Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons (3 page)

Which is what I was doing as I turned off Higel to Ocean and drove to the Village Diner where I go every morning after I’ve finished with all my pet-sitting duties. By that time it was close to ten o’clock. I’d been up since four, without caffeine or food, and I was ready for breakfast and a long nap.

That’s my excuse. I was a woman in love, and I was hungry and tired. So when I pulled into the shelled parking area at the side of the diner, I didn’t pay much attention to the black limo that purred to a stop close beside me. Like I said, Siesta Key is a prime vacation spot for well-heeled tourists, so limos are almost as numerous as egrets or herons. But when I opened the Bronco door and slid out, the limo’s back door on my side opened too, which boxed me in. I did a mental shrug. As every year-round resident on the Key knows very well, some tourists are so rude and pushy that we would cheerfully toss them into the Gulf if it weren’t for the fact that they keep our economy going.

Friendly as a Chamber of Commerce volunteer, I closed the Bronco door and waited for the limo’s backseat occupant to get out and close the limo door so I could move forward. In the next instant, a large man in a ski mask lunged from the limo’s front passenger seat and another masked man popped from the backseat. In about two nanoseconds they had my mouth covered, my limbs pinned, and me stuffed in the cavernous backseat of their car. Even in the shocked midst of it happening, while I kicked and grunted and squealed and tried to wrest myself free, part of my mind coolly appraised their expertise. These guys were pros.

The doors closed and the limo backed out of the lot and drove down Ocean at a normal speed. Both men had got into the back with me, so the driver was alone in the front. He kept his face turned forward so all I could see was the back of his head. One of the men in the back put a strip of tape over my mouth, and they had my wrists and ankles bound together before we got to Higel. As the car turned left, they pulled a black hood over my head.

Even with a hood over my head, I could tell they followed the dogleg on Higel to Siesta Drive and over the north bridge to the mainland. For a few seconds, I made angry noises. But they were a waste of energy, so I shut up and tried to pay attention to anything I could use later to identify the men. There wasn’t much. The men in the back stayed silent, and so did the driver.

After the time it would take to get to the Tamiami Trail, the limo stopped, waited, and turned left. We were headed north, which led to Sarasota Bay and the marina. If they planned to put me on a boat, that would be the place to do it. North led to Sarasota’s downtown streets, too, but I doubted they had shops or theaters or restaurants on their minds.

They could also turn off Tamiami onto the fixed-span bridge that leads to Bird Key, St. Armands Key, Lido Key, Longboat Key, and Anna Maria Island. Rich people live on those keys, so if some rich person had hired these goons to kidnap me, they might be taking me to the rich person’s house. But I couldn’t think of a single person, rich or otherwise, who would want to kidnap me.

We didn’t turn off Tamiami Trail, just kept going straight ahead. My mind raced with possibilities of where we could be headed. I doubted it would be the Ringling Museum of Art, or the Ringling College of Art and Design, or the Sarasota Airport. The car kept moving and after a while I stopped trying to guess where we were going. Instead, I started wondering how long it would be before somebody realized I had been kidnapped. That was depressing because it would probably be hours.

That’s one of the problems with living alone and having a weird schedule. I get up every morning at four
A.M.
Most days it’s ten o’clock before I have contact with any being who doesn’t have fur and four legs. Then I stop at the Village Diner for breakfast. Everybody knows me there, and they would notice if I didn’t come in. Tanisha, the cook, always knows the minute I enter, and by the time Judy, the waitress, has my coffee on my regular table, Tanisha is already cooking my usual two eggs over easy with extra-crispy fried potatoes and a biscuit. But every now and then something comes up and I don’t have breakfast there, so neither Judy nor Tanisha would think of me as a missing person if I didn’t show up. They wouldn’t call the cops and say they thought I’d been kidnapped.

But both of them took breaks, both of them left the diner to go home when their shifts ended. If they saw my Bronco in the parking lot, they’d wonder why it was there and I wasn’t. At least they would if they recognized the Bronco as mine. I wasn’t sure they would. I knew Judy and Tanisha as well as I knew anybody, but I didn’t know what kind of car either of them drove. I saw them only at the diner, not driving their cars, and that’s the same way they saw me. Heck, for all I knew, my Bronco could sit in that lot for two or three days without attracting any attention.

Michael, my brother, would miss me, but not for a while. He and his life partner, Paco, live in the Gulf-side frame house where Michael and I grew up with our grandparents. I live next to them in an apartment above our four-slot carport. Michael is a fireman with the Sarasota Fire Department, so he works a twenty-four/forty-eight shift, meaning he’s on duty twenty-four hours, then off forty-eight. He had gone on duty that morning at eight o’clock, so he wouldn’t be home until the next morning. Paco is an undercover officer with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department. His hours are erratic and never announced, so he might or might not come home and wonder where I was.

And then there was Guidry, a homicide detective with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department. Guidry, with his calm gray eyes and beaky nose and a face that looks stern until you notice little white smile lines etched around his eyes. Guidry, who made my heart clatter when he was near, but who wasn’t near on any regular basis because neither of us was ready yet for any kind of routine. We were more spontaneous. At least we told each other and ourselves that we were, but somehow spontaneous had added up to a lot of evenings together and a few mornings, which made us both skittish as feral cats wanting and fearing at the same time.

If Guidry called and I didn’t answer, he would think I was busy grooming a cat or cleaning a litter box. If he called again and I didn’t answer, he might think I was gathering information from a new client or that I was in the middle of busy traffic. But if I didn’t call him back, he’d think something was wrong. Even then, he wouldn’t consider that I’d been kidnapped. I mean, who gets kidnapped? Children of wealthy parents. Heads of big multinational corporations. Big drug dealers by their rivals. Third-world politicians. Cat sitters don’t get kidnapped.

The limo made a right turn, but I had lost track of where we were. All I knew was that we were quite a way north of Sarasota. After what I judged to be two or three miles, we turned left again. I could hear the whine of car tires and feel the vibration of rolling over highway joints so I guessed we had turned onto Highway 301. After several more miles, we turned right again, and went straight far enough to have crossed I-75 before we made a left, two more rights, and then a left onto a road that threw gravel onto the underside of the limo.

Another left turn, and the limo stopped. I heard electronic beeps like a control board being punched, then a sound like metal dragging on pavement, and the limo moved forward for a short distance and stopped.

One of the men pulled the hood from my head. “Okay, girlie, we’re here.”

I looked out the window at a smooth paved area where a jet sat in front of a gleaming white metal hangar. I don’t know much about planes, but I knew this one was large for a private jet. An area of artfully planted trees and flowering shrubs separated the hangar from a rambling low-slung stucco house. The hangar looked almost like a regular freestanding garage, except it was big enough for a good-sized plane.

A tall, wide-shouldered man walked from the hangar like Donald Trump getting ready to fire somebody. He was middle-aged, gray-streaked hair combed straight back from a receding hairline, ice-blue eyes, a long face that might have been good-looking without the surly scowl.

The driver put down his electric window and grinned. “Hey, Tuck. I got her. Followed her from the old man’s house.”

The man leaned to look in at me, and the two masked men holding my arms tightened their grip and sort of tilted me toward the window for viewing. I did my best not to look scared when I glowered at him.

His eyes raked over my face a couple of times. His mouth twisted, and for a moment he looked frightened. Then arrogance took over again. “That’s not her!”

The driver half turned to look at me. “You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! Good God, I’m surrounded by morons and idiots!”

He fixed his cold eyes on me. “Ma’am, I want you to know I had nothing to do with this. I don’t know anything about whatever these men are up to.”

Turning his fury back to the driver, he said, “Take care of this, Vern!”

“Take care like—”

“No, fool! I mean fix it! With nobody getting hurt! Understand?”

Behind him, some other men had stepped from the hangar to try to get a glimpse of the wrong woman in the limo’s backseat. I had a feeling I would be a lot better off with them than with Vern, so I made some more loud squealing noises, but nobody offered to take the tape off my mouth.

In a voice of hurt dignity and self-righteous demand, Vern said, “What do you want me to do with her?”

“It’s your screwup, you figure it out! And don’t come back here until you’ve got more sense!”

He went inside the hangar, sliding bay doors descended, and the interior was hidden from our view. Vern waited until the doors thudded onto the pavement with a sound of utter finality. Then, in a fury, he started the car, made a screeching K-turn, and sped through the open gate. I couldn’t see them, but I was sure the gate doors closed behind us. I wondered if the man would change the code for opening the gate.

The men in the backseat released their hold on me. One of them turned his head toward me and spoke through the slit in his mask.

“I guess we made a mistake.” He sounded hopeful, as if he thought I might forget the whole thing.

The other one said, “Vern, what’re you going to do with her?”

I wanted to know that myself.

They hadn’t replaced my hood, and in the driver’s dash mirror I could see Vern’s piggy little eyes darting back and forth with the effort of thinking what to do with me. I was pretty sure whatever he came up with wouldn’t be anything I’d like.

His eyes met mine in the mirror. “It’s just your word against ours, lady. If you tell anybody, we’ll say you lied.”

I nodded, trying to look humble, which took an effort. I also tried to look scared, which was no effort at all.

We retraced our route, first along the graveled one-lane road with its twists and turns, then down some streets where the lots were at least an acre, some of them with a horse or two cropping grass. I knew we were on the outskirts of some small town, but the area wasn’t familiar. It didn’t seem to me that Vern had a route in mind, but was driving aimlessly hoping for inspiration.

We finally approached an I-75 intersection where service stations and fast food places clustered in a traveler’s stop. Vern pulled into a vacant parking lot behind a Friendly’s restaurant. With the motor idling, he turned to me.

“Okay, now this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to untie you and let you out here, and we’re going to drive away. You’re going to face the other way until we’re gone, then you’re going to go in Friendly’s and call a cab and you’re going to go back where we got you. And you’re going to keep your mouth shut about this whole business.
Comprende
?”

I nodded, trying to memorize his face while he talked. He had a long upper lip that covered his top teeth. His lowers were smoker’s teeth, dark at the roots, with magenta gums. When he spoke his lower teeth were bared, making him look like a bulldog. “If you say one word, we’ll come after you and next time it won’t be for a pleasure ride. You got it?”

I nodded again. Faster.

He said, “Okay, untie her.”

Untying really meant cutting through the duct tape they’d wrapped around my wrists and ankles. Duct tape is useless for taping ducts, but it comes in handy for kidnapping people.

I could see the men’s eyes behind their ski masks. They looked embarrassed and scared. They must have been a lot smarter than Vern, who didn’t look the least bit embarrassed. Like every loser in the world, Vern was feeling sorry for himself.

I didn’t make any sudden moves. I was docile as a Ragdoll cat. When they’d got the tape off my ankles and wrists, Vern handed me a fifty-dollar bill.

“You can use this for cab fare.”

One of the other men grunted approval, and they opened the car door and moved aside so I could climb out. As soon as I was upright on the pavement, the limo door closed and the car zoomed out of the lot. Even if I’d disobeyed orders and turned around to look at the limo’s tags, it was gone before I managed to force my body to stop trembling.

Gingerly, I lifted a corner of the duct tape and carefully peeled it off my mouth. It felt as if some of my lip went with it, but it didn’t bleed. Holding the tape between thumb and finger, I held it away from me and walked around to the front entrance of the restaurant. A family came out before I got there, and the father held the door for me. I thanked him and walked directly to the ladies’ room at the back.

As I’d hoped, a paper towel dispenser was on the wall beside the row of sinks. The towels were the smooth brown kind that are useless to dry your hands on, but perfect for preserving latent fingerprints on a strip of duct tape. I pulled a towel out, folded it loosely around the tape, and tucked it in one of the pockets of my cargo shorts. Then I leaned on the counter and shook for a while. Adrenaline does that to you. After I’d got myself more or less composed, I used the facilities, washed my hands and face, and examined my puffy lips in the mirror. Women who want lips like Angelina Jolie should forget about collagen shots and just rip some duct tape off their mouths every few days.