"Cat to the Dogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Shirley Rousseau)
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Well, he'd take them home to Clyde. Let Clyde deal with the problem. Clyde would love the stupid mutts. And maybe they'd cheer up old Rube. Rube had been mourning the death of Barney, their golden retriever who had succumbed to cancer, for far too long.
So, okay, he'd take them home. But did they have to make such a scene? By the time he reached the road above Hellhag Canyon his fur was sopping from their affection.
Atop the cliff, the sea breeze came stronger, lifting and thinning the mist. The narrow two-lane, clearing of fog, glistened wet and black. In the watery sunshine, the pups looked even more skeletal, every rib casting a curved shadow, their cheeks so deeply sunken that he could see each indentation of their canine skulls. Turning his back on them, he studied the slick black road.
Where the car had gone over the edge, the earthen shoulder was scarred raw, rocks tumbled, bushes broken and uprooted. Trotting along the verge watching for the man they had scented below, for a stranger to suddenly appear climbing out of the canyon, Joe could find no skid marks on the dark macadam. It looked, just as Joe had guessed, as if the driver, when his car hit the second curve, had no brakes at all.
Examining the wet paving, he found several splatters of brake fluid pooled like oil. He had to drive the pups away, cuffing and slapping them to keep them from licking the spills. He didn't know if brake fluid was poisonous like radiator coolant, but he didn't care to find out. It was not until he trotted around the second bend that he smelled burnt rubber.
Before him, S-shaped trails snaked across the asphalt, and a larger puddle of brake fluid gleamed. Joe imagined the driver stamping repeatedly on the pedal, trying to slow, the fluid spurting out until it was gone.
Pumping the pedal, jerking the wheel, he'd have hit that second curve like a missile, the car swerving back and forth, gaining speed on the downhill, hitting the shoulder to plow up half a ton of dirt and flip a double gainer straight into Hellhag Canyon.
He could find no sign of the second car, no trace of a second set of skid marks.
He wondered if the driver had braked suddenly to avoid not an oncoming car but the pups themselves looming in the fog.
Except, the horn had honked
Crossing the road, Joe headed up Hellhag Hill through the tall, wet grass. He was halfway to the crest when he realized the pups had left him.
Rearing above the wild oats and barley, he saw them far below, creeping along the edge of the highway, staring up the hill white-eyed and quivering.
Joe didn't know what was wrong with them; something on the hill terrified them. He stood tall on his hind paws, observing them, smiling a sly cat grin.
Now would be the perfect time to ditch them. Take off across Hellhag Hill and leave them cowering down there.
A practical voice told him,
But a kinder voice whispered,
And above this internal argument, he kept wondering about the dead man, and about the unseen stranger in the canyon, wondering where he had come from, and why he didn't hike on into the village and report the wreck. Joe hadn't seen the guy come up out of the canyon.
He wondered how long before someone else would come along the road, notice the torn-up shoulder, take a look down into the canyon, and call 911. Get the cops and a wrecker down there. Meanwhile, below him on the road, the pups crept along shivering with fear. Poor dumb beasts.
Well, he'd take them home. Clyde would love them. They'd give him something to do: he'd feed them, get them in shape, have them vetted, walk them and bathe them, worm them, fawn over them. Find homes for them. He'd be so proud when they were sleek and had collars and homes of their own.
Sirens screamed from the village, and a rescue unit appeared around the farthest curve, moving fast and followed by a black-and-white. The pups stared around wildly and fled into the drainage ditch, but when a second police unit came scorching toward them, the pups chose the lesser of two evils and bolted up the hill to cower whimpering against Joe.
Joe couldn't see much with the pups milling around. He glimpsed four officers disappearing down the hill: he thought it was Wendell, Brennan, Davis, and Hendricks, following two paramedics with their stretchers and black bags. He could hear the officers' muffled voices mixed with the crackle of the police radio. The fog had broken into wispy scarves; now, beyond the cliff, the vast sweep of the Pacific Ocean gleamed up at him in the sun's first rays, the white surf crashing against the rocks. Off to the north, the red rooftops of the village caught the sun's light, too, and he could hear the distant, thin chime of the courthouse clock striking seven. The morning smelled of sea and iodine, and of coffee and frying sausages mixed, nearer at hand, with the pungent stink of wet dog. When, somewhere on the village streets, a little boy shouted, the pups cocked their floppy ears, whining and panting. Their eager innocence touched something tender in Joe Grey. "You poor, dumb puppies. So damn lonely."
They slobbered and drooled on him, so starved for affection that they made a cat barf. Gently he stroked their wet black noses with his velveted paw.
But his other voice said,
Ignoring both voices, he moved swiftly toward home, the pups pressing so close that their legs were like a moving forest through which he had to navigate. He wondered, would the cops examine the wreck carefully enough to find the leaky brake line? Lieutenants Brennan and Wendell might very well miss that damning bit of evidence; Wendell had just recently made lieutenant, but he was better with street crime than with the subleties of a possible murder scene.
But the new female officer, Davis, was thorough. Joe had watched these uniforms work a crime scene so often that he felt like part of the force.
The trouble was, they didn't know this was a crime scene. It looked like an accident that could too easily have happened in this early, foggy dawn.
Now, with the road quiet again, the pups left him, racing down the hill and glancing worriedly behind them.
"Get back up here, get off the road. The ambulance will be coming back. What's with you two? What are you afraid of?"
They stared up at him, whining.
"Come on, dummies. Get up here. There's nothing here to scare you, nothing but maybe a stray cat in the grass." Nothing but a few rats and ground squirrels, and the half dozen stray cats that had taken up residence some days before, following the quakes, appearing suddenly, a clowder of thin, wild beasts so fearful they would run from a bird shadow swooping overhead. No pup could be afraid of them. Dulcie said humans who abandoned cats ought to be stripped naked and dropped without food-without money and credit cards-in the icy wilds of Tierra del Fuego, and see how they liked being abandoned.
Joe thought those cats had probably come from the trailer park, a transient human community of the less-affluent snowbirds who trekked out to California in the winter to escape the blizzards of the Midwest. Usually those people, if they brought pets along, took care of their animals, but once in a while you got some lowlifes.
But Dulcie said these cats were too terrified of humans to have ever lived with people. She thought they were feral cats, the products of several generations of strays, gone as wild as foxes.
He wondered what Dulcie would say about his dragging home the pups.
He could just see her green eyes blazing with amazement.
Dulcie was not afraid of dogs-she could intimidate any dog in Molena Point and often did-but after their recent encounter with the black voodoo cat, she'd had enough of involvement with any fellow creature. And just then, having appropriated Clyde's backyard for her own purposes, she'd take a dim view of two giant puppies plunging around barking and whining and getting in her way.
For two weeks she had spent every daylight hour-it seemed to Joe-and most of her evenings, crouched atop Clyde's back fence within a mass of concealing maple leaves, peering into the windows of the Greenlaw mansion, which stood on the big double lot behind Clyde's cottage. Clyde called Dulcie's preoccupation,
"Of course something isn't right," Clyde had snapped at her. "Lucinda's husband just died. Lucinda's suddenly a widow. Of course life isn't right-don't you think she's grieving! Cats can be so unfeeling!"
"Why would she grieve?" Dulcie had hissed, her ears tight to her head, her green eyes fiery. "Shamas Greenlaw was nothing but a womanizer. Going off for weeks, leaving Lucinda with practically no money while he took his expensive trips, and every time with a different bimbo. Why would she grieve! She's lucky to be rid of him."
Dulcie didn't hold with the shades-of-gray school of moral behavior. Shamas Greenlaw had been sampling the herd, and Dulcie called it like it was.
Shamas had been dead for two weeks, drowned in a boating accident off Seattle-leaving his current squeeze on the boat with Shamas's nephew, Newlon Greenlaw; Shamas's cousin, Samuel Fulman; and Winnie and George Chambers, an older Molena Point couple. Probably, Dulcie said, leaving the girlfriend deeply grieving as she contemplated an end to the money Shamas had lavished upon her.
"Anyway," she'd told Clyde, "Lucinda is doing more than grieving. Something else is the matter."
"And how did you arrive at this very perceptive conclusion?"
"You don't need to be sarcastic," the little cat had hissed. "And
Joe had looked after her, grinning. But Clyde had sat at the kitchen table cradling his cold coffee, scowling and hurt; looking, that early morning, like a particularly unfortunate example of homelessness, a soul in need of extensive assistance, his short, dark hair sticking up every which way, his ancient jogging shorts threadbare and wrinkled, his sweatshirt sporting three holes where it had gotten caught in the washer. His expression, as he stared after Dulcie, was one of deep puzzlement.
Clyde could mouth off at Joe, and get just what he gave, and that was okay. But he didn't know how to respond when sweet little Dulcie snapped back at him.
It had taken Dulcie a long time, after she and Joe found they could speak, before she would talk to Clyde. Then, there had been a far longer interval of mutual good manners between cat and human, before Dulcie had the chutzpah to return Clyde's smart-mouthed remarks in kind.
Now, leaving the jungle-tall grass of Hellhag Hill, Joe called the pups to him for the last time as he crossed a narrow residential street, heading back among humans. He would not raise his voice again to give them a command until he was sheltered within his own walls. The pups bolted up to him, wagging and panting, happy to leave the wild slope.
"Idiots," he muttered. But maybe he understood their fear; sometimes when he crossed Hellhag Hill, the fur along his own back stood up as rigid as a punk haircut.
Joe didn't know what caused his unease, but once when he was hunting high atop Hellhag Hill, he'd imagined he heard voices beneath the earth, and that same night he'd dreamed that Hellhag Hill vanished from under his paws, the earth falling away suddenly into a black and bottomless cavern.
He had awakened mewling with fear, as frightened as a helpless kitten.
Ahead of him, one of the puppies stopped, sat down on the sidewalk, and began to scratch. The other pup copied him, nibbling at an itchy tail-causing Joe to itch all over, to imagine himself already flea-ridden, covered with hungry little freeloaders glad to move to fatter environs, parent and grandparent and baby fleas burrowing deep into his clean silver fur.
Hurrying through the village beside the pups, he saw the coroner's car heading out toward Highway One, and he wondered what the slim, bespectacled Dr. Bern would find. Around him, the village seemed very welcoming suddenly, very safe, the familiar little cottages tucked in among their old, twisted oaks and tall pines. Over the smell of sun-warmed geraniums came the lingering scents of bacon and pancakes and syrup.
Trotting past Molena Point's bright, tangled gardens and crowded shops, Joe was suddenly very thankful for this village. He would never admit that to Clyde, would never hint to Clyde how much he cherished Molena Point. Would never confess how glad he was to be away from the mean streets of San Francisco-an ignorant kitten trying to cadge a few bites of garbage, hiding from the bigger cats, always afraid, and cold, and mad at the world.
Suddenly, right now, Joe needed to be home. In his own safe, warm home.
Galloping eagerly in the direction of his cozy pad, he dodged the pups, who ran along grinning and panting as if their own salvation were surely near. Joe, racing up the sidewalk through blowing leaves and flashes of sunlight, wondered again: had those uniforms, up at Hellhag Canyon, seen the cut brake line?
Police Captain Max Harper needed to know about it, to know that that wreck had been no accident.
Turning down the little side street toward his and Clyde's white Cape Cod cottage, running beneath its sheltering oaks toward the ragged lawn that Clyde seldom mowed, and the gray shake roof that constantly needed fixing-repairs supplied by Clyde's girlfriend, Charlie Getz-Joe breathed in the comforting, warm smells of home.
But crossing the yard, eyeing Clyde's antique Chevy roadster still parked in the drive, knowing Clyde had not yet left for work, he began to wonder what Clyde
And he wondered if, when he tried to get a message to Max Harper about the cut brake line, Clyde would respond in his usual supercritical manner-if Clyde would hide the telephone and give him another of his high-handed lectures about how cats should not get involved in police business. How he, Joe Grey, ought to mind his own simple affairs. How Max Harper needed to pursue his official police business unencumbered by inappropriate feline meddling.
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