Jude Devine Mystery Series (56 page)

“Okay, you can cease and desist.” Chastity refocused her attention on the screen. Jude looked…bleak. “I’ll phone Mrs. Smith. But we’ll have to leave tomorrow morning if we’re going to help.”

Adeline’s dark eyes flashed wayward delight. “Don’t worry. I’m ready now.” At Chastity’s frown, she explained, “They ran this on CNN a few hours ago. I figured you’d be up for it since you feel indebted to Detective Devine. So I got packed. I’ve put your hiking gear in the car.”

“Remind me…” Chastity muttered. “Why did I adopt you?”

*

Jude parked just inside her driveway so she wouldn’t have to shovel her way out of her garage the next morning. The lights were on thanks to an electronic timer. A motorist passing would assume someone was home, which was the general idea. Jude quickly swept a glance around the house and yard, then focused automatically on a small dark shape on her front porch, the one thing that was not as she’d left it that morning.

Unholstering her Glock, she took a circumspect path toward her front door, eyes sweeping the surrounding trees for any movement. Not that she could see anything but her yellow outdoor light bouncing off mounds of snow. She reached the house, flattened her back to the wall, sidled quickly to the corner, and peered around.

A small black cat lay inert on her doormat.

Jude mounted the steps uncertainly. Was this some kind of sick joke? A message from crazy Hank Thompson, maybe? Back to the wall, she darted constant looks around, alert to any shaft of light or crunch of snow or crack of a twig. She didn’t feel as though she were being watched, but that could just be tiredness.

From the shadowed corner by the front door, she gazed down at the animal, then crouched, moving slowly so she didn’t spook it if it was actually alive and just sheltering where it could find some scant protection from the elements. She was filled with pity when she saw how thin it was. Emaciated.

A perfect end to a perfect day. She gets home and has to bury a fellow creature robbed of its life by a quirk of fate that has one of its kind starve and the next dine daily on Fancy Feast. She’d read once that black cats were the least adoptable. Some shelters euthanized them automatically because they would never find homes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said and ran her hand over the thin, dry fur.

The feline quickened and two huge gold green eyes gazed up at her from a pinched face. It could barely lift its head, but it offered a silent meow that cut Jude to the heart. The little cat was asking for its life.

“Don’t move,” she commanded.

She got up quickly, jammed her key into the lock, and shoved the front door open. The cat weighed nothing. She carried it indoors and laid it on the nearest soft chair, frantically wondering what she should do and whether there was enough time left to make it to a veterinarian. The nearest were in Montrose, but none would be open at this hour, and the emergency animal hospital in Grand Junction was over an hour away.

Jude ran upstairs to her linen closet and found a soft towel and a face cloth. She wet the cloth, swaddled the cat in the towel, picked up a sofa cushion, and headed out the door once more.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she told her dying visitor as she carried it back down to the Dakota. “Hang on for an hour and thirty minutes, and you’ll have a home for the rest of your life.”

She slapped the cushion onto the passenger seat, punched a hollow in the center, and laid the cat there. Then she squeezed some water from the face cloth into the side of its mouth.

“You can do this,” she said. “Don’t give up.”

The cat stared up at her for a beat, then seemed to relax. Jude pushed the door almost closed and hurried around to the driver’s side. Once she was in her seat, she leaned over to pull the passenger door swiftly shut, talking soothing nonsense to the cat the whole time.

She headed north on Highway 50, her headlights bouncing off the snowbanks on either side of the road. The drive was more familiar than her own backyard, but in these conditions the road was iced over and so treacherous she could take no risks. Fresh snow was no longer coming down to provide something for her tires to grip.

When she came to a straight stretch that still had a powder snow surface, she phoned ahead to tell the vet who she was and that she was bringing in an animal that would probably die. The woman she spoke to told her to drive carefully so she didn’t get herself killed trying to be a hero.

It felt like the longest drive of her life, and when she finally saw the Welcome to Grand Junction sign, she stopped the Dakota for a moment to slow her heart rate.

The roads around the town had been plowed, creating trenches wide enough for two vehicles. No one was out driving. Jude followed the directions to North Road and felt sick with relief when she finally spotted the veterinary emergency hospital. The cat was still alive and put up no resistance when she rushed it indoors bundled against her body, her overcoat wrapped around the two of them.

She was greeted by a wispy-haired brunette vet tech who looked slightly older than twelve and slightly taller than five feet. When she saw the cat, she hustled Jude directly into an examination room and ran through the Staff Only door yelling, “Dr. Gordon!”

Not a good sign, Jude thought.

The veterinarian entered the room a moment later and briefly examined the cat. He said, “I can euthanize her humanely or we can fight for her.”

When Jude said, “Fight,” he rushed the cat away.

The young vet tech came back and announced, “This is going to take a while. Would you like to wait or call us in the morning?”

Jude contemplated driving back to Montrose, exhausted, in extreme conditions and decided she’d like to stay alive. “I’ll wait,” she said. “Any chance of coffee?”

The vet tech, whose name badge said Courtney, smiled. “That sounds like a really good idea. Maybe I’ll join you.”

She showed Jude back to the waiting room and turned up shortly after with a pot of coffee and a real mug. “I know I should be giving you a plastic cup, but I thought you might like this better, Detective.”

She sat with Jude for a short while, answering the phone occasionally. Between times, Jude tried to read magazines with pretty but vacuous-looking women on the covers. In the end she phoned Eddie House, one of the few people she was close to in the Four Corners. Eddie was an expert at rehabilitating sick and maimed creatures. He was pretty effective with injured people, too.

She said, “It’s Jude. I’m sitting in the vet clinic in Grand Junction.”

“You hit an animal with your truck?” Eddie asked.

“No. I found a stray cat on my doorstep when I got home. Starving. Almost dead.” She didn’t expand. With Eddie, she found herself cutting the excess from her conversation almost as much as he did. Right now, it was easier, too. She was exhausted.

As usual, Eddie’s mind worked in different ways from hers. He asked gravely, “Have you named her?”

“Not yet. I thought I’d wait and see if she makes it first.”

Eddie took his time answering, also the norm. “I name all my animals when they are sent to me.”

“It’s easy for you,” Jude muttered. “But I don’t have your hookup to the Great Spirit.” These days she understood Eddie’s sense of humor well enough to tease him sometimes. All the same, she was relieved when he laughed.

“What does this cat look like?”

“Small and black with big golden eyes. And it meows without making any sound.”

Eddie said, “She will live. Or she would not have come to you.”

“I don’t know if it’s a female.”

He said, “I bet five dollars.”

“Done.” Jude laughed. “How’s Zach?”

Zachariah Carter had been a key prosecution witness in the Huntsberger case. Another casualty of the FLDS polygamists, he’d been expelled by his community after a life of beatings and brainwashing. Jude had asked Eddie to take him in, and the kid was barely recognizable after six months of care and good food. He was now working toward his high school diploma and planning to become an army medic.

“He speaks of going back,” Eddie surprised her by saying.

“To his family?”

“Only to shoot a man.”

Jude rolled her eyes. “What did you tell him?”

“There are many paths.”

“And?”

“A gun gives you the body, not the bird.”

“Navajo wisdom?”

“No. Henry Thoreau.”

“And what else?” Jude waited.

“Why go to jail for scum?”

“Thank you.”

“He won’t make that journey,” Eddie said with conviction.

“And you know this how?”

“I have the car keys.”

“Great. I feel confident.”

“It could be worse,” Eddie said.

“How? How could it be worse than him going back to the people who half-killed him?”

“I could be Apache. Then I would go with him.”

Jude groaned. “I don’t know why I called you expecting comfort and peace of mind.”

“Me either.”

“You’re a big help,” Jude said.

“You, too.”

Jude laughed. “Does that mean you want me to come talk some white folks’ sense into him?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not say so in the first place?”

“Because I am letting you make the offer.”

Jude wasn’t going to rise to the bait. Eddie was always hinting about her being a control freak. She said, “I’ll come by later in the week.”

“Good.” He hung up.

An hour went by, and just as Jude felt herself falling asleep sitting up, the vet came out and announced, “We managed to get an IV in. I need to tell you she may not make it.”

Jude said, “Just do the best you can. I don’t care how much it costs.”

“You got it.” Dr. Gordon hesitated. “I guess you’re up to your neck down there with that kidnapping. Terrible thing. Taken from his bed.” He shook his head, a bewildered bystander in a world gone mad.

Jude hadn’t seen any television that evening. Obviously the media had chosen their angle; a child abducted from the safety of his bed was the scariest spin they could place on the story. “They are such asses,” she said.

Dr. Gordon gave her an odd look. “There’s a sofa out back. You ought to get some sleep.” He led the way.

Mercy’s house was only a mile from the clinic, Jude thought, but she was going to sleep on a ratty old sofa in a place that smelled of antiseptic and reverberated with the cries of frightened animals. What else was there to say about the nature of their relationship? Sure, she could call Mercy and be invited over and given the spare bedroom, free occupancy of the special hell that came with knowing her girlfriend was on the other side of the wall, sleeping with another woman. If she got really lucky, maybe she would hear them having sex. Yep, that was how she wanted to end the day.

Jude winced. What did it say about her that she’d invested the past six months trying to build a relationship with a woman who would never love her and never be there when she needed anything more than sex? Jude took the blanket Dr. Gordon offered, said good night, and lay down on the lumpy cushions. Shafts of light infiltrated the room through various portals, the perfect recipe for restlessness. Her mind drifted to something Mercy had said a couple of months back, after they were lolling, sated, against their pillows.

“It’s going nowhere, but the going is really good.”

She was always dismayed when Mercy talked like that, writing off all possibility of a future as though they had no choice in the matter. “Why is it going nowhere?” she’d demanded.

“Because love requires more than either of us can give. We both need other people for that.”

“Are you saying we’re inherently selfish?”

“That’s a value judgment I wouldn’t make.” Mercy seemed genuinely thoughtful. “I’m saying we have to own up to who we are. I know my nature, and I think you know yours. But you keep making decisions as if you’re a different kind of person.”

“You’re the one who tells me not to be a jealous Neanderthal,” Jude said.

“Because if you make choices a jealous Neanderthal can’t live with, you’ll never be happy,” Mercy pointed out reasonably. “Either
you
have to change, or your choices have to change.”

Jude watched a pair of feet move past the door and heard Dr. Gordon’s voice in the hallway. Maybe Mercy was right. Maybe she kept herself in situations that would doom her to dissatisfaction. Why? Was that how she avoided tying herself down? Was it easier to blame her flunk record in relationships on bad luck than self-sabotage? Did she want to be alone?

She rolled over and studied the wall. No, she didn’t want to be alone.
Alone
was not all it was cracked up to be. But she had no idea how she was going to change that state of affairs.

Meantime, it was Mercy or nothing. And she’d just chosen nothing.

Chapter Eleven

Tonya stared at Wade across the kitchen table and said, “It’s late. I think you should go.”

“Go? Go where? The cops have torn my place apart.”