Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen by Wendelin Van Draanen Read Free Book Online

glare.
    “Well, that'll be
yours if
you don't scram!”
    Now, for T.J. that was a really good comeback, so I actually appreciated the humor in it. “Hey,” I said with a grin, “good one, Teej.”
    He pushed between me and his trash and slammed the lid down. “Get lost, ya hear me? I'm sicka youse.”
    “Of youse, T.J.?
Youse?”
    “Shaddup! I said scram!”
    “We're scrammin', we're scrammin'.” Then I Terminatored him with, “But we'll be back.”
    When we got to the sidewalk, Holly said, “Man, he's even uptight about his garbage.”
    “So where do you want to go now?”
    Holly shrugged. “Maybe Mr. T and Snowball were the only two cats.”
    I shook my head. “If you had two dead cats, would you go through all that trouble?”
    “But you said—”
    “Well, I'm revising my theory I mean two cats, okay, dump them in the same bin. Cover them up, no one'll know. But more than two cats, you'd want to spread them around. Reduce the risk of someone getting suspicious.”
    Holly sighed. “You're not ready to call it quits yet, are you?”
    “I'm not ready to go home,” I grumbled.
    “All right,” she said. “One more block.”
    So we dug through the trash of a travel agency.
    Nothing.
    We dug through the trash of a bank.
    Nothing.
    We tried a bridal shop and a jewelry store and a Mexican restaurant.
    Nothing.
    Everywhere we went, we were striking out. And by the time we were down to a carpet store, a restaurant, and a tattoo parlor, believe me, I was totally sick of digging through garbage.
    “Want to just skip it?” I asked, but Holly said, “Might as well finish the block.”
    So we checked out the Kojo Buffet Dumpster, and the minute Holly opened the lid, we both jumped back. “Oh gross!” Holly cried. “It sure
smells
like something's dead in there!”
    I held my breath as I poked through rotten vegetablesand fish heads, and brought the verdict in early. “Nothing!”
    “Pee-yew!” Holly said, lowering the lid.
    “Okay, how about I do Tiny's and you do the carpet place? I've had about enough of this.”
    “Fine by me,” Holly said.
    Tiny's Tattoo Parlor had the opposite sort of trash as the Kojo Buffet. It was tidy trash. All in white bags with knotted red drawstrings. It was a cinch to go through, too. I pulled out one sack, then the next, then the next. They were all light and just… tidy.
    And I was about to say, Nothing here, only when I pulled up the fourth sack, well, I did sort of a mental double take. There wasn't a cat under it or anything, but all the other sacks in Tiny's trash had been light.
    This one was heavy.
    And okay, I didn't think it was a cat, because I'd already carried around a cat in a sack twice and pretty much knew what that felt like.
    But still, I was curious. So I worked open the knot and spread apart the sides. And in a flash I knew—there was a sicko on the loose in Santa Martina.
    “Hey, Holly!” I called, but then
she
called, “Bingo!”
    “What?”
    “I found one!” She waved me over to the carpet-store trash bin. “Come here!”
    I closed the sack and hauled it over to where Holly was proudly pointing out a dead cat. “We weren't crazy after all!”
    Hers was a big cat. Dark gray. Smooth coat. Whitepaws. Well fed. And even though there was dried blood on it and chunks of fur were missing, you could tell it had once been a real handsome cat.
    “What's the tag say?”
    Holly turned it and read, “Prince.” Then she noticed my trash sack. “What's that?”
    “Two cats.”
    “Two?”
    “Yup. And it's not a pretty sight.”
    She checked them out and said, “They look heavy. We'd better get a different trash bag for Prince.”
    So we emptied one of the tidy sacks from the tattoo parlor, and we'd just worked it around Prince when a guy in a blood-stained apron came out of the Kojo Buffet.
    Now, this guy's apron was bad enough, but when he started coming at us, shouting, “Hey, you girls there! What you doing?” and waving a
cleaver
in the air,