“Oh, I have guts,” I told her quietly. “But I have brains, too. I usually try using them first.”
“Hmmph,” she said, clearly at a loss for words.
“Then you’d better use them fast,” a voice said from behind me. I turned. A small, dark-haired woman came into the room, tossing her parka over the back of a chair.
“Liz,” Alison said. “This is—”
“I can guess who this is,” the woman said, eyeing me.
I was getting a little tired of being the object of these folks’ displeasure. Heck, they didn’t even know me.
“The great detective.” She took two steps toward me and fingered my suede windbreaker. “Nice,” she commented. “Lambskin by the feel of it. An animal had to die for your vanity.” She skewered me with an accusing look. When I said nothing, she turned to the others. “How can we trust anyone who supports the industries that slaughter animals for their hides?”
“Oh, Liz,” Alison said in evident dismay.
“Oh, Liz,” Liz mocked her. “I’m right and you know it.” She turned on me again. “Why exactly are you here?”
“Because Alison asked her to help,” Ian said, rising to his feet.
Oh goody, I thought, now we’re all upright. We’ll be swinging on each other any minute now.
Liz grinned, a sly, secretive smile. “Well, she has four days to work a miracle.”
“Four days,” Alison exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
“We’ve formed a new organization,” Judith explained, looking at Alison rather apologetically, I thought. “And on Saturday—which is, as we all know, International Day of Shame for animals used in cosmetic and household products testing—we intend to put an end to Living World’s operation.”
“A new organization? What on earth are you talking about?” Alison asked. “We already have an organization. What—”
“No,” Liz said, interrupting her. “You have an organization. There’s no place for people like Judith and me in Ninth Life. You want to sit around and plan strategy. We want to act. My God, Alison, the very creatures you want to help are dying in droves while you plan—what? The best media approach?”
“You want to be guerrillas,” Ian accused them. “I might have guessed it. Dammit, Liz, I thought we settled this issue when you joined us in Alberta. Of course we want to use the media. We need good press to influence public opinion. You know as well as I do that if we go around smashing and burning, we’ll only antagonize people.” He flung the wing of hair out of his eyes. “For God’s sake, be sensible.”
Judith shook her head. “We’re through being sensible. We’ve worked for seven months here in Victoria to get the goods on Living World and where has it gotten us? Nowhere.” She cracked her knuckles one by one, and I got the distinct impression that she’d rather be cracking skulls. “Well, we have a better idea. And it hasn’t taken us seven months to come up with it, either. Show them, Liz.”
Liz reached into the back pocket of her jeans and tossed a pamphlet at me. Reflexively, I grabbed it. It was printed on glossy white stock, and on the front a stylized claw was depicted ripping a sheet of paper. Through the tears in the paper could be seen a photo of a laboratory, with hundreds of rabbits held in restraints.
THESE RABBITS ARE DYING
FOR YOUR NEXT DATE
read the caption at the bottom.
I opened the brochure. In a very few words—and two large photos of researchers putting paste into rabbits’ eyes—the text explained how thousands of animals died each year so that new cosmetics—shampoo, soap, make-up, lipstick, eyeliner—could be brought to the market. I turned the brochure over. On the back was a figure dressed in a ski mask and dark clothes, a rabbit held protectively in one arm, the other black-gloved hand raised as if to fend off a blow. “Help them fight back!” the caption exhorted. “Support us. We’re Citizens for the Liberation and Welfare of Animals.” Beneath the final bit of text was the same stylized claw that had appeared on the front of the brochure, and a post office box to send donations. I knew that the brochure had been designed to appeal to my emotions, to jerk me around, but dammit, it worked. I felt what anyone would feel when reading it—disgust, pity, outrage, and guilt.
“Oh, Judith,” Alison said wearily, sitting down. “This is exactly what we had agreed we wouldn’t do.”
“No,” Judith said, looking at Alison. “It’s what you agreed we wouldn’t do.”
I looked from one to the other of them, realizing at last this disagreement wasn’t really about Ninth Life at all. It was about power. It was also about Judith and Alison. Or maybe Judith and Mary and Alison. I looked over at Liz where she now stood, leaning against the doorframe, hands jammed in the pockets of her jeans, brown eyes on Judith, and thought I understood. I was willing to bet that it was Liz, not Judith, who had been the moving force behind CLAW, or CLAWA, or whatever it was.
Judith, Alison, and Ninth Life—so Alison had intimated—went back a long way. And while the two had not been entirely in agreement on every issue, Alison had hinted, they had agreed to disagree. I imagined Judith had restrained her hot-headedness in favor of Alison’s good sense. It seemed like a workable partnership to me. So what had happened? Mary, I guessed. Once there had been Judith and Alison; then there was Judith, Alison, and Mary; and now there was Judith and Liz. I groaned. Change lobsters and dance. Well, causes loftier than Ninth Life’s had been derailed by the stirrings of the libido. Unfortunate though, how much havoc can be wreaked before the itch is finally scratched.
“C’mon, Judith,” Liz said peremptorily, eyeing the rest of us spineless worms in obvious disgust. “The pamphlets are loaded in my car. Let’s go.”
Judith took one last, eloquent, baffled look at Alison and turned to go.
“Liz, you can’t be serious about giving us until Saturday,” Alison said. “It’s not reasonable.”
“Oh, we’re dead serious,” Liz replied. “If Living World isn’t closed down by the weekend, we’ll close it down. End of discussion.” She sneered a little, clearly enjoying her position of superiority over Alison.
There’s nothing like being able to call the shots to bring out the best in people. I raised my eyebrows, wondering how long this particular confrontation had been brewing.
“Who’ll do the dirty work?” Ian asked, sounding tired. “The two of you? As I recall, you were always full of talk, Judith, but when it came to the crunch you let Mary go undercover at Living World. You didn’t offer to go.”
“That’s enough,” Judith whispered, white around the lips.
“We don’t need to listen to this,” Liz said, hurrying over to put an arm around Judith. “And for your information, you gutless little turd,” she told Ian, lip lifted in scorn, “CLAW has dozens of active members. And hundreds of supporters. We have both the muscle and the will to do what needs to be done.”
Ah, but do you have the brains, I wondered. I decided it would be the wisest course of action to keep my mouth shut. One usually learns more that way. Besides, it’s often dangerous to attempt to mediate internecine strife.
With a last enigmatic look at Alison, Judith allowed herself to be led away. Alison covered her face as the back door slammed, and Ian seemed too discouraged even to push the hair out of his eyes.
“Damn it,” he said finally as a car engine started. “I’m going out to the Dog and Pony and get drunk. Are either of you interested?”
“Not right now,” Alison said, wiping her eyes.
“No thanks,” I told him, only half my mind on what he was saying.
He shrugged and walked dispiritedly into the hall. I heard the sound of a jacket being zipped, the front door opening and closing, and finally, a motorcycle being coaxed into life.
“I feel so . . . helpless,” Alison told me as Ian drove off. “It’s the end of Ninth Life.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, coming over to sit on the hearth beside her chair.
She laughed a little—a choked, unhappy sound. “
How can it not be? Liz and Judith will do something perfectly awful on Saturday. Dammit, they’ll destroy all the careful preparation we’ve made, all the sympathy we’ve aroused, all the work we’ve done.” She clenched her fists and struck the arm of her chair angrily.
Atta girl, I thought. Get mad. “They won’t if we beat them to it,” I told her.
She looked at me in evident amazement, gray eyes wide. “If we—”
“Yup.”
“But how on earth can we—can you—do in four days what we’ve been unable to do in all these months?”
I shrugged. “Urgency sometimes leads to creative solutions.”
She began to laugh in earnest this time. “Is that a quotation?” she asked. “It sounds so bloody pompous. Like something Margaret Thatcher would say.” She dissolved into laughter again.
I grinned a little in agreement. I hadn’t meant it to sound pompous, but she was right. Well, there were worse people to sound like than Margaret Thatcher. And I was glad I had made Alison laugh.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Her fit of laughter had subsided.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I appreciate your optimism, but how realistic is it? We’ve been trying—”
“For months,” I said. “I know. Seven of them. Well, what do we have to lose by trying for four days longer? And if, as you say, the credibility of this organization is at stake, then maybe we should try pretty bloody hard. Ninth Life isn’t dead yet. Maybe what we should be holding here is a pep rally instead of a wake.”
She blinked. “You really are serious.”
“That’s what I’m paid for,” I told her.
“All right,” she said at last. “I’ll need to fill you in on some background. Things that might help. I hope you’ve got a while.”
I smiled encouragingly. “I’ve got all night.”
Chapter 5
Four hours later, I found a parking place across the street from the Dog and Pony. I stood indecisively beside my car for a moment, a cold wind from the sea ruffling my hair. My brain felt stuffed to bursting with what Alison had told me, and I took in a lungful of cold sea air, trying to clear my mind. The bar’s door opened, disgorging a handful of late-night patrons onto the sidewalk, and they staggered down Foul Bay Road, laughing uproariously and slapping each other on the backs.
I hate places like the Dog and Pony. They’re small, dark, smelly, and filled with people who don’t want to go home. If I’m going to drink, I want to enjoy a few beers with my friends, out in the sunshine after an afternoon of volleyball, not in the company of strangers, crouched in the dark as though we’re all engaged in some shameful ritual. The myth of the friendly neighborhood bar is just that—a myth. I’ve seen too many paychecks and too many relationships founder on the rocks of the local watering hole. I zipped my collar a little higher and went in search of Ian.
Inside the pub, the air was so thick with smoke you could chew it. I coughed a little, remembering another reason why I disliked these places so much. As I looked around for Ian, two burly, bearded fellows at the bar looked me over with an interest I began to find annoying. One of them elbowed the other, then heaved himself off his bar stool and ambled toward me.
“Want a little company, honey?” he asked, breathing beerily into my face.
“No,” I answered firmly, finally locating Ian at a table in the far corner. I turned my back on the bearded beer drinker in preparation for threading my way through the crowd, when suddenly I felt fingers clamp closed around my left arm just above the elbow. I groaned, knowing exactly what was coming next. Men never learn. Beer Drinker pulled me around to face him, and I let him do it. I needed to be close to do what I was going to do. Good and close.
“You oughta be nicer,” he said blearily. We were almost the same height, I noted. Now that I was nice and close I noted, too, the dirty jeans and the flannel shirt that smelled of old sweat.
“Let go of my arm,” I said quietly.
He bared his teeth in what was most definitely not a smile. As his hand on my elbow rubbed up and down against my left breast, he arranged his mouth in a leer. I knew precisely what he was thinking—a series of contemptuous adjectives preceding the word “female.” Boy, was he going to show me what I was going to get for daring to come into this he-man’s domain alone, unescorted, in the middle of the night for God’s sake. And daring to spurn his advances. Why, I deserved everything that was coming to me. And he and his buddy were going to march me outside and see that I got it. The noise was so loud, and the crowd so thick in the Dog and Pony, that I doubted anyone would have paid attention if I had screamed my head off. Which I had no intention of doing.
“C’mon now,” he said, tugging my arm. “We’ll just take a little walk.”
So I did. I planted my left leg, swiveled the right side of my body into his, reached down with my right hand, and clamped my hand firmly around his balls. His look of bewilderment changed instantly to shock, then to pop-eyed agony as I squeezed. And squeezed . . . and thanked an Irishman named Brendan for my strong right hand. Years ago, Brendan, my firearms instructor, a taciturn ex-IRA type, had made me feel like a wimp for having weak hands. While the class looked on, he had me dry-fire my .357 as many times as I could in sixty seconds. I didn’t know at the time that this was every firearms instructor’s standard humiliation for novices—I just knew that I felt like a sissy. At thirty seconds I thought my finger would fall off. At forty-five seconds I had to mutter nonsense verse to make myself go on. And when sixty seconds had finally passed, I couldn’t let go of the gun because my finger had cramped so badly it was fastened like a claw around the trigger.
“Forty-two,” Brendan had said in disgust. “Reece, you’re going to have to do better than that. A hell of a lot better. We need to make your hand as strong as a vise. A vise, hear! Because you’re going to use it for things you never dreamed of.”
“Yessir,” I had mumbled, trying to pry my finger off the trigger. I never forgot that lesson, nor the other skills I had learned in Brendan’s class. I thought about him as I squeezed this lout’s balls, and silently thanked Brendan for teaching me things I had never dreamed of. Squeezing a little harder, I backed Beer Drinker up to his bar stool.
“I’m going to let go now,” I said sweetly. “And you’re going to sit down and be a good boy, or take your jacket and leave. I don’t much care which.” I let go and stepped away from him, flexing my fingers, smiling an innocent girlish smile. Beer Drinker had evidently decided not to sit down. Instead, he collapsed against his friend. I could understand that he might not want to straddle the bar stool or anything else for a few days.
“You bitch,” he moaned.
“Tut, tut,” I said. “And only a moment ago you were upbraiding me for not being nice.” I turned to go, and this time my progress through the crowd was unimpeded.
I found Ian sitting at a small table, nursing a pint of dark beer and looking doleful. He looked up as I approached, and I guessed from the redness of his eyes that the beer in front of him wasn’t his first. He smiled a little crookedly and waved.
“The detective lady. Sit down, sit down,” he said expansively. “What will you have?”
A tallish waitress in black pants and white shirt, cuffs rolled up over her elbows, towel tucked into her belt, appeared at my elbow. Her light brown hair was cut short on the top and sides, but curled irrepressibly down to her collar in back. She had jet black eyebrows and dark, dark eyes—unusual for a near-blonde, and very attractive, I thought. “Soda water, please,” I told her.
She put her hands on her hips and looked at me skeptically. “Are you trying to be smart?”
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Honest, ma’am, I swear I’m not. I’d just like something plain and fizzy without alcohol.”
“Oh,” she said, mollified. “Ginger ale okay?”
“Sure,” I agreed.
She took a swipe with a rag at a puddle of liquid on
the table and looked at me, dark eyes speculative. “I saw what you did to that guy at the bar. The guy that came on to you.”
“Oh?”
She lowered her voice. “Where did you learn how to do that?”
I smiled. “I took a course.”
“Oh yeah? You a cop or something?”
“No.”
“A kung-fu expert?”
“No. Just a person. Like you.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “How much did the course cost?”
“About two hundred and fifty dollars,” I said. “But that was three years ago. It might be more now.” I looked her over. About twenty-five, she wasn’t as tall as I had first thought. Maybe five-ten, I guessed, and wiry rather than muscular, with square shoulders and big hands. She had a tough, no-nonsense look about her, and I realized I was liking her more and more. “The instructor teaches firearms as well as dirty tricks,” I added. “It’s all included in the price.”
“Hmmmm,” she said again, clearly thinking hard. “Do you think I could . . . that he would . . .”
I smiled. “Maybe,” I said. “Got a pen?”
She handed me a ballpoint and I scribbled my phone number down on a napkin. “Call me in a couple of days. I’ll try to get him in the meantime.”
“Hey, thanks,” she said, smiling for the first time. Her teeth were white and even. She folded the napkin and stuck it in her shirt pocket. “I’m Perry,” she said. We shook hands.
“Caitlin,” I told her. Her hand was big. Strong, too. I bet she could have dry-fired sixty or so right on the spot. “I’ll call you.”
She grinned, then hurried away for my ginger ale.
“Cute,” Ian remarked acerbically as Perry left. “I’ve been coming in here for three months, and she never told me her name.”
“Must be my charm,” I told him.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, downing his beer. “She could have told me I was the wrong sex. I would have stopped trying.”
Perry brought my ginger ale and declined payment. “On the house,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. Wow. What a grip!
Ninth Life Page 5