Deviant (27 page)

Tom nodded, unconvinced.

“Maybe I'm crazy,” Danny said.

“No ‘maybe' about it.” Tom laughed.

“OK, bro, I guess I should go,” Danny said, and offered Tom his hand. Tom shook it.

“See you Monday?” Tom said.

Danny nodded. “Sure,” he replied.

Danny gave him a wave, bomb-dropped onto his board, waved to Tony, and skated home.

He found the key under the mat and opened the front door.

“Hello? Hello?” he called out, but of course no one was there.

Even Jeffrey didn't come to say hi.

He made himself a PB&J, got some Coke from the fridge, and sat in front of the blank TV for a while. The sandwich was bad. The jelly was plum and the peanut butter was some kind of crazy organic kind that wasn't terrific-tasting.

He tried to get a picture on the TV by sticking a metal coat hanger in the back of it to use as an aerial, but the
only channel that would come in featured a blurry woman selling a kitchen whisk with a demented level of enthusiasm.

He turned off the TV, went upstairs, and found Jeffrey.

“Well, you're safe. You don't know what's been going on, do you? We might even unlock the cat flap now. Would you like that?” Danny asked.

Jeffrey purred, closed his eyes and, after ten minutes of Danny's petting, fell asleep.

“I remember when you used to be a bad-ass cat,” Danny said, and went back downstairs. He was bored. No TV. No radio. He was sick of everything on his iPod. And they didn't even have books except for that book Mr. Lebkuchen had loaned him. He rummaged in his backpack and pulled it out.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
, it was called. He read a poem.

Cold night: the wild duck
sick, falls from the sky
and sleeps awhile.

The poems weren't really his thing, but they were kind of cool. He flipped over the book and read the author information on the back.

Danny closed the book and stared at the cover, which looked remarkably like the view of Pikes Peak out the living room window. A snowy mountain, a forest, an empty road. Basho was a guy who lived in ancient Japan, traveling around and seeing things. He sounded a bit like a wandering
samurai in a manga, which was made of awesome if you thought about it.

Danny put the book on the coffee table.

“That's what I need. A quest. A mission,” he said aloud.

An idea was brewing in his mind.

He went back upstairs and got changed into his jeans, fleece sweater, and Converse sneakers. He pulled on his North Face jacket, grabbed Sunflower, and went outside. He skated in the cul-de-sac for a minute or two, hoping that Tony would appear. Not so much as a curtain twitch, so he skated down Alameda and found himself kicking in the direction of the new casino road to Walt's road crew.

The road was very nearly finished.

Only a couple of hundred yards to go. What would happen to Walt then? Would they have other jobs for the prisoners to do around town, or would Walt become a bum again, hanging around the house all the time? That prospect was grim; the dude would only get himself into mischief.

“Hey, son,” Walt said.

“Hey, boy,” some of the other prisoners called out.

“Is it OK if I talk to Bob for a minute?” Danny asked Vern.

Vern shrugged. “You have to ask Walt,” he said.

Danny was a little taken aback by this casting of his lame-ass stepdad as some kind of authority figure.

“Can I talk to Bob?” Danny asked.

“'Course you can,” Walt said.

Danny flipped Sunflower, caught it in his fingertips, put it
under his arm, and walked over to Bob, who was supervising a machine that was pulverizing gravel. Bob turned off the earth flattener and offered Danny his hand. Danny looked at it for a second and then shook it.

“They caught the cat killer,” Danny said.

“Oh yeah?” Bob replied in his Alaskan drawl.

“Yeah, last night he killed another cat at our school and then supposedly they caught him speeding on I-70. It was a crack addict.”

“That's good news. Good news about catching this guy, not about the cat,” Bob said.

Danny shook his head. “I guess, but …” His voice trailed off.

“But what?”

“These killings were so well planned, it just doesn't seem like the actions of someone on crack or meth.”

Bob shrugged. “Well, it's true that most criminals are pretty stupid, but sometimes you'd be surprised.”

“To find out who owns cats in Cobalt, you'd have to hack into the town database. And then you'd have to stalk the houses and make sure no one's home. You gotta have patience for that kind of thing.”

Bob grew thoughtful. “Maybe you don't need patience. Maybe you make sure they're not at home, somehow.”

“Jessie and her family were at the movies. How could he make her go to the movies?”

“What if he sent them free tickets to the movies that can only be used at a certain time? That would be the smart
thing to do. He pays cash, then he fakes up some letter saying they've been given the tickets through a special offer, a free gift, a competition, something like that?”

“Yes!” Danny said excitedly.

“It would be an easy thing to check. Though it probably won't come to anything; they've probably got the right guy. Ninety percent of criminal cases end in a confession or a guilty plea,” Bob said, but Danny was already on Sunflower, skating back toward Cobalt.

In the back pocket of his jeans he found the list of addresses of everyone whose cat had been abducted.

There was no one home at Mrs. Pigeon's house, but on Beechfield Road, he found Mrs. Craven, who had lost her Persian cat Tigerfeet supposedly to the coyote.

He rang her doorbell and when she answered it he recognized her as one of the lunch ladies at CJHCS.

She recognized him too, but of course they had never spoken.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm Danny Lopez, grade nine.”

“Hello, Danny, I know you,” she said.

Danny had thought about beating around the bush or inventing some lie, but instead he decided to come right out with it: “Mrs. Craven, the night your cat went missing, when they thought it was the coyote, were you at home?”

“Why do you want to know?” she asked suspiciously.

“We're doing a project on it at school, sort of a special homework.”

Mrs. Craven shook her head. “That's an odd subject for
homework, but then …” Her voice trailed off a moment, but then she concluded the thought: “It's an odd school.”

“Were you at home?” Danny persisted.

“No. I wasn't. I got a voucher for a free meal at that new restaurant. A brasserie, they call it. Les Deux Magots on Center Street in the Springs. Well, it's not that new anymore, but it's new to me. I'm so sorry that I went now. If I'd been home …”

Danny had heard all he needed to. He said good-bye to Mrs. Craven and rushed away.

Danny's cell phone had died days earlier, so five minutes later he found himself at a pay phone outside the Cobalt 7-Eleven.

He put in fifty cents and Information gave him the number of Les Deux Magots. After a couple of flunkies he got the manager.

“If I wanted to get a voucher for a meal as a present for someone, would I need a credit card or could I pay cash?” he asked.

“You could pay cash if you come in,” the restaurant manager replied.

The cat killer wasn't stupid enough to have used a credit card, so he must have gone there in person and paid cash, Danny thought.

His next question was obvious. “Do you sell a lot of gift vouchers?”

“Yes, it's a popular gift,” the manager said.

“About how many a month?” Danny asked.

“I don't know, twenty or thirty. Why do you want to know?”

“Thank you,” Danny said, and hung up.

Twenty or thirty a month. That was too many for him to work with. If it had been half a dozen he could maybe have gotten a description of who'd bought one, but twenty or thirty? Unlikely. Still, it was excellent data.

“OK, work to do,” he said, and jumped on Sunflower again. He kicked hard to Douglas Street, walked past that awful chestnut tree, and knocked on the door of number 9.

A girl with brown hair and green eyes in a CJHCS uniform answered the door. Sarah Kolpek.

“Hi, I'm Danny Lopez. I'm in grade nine. I was talking to your sister about Coco,” he said.

“I know you. I've seen you around. You're Tom Sloane's friend.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, I wanted to talk to you. I don't know if they caught the right guy who's been going around killing cats.”

“What are you talking about?” Sarah said. “Nobody killed Coco. Coco's death was just an accident. A freak accident was what the sheriff said.”

Danny nodded.

Sarah's sister, Claire, knew, but Sarah did not.

There was absolutely no point trying to convince her otherwise. “Yeah, I forgot. But listen, I just wanted to know how come you guys were out that night? Where were you?”

Sarah shook her head. “What difference does that make?”

“It might be important,” Danny insisted.

“Uh, yeah, we were out. How did you know that? We were at
The Lion King
in Denver.”

“
The Lion King
? And your tickets, lemme guess … You got free tickets, right?”

Sarah nodded. “Yeah, apparently the theater pulled our name out of the phonebook, totally at random, like a lottery or something. We got tickets for the whole family. We were pretty excited …”

Her lips continued to move. She was still talking, but Danny no longer heard what she was saying.

Free tickets to the movies.

Free tickets to a restaurant.

Free tickets to
The Lion King
in Denver.

That's how he got them out of the house.

He knew what houses had cats and he knew when the owners wouldn't be home.

“Do you mind if I take a look at the dog flap for a sec? Your sister said the only way the intruder could have gotten into the house was through the dog flap.”

“It wasn't an intruder. It was an accident,” Sarah said, but Danny had already pulled the screen door back and was examining the flap in the lower part of the front door.

It was about fifteen inches across.

It would be tough for a kid to squeeze through that.

For a grown-up it would be very difficult.

He got to his feet.

“I'm sorry about your cat, Sarah, I really am,” he said.

“It's OK. Dad says we can get a new one from the shelter,” she muttered without enthusiasm.

Danny nodded, walked down her path, laid down Sunflower, and skated back to Alameda.

And now he knew.

This was no crazed crack addict. This was someone who was intelligent. This was someone who planned each cat killing like a military operation and, what's more, this was someone who was patient enough to wait until a cat came outside or who was small enough to squeeze through a dog flap.

Three of the four cats had belonged to people who were connected with Danny's school. Probably the fourth was too.

Danny kicked hard to the casino road crew.

He knew.

He
knew
.

The wind was cold.

The mountain was like the painting on the cover of his Basho book.

Snow was beginning to fall.

He thought of the poems and the poet, the wandering samurai, traveling through ancient Japan.

I'm like him.

Investigating.

Seeing things that others don't.

And this is Japan.

That is, Japan before the A-bombs hit.

This is Japan before the nightmare goes down.

“Hey, I forgot to ask: Why aren't you at school today?” Walt wondered as Danny skidded to a halt in front of the road crew.

Danny ignored him and walked straight over to Bob.

Bob turned off his machine and took his mufflers off.

“Hello again,” Bob said.

“They got the wrong guy,” Danny said. “It's a kid, it's a kid at my school. And he's going to strike again tonight. And I know where and I know when and I'm gonna catch him in the act.”

After Danny had explained his plan, Bob shook his head slowly from side to side. His long red hippie hair, straggly goatee, and pinched figure-eight face made him seem more like a puppeteer on
Sesame Street
than a convict working on a chain gang. He lacked gravitas and, as if to compensate, he drew himself up to his full height, which was well over six feet.

“Well?” Danny asked.

“I don't think I can do that, son,” he said. “I think I'm going to have to tell your dad.”

“You can't break a promise.”

“I didn't promise you anything,” Bob said.

“There was a … um … what do you call those things?” Danny tried.

“Tacit understanding of confidentiality?” Bob suggested.