Chapter 25

Time flies when you’re having fun, and apparently it goes even faster when you’re pursuing a bunch of dead ends. When Jacob showed up at my office, I realized it was dark out and I was hungry enough to eat one of Darla’s houseplants.

Carl let Jacob in, and Darla perked right up. When someone who’s never met Jacob before gets a load of him, I’ll sometimes have a little flashback myself of what it was like to encounter him for the very first time. His presence was like a car alarm—when he walked into a room, everyone noticed, whether they tried to play it cool or not. “Darla, this is Jacob Marks. We live together.” There. Now she knew.

“Darla Daniels,” she supplied, in a tone of voice laden with, How the hell’d you manage that, Vic?

“Good to meet you,” Jacob said, with more eye contact than I would have managed, given the mental energy he was pumping into his current investigation. Then he turned to me and asked, “Are you ready to go home, or do you need to stay?”

It wasn’t as if I was doing much good where I was, and yet I didn’t want to give Darla any more reason to be snippy with me by clocking out after a mere ten hours. Thankfully, Carl was happy to shut down his computer and say, “Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sleep on it.”

We pulled out onto Grand and headed home, both of us quiet. Caught up in our problems, or unsure whether the Crown Vic was bugged? A little of each. I had a document littered with broad black marks dancing in my head, and I was bursting with the desire to unload my anxiety about my permanent record on Jacob. But by the time we got to the cannery, I wondered if it was really such a good idea. Because what could he do about it, other than give me a few shitty platitudes and then start worrying about it himself?

He parked in our conveniently “haunted” spot. As we made our way up the front walk, the wind picked up, howling around us, and I realized it was the perfect opportunity to tell Jacob, without any electronic busybodies finding out I was on to them, that huge hunks of my past were redacted. But before I could figure out the least loaded way to tell him, he turned to me and said, “Okay, there’s no good way of saying this and you’re not gonna be happy about it. But I did what I had to do.”

“What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

His expression was grim. “You’ll see.”

While he unlocked the door and forged in, I said, “Jacob? Hey. You can’t just drop a non-explanation like that on my head and—” In the cavernous darkness beyond the entryway, something skittered.

My hand flew to my sidearm, but before it even cleared the holster, Jacob barked out in his bossiest cop-voice, “Stand down!” Not at whatever was rustling around in the dark, but at me. He startled me so badly, he was lucky I didn’t drop the gun and shoot out our new light fixture.

He turned it on and the room lit up.

Throw pillows were scattered across the floor, one of them torn open with its stuffing hanging out like a spill of intestines in a zombie flick. Ransacked. Not by robbers, but some secret branch of the FPMP, whoever beat up Con Dreyfuss and stole the GhosTVs. And now they were targeting us.

Jacob crossed the room to the basement door, which was open about three, four inches. “Wait,” I croaked out. Because…fuck, the basement door was open and the lights downstairs were on. 

He was Jacob. So he ignored me. He yanked the door the rest of the way open and thrust his head in. I half-expected something to rip it off and lob it at me. But instead, a small bundle of gray fur slipped past him and barreled into the kitchen, claws scraping frantically on worn hardwood.

When my brain re-engaged from its freakout loop, I said, “You got a cat?”

He sighed. “It’s Veronica’s. All three of them. I have no idea how they managed to open the basement door.”

I looked back at the living room. There was a yellow puddle beside the disemboweled throw pillow.

“There was no time to get someone to take them,” he said. “It was a security risk to start calling around. It’s not ideal, I know.”

In my relief, my neurochemicals did a lurch so sickening I thought I might vomit. Belatedly, I broke into a sweat. I hung up my suit jacket to save it a trip to the dry cleaner’s and said, “It’s fine.” My voice didn’t jibe, so I repeated it to try and force it to be true. “It’s fine.”

Showering presented me with a great opportunity to calm the hell down and sort myself out. A cat? Three cats? Fine, make it a dozen, who cared? Cats might be unfamiliar, but at least they were something normal. In the face of the fear that someone had broken into our house and was waiting in the basement with a canister of tear gas—or, worse, a buddy of the sex demon that exploded in Jacob’s old condo had come back for revenge—I was thrilled to find out we were babysitting Veronica’s cats.

A few weeks before, at a trip to the home center on a hunt for weather stripping, I’d found a showerhead that concentrated our so-so water pressure into something more satisfying. I planted myself under the blast face-on. It couldn’t really slough off everything I was trying to forget. But it did help me feel at least a little bit human.

Jacob had the mess cleaned up and dinner on the table by the time I dried off. The same batch of frozen chicken breasts we’d attempted to eat before? Impossible. These could actually be cut. I was chasing some couscous around the plate when Jacob said, “It’s only temporary.”

Unless Veronica ended up dead…which I chose not to point out. “We’ve got a ton of space. It’ll be fine.”

It turned out, my assessment of the situation was uncharacteristically optimistic. Initially, the cats were scared of us and kept themselves hidden. But one by one, they sized up the situation and, when they realized we lived there and they’d be stuck with us, decided they wanted to interact.

“What’s it doing?” I said. This cat was white with a single black ear, and it had parked itself in one of the dining room chairs, with nothing showing above the tabletop but its face. Its tiny, big-eyed face. “Why is it staring at me like that?”

“It’s begging. Veronica told me not to give them people food. Specifically.”

I ate a few green beans. The cat watched. “I’m sure it doesn’t like vegetables. Does it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a cat person.”

“A little bit wouldn’t hurt.”

“You don’t want to encourage the habit.”

I ate a few more bites. Did my best not to look. But eventually found myself drawn back to that unnerving feline gaze. “Did you feed it?”

“It has a huge bowl full of food downstairs. It’s not starving.”

“Sure looks that way to me.”

Jacob stood. “Okay, pal, you’ve worn out your welcome. Into the basement with you.” He made a grab, but the cat was too quick for him. With a thump, it landed on the floor and darted upstairs toward our bedroom. Jacob shook his head, sat back down and finished eating. 

I was almost done when I got that feeling you get when a ghost full of tire tracks is staring at you from the nearest intersection, and when I looked up, I saw it. A tiny white face with big green eyes and a single black ear, poking out from around the banister, gazing at me like I was the biggest jerk in the world for not sharing.

“Sorry,” I told it.

It turned disdainfully and ran back upstairs.

 As much as I hoped nothing of mine ended up shredded or peed on, I supposed I was glad for the distraction. Having that little bit of distance helped me decide to wait until I had a concrete piece of evidence in hand to bring up my redacted records with Jacob. Something that gave us a better idea of what, exactly, had been blacked out.

I went downstairs to verify that the cats did, indeed, have a big bowl of food (yes, I even braved the basement after 9 p.m. on their behalf) and found that Jacob was not exaggerating. The bowl was huge, though the multicolored kibble in it didn’t strike me as particularly appetizing. There was also a litter box and a carpet-covered piece of cat furniture as high as my shoulder. The whole setup was in the finished half of the basement, where interlocking rubber gym tiles covered the floor and bright lighting kept all the shadows at bay. But cats have a feral bent to their feline brains, and I suspected they were drawn to the basement’s other half—the creepy half, where century-old machinery that was too heavy to dispose of lurked, draped with cobwebs, within the crumbling brick. “If you want to earn your keep,” I announced to the room at large, “feel free to catch a few spiders. Shouldn’t be any mice since we filled all the gaps with spray-foam, but if you were to prove me wrong, I’d definitely express my gratitude by slipping you some people food on the down-low.”

Movement flickered among the shadowed remains of the once-great machines. Not a ghost. Just a gray and white tabby.

Maybe temporary cat ownership wouldn’t be so bad. The box of poop they came with wasn’t ideal, but at least they didn’t require walking. They had each other, so they didn’t need attention from us. And their propensity to shred things might actually encourage Jacob to start picking up after himself. 

When I climbed into bed, Jacob put away his book and rolled on top of me, hoping for a little action. We kissed, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to close my eyes. Does a person kiss differently with their eyes open? They must, because pretty soon Jacob opened his eyes too, and said, “What?”

“Can’t shake the feeling that they’re watching.”

Jacob levered himself off me and looked around. “I don’t see any of them.”

“Like that means anything.”

“We do this all the time under surveillance.”

“Not really….” Other than the chips in our phones and our guns, we’d never proven we were being actively spied on. He was Internal Affairs. He should know.

“And you’re worried about an animal seeing you naked?” he teased.

“No….” But knowing another living creature would be staring at me while I got nailed was seriously cramping my style. The sounds. The smells. The sight of my awkward body. My o-face. Way too vulnerable all around. 

We tried closing the door, but the room felt stuffy and claustrophobic. Plus I wasn’t entirely convinced we didn’t have a stowaway behind the furniture. Eventually, Jacob talked me into a furtive handjob beneath the covers. But me, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. Once I swabbed his jiz off my thigh with an old sock I rummaged out from beneath the bed, I brushed his hand away, rolled over and turned out the light. “I’ll take a raincheck.”

With a disappointed huff, Jacob settled against my back and slung a heavy arm around me, and in less than a minute, started to snore.