Read Cat Bearing Gifts for Free Online Page A

to find out, Ryan and Clyde will know where to come, and they’ll come to get me, too, she thought, comforting herself . But how soon? Soon enough, before those coyotes up there find me, soon enough to save my little cat neck?
    Maybe she should go back down, slip into the medics’ van while they were busy, and the cops were all working the crash scene. She watched another set of headlights coming down the mountain on the other side of the slide, watched a lone sheriff’s car park beyond the wrecked truck. A lone officer got out and started across to join the others. The back doors of the white van stood open. In a flash she could be down the cliff and inside, hiding among the metal cabinets and oxygen tanks and all that tangle of medical equipment. I could hide in there close to Lucinda and Pedric and, at the hospital—a strange hospital, a strange town—I could hide in the bushes outside and watch the door and wait for Ryan and Clyde or maybe for Charlie to come, and then . . .
    Oh, right. And if those medics spot me in their van trying to catch a ride, they’ll try to corner me in that tight space. If they shut the doors, and surround me, and I can’t get out and one of them grabs me, what then? They’ll lock me up somewhere, to keep me safe? One of the cops will shut me in his squad car? No, she was too upset and uncertain to go back. Taking the phone in her mouth again, she moved from the top of the slide on up into the bushes that stretched away to the edge of the dense pine woods, damp and dark and chill. There she laid the phone down among dead leaves and pine needles and pawed in the single digit for the Damens’ house phone. Crouched there listening to it ring, she watched the lighted road below as the medics slid Pedric into their van, working over him, attaching him to an oxygen tank. Lucinda sat on a gurney as the other two medics splinted and taped her shoulder and arm. The phone rang seven times, eight. On the twelfth ring, she hung up. Why didn’t the tape kick in? The Damens’ answering machine, which stood upstairs on Clyde’s desk, was so incredibly ancient it still used tape, but Clyde wouldn’t get a new one, he said it worked just fine, you simply had to understand its temperament. Right , Kit thought, with a little hiss.
    She tried Wilma Getz, but she got only the machine. Where was everyone? She left a garbled message, she said there’d been an accident, that she had Lucinda’s cell phone, that it was on vibrate so the cops wouldn’t hear it ring. She hung up, disappointed by the failure of the electronic world to help her, and worrying about Lucinda and Pedric. What might happen to them on their way to the hospital, some delayed reaction that would be even beyond the medics’ control? Or what might happen in the hospital? If ever a cat’s prayers should be heard, if ever a strong hand were to reach down in intervention for a little cat’s loved ones, that hand should come reaching now. This was not Lucinda’s or Pedric’s time to move on to some other life, she wouldn’t let it be that time. Punching in the Damens’ number again, she was crouched with her ear to the phone when she realized that, down on the road, Lucinda had awakened and was arguing with the medics, her voice raised in anger. Kit broke off the call, and listened.
    â€œYou can’t leave her, you must find her. If I call her, she’ll come to me. I won’t go with you, neither of us will, unless you bring her with us.”
    The two medics just looked at her, more puzzled than reluctant. The taller one said, “You can’t find a runaway cat, in the dark of night, it’ll be scared to death, panicked. No cat would—”
    The dark-haired medic said, “We’ll send someone, the local shelter . . .”
    â€œNo,” Lucinda said fiercely. “I want her with us. You can’t take us by force unless