Two #2
“Let’s go home, Marshal; maybe I have time to do you before my husband shows up to take me to my mother-in-law’s for dinner.”
“Oh, yes, please,” he whispered before he kissed me harder and held on tighter.
Sam turned onto our street and then took the left into the driveway along the right side of the house. It ran along the fence separating our property from the Petersons’, where the circus had come to town.
There were at least ten squad cars on the street and another two and an ambulance in the driveway.
I didn’t get to make an inquiry; I was shoved through the back door of my house into the kitchen and told to lock the door behind me.
I bolted to the window and watched Sam walk back down the driveway to the street.
I could see through the chain-link fence into the Petersons’ front lawn; I saw all the neighbors standing across the street and a lot of policemen traipsing through the yard.
I wanted to go outside, but that would be a bad idea, so I walked to the front door to see if the mail was splattered in the entryway.
My whole life, I’d had a mailbox; only since we’d moved into this house did I have a mail slot that everything got shoved through.
As I’d expected, my stupid cat, Chilly—all white, except for his nose and the tips of his ears, which were black—was lying on his back on the mail, feet up in the air.
Why he did it every single day, I had no idea.
Sam thought maybe it was something new coming into the house on a daily basis that didn’t smell like him. It was just weird.
“What are you doing?” I asked my feline friend.
I got the talking he always did with me—a soft chuffing—before he rolled to his feet to prance over and greet me.
He was a “second-chance pet,” and when we had adopted him from the humane society, he was alone on one side of the cat enclosure.
He was in one of the stacked metal cages instead of the Plexiglas area, where all the others were.
I walked over to him, and he shoved his little paw through the bars and put it on the top of my head. Right that second, I had been a goner.
“Second chance” meant that he had been adopted and brought back. Twice. Apparently, he was manic. It was a match made in heaven!
I had had specific directions. Sam had said to go to the humane society and get a declawed, long-haired older cat that would be mellow with the kids.
He liked long-haired cats because that was what he had been raised with.
His mother always had Persians or Himalayans, so he knew how to care for them, the brushing that was needed, and figured that would be good for the kids, to teach them responsibility.
A Maine coon, he had told me, was also perfectly acceptable.
It really had been an easy request if he’d have sent the right guy. I wasn’t him.
When I brought Chilly home, he peed on himself in the carrier because he was scared.
I felt so sorry for him, but even though I wanted him to make a good impression, I just couldn’t bring myself to add to his terror by bathing him.
So, unfortunately, the cat Sam saw for the first time reeked of urine, still had claws, and possessed a sort of crazed look in his eyes.
It was not the best first impression that was ever made.
Dylan saved me by coming over with some kitty bath wash that you didn’t need water for, but afterward, Chilly smelled more like linen-scented piss than anything else. Sam was not impressed.
We had one of those Chia Pets that you bought at Walmart because Kola had wanted one. It was basically a head, Mr. Grass Head, and Chilly took one look at that thing and decided that it needed to be batted off of Kola and Hannah’s desk and dumped onto the floor.
Chilly got stuck between the window ledge and the chair, wedged so that his legs crossed, and he looked like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit when he was stuck in the floor in a carpet.
He got up on his back legs and attacked Hannah’s stuffed bunny, Bunny—so original—and made her shriek. He deflated Kola’s Spider-Man ball with his claws and knocked down the fan in the kitchen. All of it done within the first two hours of him living with us.
Hannah decided she wanted a puppy. Kola thought we should set him free. Sam told me if I took him back, maybe I could get a refund.
I told them all if I took him back, he was going to die.
Hannah, still consoling and comforting Bunny, called Chilly. He sprinted over, flipped a somersault for her, grabbed Bunny, bit it, rabbit-kicked it, leaped up, and then tore off in another direction.
“I hope he doesn’t suffer when they gas him.” Sam cackled.
“Honey,” I whined.
“He looks like a snow demon,” Kola told me.
“The snow is cold,” Hannah informed me.
“Yep, it’s chilly,” Kola agreed with his sister.
“Chilly!” Hannah squealed, clapping her hands.
“Chilly the cat.” Kola nodded, beaming up at me. “Chilly! Chilly!”
And the damn cat came, and he brought one of Kola’s green Nerf Blaster balls with him.
“Look, he can fetch!” My son was so happy.
“Little shit,” Sam muttered under his breath because he knew as well as I did that it was a done deal at that point.
I had concerns—like the way the cat just ran, for no apparent reason, from one end of the house to the other—but over that, Sam just raised an eyebrow.
“He’s a spaz, just like you.”
I scowled at the marshal.
The appointment had been made to have the cat declawed, but the night before the surgery, Sam came home with an assortment of scratching posts—a few that looked like abstract art—and an enormous multilevel cat tower for Chilly to climb and sit on.
I just waited as Sam put everything down in the living room.
He had cleared his throat. “We’ll try this first.”
Apparently, whatever the marshal had read on the internet about declawing, he didn’t like. So, Chilly—who, as it had turned out, really liked his plethora of alternatives to shredding the couch—got to keep the murder mittens he had been born with.
Kola adored him, and Hannah kept calling for him to do whatever trick he had been doing again and again, and he got so wound up that I thought he would ricochet off the walls. She chanted his name, bounced on her toes, and squealed. My girl was in love.
My boy was in love too. He taught Chilly to fetch on purpose and not by accident.
Hannah taught Chilly that batting things off the counter—spoons, forks, broccoli, pretzels, even yogurt very carefully spooned out—would get him lots of petting as a reward.
When she was sticky, inevitably, so was the cat, and I ended up having to clean them both.
Chilly never pulled away or leaned out of reach; instead, he allowed grubby hands to stroke him in whatever condition they were in.
The kids loved to carry him, put him in a backpack with his head sticking out, and walk him on the leash, which Sam thought was the height of absurdity—who walked a cat, for heaven’s sake?
—and sleep with him. The fact that he would sleep, stretched out beside them, in their beds was hysterical.
And the part where my kids would contort themselves into absurd positions because they didn’t want to wake him was even funnier. Heaven forbid we disturbed the cat.
He was a member of our family, and even Sam was pleased when he was greeted by all of us at the door when he came home at night.
Chilly would scold him if he didn’t get his own pat of affection, so Sam and he had their own routine.
Sam would walk to the couch, where the cat would run to meet him and leap onto the arm; then my husband could bend down, and Chilly could lift up, and they could touch noses.
I had taken a picture of it once just to show Sam’s mother, and I was supposed to delete it afterward. I still had it.
“Why do you have to scent-mark the mail?” I asked the cat, who was purring loudly under my ministrations.
As I gathered the scattered correspondence, the doorbell rang. When I answered it, the man there showed me his badge. It was a marshal badge, like Sam’s.
“Good afternoon,” he greeted me. “May I speak to Supervisory—”
“Deputy White?” Sam said, walking up beside me, standing close.
The man held a manila envelope out for Sam. “These came for you, and I remember you saying if anything came from Phoenix, you were to get it right away.”
“Thank you,” he said, opening it up.
The marshal shoved his hands down into his pockets, but didn’t say anything.
I was uncomfortable just looking at him and leaned ever so slightly to get Sam’s attention.
He turned to me, and I made my eyes big, and because it was Sam and he knew me, his eyes flicked over to the marshal on my porch. “Something you wanna say?”
The younger man cleared his throat. “I just—we … if you need us while you’re out there on vacation … not that you would, but if you do … we can be on a plane in an hour, day or night. Just so you know.”
He squinted at White. “No one but you, Sanchez, Kowalski, Ryan, and Dorsey know where I’m going, right?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
Sam nodded. “Good. So, if anything—”
“We’re your team, yeah?” He looked Sam in the eye. “Whatever you need, just call.”
“Understood.”
White took a breath. “Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“ ’Cause you know if one of those marshals from Nevada wasn’t right, then maybe—”
“I’m going to a family reunion in Phoenix—in Scottsdale actually—so why are you—”
“We’ve only ever lost one witness here in Chicago,” he said. “And it was before you were in charge, but still, we all know you never got over it. So, when we see you—you, Sam Kage—not using regular channels to have stuff delivered, we know something’s up.”
Sam was silent.
“And you know us; none of us would say shit to anybody about what you’re doing or where you’re going, but we want you to know that we’re ready to move if you need us.”
“I’m not supposed to use you guys to follow up on leads, for hunches or wild goose chases. That’s a misappropriation of—”
“But, sir, we would never say—”
“You’re arguing with me, Marshal.”