Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen Read online

  “Maybe some dog killed him,” she said, keeping her eyes locked on mine as she lifted the piece of ear between our faces.

  Now, even with my eyes on hers, I could see the tattered tan hide, crusted in blood. That was plenty gross to begin with, but then she started rubbing it between her fingers, saying, “This feels like dog…” She brought it closer to her face and her nose twitched. “It smells like dog…” Then very slowly, she brought it to her lips and licked it. “And girl, it tastes like dog.”

  “Eeeew,” I said, and turned away. How could anyone win a stare-down against that?

  Before she can gloat, though, a voice behind me says, “Sammy?”

  I spin around. “Officer Borsch!”

  “Took you long enough,” the Kitty Queen snaps.

  “I just got on shift, ma'am.” He sizes up the situation. Me. Holly. Kitty-the-Dog-Licker. The dead cat. Then he lets out a deep sigh and says, “Why do I get the feeling that this is going to be more complicated than a simple missing cat?”

  “There's no such thing as a simple missing cat!” the Dog Licker says down her nose at him. “And because of all your attention to my last two reports”—she points to Snowball—“this is what I have to face today!”

  “I'm sorry for your loss, ma'am, but—”

  “Oh, you don't give a hoot! There's a dog out there, and he's mauling my kitties! I expect you to find him, catch him, and destroy him!”

  Officer Borsch hikes up his gun belt and nods. “We are doing the best we—”

  “Oh, let me guess,” she says. “You've got your canine patrol on the case, right?”

  Officer Borsch takes a deep breath, then goes over and stands by Snowball, looking down at him. “Who found him?”

  So I tell him the story about Holly taking out the trash, and when I'm done he hmms and makes little sucking noises through his teeth. Then finally he lets out a weary sigh and says, “None of that gives me much to work with.”

  The Dog Licker wags the piece of ear in his face. “Well, this should!”

  “What's that?”

  “A dog ear! I pried it out of my poor kitty's mouth.”

  Officer Borsch squints at the fragment of fur. “A dog ear? Ma'am, how can you be so sure …”

  “Don't ask,” I whisper to him. “You don't want to know.”

  He eyes me, then takes another deep breath and goes back to his squad car for a Ziploc. And when he's got the piece of fur bagged, he takes off, saying, “We'll be sure to contact you if we discover anything.”

  “You can't just leave!” the Kitty Queen screeches after him. “You have to write a report! You have to—” but Officer Borsch just keeps on trucking. So she takes it out on us. “Well?” she says. “What are you brats hanging around for?”

  I snort and grumble, “You're welcome,” and head for the sidewalk. But before we can reach it, that crazy cat woman cranks up a hose and shouts, “Here's the thanks you deserve!” and soaks us with a power nozzle.

  “What did you do that for?” I scream, charging back at her.

  But she just blasts me until Holly drags me away, saying, “Sammy, come on!”

  I was soaked from my head clear down to my butt. Water was actually running down my legs, inside my jeans. “Hold up a minute,” I said when we were on the sidewalk and out of reach. I wrung out my hair. I wrung out my shirt.

  “Wow. She nailed you!”

  “She's psycho!”

  “You can say that again.”

  So I'd wrung out all the water I could, and we were about to head up Cypress when I spotted a police car cruising toward us. “Don't forget,” I whispered when I saw that it was Officer Borsch, “he can not know where I live.”

  Officer Borsch powered down the window, then leaned across the seat and called, “Wow. What happened to you?”

  “That psycho hosed me down!”

  He shook his head and chuckled, then nodded over to Holly. “I remember you now. New Year's. Sisquane. That whole business with the pig.”

  Holly nodded and tried to keep a straight face. Not an easy thing, thinking back to how a two-hundred-pound pig had followed the Borschman all over Sisquane.

  We'd called it Oinkers in Love.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you really think that piece of fuzz was the tip of a dog's ear? Since when do cats chomp down on dogs? Don't they just hiss and claw and run up trees when dogs chase them? I mean, it looked more like a mouse ear to me.”

  He nodded. “It could be anything.”

  “And why'd she call you about her cat, anyway? Why didn't she call the pound, or the Humane Society, or put up lost-and-found posters? This is the third one she's missing? How many does she have? They're all over the place!”

  He nodded and moved his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. Like he was shifting around a wad of chew, deciding which, if any, of my questions he was going to answer. Finally he said, “I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, and enough for the neighbors to complain regularly. So you see, I get the joy of dealing with this from both sides of the fence. And why me?” He frowned. “I ask myself that every day.”

  Just then a staticky voice came from inside the squad car. Officer Borsch sat up, said, “Ten-four, copy that,” into his radio, then called, “Stay out of trouble!” and zoomed off.

  My clothes and hair were still wet when we reached the intersection of Broadway and Main. And since it was about time for me to be getting home anyway, I said bye to Holly and snuck around the Senior Highrise to the fire escape.

  Now, if I hadn't been soaked to the spine, I might've gone in the front door. But I didn't want the manager, Mr. Garnucci, to ask me a bunch of questions later. Like why I was so wet coming in and dry going out. Or how my grandmother happened to have an extra shirt and jeans in my size just lying around the apartment. So up the fire escape I went, to the fifth-floor door, which I've jammed with bubble gum so it doesn't latch.

  And as I hurried down the hall to the apartment, I started wondering what kind of cake Grams had baked me. Maybe I'd be able to tell by smell! Yum!

  But as I eased open the apartment door and said, “Can I come in?” I discovered that Grams had been up to a whole lot more than baking a cake.

  “Mom!” I cried when I saw my mother in the kitchen.

  “Surprise!” she said, coming over to give me a hug.

  “Wow!” I pulled back and looked at her. “You're really here!”

  She laughed. A tinkly, sparkly laugh. Like it had been tapped with fairy dust.

  “And oh!” I called to Grams in the kitchen. “That smells wonderful!” I inched a little closer. “I smell chocolate! And candied oranges! And toasted walnuts. And…”

  “Stop!” Grams said. She was scrambling around like crazy. “It's supposed to be a surprise.”

  “It is!” I laughed, and hugged my mother again.

  But after a second she backed away and said, “Samantha, you're soaked! What happened?”

  “Oh,” I said. “It's kind of a long story.”

  Grams laughed and called from the kitchen, “Prepare yourself, Lana.”

  My mom smiled at me like, well? So I shrugged and said, “I was hosed down by a crazy cat lady.”

  “For?”

  “For returning her dead cat.”

  Mom's smile started to fade. “For returning her dead cat?”

  But just then, out of nowhere, my cat jumps right over my feet, dives under the kitchen table, and pounces on something in the corner.

  My mother puts one hand to her heart and catches her breath. “What on earth…?”

  “Hey, Dorito,” I say, moving toward my cat. “What'cha got there?”

  Now, I can tell he's not just playing with a kitty toy— he's being way too intense. So I crouch beside him, and when he turns to face me, there's something long and skinny sticking out of his mouth. And it's twitching. Like some sort of freaky alien tongue.

  “That's a tail,“ Mom squeaks.

  I clamp onto Dorito's muzzl
e and try to pry his teeth apart, but Grams kneels beside me and says, “It's a mouse, Samantha—just let him have it!”

  “But Grams… !” I felt so sorry for the mouse, trapped inside jaws of death, twitching like crazy to get free.

  “Oh! Eeeew!” my mom squeals, and believe me, she's looking around for a chair to jump on.

  “Samantha,” Grams says gently, “this is what cats do. This is what they're for.”

  I frown at her. “This is what they're for? You mean you got me Dorito so he could catch mice?”

  She sighs. “Look. If there are mice in the building, they're going to have to exterminate them anyway.”

  “Oh! Eeeew!” Mom says again with her hands to her cheeks.

  I've got Dorito's lips peeled back, but he's not giving up the mouse. His big yellow eyes are actually glaring at me. And Grams is still coaching me, saying, “Samantha, mice can carry salmonella or hantavirus or Lyme disease, not to mention fleas. They're not animals you want in your house!”

  By now the tail has stopped twitching, but I pry Dorito's mouth open anyway. “Let go, Dorito!”

  Grams grumbles, “You are so stubborn…,” and Dorito gives me a disgusted look, but finally he opens up and lets me have the mouse.

  I hold it out, letting it dangle by its tail. It's so little. So cute.

  So dead.

  “Oh eeeew!” my mom says again. “You have mice.”

  “It's just a baby, Lana,” Grams says to her. “And it's the first one I've ever seen.”

  “But…,” my mom says, giving her a panicked look, “a baby means there's an entire litter somewhere. It means—”

  “Oh, Lana. Don't get yourself all worked up. It's just a mouse.”

  “But you yourself said they can carry salmonella or hantavirus or Lyme disease. Not to mention”—she shudders, nose to toes—”fleas.”

  So I'm dangling a tiny dead mouse by the tail, with a disgusted cat on one side and a flea-phobic mother on the other, when Grams says, “Just take it downstairs, would you?”

  “Take it downstairs?” I ask. “And do what with it?”

  “Throw it out!”

  “But—”

  “And don't use the trash chute. Millie in five-oh-two says it's plugged up again.”

  “But—”

  “Just go!” Grams whispers, eyeing my mother, who's looking like she's about to faint.

  So okay. I sneak down the fire escape and over to the Dumpster. And maybe I should have just tossed the little flea-infested, hantavirus-carrying rodent in and forgotten about him, but he was so cute. And it just felt so … wrong.

  So I wound up saying, “Sorry, little guy. I hope mousy heaven's a really nice place. With lots of crackers and cheese and… and whatever else you like.” And since one side of the Dumpster was open like it always is to catch trash from the chute, I was just reaching in to lay the mouse on something, you know, soft and not too smelly—like that made any sense, I know, but that's what I was doing—when I noticed the tip of something sticking out from underneath a grocery sack of trash.

  It was orange. And furry.

  I just stood there holding the mouse by its tail, thinking, It can't be. But when I pushed aside the grocery sack, there it was.

  A big dead cat.

  Not only was it a big dead cat, it was a big dead cat that looked like it had been hurled off the Empire State Building. Its eyes were glazed open, and its fur looked gelled out in spots. Like it had been electrocuted.

  I thought about tracking down Officer Borsch but nipped that idea right in the bud. I sure didn't want to have to deal with nosy questions about why I was digging through the Highrise Dumpster.

  But I didn't want to just leave the cat. For one thing, I could see a collar and a tag—this was somebody's pet. But I didn't really want to touch it, either. Something about it was really… creepy.

  Finally I decided to zip over to the Pup Parlor and get Holly. So I lay the mouse in the Dumpster, ran across the Highrise lawn, jaywalked Broadway, and jingled through the Pup Parlor door. “Hey, Vera. Hi, Meg. Can I borrow Holly?”

  “Again?” Meg asked.

  Holly appeared from the back of the shop. “Hey, I thought you went home to change.”

  “Yeah, but, well…” I decided to cut to the chase. “I found another dead cat.”

  “You're kidding, right?”

  “No. And it looks a lot like Snowball did.” I spazzed up my arms, stuck out my tongue, and cranked open my eyes.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the Highrise Dumpster.”

  “Are you going to tell Officer Borsch?”

  “I… don't know.”

  Meg nodded. “That would open up a can of worms, wouldn't it?”

  “Exactly. But the cat's got tags, so I want to at least check it out.”

  “Okay,” Holly said. “Let me get some gloves and a plastic liner.”

  So Holly and I dashed back to the Senior Highrise, and when she saw the cat, she said, “Wow. It looks like the same thing killed both cats.”

  I snapped the gloves on. “I know. But why would someone put one here, and one over there?”

  “So maybe they're not connected.”

  “But what are the odds that there's a dead cat in my trash can and another in yours?”

  “So what are you saying?”

  I hopped up and leaned into the Dumpster. “I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.”

  I had a little trouble reaching the cat, and since I didn't want to actually climb into the Dumpster, I wound up pulling the cat toward me by its tail. I felt a little bad about doing it, which was stupid—it was way beyond feeling a thing.

  But then all of a sudden Holly cried, “Look! There's a dead mouse, too!”

  I pushed off of the rim, saying, “I put him there. Dorito caught it—which is how I found the cat.”

  “Oh! For a second there I thought … well, I don't know what I thought!”

  I read the cat's tags. “His name's Mr. T.”

  “Phone number?”

  “Yup.” I scooped him into the bag and tied it closed. “Something about this is just too weird.” My spine was tingling, which, believe me, is never a good sign. It means I'm either in serious trouble, or about to put myself there. But I couldn't ignore what I was thinking, so finally I just said it: “Holly, what if these aren't the only cats?”

  “Huh?”

  “What if there are more of them? What if there are cats in trash cans all up and down the block?”

  “But…why?”

  “What if the Psycho Kitty Queen's right? What if there's someone in town who hates cats? What if they're going around killing them?”

  “Sammy! Who in their right mind would do that?”

  I pulled a face at her. “We live in Santa Martina, remember? This town is full of wackos.”

  “Good point.”

  “So what if someone's killing cats and putting them around town in different people's trash cans?”

  She shrugged. “Well, why not just put them all in one Dumpster?”

  “Because if someone happens to notice one cat in a trash can, that's one thing. It's no reason to call the police, right? But if there are two, or three, or four, you're going to think, Whoa now! Something weird is going on.”

  “But—”

  “Is your trash pickup on Mondays?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ours, too. Which means we've got today and tomorrow to check around. And tomorrow… well, tomorrow's out for me.”

  “So you're saying you want to go snooping through trash cans?”

  I nodded. “That's what I'm saying.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Isn't that ironic.”

  I grinned at her and said, “Yeah, it's ironic,” because back before Meg and her mother, Vera, took her in, Holly was a foster-home runaway. She lived her life digging through trash, and even after she wasn't homeless any more, she still did it. I finally had to yell at her to stop, because it was
so embarrassing walking around with someone who snooped through everyone's garbage.

  She laughed. “So when do you want to start?”

  “Well, my mom's here—”

  “Your mom'shere?”

  “Yeah. And I should get back up there, but I already need a shower so… “

  “So you want to go now?”

  “Just for a little while. Why don't we start behind your building and take a quick check around the block?”

  “Sounds good to me.” She nodded at the plastic sack. “What about Mr. T?”

  “Can we leave him behind the Pup Parlor for now?”

  She shrugged. “Don't see why not.”

  So we raced back across the lawn, jaywalked Broadway again, and after we'd shown Meg and Vera the Unfortunate Mr. T, we grabbed a couple of plastic liners and some clean gloves and got to work.

  There was nothing in Slammin' Dave's trash. Nothing in any of the trash cans on Wesler. Nothing down the next street or in the alley or the Heavenly Hotel's Dumpster. We ran from can to can, got barked at by a lot of dogs, and got some pretty strange looks from people, but we didn't find any cats.

  Well, not dead ones anyway

  When we got to Main Street, I sighed and said, “It sure felt like we were on to something.”

  “We've still got the whole Maynard's area and down that way,” Holly said.

  “Yeah, but I've got to get back home.” I handed her my gloves and sacks. “Thanks for doing this with me.”

  “Sure,” she said as I took off running. “I'll call you later!”

  “Bye!”

  When I got home, my mom said, “There you are!”

  “Sorry!” I said. “I found another dead cat down in the Dumpster—”

  “Another dead cat?” My mother's face crinkled up. “What on earth…?”

  “I know. So I went over to Holly's ‘cause—”

  “Enough talk of dead things,” Grams said. “Why don't you take a quick shower and I'll make us some lunch. We've got lots we need to talk about.” Then she looked over at my mother and said, “Right?”

  My mom smiled politely, then looked away.

  Lots to talk about? As I went to Grams' dresser and got a change of clothes, my whole body started feeling disconnected. Like my ligaments weren't holding my bones together right. Had the day finally come that my mom was going to tell me who my father was? Did she finally think I was old enough?