The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives (2 page)

I opened my eyes and looked around. Everything seemed to be in one piece. Then I looked up in the rearview mirror, primarily to see if the woman was in good enough shape for a sound beating, and all I could see was a mass of blond curls spread out over her dashboard. Without even thinking I jumped out of the car and ran back as fast as my legs would carry me.

As I approached the car I could see her through the windshield. She was wearing a black and white striped tank top and a green barrette in her hair. Her head was lying completely still on the steering wheel, and her left arm was hanging listlessly at her side. As I approached the driver’s-side door, I took a deep breath and prepared myself for the worst, and just as I reached out to try the door handle she jolted her head up, eyes wide with alarm. She rolled down the window halfway, and that’s when I realized she was still cradling the phone to her ear.

“I have to go,” she said into the phone. “I just hit somebody.”

She flicked the phone closed and dropped it down into the cup holder next to the seat and stared straight ahead. I reached out and put one hand on the hood of her car to steady myself. “Umm, are you okay?”

She looked up at the mirror in her sun visor and blinked her eyes a couple of times, like she was checking her makeup. “Yeah, I think so.”

I thought to myself,
Now is the time to strangle this woman to death
. Just then she looked at me, pulled her curly locks away from her face, and said, “Are
you
?”

She was much younger than I’d thought, probably not a day older than the legal driving age, which in Florida is eighteen. Her eyes started to well with tears.

I sighed. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why don’t you put that phone to good use and call 911.”

She touched a finger to her lip. “You’re bleeding.”

“Huh?”

“Your lip is bleeding.”

I looked at my reflection in the backseat window. She was right. My lower lip was bleeding, but not badly, just smudged with a bit of red, as if I’d been interrupted in the middle of putting on lipstick. “I must have bit my lip when you hit me.”

Handing me a tissue, she said, “I am so sorry. I was talking on my phone and I guess I just got distracted.”

“That’s alright,” I said, dabbing at my lip. “I used to be young and stupid, too. Just call 911. I’m gonna go up and see what happened.”

But I already knew what had happened: Baldy McGrumpypants. He’d probably been weaving in and out of traffic and caused an accident. I tried to stay positive, but with so many cars and people around, it was hard not to think someone could’ve been hurt. As I headed up I glanced at my rear bumper to assess the damage.

My Bronco is pale yellow, like homemade lemon ice cream, so it shows even the slightest nick or speck of dirt, but there was hardly a scratch, just a couple of dime-sized dents on the chrome guard. The girl’s front fender was slightly concussed, but nothing a good body shop couldn’t hammer back into shape in a couple of minutes.

“Ma’am?”

I looked back at the girl, who was already on the phone with 911. She was leaning her head out the window. I hate it when teenaged girls call me ma’am. She said, “What street is this?”

If she hadn’t looked so serious I would have thought she was joking. “It’s Ocean Boulevard.”

She gave me a quick thumbs-up and then got back on the phone, gesticulating wildly with her hands. I could tell she was describing the accident to the emergency dispatcher.

Okay,
I thought to myself,
maybe I was never
that
young and stupid,
but I had to smile. She was just a kid, and she was lucky. We both were. Except for a bloody lip and a few tears, we’d both come out smelling like roses. I had a terrible feeling not everyone up ahead had been quite so fortunate.

I reached into the Bronco and switched off the ignition. At first I thought I’d better grab my backpack in case there were any serious injuries to contend with. I keep it stocked with all kinds of supplies for pet emergencies: scissors, bandages, rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, a pocketknife, etc. Then I told myself I was probably overreacting. I tend to have a pretty healthy imagination. Plus, every once in a while my old cop training comes bubbling up to the surface and I have to remind myself that it’s no longer my job to protect the public welfare.

I took the backpack anyway, slinging it over my shoulder as I dropped my car keys down in the hip pocket of my cargo shorts and headed toward the front of the pileup. There was a burly man with short-cropped black hair in a blue business suit standing next to the black Cadillac in front of me. He was holding a monogrammed handkerchief to his forehead and talking to an elderly woman who was sitting at the driver’s wheel.

As I got closer I heard the man say to her, “No, I’m not a cop. I said the cops are probably on their way.”

The woman wore what looked like a man’s overcoat over a white dress, with a white hat sitting atop her perfectly coiffed hair, with that wiglike, hair-sprayed look they give you at the beauty shop, and her makeup looked like it had been applied with a child’s hand—lips smeared beet red and powdery pink cheeks. She wore a lavender scarf wrapped tightly around her neck and tied in a bow at her throat, with white gloves stretched tautly over her hands.

I said, “Are you folks okay?”

I heard the woman mutter under her breath in a smoker’s growl,
“Bastard!”

The burly man smiled at me as he pulled the bloody handkerchief away from his brow. There was a scratch about an inch long in the middle of his forehead. He pointed at the baby blue BMW in front of the Cadillac. “That BMW’s mine. I hit the car in front of me, and this nice lady hit me, but we’re all fine. I can’t say the same thing for those guys up there, though.”

As he said “this nice lady,” he rolled his eyes, but my attention was already focused up ahead, where a small crowd of people was forming around the green landscaping truck. There was a plume of white smoke rising up from its front grille, which was painted bright red.

The man said, “I just called 911. It ain’t pretty.”

That was when I realized—the smoke wasn’t coming from the truck, and the truck’s front grille wasn’t red. What I was looking at was the cherry red convertible that had been tailgating me, only now it was folded around the front of the landscaping truck like a piece of shiny red wrapping foil. That bald idiot must have been trying to speed around someone again and had pulled into the northbound lane and plowed into the landscaping truck head-on. It would be a miracle if he was still alive.

I ran up as fast as I could, and sure enough, there was Baldy, slumped over the air bag in a haze of smoke and fumes in the passenger seat, which was a good thing since the driver’s side was so crumpled the whole thing barely looked like a car anymore, just a triangular mess of red metal—like a giant slice of steaming pizza. Strewn all over the ground like pieces of mushroom and bits of pepperoni were hundreds of shards of glass and little strips of black plastic.

The man’s bald head was shiny with blood, but to my utter surprise his eyes were open and looking right at me. He must have somehow managed to extricate himself from the driver’s seat and climb over to the passenger side, or else he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and the impact had tossed him right out of harm’s way. I noted that his expensive-looking sunglasses were nowhere in sight. I tried to open the passenger door, but it was stuck, and now there was more smoke pouring out from under the dashboard and a thick, syrupy smell in the air. I could hear the familiar wail of a siren approaching not very far away, but I knew there wasn’t a moment to waste.

My heart started racing like a jackhammer. I reached in and laid my hand gently on his shoulder. “Sir, my name is Dixie. I’m going to get you out of this car, okay?”

He didn’t move. I wondered if he even understood what I was saying, and yet he didn’t take his eyes off me.

He said, “I am not dead?”

“No, sir. No, you’re not dead, but I need to get you somewhere safe.”

His eyes narrowed and he smiled, almost like he’d just thought of a funny joke, and then he nodded slightly, as if considering the punchline, and said, “Safe…”

I wasn’t sure what he could possibly think was so funny at that moment, but I hoped it was a good sign as I considered my options. Normally it’s a pretty good idea to leave an accident victim completely still until paramedics arrive—moving someone with broken bones or spinal damage can cause irreparable harm—but the smoke from the car was getting heavier, and I could feel heat rising from behind the dashboard. This car was about to go up in flames, and this man needed help.

I braced myself for a fight as I hooked my arms under his shoulders. Sometimes people in accidents can go into a state of shock and resist being handled. It’s like some deeply rooted, ancient survival instinct kicks in, and they’ll fight tooth and nail before they’ll let strangers touch them no matter how bad off they are. Luckily, Baldy didn’t look the least bit fazed by the idea of being moved. In fact, the expression on his face was eerily peaceful.

Just then the burly man in the blue suit appeared behind me. He pointed at the smoke and said, “Uh, lady, I think you better get away from that car.”

I looked back at him and blew a strand of hair away from my face. “Ya think?”

I could hear creaking coming from deep inside the car as I tried to pull Baldy up enough to hook my right arm under his legs, but he was deadweight. I could barely lift him.

“Aw, goddammit.” The burly man whipped off his jacket and slipped in next to me. “I’ll get this half and you get his legs.”

I shuffled over as he reached in and locked his arms around Baldy’s chest, and just then there was a loud
pop
followed by an angry hiss from somewhere under the hood. I glanced over at the dashboard and gasped—there were black blisters starting to bubble up in the center. The burly man flashed me a look as if to say, “Ready?” and I nodded.

He said, “One, two, three…” and then in one swift motion we heaved Baldy up out of the car. He let out a low moan, and I felt a shiver go down my spine—I couldn’t even imagine the pain he must have been in.

As we moved away from the car it jolted backward spastically off the grille of the truck, and then a high-pitched scream started from deep inside the engine. I heard a little voice in my head say,
It’s too late,
and I had a vision of us all flying through the air in a ball of fire and glass and twisted metal.

Someone yelled “Run!”—for all I know it could have been me—and then we were racing with Baldy in our arms as fast as we could through the crowd of gawkers who were running, too, pushing their way past us. The screaming sound was getting louder and louder, and by the time we got beyond the row of cars parked along the sidewalk it sounded like a steam whistle going off inside my head. We got Baldy down on the sidewalk as fast as we could, and then without even thinking my old training kicked in. I covered his body with mine, clenched my eyes shut, and waited.

The explosion shook the entire street.

The high-pitched screaming was gone now, replaced with an eerie silence, but I wasn’t about to move. I stayed huddled over Baldy’s body and counted to ten. In the movies, when a car blows up, two or three other cars usually blow up too just to make it extra loud and scary, but all I could hear was Baldy’s labored breathing and the dying wail of the siren pulling up to the scene. I opened my eyes to find the burly man standing at Baldy’s feet and looking back at the accident. The firemen were already scrambling to get their hoses off the truck, so I knew they’d put the fire out before it had a chance to spread.

The burly man squatted down and sighed. “Jesus, who the hell are you? Wonder Woman?”

For a split second, I thought of how as a little girl I would sneak down to the beach in the middle of the night and let the waves wash up over my bare feet. I pretended the sea foam was magic, and if I stood there long enough, the magic would seep up my legs into my whole body. Then I’d stretch my arms out. Once my body had soaked up enough magic, I could rise off the sand and fly through the air. I’d form a picture in my mind of where I wanted to go, and then my body would take me there. I could see through walls, so I’d hover over my school and look inside all the empty classrooms, or I’d go to the firehouse and sit on the roof to watch my father inside, playing cards and dominoes with his fireman friends.

I slipped my backpack off. “No, I used to be a sheriff’s deputy.”

“Ah. That explains it.” There were beads of perspiration on his forehead, and his dress shirt was wet under the arms.

I said, “You better sit down. You look like you’re about to keel over.”

“I probably am. You nearly got us killed!”

I looked down at Baldy’s face. His eyes were closed now, and his shirt was bunched up at his neck and soaked in blood. I loosened the top buttons just in case they were restricting his breathing and then mustered up a smile for my burly accomplice. “Well, thanks for your help. I don’t think I could have gotten him out of that car by myself.”

He nodded. “You’ve got blood on your lip.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll be okay.”

“I mean, you should probably get that off.”

I knew what he was getting at. There are all kinds of nasty blood-borne diseases, and whether or not Baldy here had any of them, I certainly didn’t want his blood anywhere near my mouth.

I pulled some gauze out of my backpack. “It’s okay. My car was at the back of the pileup. I think I bit my lip when I got rear-ended.”

He stood up and stuck his hands down in his pockets. “Oh, good. I mean, it’s not good you got rear-ended, but you might want to make sure you don’t get any of this guy’s blood on that.”

“What are you? A doctor?”

A faint look of guilt flashed across his face. He extended his hand. “Dr. Philip Dunlop.”

I shook his hand. “Oh. Dixie Hemingway. Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah. I guess I better go see what the driver of that truck looks like.”

A crowd of people had formed around us, and as he made his way through them I heard him say, “Alright, people, give ’em some air,” as if we were on some kind of TV hospital drama.