Whooof I heard myself say as I landed on my back. Almost simultaneously I heard a nasty thunk—exactly like the sound a ripe cantaloupe makes when it tumbles from the grocery bag onto your kitchen floor. Then I neither heard nor saw anything else.
Fang woke me. “Rorf, rorf, rrrorrARF!” he said, dancing like a mad thing on the other side of the fence. “GrrrARFARFARF!”
“Oh, shut up,” I told him. I sat up and grabbed for my head. It was split in two, or maybe four. Worse yet, it rang, as though someone were beating the J. Arthur Rank movie gong somewhere behind my eyes.
“What is it, boy?” someone said, a voice that wasn’t mine. Oh goody. The guard was coming. Now I could look forward to being shot as well as masticated.
I lurched to my hands and knees, hoped my head would stay on by itself, and staggered into the woods. I got about twenty yards before I fell into the pine needles. This is good, my inner voice taunted me as I lay on my side, looking at a line of ants marching up a dead leaf. Caitlin the Great Detective, lying here with her nose in the mud. There are dozens of people who would pay big money for this picture. Girl investigator gets her comeuppance. Well? Are you going to lie here and let them find you? I heard myself groan in reply. Yeah, I answered, I kinda thought I would. I’m feeling puny, if it’s all the same to you. But that pain-in-the-ass inner voice continued. Oh no, you don’t! Up and at ’em. On your feet. Once more unto the breach. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward! I groaned again and rolled to my knees. Okay. I’d try.
Some homing instinct I didn’t know I possessed led me to my car. Fishing the keys out of my pocket, I put them in the ignition, and without taking off my backpack, pulled out onto the highway. McDonald’s was about a mile farther on the right, and I drove there in first gear, the traffic honking and zooming past me. I parked near the back of the lot, and concentrating fiercely, took two quarters out of the change holder in my glove compartment. Very slowly, very carefully, I walked to the phone. But when I got there, I found that my mind was a blank page. I couldn’t even remember my own phone number. I leaned my forehead against the cool metal of the booth and concentrated as hard as I could. It worked. Something came. I inserted the quarter with fingers that had begun to shake, and waited for the dial tone. Please be there, I whispered, knowing I had one shot at this.
“Hello,” a voice said. Whose voice, I had no idea.
“Who’s this?” I rasped.
“Alison,” she said warily.
I started to giggle. Why, out of all the people I knew, did I call on her for help? “Don’t hang up,” I said quickly, trying to stifle my laughter. “It’s Caitlin.” I managed to tell her where I was, and I managed a fairly steady walk back to my car. I wrote a note on a piece of paper, jamming it in the zipper of my jacket where it would be sure to be seen. Then I passed out, falling down, down, into an oily black sea where there was neither sound nor light. I’m dead, I thought as the Leviathan that always waits in those terrible, lonely dark places reached eager hands to draw me deeper. Dead.
Chapter 14
Someone was shaking me. “Caitlin,” a voice said urgently. “Caitlin! Come on, please wake up. Why won’t she wake up?” the voice asked someone else.
“Oh, she’ll wake up,” another voice answered, a gravelly, curmudgeonly voice I knew well. But for the life of me, I couldn’t put a name to it. And besides, I didn’t want to wake up. I decided to ignore both voices.
I heard a muffled craak, then a pungent, acrid odor stabbed sharp fingers up my nose. “Gaaak!” I said, snapping my head smartly away from that revolting smell.
“A little ammonia does it every time,” Emma Neely’s voice said.
I opened my eyes. I was lying on my stomach, on an examining table in Emma’s animal clinic. I still had on the turtleneck I had worn for my adventure at Living World, but judging by the draft swirling around my hindquarters, I figured I must be sans jeans. “I didn’t know they made tables this big,” I said grumpily.
“Ah, it lives,” Emma said, bending over to look into my eyes. She shone a light in each of them, and grunted a little. “Not too good,” she said. “You took an awful whack on the head. But that’s nothing compared to your dog bites,” she said cheerfully. “What was it—a Doberman?”
“Grrrr,” I replied.
As if they had been waiting to be called upon, my bites began to hurt. First they twinged, then they settled into a good steady throb. I flexed my foot experimentally and was happy to note that though it was painful, I could still move and wiggle everything. Thank the Lord for my new leather Reeboks.
“Well, let’s get on with this,” Emma bent down to look me in the eye again. “Are you sure you don’t want to go see a people doctor,” she asked. “It seems to be just a suturing job, but human anatomy is a little out of my league.”
“I’m sure.” Maggie Kent, my friendly ask-no-questions physician, was out of the country for a few months. I’d been trying my best to stay out of trouble in that time, but alas, trouble had caught up with me. I figured Emma could handle it. After all, a suture is a suture, as Emma had so pithily remarked. “Just pretend I’m a pedigreed poodle with my show career ahead of me.”
“Do you want me to leave?” a small voice asked.
Alison. I’d completely forgotten about her. “Wait a minute, Emma,” I said quickly. I hitched around so I was lying on my side. Alison sat on a straight-backed chair against the wall, my leather jacket and jeans in her lap.
“I’ll just go fetch a few things I’ll need,” Emma said discreetly, leaving us alone.
“Thank you for coming,” I told Alison. “I’m sorry I had to drag you into all this, but yours was the only phone number I could remember.”
She put my clothes down on the floor and came over beside me. “I’m already in all this,” she said. “Remember?” Her eyes filled with tears. “My God, Caitlin, you could have been badly hurt.”
“Yeah, well,” I said sheepishly. “Next time I’ll be more careful. Or run faster.”
She brushed the hair out of my eyes. “I’ll wait outside. I don’t have a strong stomach for this sort of thing. Then will you come home with me?”
That was the best offer I’d had all day. “Sure,” I told her.
She squeezed my arm and left.
I rolled back onto my stomach, put my head on my crossed arms, and prepared to suffer. The door opened and closed behind me.
“Now, you’ll just feel a little sting,” Emma said in that smarmy voice all doctors use when they’re about to hurt you like hell.
“Ha,” I said.
“Here we go,” Emma said, stabbing me in the calf with a needle that felt about as dull as a butter knife and as long as a javelin.
I ground my teeth together and, after few initial moans, prepared to endure.
Alison helped me hobble out of her Toyota Camry and up the steps to her house. It’s hard to summon up any dignity when you’re minus one shoe and have one leg of your jeans slit up the seams. Emma had wrapped my bandaged foot in a plastic bag to keep it clean, and I hopped gingerly, leaning on Alison. I felt about eighty years old, but at least there was no pain. The shots Emma had given me had taken care of that. I couldn’t believe that it was still the afternoon of the day Lester and I had gone to Living World. It felt as though months had passed.
She settled me in the living room with a footstool and a pillow under my right foot.
“I’m going to get one of my pairs of sweat pants,” she said. “And some socks. Then you can get rid of those jeans, and that plastic bag. I might even be able to scare up some shoes that would fit you.”
I wiggled my size-nine foot. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Ian just bought some new sneakers. They’re still in the box.”
She went upstairs and I leaned back in the armchair, feeling worried, ill, and tired. Now what? The way I felt, I would certainly be out of commission for the rest of the day. That left only tomorrow for me to do somet
hing productive. Friday would be too late. I closed my eyes. Tomorrow was Thursday, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was. Okay, fine. Then tomorrow it would have to be. I closed my eyes.
“Caitlin!” Alison said in alarm. “I don’t want to nag, but Emma said I wasn’t supposed to let you sleep. Not until tonight, anyhow.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said groggily, recalling her instructions. Opening my eyes very wide, I tried to will myself awake.
“I found these for you,” she said, offering me a pair of navy blue sweatpants. They looked a little short, but what the heck. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. I unlaced my right shoe and took it off, then unwrapped my left foot, giving Alison the plastic bag. Standing up, I winced. The local anaesthetic was beginning to wear off. The puncture wounds on my ankle and the sutures on the back of my calf were beginning to protest. Alison came over and offered a shoulder. I leaned on her while I unzipped my jeans, let them fall, then stepped out of them. One hand on Alison’s shoulder, one hand wrestling with the sweatpants, I finally managed to hop my way into them. As I suspected, they were short, but I was beyond caring. I put one of Alison’s socks on over my bandaged left foot, then sat back down in the armchair, feeling as though I had just done a hard day’s work.
“Brother,” I said. “Maybe I’m getting old, but I have a renewed appreciation for the frailty of the flesh.”
Alison sat on the arm of my chair. “Do you want something to eat?”
I considered this question. Did I? When had I last eaten? I decided it must have been the Rock Cod Special that morning. I didn’t feel at all hungry, but maybe I should eat something. Just to keep my strength up. “Maybe something soupish,” I said. “You know, chicken noodle. Something like that.”
“Okay,” Alison said. “I’ll be in the kitchen for a while. Anything I can get you in the meantime?”
I looked around. “How about the telephone? And something to write on.” I smiled at her, trying to project confidence. “Time to see how the battle is progressing on the other fronts.”
She handed me the phone with a skeptical look, then went on into the kitchen. I didn’t blame her. My confidence-projecting ability was at a low ebb.
Francis was unavailable, so I was unable to cross his name off my list. Darn. I had hoped he would have something for me by now.
Gray was next, and she answered her phone on the third ring.
“Hi,” I said. “How are Repo and Jeoffrey getting along?”
“They’re sleeping together in Jeoffrey’s cage,” Gray told me. “Repo evidently considers himself Jeoffrey’s protector. He seems quite happy in the role. He has eaten both breakfast and lunch, is playful and alert, and has groomed himself extensively.”
“Hmmf,” I said. “He sounds like his old self. And all this fuss was because he wanted a kitten?”
“Apparently.”
“There’s no figuring cats,” I told her. “Listen, I might have to leave Repo there a little while longer. Something’s come up.”
“Come for him whenever it’s convenient,” she said graciously.
“I appreciate it, Gray.”
Lester didn’t answer his phone, either, and I was just about to give up when a breathless female voice said, “Hello?”
“Er, hello. Can I talk to Lester?”
“Oh, well, yes you can,” the voice said, flustered. “Well, that is you could normally, but you can’t right now. Lester’s still at the hospital.”
“Still where?”
“The hospital. He was in a car accident. They’re setting his arm right now. He just called me for a ride. I live next door,” she explained, “and I’m already late for work. Say, are you a friend of his?”
“Oh no,” I whispered, a horrible premonition lifting the hairs on the back of my neck. “Oh no.”
In the harsh light of the emergency ward, Lester looked about the way I felt. The right side of his face was scraped raw, there was dirt ground into his jeans, dried blood in his hair, and his right forearm was now encased in a white plaster cast.
“What does the other guy look like?” I asked him. “Hi, Caitlin,” he said in surprise. “Where’s Dorothy?”
“I told her I’d come and get you,” I said. “She had to rush off to work, anyhow. So tell me what happened.”
“I dunno,” he said, shrugging. “Some jerk tried to run me off the road.”
My stomach fell into my borrowed shoes, and I swallowed. “A jerk in a yellow car?”
“Yeah. Hey, how did you know?”
“I’m psychic,” I told him grimly. “Lester. Now think back to this morning. You let me off in my driveway. Then what did you do?”
“Well, I had to go back to Living World.”
“You what?” I said faintly.
“Went back to Living World. For one of my portable lights. I forgot I’d left it in a corner of the lobby.”
I sat down heavily on the bed by his feet. “Did anything happen there?”
He shook his head, plainly mystified. “Like what?”
“Like anything, Lester. Think.”
He wrinkled his brow. “Well that public relations guy—the one we met—made me wait a bit because they’d had a security breach. Had to call out the dogs, he said. But he gave me coffee and some magazines to read. A guard poked around in the jeep a little, then they let me go.” He shrugged. “No big deal. Then, when I was halfway home, that nut case in the yellow car came out of nowhere and sideswiped me. I took my foot off the gas and steered for the shoulder. Lucky for me there was a nice shallow ditch. I flipped the jeep, but by then I was going pretty slow.”
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“Yeah. Someone came and took a report.”
“Did you get his name?”
Lester frowned. “Peters, Petrie. Something like that. Why?”
“I like to know these things,” I told him. “So, are you ready to go?”
“Yeah. I was just waiting for Dorothy.”
“C’mon, then.”
“Ouch,” he said, climbing down from the bed.
“What hurts?”
“What doesn’t?” He hobbled a little way down the hall before he noticed that I was hobbling, too. “Say, what happened to you?”
“Me? Nothing much. Just an argument with a Doberman.”
“Oh,” he said, looking at me, eyes wide in sudden comprehension. “Caitlin. You weren’t—”
“Don’t ask,” I told him.
“Right,” he sighed.
Putting an arm around each other’s waist, we shuffled like nonagenarians out into the late afternoon sunlight to where Alison waited in the car.
Alison pulled up in front of Lester’s house—a white side-by-side duplex with an enormous holly hedge separating the yard from the sidewalk. He dragged himself out of the car, groaning, and stood on the sidewalk, his face so pale his freckles stood out like crumbs on a tablecloth.
I rolled down the window. “Go to bed, kiddo.”
“There’s something I forgot to tell you,” he said weakly.
“What?”
“The video equipment. It’s, well, it’s wrecked.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking tragic. “When I rolled the jeep it fell out. The camera is a total loss.” I felt a little tragic myself. “How much?”
“About two thousand.”
Now I felt sick. “Don’t worry,” I told him, feigning insouciance. “I’m good for it.”
“But what about tomorrow night?” he asked, a worried frown on his face. “What will you do for equipment? Heck, you don’t even know how to use it.”
“Are you kidding?” I said breezily. “I’ll just head for the local video shop. They’d be happy to set me up with something. And we’ll let them do the teaching.” I winked. “I’m a quick study. Don’t worry, Lester. It’ll all work out.”
He sighed. “If you say so. The way I feel, I’d like to sleep for two days. But if you need me . . .”
“You take c
are of yourself, now,” I told him. “I’ll call you soon.”
We drove down Foul Bay Road to the ocean in a ruddy sunset glow that promised good weather tomorrow. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. But for the life of me, I couldn’t summon up a scintilla of optimism. I hurt everywhere, and pretty darned soon, Alison or no Alison, I wanted to lie down and have a good cry. It may not be very grown-up, but I’ve found it to be extremely beneficial.
“That was very nice,” Alison told me, pulling into the driveway and shutting off the Toyota’s engine. She turned to face me, the sunset behind her turning the sea to a sheet of amber. Her hair shone golden, her eyes glinted like pools of quicksilver. I had to remind myself to concentrate on what she was saying.
“What was nice?” I asked.
“The way you talked to Lester. You made it easy for him.”
“Oh, that. Well, I owed it to him, didn’t I? He wouldn’t be in such bad shape if it weren’t for me. I got him into this.”
“And I got you into it. Don’t you think this is getting out of control? Maybe we should back off.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Things are getting a little hairy, that’s all. I wouldn’t exactly say they were out of control.” I looked at her thoughtfully. “You’re the boss, you know. Do you want me to quit?”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. And I’m afraid they will. I’m afraid you will.”
“I might,” I said honestly. “But surely you realized that when we started. The folks at Living World mean business. They ran Mary off the road. They just tried to do the same thing to Lester. I don’t know about you, but I get mad when friends of mine get hurt. It kind of makes me want to get even. Taking a few lumps seems a small price to pay for putting those guys out of business.” But, after all, the decision was hers to make. If she wanted me to quit, though, I needed to know about it pretty soon. My mind was already turning over the problems associated with hauling video equipment through Living World’s bathroom window.
Ninth Life Page 14