Cat in the Flock (Dreamslippers Book 1) Page 3

  "I bet she is," said Dave, who gave her a kiss on the cheek. "There's no better teacher than Amazing Grace."

  "What did she ever teach you?" Cat asked.

  "Didn't your grandmother ever tell you how we met?" asked Simon.

  "No, she didn't."

  "Well, Dave here went to her for spiritual guidance. He was forty-two, unhappily married—to a woman, let me add—and working as a corporate lawyer for a chemical company. After a couple sessions with your grandmother, he filed for divorce and quit his job. I met him two years later at one of Grace's legendary cocktail parties."

  "My grandmother, the matchmaker. And now you're helping those in need," Cat said, finishing the story. Dave was a lawyer who represented women pressing charges against abusive men.

  Dave put his hand in Simon's. "But most importantly, now I'm happy." The two smiled at each other.

  "I didn't know Granny Grace counseled people," she said.

  "It was part of what she did as a volunteer for a meditation center," Dave explained.

  "Yes, that was back when Dave was dabbling in New Age spiritualism, trying to find himself," said Simon, a teasing hint to his tone.

  "Don't mock it," Dave said. "It led me to you, didn't it?"

  "True," he admitted. Then, turning to Cat, he asked, "Has your grandmother taken you to her meditation class?"

  Cat laughed. "You mean, have I sat in the presence of Guru Dave? Yes, I have. And my spirit has transcended the physical sphere and is entirely without ego attachment."

  Simon snickered. "Oh, God. It's all over once the chanting begins."

  "At least I don't have to shave my head," Cat said. "Guru Dave thinks shaving hides what the divine has created."

  "I once had my chakras realigned," Dave said. "My heart chakra slipped down to my butt." The two men roared with laughter.

  "Now, how are you really doing?" Simon asked once the laughter died down.

  "Honestly speaking," Cat admitted, "I'm having the hardest time finding a job. I can't even get work as a barista. Of course, it would help if I'd ever made something besides my mom's drip coffee."

  "It's rough out there these days," said Simon, and Dave nodded in agreement.

  "We've halted construction on one of our condo projects," he continued. "The irony is, we have to pay to have a security guard on the premises."

  "Say," Simon faced Dave, looking as if a lightbulb had popped up over his head. "Maybe she could be our booth guard."

  "Yeah, yeah," agreed Dave. "The guy they've got out there now just sleeps all day. Cat would be great!"

  They turned to her. "We know it's beneath you, sweetie," Dave ventured, "but think about it. We'd love to have you as our rent-a-cop!"

  As they moved to greet some friends of theirs, Dave, the bigger jokester of the two, squeezed her arm. "Hey, Cat, did you see the satyr in the bathroom? Crazy what that Chihuly can do with glass, isn't it?"

  Simon pulled him away, making tsk-tsk noises. "Dave, I think that's only in the men's room." Then turning to Cat, he winked and said, "We'll call you about the guard gig."

  And that was that. Cat had her first full-time job. At first she thought it wouldn't be so bad. She imagined she would be like the security guards at the hospital where she'd been a candy striper: sit in an office all day, maybe even watch a little TV, walk around the building every hour, piece of cake.

  But when she showed up for her first day—make that first night, since she'd been given the highly despised 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift—she met Tony, the security company's general manager. Tony only came up to Cat's shoulder in height, and he had a row of broken, crooked, yellowing teeth. He smelled of cigarettes and mothballs.

  "I'm here to guard the building," Cat said by way of introduction. Conscious of favoritism, she didn't mention Simon and Dave.

  "You're not guarding a building," Tony barked at her.

  "I'm not? Well then, what am I guarding?"

  "A construction site."

  "Well, yes, I know they're not done building it. Am I guarding the equipment?"

  "No equipment," he replied. "The contractors cleared that out already."

  "Um, I don't understand," said Cat. "What is there?"

  "About three floors of an eight-story condom project," Tony said. He leered at Cat to see if she had heard his mispronunciation.

  She decided to ignore for a moment his attempt at wit, and the fact that this constituted sexual harassment. "I know that, but what am I protecting? Are they afraid the copper pipes will get stolen?" She knew copper was sometimes stolen out of abandoned buildings and sold for scrap.

  "Yeah, that's part of it, smart girl. The other part is liability. Someone gets hurt there, they sue your fairy friends." He made a little flying Tinker Bell motion with his hands when he said the bit about Simon and Dave.

  So Tony already knew her ties to the owners. This was not going in a good direction, and Cat hesitated to ask the next question—after all, this was Seattle, and it had been raining for the last three days.

  "Is there a roof?"

  "Only in part of the building, but that don't matter none to you. You'll stay outside the condo in the hut."

  Tony hadn't lied about the booth, and she thought maybe his word for it, "hut," was more accurate. Cat spent her first week sitting in a four-by-four hut with one tiny window. She had a radio that ran on batteries, her flashlight, and a clipboard of papers on which she was supposed to record her rounds. The bathroom was a port-a-john about ten feet away.

  To make the job even duller, Tony had carefully instructed her about how this security thing worked: "You make your rounds every hour on the hour. You take ten minutes to make the rounds, no more, no less. The rest of the time you stay in the hut."

  "Won't that make it kind of easy for someone to avoid security?"

  Tony looked at her with contempt. "Listen, smart girl, here's how it works. We contract with the client to provide security. In the contract we specify exactly what we will do, and we do exactly that. If a representative from the company comes by to check on you at five minutes after the hour, and you are in the hut, you are fired. On the other hand, if he comes by at fifteen minutes after the hour, and you are not in the hut, you are fired. Do I make myself clear?"

  "So what if someone steals something at half past the hour?"

  Tony had a surprising ability to convey disdain with his expressions. "It's an empty building. And you'll spot the thieves before they ever get around to ripping out any copper, trust me."

  The only bright spot for Cat was that Granny Grace let her drive Siddhartha to work, since by bus it would have meant three transfers and more than an hour-long trip to the Eastside. Granny Grace had taken Cat out in the old Mercedes for an instructional test run. The car handled beautifully; it was the smoothest ride she'd ever driven. On Cat's first day of work, Granny Grace had been on hand to bid her bon voyage.

  Cat sat in the driver's seat while her grandmother assessed her from outside. "The only thing missing is your attitude," she observed. "You look like someone borrowing a Mercedes for the day. You need to drive it like you own it."

  "Now how am I supposed to look like that when I'm wearing a rent-a-cop uniform?" Cat asked.

  "Put these on," Granny Grace ordered, handing her a pair of her Jackie O. shades.

  "Gran, it's dark and rainy outside."

  "So what? Now stick your chin out."

  "There. That's my granddaughter." Granny Grace smiled her approval. "Don't let the birds poop on Siddhartha," she added, patting the car's fender as Cat started it up. "He's used to the garage."

  Chapter 3

  Cat was standing in front of the building she was supposed to be guarding. The bit of yard leading up to it had been stripped of vegetation, and weeks of Seattle rain had turned it to mud, her feet sinking a bit as she walked. A dusting of snow had fallen, making the entire area seem new and pleasant instead of derelict. It smelled fresh and clean, like the first snowfall of winter back home. She looke
d down at her feet and saw a pair of expensive leather boots instead of the cheap Velcro-fastened shoes the security agency issued her. She was in someone else's dream.

  She walked up to the condo building and paused. Something was definitely wrong here. The building as she knew it was only partially built—construction had halted abruptly at floor three, though there were eight in Simon's architectural plans. But it looked now as if it had been finished. And now she could get inside. She wasn't supposed to go inside—she was meant to stay in her guard hut out front unless making rounds outside the building—but the door was wide open.

  The inside of the building consisted of grey concrete and looked vaguely utilitarian, like a school or hospital. She walked slowly, disoriented, nothing seeming familiar to her. Suddenly, down an empty corridor, she heard a faint squeaking, honking noise. It was a gosling, covered in mottled fuzz. It squeaked and honked frantically, as if afraid and missing its mother. Cat felt a rush of protective instinct then, as if she were its mother, and then a terrific fear mixed with anger hurled around inside her chest. She felt herself straining to push her feelings out through her body. She looked down at her arms. Sharp pinpricks of pain ran up and down the length of them as feathers burst through the fabric of her clothing. She felt her chin and nose grow and harden into a beak. She opened her mouth to let out a cry, and it came out as a loud hiss. Instinctively, she wrapped her wings around the gosling.

  Then a man carrying a rifle and wearing a hunting cap appeared around the corner. Cat hoisted the gosling onto her back, ran outside, and spread her wings. Just as he reached the doorway to the building, she was airborne. He fired a few shots in the air, which zinged past her. Cat could see Canada in the distance, represented by a multicolored map, the border between it and the United States showing as a red line. That was her destination. She pumped her wings harder, the gosling on her back crying in squeaks muted by the wind. If only she could get there...

  Cat woke up sweating. The clock in her guard booth showed 2:13 a.m.

  She had always wondered why these digital clocks seemed only to come in one color, devilish red. She'd fallen asleep on the job, which could be a firing offense—if anyone ever bothered to check on her. Cat knew by the feel of things that she'd been dreamslipping.

  There was a real problem with this particular dream, though. She knew from experience that she had to be physically close to the person dreaming. Maybe a couple hundred feet but not much more could separate her from the person whose dream she entered. Cat stepped outside the hut. The condo building was close enough, but it was vacant and locked up tight. The streets were lined with parked cars. If someone were asleep in one of them, they might be close enough. Sweeping her gaze down the row of cars, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, only what looked like upper-middle-class Seattleites' vehicles, a few Volvos, lots of Priuses, all of them empty.

  Cat walked around the booth and looked to the other side. Nothing but an empty space where the condo would have lovely landscaping, were it completed. Cat looked back at the incomplete condo—unlike in her dream, it was its proper three-story height. It was well within her range. Someone was sleeping nearby, and the most likely place was inside the structure.

  Cat felt torn about whether or not to investigate this dream further. She had been working for only five days, and she needed the job. Should she investigate and risk getting fired? She reasoned that it was her duty to protect the site.

  There was indeed a roof on only part of the building, so they'd placed a tarp on the other side, and she could hear the rattle and snap of the blue plastic as it shifted in the wind. It was supposed to be an empty building. It was not time for her rounds, and if the "representative of the company" that Tony mentioned came by and found her hut empty, she'd be out of a job. But then, in her five days (nights, really) on the job, she had yet to see anything more than raccoons knocking over trashcans. They had looked at her with an expression that seemed to say, "Hey lady, where's our food?" But even they didn't come back the next night.

  As Cat walked up to the front of the building, a flock of geese flew overhead, reminding her of her dream.

  Just as in the dream, she had to step carefully to avoid the worst of the mud, but there was no snow on the ground. The front door was locked as usual. Nothing had been tampered with. Cat walked around to the back of the building to check out the rear entrance. There was a padlock on a loose chain dangling from the handles on the doors. She touched it to find that the lock was only resting in place, as if someone wanted to make it look as if it were locked, but it hadn't been secured. She unhooked it from the chain, unwrapped the chain from the handles, opened the door, and stepped inside.

  The air smelled slightly musty, as if mold were just beginning to grow, but the sawdust smell was still strong enough to cover it up. It was not even slightly warmer inside the building. Cat rubbed her arms with her hands and shivered. It might even be colder in here than outside, she thought to herself. She flipped on her flashlight, and the faint glow showed bare walls that had nothing more than drywall covering studs. The floor was just plywood. Then she heard it: a noise coming from upstairs.

  Cat's heart began to thump in her chest, making her chide herself for not being the brave PI that Granny Grace was. She could search this building from one end to the other, which would take a while, or she could try to use some logic. She asked herself, if I were going to sleep here, where would I sleep? Whoever was trespassing would know there was a security guard who made regular rounds. Cat began to make her way upstairs. There were boards and tarps lining the stairwell, but there was a clear path in the center. She crouched down to look at the steps. She could see her own fresh footprints in the dust but could not make out if there were others besides hers.

  The rooms on the outside would be too cold, even on the first floor. The interior rooms would be the warmest and driest, especially on the second floor, on the side that had a roof. Cat turned the corner in the stairwell and stopped abruptly. The door to the second floor was open just a crack.

  She switched off her flashlight and cautiously approached the door, gently pushing it open. There was a sharp clatter. Cat turned on her light quickly and saw an empty paint can rolling on the plywood floor. She flashed her light in that direction. Nothing.

  The condo units did not have doors, so Cat quickly ducked into the nearest one on her left. Bare studs like bones allowed her to see almost from one end of the unit to the other. The bathroom was the room furthest from the cold building exterior, and it was also the only room in the unit that had drywall. Her father had worked in construction, so she knew at least something about the way buildings were put together. She made her way through the maze of wall studs, piles of two-by-fours, and holes in the flooring where some valuable amenity was going to be installed, until she reached the bathroom door. There was no knob, just an empty hole cut into the door where the knob would be fitted. Cat gently put her fingers into the hole and then swiftly yanked open the door. The room was empty.

  A series of muffled thumps reached her from the hallway. Footsteps. She sped back through the labyrinth of studs, nearly stepping in the hole in the floor. Cat jogged down the hallway to the opposite stairs on the far side of the building, playing her flashlight up and down. Someone had just raced out of one of the rooms and taken the back stairs. She was sure of it; there was dust in the air.

  When she reached the stairs, she stopped long enough to listen. There was a sharp bang. Cat was certain it was the downstairs door banging open against the wall. She jumped the first flight and landed with a loud thud on the turnaround, despite trying to move quietly. The door was open at the bottom, but jumping would likely mean stumbling out the door into an unknown situation. Cat took the stairs as quietly and quickly as she could. She landed at the base softly and carefully headed through the door.

  "Just what do you think you're doing?" It was a man's voice.

  She spun around in the direction of the voice. He was taller than Cat
, and he wore a starched white shirt and a loud tie with angular red-and-yellow stripes, a black jacket over it with the name M&O Security emblazoned in red on the front, the zipper slicing right through the middle of the ampersand in M&O so that his jacket seemed to shout "MO" at her. Having grown up in St. Louis, "MO" meant Missouri to her, the Show-Me State.

  "M-making my rounds," she said, at once aware that not only was whoever she'd been stalking getting away, but that her job was now on the line. This must be the "representative of the company" that Tony had told her about. For all intents and purposes, this man was her boss, though M&O didn't assign mere security guards with set supervisors. Any of these "representatives" could fire her.

  "Not in here, you're not," Mr. M&O Security declared. "Didn't Tony tell you under no circumstances should you enter the building?"

  "The back door wasn't secure," explained Cat. "I had to check it out."

  "Yeah, I noticed that," the man mused. "So, you didn't break in here?"

  "No," she said. "Didn't you see? The lock wasn't broken. It just wasn't clicked into the padlock all the way when I found it. I heard something, and I came to investigate."

  "Investigate, huh?" he replied. "What did you hear?"

  She tried to think fast. Crying would be too alarming. "Scuffling around," she said. "You know, like thieves casing the joint." As the phrase came out of her mouth, she inwardly rolled her eyes at herself. Thieves? Casing the joint? Really?

  The man chuckled. Actually chuckled. His laugh was the type of laugh for which the word "chuckled" had been coined.

  "Okay, Nancy Drew," he said. "I get that you've got a pretty dull job out here, sitting on your ass for eight hours doing nothing. It's easy to hear things, concoct some mystery to 'investigate.'" He used air quotes as he said "investigate."

  "And you got in here somehow without breaking the lock. Maybe one of us didn't shut the lock all the way. As for the people you heard, it was probably a bunch of meth heads looking for a place to squat. You ever get into a tussle with a tweaker?"