Raining cat sitters and dogs : a Dixie Hemingway mystery / #5

Curiosity is always a killer for former police officer Dixie Hemingway. Even a trip to pick up her parrot at the veterinarian's office is bound to turn up something... curious. ..and the teenager Dixie meets in the waiting room is no exception. Jaz, as she calls herself, is inconsolable after her stepfather ran over a rabbit with his car. Really? Dixie's animal-like instinct tells her that something's not quite right about this Jaz--and she's going to make it her purr sonal business to find out more. Even if that means going on a wild-goose chase, from the pampered luxury of Siesta Key's exclusive resorts to the gang wars being fought in the back alleys, to ferret out the truth. And not get caught with her tail between her legs in the process...

1

Every now and then you meet somebody you like on sight, even when everything about them says they’re bad news. Jaz was like that. The first time I saw the girl, she was sobbing hysterically and rushing across Dr. Layton’s parking lot with a towel-wrapped bundle in her arms. A large man trailed behind her with reluctance making heavy weights on his feet.

She looked about twelve or thirteen, with beginner breasts making plum-sized bulges under a stretchy tube top, and the thin, coltish awkwardness of adolescence. She had cocoa-colored skin and a long mop of tangled black curls. Her cutoffs were frayed and had the mulled look that clothes get when they’ve been slept in.

The man was around fifty, with pale jowls beginning to sag, and graying hair that looked more mowed than barbered. He wore a navy blue suit and a paler blue tie, both too unwrinkled to be anything except polyester. With his pulled-back shoulders and drip-dry shirt taut across his chest, he looked like a junior high school principal who had learned too late that he hated kids.

I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who. I’m a pet sitter on Siesta Key, an eight-mile barrier island off Sarasota, Florida. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, but something happened almost four years ago that caused me to go howling mad-dog crazy for a little while, so I left with the department’s blessing. I’m still a little bit tilted, I guess, but not more than the average person. Like they say, a person who’s totally sane is just somebody you don’t know very well.

Now that I’m more or less normal, I have a pet-sitting business that I enjoy, and I end every day feeling like I matter to the world. I mostly take care of cats, with a few dogs and an occasional rabbit or hamster or bird. No snakes. I refer snakes to other sitters. Not that I’m snake-phobic. Not much, anyway. It just gives me the shivers to drop little living critters into open snake mouths.

I had come to the vet’s that morning to pick up Big Bubba, a Congo African Grey parrot who had seemed under the weather when I’d called on him the day before. When a bird sneezes and looks lethargic on his perch, I don’t take any chances. As it turned out, Big Bubba had merely been having a bad day. Dr. Layton had called the night before to tell me I could pick him up that morning, so I was there to take him home.

The crying girl and the man went in ahead of me. When I got to the reception desk, one of Dr. Layton’s assistants was taking the bundle from the girl, and the receptionist was making sympathetic sounds and patting the girl on the shoulder. She was crying so hard that her words came out slurred and broken.

The only thing I could clearly understand was, "He hit him!"

The receptionist and assistant looked up sharply at the man, who heaved a great sigh.

"It’s a wild rabbit," he said. "It ran in front of my car. It was an accident."

The girl turned and screamed at him. "But it matters! It may just be a rabbit, but it matters!"

Now that I could see her face, she was older in the eyes than I’d expected, and they a surprisingly pale aqua-marine. With her tawny skin and wild black curls, the improbable eyes testified to ancestors from all over the world, a coming together of genes that can either be a societal blessing or curse. From the set to her jaw that was both defiant and desperate, I guessed in her case it had not been a blessing.

Everything about her said, I’m young, I’m pissed, and I’m miserable.

The man said, "Okay, okay, okay," and looked around with jittery uneasiness.

Dr. Layton bustled out from the backstage labyrinth of examining rooms and boarding areas. A comfortably plump African-American woman roughly my age, which is thirty-three, Dr. Layton has the ability to soothe and command at the same time. With a quick glance at the injured rabbit lying suspiciously limp in its towel covering, she turned briskly to the man.

"It ran in front of your car?"

"It was an accident. I wasn’t going more than ten miles an hour. It wasn’t like I was speeding."

The girl seemed close to a complete meltdown. She buried her face in her hands, her whole body quivering with the intensity of her sobbing. The receptionist and the vet’s assistant looked like they might cry at any minute, just in sympathy, and people and animals in the waiting area stretched their necks to look at her.

Dr. Layton said, "What’s your name, dear?"

She said, "Jaz." At the same time, the man said, "Rosemary."

The girl shot him a hostile glare, and Dr. Layton studied him.

She said, "Are you this girl’s father?"

Too firmly, he said, "Stepfather."

Dr. Layton put a calm hand on the girl’s shoulder. "Jaz, go sit down while I check the bunny. I’ll let you know if I can do anything for it."

To me, she said, "Dixie, do you mind waiting a few minutes? I want to have a word with you."

I nodded mutely and followed the man and girl to the waiting area. His hammy hand was wrapped around her upper arm in a tight vise, while she continued to heave with sobs. When she felt the edge of the chair against her legs, she shrank into it and drew her knees up to her face, sobbing as if she had lost her closest friend.

I took a seat across from her. Around the room, a handful of people and their pets were looking at her with sympathetic eyes. Two seats away from her, Hetty Soames was there with a new puppy. She gave me a quick smile and discreet wave, the way people do when they see somebody they know at a funeral, and then turned her attention back to the crying girl.

If Hetty weren’t so busy raising future service dogs, she could be an Eileen Fisher model. An ageless take-charge woman, she has sleek silver hair and looks elegant in loose linen pants and tunics that would look like pajamas on any other woman. The new pup with her was the latest in a series of pups she raises for Southeastern Guide Dogs. Raising future service dogs isn’t like raising other puppies. They need the same love and attention, but they have to be socialized differently. Those little guys will one day need to focus solely on doing their job and not get sidetracked by things other dogs might explore out of curiosity. Raising them takes thousands of hours of patient work, not to mention a heart big enough to pour out lots of love on a puppy and then hand it over to somebody else. Hetty has been doing it for years, and the only way you can tell she’s sad when a young dog leaves is that the spark in her eyes dims for a few weeks, only to come back when a new pup comes to live with her.

The girl’s distress obviously bothered Hetty. It bothered her new pup too. A three-month-old golden Lab-shepherd mix, his little ears were up and he was watching the girl with concentrated attention. We all were.

Jaz was like the mutt you see at a shelter, the one that reason tells you is not a good choice to take home, but the one that tugs at your heart. Huddled as she was in the chair, we could see that the golden sparkles had mostly worn away from her green rubber flip-flops. Her toenails were painted black, and several of her toes wore gold or silver rings. Her ankles were amateurishly tattooed with flower bracelets, but a well-done black tattoo in the shape of a dagger ran several inches up the outside of her right ankle.

If I’d got a tattoo when I was her age, my grandmother would have sanded it off with a Brillo pad.

The man kept making uneasy shushing sounds, as if the girl’s despair embarrassed him. Teenage angst affects people the same way that a pet peeing on the furniture does—it brings out basic tr

Continues...
Excerpted from Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs by Clement, Blaize Copyright © 2010 by Clement, Blaize. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Pet-sitter Dixie Hemingway Never Would Have Guessed That Her Trip Tot He Veterinarian's Office Would Be Anything But Ordinary. But When She Meets A Teenage Girl Named Jaz In The Waiting Room, The Ordinary Is Turned On Its Head, And Dixie Is Led On A Wild-goose Chase Of Epic Proportions.--from Publisher's Description. Blaize Clement. A Thomas Dunne Book.