The Defective Detective : Cat Chaser (4 page)

The van itself was nothing out of the ordinary, exactly what you would expect of a security guard I suppose.  Over ten years old, bits of rust here and there and once Ray opened it up the inside was much the same.  It was clean.  Very clean. But scruffy  from a decade of heavy use and Jacob seemed to have an obsession with air fresheners, with ten or more hanging from the partition that separated the cabin of the van from the back.

“So what made you think there might be something here?” I shouted out to Ray as I took a bunch of papers from the compartment in the door.

“Dunno,” he walked in front of the car so I could see him from where I sat in the driver’s seat.  “You said about taxidermy so… ”

There was nothing of any interest in the papers, just junk.  I leaned over and opened the glove compartment but all it contained, strangely, was a pair of gloves.  I took them out and mused briefly on the fact that Jacob may be the only person I’d ever met who actually used his glove compartment for gloves.  If you could call them gloves, they were more gauntlets of protective type workmen might wear.  I threw them back, got out of the car and wandered around the back.

“So have you worked here long?” I said, opening the doors at the back of the van to reveal… not much.

“Six years, maybe seven,” I heard Ray clack-clacking around the van as I climbed inside.  “But it doesn’t pay well.”

“No?”  I hunched over so I could walk around inside the van, again getting paranoid that he might just lock me in here I decided to make this a very quick check.

“No,” he replied.  “It’s difficult to make ends meet so I do a bit of moonlighting.”

And then I saw it.  It stood out because you didn’t usually expect to see a fossil amongst the newspapers and cardboard boxes.  At least, that’s what it looked like.

“Moonlighting?” I asked, not really listening as I reached forward and picked up the strange object.

“Yeah.  Just as a cleaner, same as here.”

“Mmmm,” once the object was in my hand it was clear that I had been wrong, this wasn’t a fossil.  It was a claw.  A bloody enormous claw that was maybe three inches long from the horrendously sharp tip to the part where it had become detached.  I shoved it in my pocket and scrambled out of the van in time to see Erin bearing down on Ray.

“I knew it!” Erin’s nasal voice echoed irritatingly around the empty car park.

“Hey, hang on a minute,” said Ray.  “What are you doing down here?”

“Came to get you two, something weird’s going on but that’s beside the point, did I hear correctly?  Did Ray say that he was working two jobs?”

Ray inhaled to answer but apparently wasn’t going to be given the chance as Erin just kept stamping towards him.

“You know what that means, don’t you Ray?  It means that when I tell the management you will finally be sacked you lazy little man.”

I slammed the doors of the van.

“You were mistaken,” I said.  “He said no such thing, did you Ray?”

“Well… ” he replied.

“We were talking about someone else.  Now please, Erin, why don’t you take the elevator with Ray?  I’ll take the stairs and see you up there.”

Erin huffed then turned around and stomped towards the metal cage.  There was no way I was going back inside that to play sardines with the two of them.

“Come on,” I said to Ray.

“Thanks,” he put his hand out and shook mine.  “You didn’t have to do that.  Thanks.”

I shrugged, “Come on.  I need to talk to Jacob.”

~*~

T
he stairs were a bit of a mistake if I’m honest.  They went around the elevator shaft so there were three flights of stairs and a landing for every floor.  And since there were two basements, a ground floor and three shopping floors to climb by the time I got to the top I was doubled over panting, my jacket over my arm and regretting taking a stand against the death-caged sardines.

Incredibly, the lift still hadn’t arrived.  Clearly without gravity on its side the antique mechanism was struggling.  I leaned against the wall, the sweat from my shirt simultaneously sticking to my back and the cold of the wall and sending a welcome chill across it.

I closed my eyes and the sleep came, just for a second. My jacket fell from my grip and the claw too, dropping down onto the grey concrete.  The noise was enough to snap me back and I stared at it for a second, trying to figure out how it fitted in. 
If
it fitted in.

The door of the lift rattled open echoing around the tunnel.  I yawned as I scooped up the claw and put the jacket back on.  It was time to get down to business.

Ray and Erin maintained the silence of two people who’d had a row, an atmosphere hanging cloyingly around them as we made our way back to the shop floor.  I tried to lead the way, staying ahead the whole time and only needing the odd navigational correction until we walked through the double doors to see Jacob standing next to a young girl.

She was dressed in the same white make-up girl uniform as Erin but there the comparison ended.  Lori was a pale girl in her early twenties and she was striking if for no other reason than in the heels she wore she must have been over six feet tall.  She and Jacob both smiled as we returned.

“This is Lori,” said Jacob.  I smiled back at them both.  “He’s the private detective I was telling you about.”

Lori seemed to have a nervousness about her and I wasn’t sure whether it was the situation she found herself in or whether she was just like that naturally.

Erin and Ray were still a few steps behind, I waited for them to catch up, hearing the now familiar dragging of Ray’s gait and waiting until it stopped to strike.

“Tell me about Lucky, Erin,” I said, spinning around.

It had just the effect I expected, sending Erin into floods of tears.  Jacob stood up, walking over the her and handing back his threadbare handkerchief.

“In your own time,” I added.  “I should probably say I do know that Lucky is not tied up in this whole messy business.”

“Messy business?”  Erin was still fighting back the tears.  This may take a bit longer than I’d hoped.

“And Jacob,” I continued.  “What can you tell me about your interest in taxidermy?”

Erin turned to face Jacob, recoiling as she did so.  “Oh no, not you,” she said.  But it wasn’t anger in her voice, it was disappointment.

“Erin?” I said, turning away from Jacob.  “Something you want to tell me?”

“It wasn’t him,” Erin began to compose herself.  Thankfully.  “If you must know, I went away on holiday and a friend of mine, a very close friend of mine was looking after my house.  Looking after Lucky.”

I nodded and motioned with my hand that she continue.

“Lucky went missing and, well, she claimed that he’d been run over,” Erin was fighting back the tears again.  Jacob reached out to touch her shoulder but she moved from him.  “She claimed that one of the builders who had been working on the house next door had found him.  She claimed that, in all innocence, he had scooped up my poor, dear little pussy cat and then he had stuffed him and mounted him.”

“I’m sorry,” I tried to give her what I thought was a sympathetic smile.

“To add insult to… to… murder… the sick bastard had mounted Lucky in a remote control car!”

My sympathetic smile was in danger of metamorphosising into a grin.

“And if that wasn’t bad enough she started dating the builder.  And then… then they were married in the Seychelles two months ago.”

Lori, who’d clearly heard this story before, had gone off to fetch a chair which she duly deposited under Erin just as the story ended.  Erin was lost in the grief for her lost pet but this was great news.  That was months ago, at least, so Agatha had been right, it wasn’t Erin’s cat we were looking for.

“Excellent,” I grinned and clapped my hands together.  Everyone turned and looked at me, their faces a picture of concern for their colleague.  “I mean, not excellent, obviously but we’re making progress, are we not?”

“Are we?” said Jacob.

“We are, sir,” I said and beckoned Jacob to come to me.  “You haven’t been entirely honest with me, have you, Jacob?”

The colour drained from Jacob’s face as he stood up and stepped towards me.

“No, sir,” he said.  “I haven’t.  There’s something I should tell you.”

“About this?” I whipped the claw out of my pocket with a flourish.

Everyone stared.  This was great.

“Can anyone tell me what this is?” I asked, waving the claw aloft.

“Did you find that in the car?” asked Ray.

I nodded and grinned back.

“The car?” said Jacob.  “Which car?”

“Is that some sort of claw?” said Erin, squinting through tears and vague confusion.

“It would appear so.  But the claw of what?”

“A Tiger!” Lori screamed.  A bit of an overreaction I thought.

“Could be, I suppose,” I brought the claw closer to get another look.  “Why do you say that?”

“No,” Lori hissed quietly and began moving backwards.  “Over there, behind you, there’s a tiger.”

Not really sure how to respond to a statement like that I turned around to see an enormous tiger stalking through the lingerie section of the shop.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve even seen a tiger up close but, at maybe three feet high and, I don’t know, maybe ten feet long it

~*~

M
y eyes snapped open and I sat up sharply, smacking my head on the underside of a counter and sending several sample bottles rolling off to break on the floor. I hopped to my feet to avoid the stink getting on me and instantly regretted it. Panic hit me as if it had been fired, point-blank from a custom built panic gun.

My head whipped from side to side, scanning the perfumery, the lingerie, the ladieswear but there was no obvious tiger. There had been a tiger. Had there been a tiger?

Yes, there had. Otherwise the others would still be here. I bit the inside of my cheek hard. It hurt. A lot. So I was awake at least. The memory of the tiger felt real enough. I took the claw out of my pocket. The tiger’s claw. It looked like how I would imagine a tiger’s claw to look.

Although that didn’t prove much because when I first saw it I was convinced it looked like how a dinosaur’s claw would look, but still…

This was it. The task at hand. The cat.

The bloody ‘cat’.

And how to catch it, I suppose.

“Hello?” I shouted to no-one in particular.

I looked around again, half expecting the tiger to answer or at least jump out but instead there was a slightly more familiar although no less unexpected sound.

Bing bong.

The doorbell noise over the store’s tannoy system that signified someone was about to start telling you the special offers for the day. Except it didn’t. Not this time.

“Clint,” Jacob’s voice crackling out of a multitude of speakers. “We can see you on the security cameras.”

“Excellent,” I said, spotting one and turning to wave. “Can you hear me? Where the hell did the tiger go?”

Bing bong
 went the chime again.

“We can’t hear you but we can see you. We tried to get outside but we can’t something’s happened with the doors. They’re all locked. Even the fire doors.”

So Agatha 
had 
locked the place down. I took my phone out of my pocket. Still no signal.

Bing bong
.

“And the land lines are down too,” this time it was Erin’s voice emanating from the aging address system. “This better not be your doing, 
Detective
, because if it is -”

The system cut off.

I stepped as far towards the camera as I could and began to slowly mouth the words:

WHERE IS THE TIGER?

Adding a little mime of a tiger at the end.

Bing bong.

“Ground floor,” it was Jacob again. “We think.”

They think. Bloody brilliant leaving me there while they save their skins.

Bing bong.

“We’re in the security office,” his voice crackled out. “Ray’s coming to get you.”

The double doors burst open and I flinched for a moment then pretended that I hadn’t and ran one of my raised hands through my hair. Ray hobbled in, his hand dipping quickly into his pocket.

“Come on,” he snapped, waving to me. “Now.”

I sprinted to his side then skittered behind him, following along the corridors and up the stairs to the security office. Meant for two people, maybe three, it was probably around the size of a shed but in the corner was an unvarnished desk with four monitors and some sort of controller mounted on it. All of them were black and white and currently none of them showed a tiger.

Not that it was particularly easy to see them. With Jacob and Erin sitting on the only two seats and Lori perched on the edge of the desk as I squeezed into the room it was practically full.

“We need to catch it,” I got straight to the point, I didn’t see I had any choice in the matter really. It wasn’t just about the job. Well, okay, it was mostly about the job. But there was also the life and death aspect. That certainly had some impact on the proceedings.

“You’re bloody mad!” Ray’s voice from the corridor was high pitched and cracked as he spoke. “There’s no way - it’s… a bloody tiger.”

“We need to catch it. If not, then what? It gets out? We’ve got it contained.”

Ray let out an even higher pitched laugh. “There’s no way. I’m… No. I’m not having any part of this. You’re insane, Barnum. You can’t go chasing after bloody tigers.”

“Fine,” I said. “Bugger off then.”

The click-drag noise of Ray’s exit wasn’t wasted on the others and Jacob pushed past, leaning out of the office to shout after him but he didn’t stop for a second.

Erin and Lori looked scared and just sat and stared at Jacob shouting. As Ray turned the corner out of sight he appeared on one of the monitors in front of us.

It was time to take control. I hadn’t just been given a lost kitten case at the agency I’d been given a big time fucking dangerous job which meant they must have some sort of confidence in me.

“Erin. I need your help,” I said, definitely not thinking about going to sleep. “I need you to watch those screens. Watch Ray, see where he goes, make sure he’s alright and let me know whatever happens.”