“If your man ran off, you want me take care of him.”
“Yes.”
“If he was hijacked, you want me to track down whoever did it.”
“Yes. I also wish to determine whether the offender was acting independently or on orders… and have my inventory returned to me if possible.”
Earl tipped his head up and down a second time.
“What’s the other part of the job?” he said.
Hasul was quiet a second, his palms flat on his desk.
“Patrick Sullivan’s woman,” he said. “Whatever the reason for his disappearance, I’ve learned he has shared extremely sensitive information about my business affairs with her.”
“And?” “Unfortunately, I cannot risk her passing this information along to anyone else.”
Earl looked at him with a hint of a smile.
“I’m guessing you know her name,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Where I can find her.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, leave everything to me.” Earl paused. “That takes care of the ‘for now’ part…”
Hasul raised a hand, offering his own taut smile.
“The later,” he said, “is for later.”
Silence. They looked across the room at each other.
“Zaheer will give you the pertinent details,” Hasul said, then. “Of course you can expect to be well compensated.”
“Never would doubt it.”
Earl rose from his chair, buttoned his jacket, tugged its sleeves down over his arms.
“Better be on my way,” he said.
Hasul stood to show him from the office, but Earl had already started toward the door as he came around his desk, breaking stride for only an instant to have another look at the aquarium.
Its inhabitant remained gathered in its sheltering hole.
“See ya when I see ya,” Earl said to the glass front of the tank.
Then he turned back toward the door, opened it, and was gone.
Lathrop had noticed Missus Frakes’s waning interest in her ball of yarn for quite some time, but it was just recently that this change of behavior had started to infiltrate his thoughts.
It was another of many signs the coon cat was getting up there in age, signs that were inescapable unless Lathrop deliberately blinded himself to them… and he wasn’t a believer in papering over reality’s moldy walls as if calm pastel colors and landscape prints could stop the decay from spreading underneath, turning it to heaps of dust and rubble. The house hadn’t been built to last, and Lathrop could smell its infectious rot every waking minute of his life, penetrating the framework like an incurable cancer of the bones. He supposed his biggest goal was to keep a step ahead of the rest as it fell apart piece by piece, edge beneath the final section of roof to come crashing down. He wasn’t sure why he ought to care, but there was a certain appeal to the idea of staying on his own two feet to the bitter end and having a good look around at the wreckage.
Now Lathrop sat watching Missus Frakes from the convertible sofa of his studio apartment on the corner of East 63rd and Lexington, a co-op he subleased for a couple thousand a month, no paltry sum for a single room with a view of the faceless high-rise and twenty-four-hour Gristedes supermarket across the street. The cat was curled on the rug near the radiator, warming herself there, her head tucked into her breast, a half-lidded green eye gleaming out from under one furry paw the only discernable evidence that she wasn’t asleep. Nearby lay what used to be her favorite plaything, a ball of brown yarn Lathrop had brought across the thousands of miles he’d traveled with her in the past six years, on the move, always on the move, crossing borderlines he couldn’t even remember anymore, slipping through the darkest of cracks and crannies in the slowly disintegrating house that God built.
The coon had belonged to a meth chemist in Albuquerque when Lathrop first made her acquaintance. Half starved, beaten, mean, she’d almost completely reverted to a feral state, living off scavenged trash and whatever rodents she could catch in and around some chicken barn her nominal owner was using as a clan lab. This was when Lathrop was still DEA, still chasing drug peddlers, trying to hold on to the belief that it was possible to keep the house upright, or at least slow its inevitable deterioration with management and control, patching holes with mortar, digging out the fungus that had invaded its timbers. His special agent’s badge pushed way up where the sun didn’t shine — no decent place to keep it clean — he’d been working deep to bust a relocated East Coast mafia squealer who’d used witness protection’s get-out-of-jail-free card as a ticket to organize a hot meth distribution syndicate out west, turning half the teenage kids in his new neighborhood into strung-out jugglers. That winner ended up in a supermax prison as a result of the sting operation, but before Lathrop called a task force down on the speed factory, he’d rushed to pay an
It wasn’t the first bit of personal justice Lathrop had administered before cutting ties with the agency. Nor would it be the last. But it was the only instance on which he’d gotten a new house pet to compensate for his trouble.
All taken into account, it hadn’t been a bad deal.
Lathrop could remember when Missus Frakes had loved going vicious on the yarn. She would attack without any quit, first stalking it, then batting it around with her front paws, then pouncing, tearing at it with tooth and claw until the whole thing unraveled, as if hoping to find some sort of bloody reward in the center, a steaming heart or liver that would satisfy her honed killer instincts.
There had been a time when Lathrop would have needed to rewind the long, scrambled skein of yarn within ten minutes after putting it down on the floor beside her.
The ball had been wrapped tight for days now, untouched, ignored.
Missus Frakes was getting old. Her muscles were stiff at the joints and her hindquarters dragged a little when she walked. She slept most of the day, needing help up onto the high perches she had once been able to reach with supple leaps. She hadn’t lost any of the toughness or smarts that had carried her along when she’d adapted to fending for herself, and Lathrop thought she still had what it took to make it on her own, might even hang on to that ability for a while longer… but the point always came when the senses dulled, and the reflexes slowed just enough to give an enemy the split-second chance it needed to get in under the throat.
Lathrop leaned forward on the couch, winked at the jade green eye studying him from across the room.
“We make some team,” he said, and patted his leg to invite her over. “Fellow travelers, partners in crime.”
Missus Frakes dropped her paw from her face, stretched, sat, yawned. Then she sauntered over in her listless, draggy way and came brushing up against his legs.
Lathrop stroked her back, heard and felt her purr, gently massaged the tight, stiffened muscles of her hips.
Suddenly a sharp hiss. She twisted clear of his fingertips and raked the back of his hand with her claws before he could pull away, slashing into it from wrist to knuckle.
Then she stood in front of the sofa, facing him calmly.
The scratches on his hand already burning, Lathrop looked at her and almost smiled. She’d gotten her message across loud and clear.
“That a girl,” he said. “You show me where it hurts, I’ ll be more careful about where I touch.”
Missus Frakes watched him, her motor purring again. After a moment she turned into the kitchenette with a noticeable little strut in her gait and sat down near her empty food dish.
Lathrop followed her inside, turned on the cold water, held his bleeding hand under the tap, and dabbed it with a paper towel. The furball had skinned him one good, he thought.
He held the blood-splotched paper towel to his hand a minute and disposed of it. Then he reached into an overhead cabinet for a can of moist cat food, opened the flip top, dropped it onto the trash as well. It occurred to
