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.