Chapter 1
ISAK
There's freedom behind a motorcycle helmet.
Nobody knows who you are.
No name. No jersey number. No six older brothers who'd been famous longer than I could legally drive, and no sportswriters staked out with camera phones and opinions about whether I was going to have a third year of losing more games than we won, and no one stopping me on the sidewalk to ask if I was actually related to the Chris Kingman.
I was just a guy on a bike.
The only one who got to have opinions about this zen and the art of motorcycle philosophy was Vito. Vito Catleone.
Specifically, he had opinions about the fact that I'd gone the long way home because I needed the extra twenty minutes to strategize how to take Fox down in our Schmadden live stream later. Vito expressed these opinions through a highly specialized system of sharp flicks of his tail, since he couldn’t meow at me through his kitty-cat helmet.
I had become fluent in tail communication over years of shared rides.
His low back and forth tail flicks right now meant he was more than ready to go home and eat.
"We're almost home to your after ride treats."
He shifted position on his padded seat, designed especially for the transportation of one twelve-and-a-half-pound cat, fitted in front of me on the bike. And yes, I'd had it custom made, and no, I was not going to apologize for that.
Something on my left attracted his attention. Pigeon, probably. He felt strongly about pigeons and their shenanigans.
The light at Vine turned red. I stopped, adjusted his jacket strap, his second-best one, the black leather, very tasteful, and he accepted this with the patience of a cat who’s human bought him new outfits every other week or so.
Green light. We moved.
Vito heard the cry for help before I did.
Not screaming, exactly. Higher than that. More indignant. The kind of sound something makes when it has been genuinely wronged by the universe and wants the universe to know it.
In operatic vibrato decibels.
Coming from up ahead and to the right.
Vito’s tail flicked in the right direction and I slowed as we rolled down my street.
The oak tree out front was old. Cincinnati's OTR neighborhood kept trees like this around as proof the city had existed before concrete. Beautiful. Massive. The kind you could actually climb. Currently occupied by one extremely unhappy orange cat and one woman with a stick up her ass.
Kind of literally.
The cat was ten feet up on a branch and announcing his feelings about it to the entire block. The woman was two branches below him, arms wrapped around the trunk, legs at angles that suggested she'd made some questionable choices and was actively reconsidering her life, and her cat’s.
All her attention was on the yowler.
Her feet were bare, and I didn't see any shoes around. Which meant she'd probably left her building in a hurry, done something genuinely impractical in service of an animal that was currently ignoring her with professional commitment and zero apology.
There was something about that which made me like her already. I pulled over, popped the kickstand and threw my leg over the bike seat.
The sudden quiet made her look down. She took in the motorcycle, the helmet, the leather jacket in the summer heat, and then slower, with a look that was trying very hard to be a nonchalant and was not quite pulling it off she stared over at the cat on the front of the motorcycle, with his own helmet and his own jacket, sitting very straight, observing the situation below with focused feline attention.
Vito did not look away. He had located the problem and he was assessing it. I unlatched him from the harness and he jumped down, darted over to the tree and circled it.
The big orange cat reprised its earlier operatic song of their people. Vito's tail swished and he plopped down directly at the base of the tree.
My dark and curly-haired Rapunzel opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.
"Your cat," she said carefully, "is wearing a helmet."
"Safety-conscious," I said. "He’s a very responsible guy."
Vito tilted his head at the woman, decided she wasn't the problem and went back to the kind of tail swishing that meant the orange-striped noise machine was his new object of affection.
She watched him for a moment.
Then she looked back up at her own cat, who I swear narrowed its eyes and released a sound of profound betrayal at her. With the flat exhaustion of obviously having this exact argument for twenty minutes, she stuck out her tongue at the orange menace and looked back down at me.
"He got out through the door and onto the porch, and somehow into the tree from above.
I thought if I climbed up I could get him down.
But then he went out further on the branch, and I'm not—" She stopped.
Made a face at the branch. "I'm not great with trees, or pokey branches, or getting out of trees with pokey branches, it turns out. "
"Tough time to find that out."
"I had a theory about my tree climbing abilities that was incorrect."
I glanced up at the cat. He had the whole branch to himself and the full attention of two humans and a well-dressed cat consultant. Living the dream, man.
I respected that.
"What's his name?"
She hesitated. That was interesting.
"Tig," she said.
Definitely not just Tig.
"Tig what?"
With a very dignified sigh, she said, "Bitties."
"Tig… Bitties." I pressed my lips together so I didn’t snort-laugh.
"His full government veterinary name is," she said as if this was the part that was the inconvenience, "is Tiger O'Bittlesworth the Third, if you must know."
Something moved in my chest. I was not going to laugh. I refused. I did smile. Not that she could see that behind the helmet.
"Do you know if the fire department actually rescues cats, and-or women out of trees?"
"I think that's just in books and movies."
"Right. Well, umm, would you maybe call them anyway? Because I...don't think I can get down."
Vito made a small growling sound that I hadn’t heard before, flicked his tail in a full circle, and put his paws up on the tree trunk, as if he was going to climb it. Then looked back at me. I nodded, understanding the assignment. "Don't move."
"Wouldn’t if I could."
The tree was good, old bark with solid footholds, branches thick enough to trust. I found the route fast. Motorcycle boots weren't ideal climbing equipment but I'd done worse.
One branch, then another, then another, pulling up with ease that came from a combination of consistent gym work and complete refusal to think about the insurance implications of falling out of this tree and breaking any bones in my body.
Tig Bitties watched me coming. His tail went full bottle-brush. Evaluating my technique, probably. He was enormous for a cat, the kind of fluffernutter that would suffocate anyone who tried to snuggle him.
I stopped two branches below him, opposite my damsel in distress
Holy shit. I completely forgot what I was doing for approximately two seconds. Damn she was pretty.
Whoa, okay, focus lover-boy or all three of us would be spending the night in this tree. Could be fun. No, fuck. I held out a hand to the cat, palm up. Waited for his sniff of approval.
Cats always liked me. It was genuinely the only thing in my life that had ever come without work. Everything else I'd built or earned through some combination of stubbornness and secretly grinding harder than anyone realized.
Tig Bitties looked at my gloved hand, sniffed it with the thoroughness of running a background check, and apparently the results were satisfactory. He wiggled forward, tucked himself under the chin of my helmet and rubbed his face against the plastic.
I unzipped the top of my jacket, then snagged his generous fluffy butt and tucked him inside. Little one-brain-cell weirdo stuck his head right in my armpit and started purring like this had been his plan the whole time.
"Got him."
My treemate shook her head. "How did you—He hates everyone but me and my father."
"Not everyone." I moved toward her branch for rescue number two of the day. Too bad I couldn’t just grab her plump, delicious ass and tuck her into my jacket too. "He just has standards."
"If Tig’s stranger danger alert didn’t go off, you might not be a murderer under that helmet," she said. "But if you kill me later, I expect Tig to scratch your eyes out for me."
"I’m here to help. I think serial killers do it the other way around. Move left a little."
"Your move could be a reverse Bundy. And no can do, buckaroo. I’m stuck."
Well, shit. The branch had gone straight through the back of her shirt, the fabric was pulled taut around the wood, holding her against the trunk like she'd been stapled there. She hadn't been frozen from fear. She'd been literally pinned.
She couldn't have gotten down if she'd wanted to.
I filed away the fact that she hadn't mentioned this. Faster to just fix it than explain. I understood that better than she knew.
"If I murder you later, I give the cats permission to eat my face. Now, don't move," I said.
"Not planning to. Can I change their names to Catfrey Dahmer and CattibleLecter?"
The angle was awkward and I had to get above the branch to get any leverage, which meant climbing past her. In a tree of this width meant my jacket brushed her shoulder and I was close enough to see that the branch had a serious grip on her.
"You can and should. I’m gonna have to climb over you. This is going to feel weird," I said.
"It already feels weird. There's a man with a cat in his jacket, who may or may not be a serial killer straddling me, in my tree."
"I think you watch too much true crime and it's a public tree."
"It's the tree outside the building where I live, in the true crime documentary about my murder by a faceless motorcycle man with a faceless motorcycle cat, they will call it my tree."
"Okay, it’s your tree."