Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits (10 page)

I hesitated for a moment and the first few drops of rain splashed onto the pavement at my feet.

“It’s dry up here,” said Marmalade, ducking under an overhang. “You don’t want to get wet, do you?”

“Not really,” I said. I’d had enough water for a lifetime.

I climbed up the stack of kegs, then leaped onto the roof of the truck.

“Whatever you do, don’t fall into the back of that truck,” she warned.

In the bed of the truck were a dozen wooden cages, each with three or four chickens inside, clucking and cooing.

I had spent time around chickens back on the farm in Linesville, so I wasn’t too worried. “I’m not afraid of chickens,” I said, jumping from the truck roof to a tree branch and then onto the roof next to Marmalade.

She looked me up and down, frowning. “Rrowww. Why, you’re just a baby. What are you, a whole year old?”

“Not quite.”

“And I’ll bet this is your first time in the big city, right?”

I nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Sam.”

“Well, Sam, it’s your lucky day. My name is Marmalade and I’m going to show you all the best spots in Cleveland. Do you like oysters, Sam? Because I know a place where—”

Without warning, a bolt of lightning tore the sky open directly above us, blinding me temporarily. Fagin’s Place shook beneath my feet, and every bit of my hair stood on end from all the static electricity in the air. When I was finally able to see again, a gray tom, three times my size, stood between Marmalade and me. To this day, I have no idea where he came from; at the time, I was convinced that he rode in on the back of the lightning bolt.

“I thought you were out of town,” purred Marmalade.

“Obviously,” the tom growled. “Who’s the shrimp?”

“This is Sam. He’s new in town. Sam, meet Tom.”

A tomcat named Tom? How
creative
, I thought.

“Nice to, er, meet you, Tom,” I stammered.

Tom circled me silently, a lion sizing up his prey.

“Easy, Tom,” said Marmalade. “Please don’t hurt him. Nothing happened. He’s practically a kitten.”

“Just a scratch,” said Tom. “A little something to remember me by.”

I thought I was ready, but the truth is that I never even saw it coming. I’d done plenty of fighting with my brothers and sisters, but they all had one thing in common: they were all right-pawed. Tom, it turned out, was a southpaw.

And what a paw! The first swipe took a notch out of my right ear, and the second spun me around so hard I sailed off the roof, bounced once on the top of the truck, and then landed with a thump in the back, right smack in the middle of the chicken cages. At the moment I hit the truck bed, the owner hit the ignition, and the engine sputtered for a second before springing to life. As we bounced down the alley behind Fagin’s Place, I heard Tom laughing from the roof above me.

“Get up, Sam!” cried Marmalade. “You have to get out of there before—”

It was already too late. I was about to discover why the owner of the truck wasn’t worried about anyone trying to steal his chickens. (I know what you’re thinking: why does anyone drive around with chickens in the first place? I still don’t know the answer to that question.)

No matter how tough you think you are, you do
not
want—ever—to find yourself between a very protective rooster and a bunch of hens. Now, before you laugh, I’ll just mention that the rooster outweighed me by a dozen pounds, and on top of that, he had the advantage of surprise. The monster came out of nowhere—a spinning, kicking, pecking, slashing, feathered blur—and I was bruised and bloodied in a matter of seconds. I got in a couple of decent hits, ending up with a paw full of feathers at one point, and he backed off momentarily in order to regroup. I wasn’t about to stick around for part two, though, so I climbed up the tailgate and jumped.

In the midst of the teeming rain and all that rooster fury, however, I hadn’t realized that the truck had sped up to about thirty-five miles an hour, so when I hit the road, I skidded along the edge of the pavement, desperately trying to bring myself to a stop. All my claws were worn down to the nubs and one was yanked out completely, never to grow back, leaving me with only seventeen. (Like most cats, I started out with eighteen, not twenty, in case you’re wondering.)

But my night wasn’t over yet.

Maybe if I hadn’t lost that claw, I would have been able to stop a few feet shorter. Two, three feet—that’s all the difference I needed. Instead, a river of rainwater swept me straight into a storm sewer! When my head finally bobbed back to the surface, I found myself floating down the rapids below
street level, getting dunked by a waterfall every time I passed under another drain.

I continued like that for probably half a mile in utter darkness, cursing my luck, a cat named Marmalade, and a watch-rooster with an exceptionally bad attitude. My hopes lifted when I finally saw a speck of light in the distance: the end of the ride! The pipe ended suddenly, firing a furry, soaked-to-the-bone cannonball into Cleveland Harbor.

Using my last bit of energy, I swam back to shore and managed to pull myself up onto a dock, much to the surprise of the sailor who had tied up his boat for the night.

“Hey, I know you,” said Walt, who probably recognized me because I looked exactly like I had the first time we met. “Again? I thought cats hated the water. Let me get you dried off and find you something to eat. Do you like
chicken
?”

I shuddered, picturing the face of the crazed rooster who tried to kill me. “Mrrraaa. It just became my second favorite food.”

Inudged Sam. “Did he just say what I think he said?” My already overactive imagination was churning and sputtering:
Why
was it too late for the little girl to say something? Was he talking about Ellie? What had he done to her? And
how
, exactly, was the man going to “take care of” the lady in the hat?

While those questions and a thousand others were spinning wildly through my brain, Clarence unexpectedly touched me on the shoulder. I gasped so loudly that we were all sure everyone in the dining car heard.

“Dinnertime, Henry,” Clarence whispered. “Your table will be ready in a few minutes.” He moved the piano just enough for me to crawl out.

“Hear anything interesting?” Clarence asked Sam as he pushed the piano back into place.

“Plenty. I want to hear what else this couple has to say. And then you need to get me into the salesman’s cabin again—there’s something I need to see.”

Clarence glanced over at the judge, whose nose seemed to be glowing red. “He doesn’t want me snooping around anymore, but you know what—it’s still my train.”

“That’s the spirit,”
said Sam.
“Besides, after all that booze, it would take a bulldozer to move His Enormousness.”

“Uh-oh, you spoke too soon. Here he comes,” said Clarence, pretending to be busy wiping dust from the top of the piano. I ducked around the corner, out of sight.

“Who the devil are you talking to?” Judge Ambrose demanded. He walked around the piano and looked behind it. “Is that cat in here? Get him out—now! Mr. Nockwood. My daughter and I are highly allergic to cats, especially common alley cats like that one, and we will not be subjected to such bothersome complications. You leave me no choice, sir. I shall write to the president of the railroad and inform him of the less-than-satisfactory conditions aboard this train.”

With that, the judge took a cane from a man sitting at a nearby table and began to poke it in Sam’s direction.

A growl rose from deep within Sam as he dodged the end of the cane.
“Hsssttt!”
he screamed, and spat.

“Stop!” cried Clarence. “You’ll hurt him, you—I’ll take care of it,
Mr
. Ambrose. Go, Sam, run!”

Sam bolted past Clarence and the judge, then scooted through the dining car and into the sleepers, with me a few steps behind.

Mother stood in the aisle next to our section with her back to me, gathering Jessica into her arms before heading into the dining car. Jessica’s eyes grew wide with excitement as we raced past. “Kitty!”

“What?” Mother asked, but by the time she turned to look, Sam and I were long gone.

Five minutes later Sam, Clarence, and I were standing in front of the compartment that had been occupied by the marble salesman. The hair down the center of Sam’s back still hadn’t settled into place, and his tail was three times its normal size.

“A cane! Did you see the look in his eyes? He was trying to kill me! And on top of that, he insulted me and my family. Common alley cat, indeed. He is going to live to regret that, mark my words. If he so much as turns his back to me, I’m going to shred him into a pile of ribbon the size of the city dump in Erie. He messed with the wrong calico.”

“Easy, Sam,” said Clarence. “Remember what they say about revenge.”

“I think the Greek poet Homer said that it is sweeter than flowing honey.”

“No, that’s not the quote I was referring to. ‘If you’re going to seek revenge, dig two graves.’ The second one is for yourself. Just be careful, Sam.” As he turned the key and opened the door, he nodded at James, who was still keeping watch.

Once inside, Sam momentarily forgot his anger at Judge Ambrose and hopped up onto the seat.
“Something’s different. The first time we checked, what was in the ashtray?”

“Two cigars, one cigarette,” I said.

“Right. And now look: no cigarette butt. That’s been bugging me since the first time we were in here. It just didn’t fit. The salesman is a cigar smoker. Why would there be a cigarette butt in his ashtray?”

“Maybe he had a visitor,” said Clarence. “Or maybe the porters forgot to clean the ashtray before we left New York.”

“Possibly,”
said Sam.
“And if the butt were still there, I would probably accept either one of those as reasonable. But there is only one logical explanation for its
disappearance:
somebody on this train doesn’t want us to know that he—or she—was in here.”

Clarence opened the door and asked James to join us inside the compartment. “Has anybody else been inside since I spoke to you?”

“No, sir,” said James. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the door, just like you said.”

Clarence thanked him and sent him back into the corridor.

Sam clambered about the room, sniffing and sticking his nose into every corner.
“Mrrr. Did anyone else come in with Judge Ambrose when he made his so-called investigation? How about Reverend Dribble?”

“Perfiddle,” Clarence corrected. “And no, it was just me and the judge, and I was with him the whole time … no, wait, I left him alone for a few seconds. There was a noise outside in the corridor, and I went out to make sure nothing was wrong.”

“Where was Judge Giganticus when you came back in?”
Sam asked.

Clarence closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. “He had his back to me … facing the window. And the ashtray. But why—”

“Why would the judge, revered by all—especially his grocer—remove a crucial piece of evidence? Simple. He knows who smoked that cigarette.”