Dead acorn husks and rain dripped on the flat roof. Danny had slept a full eight hours and had not dreamed. It was too foggy to run, so he showered, shaved, and fooled in front of the mirror with the hair drier, fluffing his new haircut.
When he emerged from the bathroom, the new coffeemaker he’d bought had his coffee waiting, and he took a cup to his computer on the screened porch overlooking the backyard.
Coastal fog basted the foliage, drifting like a cloud through the screens; he had to wipe down the computer. First day in his new office. A little rustic, but that would improve.
His video monitor cut a crisp black rectangle in the morning mist. The screen saver was a flowing star scene that created the sensation of traveling through deep space-the view from Captain Picard’s command chair on the Enterprise.
He sat down, sipped his coffee, and logged into the net.
The whole world just a click away. Cruising.
Old habits. He’d started the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Cruz Sentinel, but they hadn’t shown up on his stoop yet. No problem. He’d peruse the St. Paul paper’s Web page. He typed in the address. The awesome Pentium gobbled up the bytes, constructing the site.
When the page was intact, he selected the weather icon and waited for the display to come on-screen. The familiar forecast symbols marched across the page. White dots sprinkled from a cloud on a blue field. Snow today. High 31. Low 13. Snow turning to sleet tomorrow…sounded ugly.
Through the screened mist he heard Ruby’s voice, “Here kitty, kitty.”
Danny grinned. The voice came again. “Dan…can I come over. I’m missing a cat.”
“Sure,” yelled Danny back. “I’m on the back porch.” He clicked off the site.
She materialized out of the vapor in shorts and a blouse tied in a loose square knot above her navel. No shoes. Flossy white hairs coated her brown stomach. The idea of touching her was as sexually appealing as hugging a bundle of cotton sheets fresh off the wash line.
Looking at her. What? Nothing happened.
Ruby. I’m sure. I’ll bet your name was a solid Lutheran Emily or Gertrude back in Iowa before you came to California and were reborn in Licker-ville. Was she the pitcher or the catcher? Which one strapped on the dildo? Some night he’d drop over for a peek.
“Hi, Ruby. Want some coffee?” he said pleasantly.
“Thanks,” she said. “You haven’t seen any of the cats have you?”
“Nope.” He got up and went into the kitchen. As he poured a cup he called out, “You take anything?”
“Some two percent if you have it. You’ve really been fixing this place up. Pentium. Nice box,” she added.
He poured in a dollop of half-and-half and returned to the porch. Ruby took the cup and sat in a wicker chair he’d brought in from the deck. Her smooth thighs would feel like tennis balls if you squeezed them. Or if you got squeezed by them. He pictured Terra, her butchy partner, whom he’d only glimpsed, caught in a choke hold between those thighs. Fat zapper tongue, he bet-like the frog in the Budweiser commercial.
“Cats are independent. It’ll come back,” sympathized Danny.
“It’s not that simple around here,” she said.
“Why’s that?” Curious.
“Do you believe in precursor events?” she asked seriously.
Danny gnawed his lip. Hmmm. Some New Age mumbo jumbo?
Seeing his lost expression, she explained, “I mean to earthquakes.”
“Oh.” He leaned back to listen. As he did, he discovered that if he looked at Ruby and thought about Ida Rain, he started to get excited.
“Dan, you’re living in the footprint of Loma Prieta,” she announced in hushed tones. “I was in downtown Santa Cruz, at work, when it hit. And I never want to go through that again.”
“What’s that got to do with cats?”
“Well, that was before I…met Terra, and I only had one cat. And before the quake, my cat vanished. When I met Terra she told me she had two cats, and both of them ran away two days before it hit.”
“Cats,” said Danny, looking at her flawless delineation of inner thigh, remembering the clasp of Ida’s legs in the dark.
Here pussy, pussy.
“Terra explained it to me. Abnormal animal behavior is common before seismic events. There are scientists who keep track of lost cats. When the cats run off, watch out.”
“Ah-huh.” Playfully, Danny moused into accessories, pulled up networking and dialed the 800 number for the St. Paul paper. It was about eight o’clock. Ten in Minnesota. Ida Rain ran on strict time. Sunday mornings, she went out to breakfast and then grocery shopped for the week. It was safe to assume she wasn’t logged on to her computer at home or in the newsroom.
Still thinking Ida, he watched Ruby cross her legs. Ow, that was nice.
The network marquee came on the screen. Under user name, he typed in Ida Rain. Password-one of the first things he had learned about Ida was her password. He’d just watched her type it in until he had the sequence of keys. It was Burgundy, her favorite color. He toyed with the notion of reading Ida’s e-mail, getting seriously kinky and voyeuristic as his eyes tracked south of Ruby’s belly button. The computer screen shivered, repixelated. He was in.
Ruby sipped her coffee and went on. “It’s something to do with their ears. There’s a mineral in a cat’s ear-magnetite? You ever hear of that?”
“Ah, no.” He opened Ida’s e-mail box.
“According to this theory, when the tectonic plates down in the earth grind together, the pressure on all that rock acts like a transmitter…”
Danny started to scroll down the menu of Ida Rain’s messages. Memory Lane. Going-away party for Howie Norell.
Bye, Howie. Internal memo about company cell phones.
United Way Appeal.
“…and the magnetite acts like a receiver for these low signals-like a dog whistle. It vibrates the magnetite in the cat’s ears, and they take off because they know…”
Danny’s eyes scanned past and then whipsawed back on the message tag; BruceNote, the metro editor; Good old Bruce, the prick. He clicked on it. It opened. Began to read: Ida,
We’re holding the Wanger’s story idea on Tom James you proposed. Wanger contacted Angland in jail, and Angland denied that James ever told him anything
about the money. So we have questions whether this Broker, who is just a temporary deputy up there, is pressing a legitimate investigation. I put the story back in your basket. Let’s talk-B
“…an event is coming.”
“Motherfucker!” he screamed. He shot to his feet, his chair and coffee cup flew in different directions.
Ruby went rigid, terrified, speechless. Coffee slicked her bare thighs and shorts. Her empty cup spun in hollow circles on the tile floor.
“Fucking no good bitch…” Danny seized the upturned chair and slammed it down. When it fell over again he hurled it through the screens, it smashed into a collection of brittle, empty terra-cotta planters on the deck.
Ruby was on her feet, backing away with her hands extended, palms out, but turned sideways, not defensive, more like pleading. “Pleeaase,” she whispered. And the nightmarish expression on her face bespoke a fault line all her own, a terror of men rammed deep within her. Seeing it brought Danny to his senses.
His smile came too suddenly, still quivering with anger, and that also terrified her, as if she’d seen it before.
“No, no,” he said in an embarrassed voice. “It’s…”
But she was going through the screen door. Her pretty face froze in profile. One flat wild eye splashed on features jagged as a piece of broken glass. Her bare feet made fast slapping sounds on the paving stones as she fled the property.
God. He touched his forehead, which felt like hot paper ready to combust. His eyes locked back on the monitor. But the screen saver had kicked on. Black panel. White dots zipping like blizzard snow pelting a windshield.
Like a bad night in Minnesota.
God. He felt like he was going to puke. Unsteady, he walked toward the bathroom. He even managed a sickly smile. His rubber knees duplicated the shock of a quake.
God. I could lose it all. That thought went down like a plunger, and he felt a wave of stomach acid froth in his throat.
He barely made the bathroom, knelt before the stool and projectile vomited. Immediately he felt relief. He rose to his feet, wiping away hot strings of spittle.
The shower curtain moved.
Someone in the shower.
A fast low shape shot past the cheap plastic curtain. Gray.
Sleek. Oriental black boots on the gray paws. Ruby’s cat.
Her missing fucking precursor cat.
Rage networked a million miles of nerves and assembled, red hot, in his hands. He ripped the toilet seat from the stool and in one powerful, flawless spin, turned and smashed the wooden oval down on the animal’s head.
He dropped the seat and kicked it and kicked it and…it died a kind of floppy miniature animal death somewhere between a small dog and an insect.
Squashed. Blood on its tiny white needle teeth.
Calmer now, with matted blood and fur on his bare feet, he walked back through the house to the kitchen, got a fresh cup and poured coffee.
Think. Clean up the bathroom. Hard to think. Fucking Broker again. Got to Ida somehow. And I would have bought her a new chin. He grimaced at his gory feet as he walked back into the bathroom. Bloody footprints on the tile.
Splashes on the wall. Jesus Christ, he giggled. Looks like a goddamn slaughterhouse in here.
Then-holy shit!
Almost as an afterthought, he saw his whole new life crumble. The folly. So obvious. She knew his name. Had THE BIG LAW/341
whispered it in the dark for months. Those pages in her desk…
He stooped, picked up the dripping cat-thing and said to the smashed head, “We’ll have to do something about that!”
Then, practical: Wash the floor, Danny; get rid of the damn cat. With a pail, some Comet and a rag he sopped up the tracks and the mess in the bathroom. He placed the toilet seat tentatively back on the stool.
Stupid damn thing to do. Got to be careful now. This is when you make mistakes.
He wrapped the dead cat in the ragged cleaning towel and carried it to his truck. A light rain hissed from the warm tangerine sky, strange low clouds, air thick as jam.
He consulted his county map, drove through the flooded strawberry fields and orchards until he found the road to the nearest beach. Good. The parking lot was deserted. With the leaky cat wrapped under his arm, he went up the plank walkway through the dunes and crossed the beach toward the Pacific Ocean. Rain threaded down. He could barely make out the silhouette of the power plant to the south in Monterey.
Slow gray rollers flopped over and foamed lacy surf across the beach. Coils of fluted gray kelp protruded from hum-mocks of damp sand. Looked like dead worms from Mars.
Fucking Jeremiah Johnson running through the trees, tomahawk out.
He’d zeroed in on Ida.
She knew his name. But she didn’t know she knew it.
The fear washed through him faster than his eyes could process or conscious thought could catch. And there, like his fear manifest-thirty feet away, where the waves tumbled in the first breaker line-a long supple shadow broke the surface, glided. Fins.
Had to be twelve, thirteen feet, the distance between the dorsal and the tail. Just-right there. Then silently gone into the wide endless Pacific.
He lobbed the cat overhand, a lazy layup. It splashed just past the first breakers. He waited to see if the shark would strike. If it did, it happened below the surface where he couldn’t see.
Like he would. Silent.
Some fishermen in hip waders with very long poles were walking up the beach. Short men with black hair. The tonal mystery of an Asian language cartwheeled in the sound of the waves. He watched them take huge lures with ferocious curved hooks from their tackle box and string them to their leader. Calmer, composed, Danny walked back to his car.
These events disrupted his timetable. He’d have to take risks. It infuriated him that Ida Rain had repaid his compassion with betrayal. The bitch could have had it all.
The best goddamn face money could buy.
Then he looked at his watch. Shit. He was supposed to meet the retired cop at that bar in Santa Cruz this afternoon.