Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs by Blaize Clement Read Free Book Online Page B

other because Paco deals with the dregs of humanity without showing a shred of sympathy, but guilt at cramping Ella’s stylewith a leash had reduced him to pleading with her to eat twenty-dollar-a-pound tuna.
    In the kitchen, I loaded the dishwasher and helped Michael stow left overs in the refrigerator. Then I hugged him good night and headed for bed, with a detour to tell Paco and Ella good night. Paco had stretched out on the chaise and Ella was sitting on his chest purring at him, so I guess she’d forgiven him for trying to keep her safe.
    Upstairs, I lowered the storm shutters, checked phone messages, brushed my teeth, and shed my clothes. By nine o’clock, I was in bed with a book. By ten o’clock, I’d turned out the lights and was asleep. When you get up at four A.M. , bedtime comes early.
    In my sleep, I heard the subdued purring sound of Paco’s Harley, and knew that he was headed for some undercover job.
    It was after one when I woke to the sound of somebody banging on the hurricane shutters and screaming my name. I shot out of bed in a momentary panic. It took a few seconds to get my bearings and recognize the voice hysterically shouting my name.

6
    T he thing about going crazy, really, truly crazy with no more pretending that you’re even a little bit sane, is that once you’ve been there you don’t have to wonder anymore what it’s like. Crazy is a dark ugly town. Stay there long enough and you’ll learn all the roads, all the houses and gas stations, until you figure out that crazy is just an alternate territory. You can live there if you want to, or you can leave. It’s your choice. There’s a kind of strength in that, a weird kind of power that people who’ve never gone crazy don’t know about. When you leave crazy and come back to normal, you feel a special closeness to people who were loyal to you while you were there—like the woman calling my name.
    Sleep dazed, I grabbed a robe to cover my naked self and ran to open the door to the woman who’d been my best friend all through high school. Maureen had been a total airhead then, but fun. Her father had abandoned her the same way my mother had abandoned me. Being the kids whose parents hadn’t loved them enough tostay with them had drawn us together like orphaned lambs huddled away from the herd. In our senior year, Maureen had fallen in love with a sweet guy named Harry Henry. Everybody had expected them to marry, but right after we graduated Maureen had broken Harry’s heart by marrying a rich old man from South America.
    She and I lost contact after that. I went to college for two years and then to the police academy. Maureen learned to travel in private jets and hang out with movie stars and European princesses. By the time I married Todd, a fellow deputy, I was deep in the hard-edged world of law enforcement, and Maureen was deep in the soft world of luxury. She sent me a baby gift when Christy was born, but we no longer saw each other.
    But after Todd and Christy were killed and I fell into a bottomless pit of crazed agony, Maureen had shown up one night with a tremulous smile and a bottle of Grey Goose. She had only come that one time, but I’d always been grateful for it. With Maureen, it hadn’t been necessary to pretend to be strong or rational. I could be what I truly was, broken and empty and full of fury. And baring my true self had helped me find the thread that would eventually lead me back to sanity.
    Now it was Maureen screaming into the night for my help.
    I ran barefoot to hit the electric control to raise the metal shutters. I saw Maureen’s feet step back a bit as the shutters folded into the soffit above the door. Her feet were bare like mine. Even sleep stunned and addled, I knew her naked toes were an especially bad omen.
    When the shutters were head-high, I opened the glass-paned french doors and Maureen hurled through. She was sobbing so hard I couldn’t make out what she was saying, just that somebody was