’s best leftovers.
“If Williams had gone to the police when he first suspected—” She interrupted him.
“You mean, like we did?”
He acknowledged the hit. “Him saying why he was there off hours might’ve meant admitting why he was there, and then all the story between him and Este comes out, but he knew something was wrong, and—”
“And he just went in and tried to investigate by himself?” Ginny’s question had a self-mocking tone that he acknowledged.
“The difference is, we’re okay with giving the cops what we know.”
“No, we’re not,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “We’re obsessive and compulsive and we want to find the answer first.”
“I’m neither obsessive, nor compulsive.” But he had to admit that she had a point. They had first gotten to know each other going head-to-head on trivia night, after all. “You playing tonight?”
She looked exhausted, her face drawn and her mouth sad, but she looked up at that, and then down the bar to where the chalk scoreboard was already set up. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Let me take Georgie home and settle her, then I’ll be back. We’re gonna kick your team’s ass, Tonica.”
“Sure you are, Mallard. Sure you are.”
He gave a quick scan down the bar, to make sure that nobody else needed a refill, or was lifting a finger to call for Stacy. She was right: with Jon gone and Seth sulking, they were short-staffed and overrun. If Patrick didn’t hire someone soon, he was going to have a total revolt on his hands. But his comment about hiring a bunch of people… what the hell was up with that?
“So they’re still calling the bookkeeper’s death an accident?” Ginny asked, obviously not able to let the job go, even though they’d done what they’d been hired for, and more.
“Well, it was. Stroke or heart attack; just one of those things that happen, although at a really damn bad time. Tragedy, but no foul play.”
“But…”
“Ginny. An affair, embezzlement-for-revenge, blackmail, and wild animal smuggling isn’t enough, you want murder, too?” He shook his head. “I think that’s taking overcompetitiveness to a new and bad level.”
“Right. I know.” She sipped her drink, and looked around the bar. “Uh-oh…”
Patrick had just walked in, and he had a look on his face that made her want to dive under the nearest table. It wasn’t a bad look, in fact, it was open, happy… maybe even exuberant. That was what made it so terrifying.
“Teddy. Open a bottle of the good stuff.”
For Patrick, that meant bourbon. Teddy went back behind the bar and pulled the bottle in question off the shelf—the small batch, not the crap they kept for mixing—and poured a glass.
“To me, and to my budding empire,” Patrick said, toasting the bar, and then took a drink. “The bank approved the loan, the deal went through. Next year, we’ll have a sister site in Fremont. And after that… who knows?”
“You’re opening another bar?”
“I am.” Patrick looked so proud, Teddy bit back the urge to yell at him that he should be dealing with the one he had, first.
“So those architects…”
“Were here to see what it was about Mary’s that I like so much. I’ll be spending a lot of time at the new site, making sure they do it properly… and that means I’m not going to be able to give as much attention to Mary’s as I usually do.”
Teddy bit his tongue, hard.
“So I want you to take over.”
He almost bit his tongue again, and carefully did not look over at Ginny. “What?”
“As manager. Run the place for me.”
“You want me…”
“You think I didn’t know you were doing the job already?”
That was exactly what he had thought, yeah.
“If I’m going to do this, I can’t be paying attention to every little detail of the day-to-day running. I need a manager I can trust. Is that you?”
Responsibility. Teddy licked suddenly dry lips, and gave the bartop a pointless sweep with his dishcloth, buying time to think. He like being a bartender: coming in and then going home, not carrying anything of the job with him when he left. And it gave him the freedom to help Ginny, which he enjoyed, probably more than he should.
But it wasn’t like he hadn’t been doing the work anyway, because it had to be done, and worrying about it all the time anyway. And if he said no, and Patrick hired s
omeone else, someone who didn’t know Mary’s, who didn’t understand that they’d figured out what worked and what didn’t…
He looked up and saw that Ginny and Stacy were talking now, leaning across the bar, heads together, Ginny’s tablet between them. They could have been arguing about the proper way to make a gimlet, or looking at the new fashions, or discussing the details of wild animal trafficking, or… with those two, he never knew.
And beyond them, he could see Georgie through the window, sleeping where they’d left her. On impulse, Teddy looked up, and saw just the tip of a striped tail dangling over the edge of the shelving, twitching back and forth as Penny surveyed her domain.
Without realizing it, he’d made his choice already. It wasn’t as though the investigating—researching—projects took that much time… .
Ginny looked over at him then, and raised her eyebrows. Clearly, she’d heard every word Patrick had said. Her expression was neutral, but the look in her eyes was a challenge.
Woman knew him too damn well.
Teddy nodded back at her, then turned to Patrick. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s me, yeah.”
Above them, Penny’s tail flicked once, then curled up in satisfaction.
Acknowledgments
Once again, to my on-site research team: Barbara Caridad Ferrer, Janna Silverstein, and Kat Richardson, who were always willing to check details against my imagination. Any missteps, mistakes, or misinterpretations are the work of the author, not her advisors.
L.A. Kornetsky lives in New York City with two cats and a time-share dog. She also writes fantasy fiction under the name Laura Anne Gilman.
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