The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives by Clement Blaize Clement John

Author:Clement, Blaize, Clement, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466848511
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

16

As I made my way south toward the end of the Key, the sun was dead center in the sky and there were wavy lines of heat radiating off the asphalt up ahead. My mind was swimming. Could there have been something about Mr. Hoskins that I had overlooked? Something he was hiding? He had seemed so harmless and sweet, even grandfatherly.

Of course, the fact that I liked Mr. Hoskins should probably have been a little red flag. I don’t know why, but I seem to be drawn to people who give off a certain kind of energy, people who are just a little bit unhinged. I’m not sure if they’re the flame and I’m the moth or vice versa, but I do know one thing: People that are a little bonkers can be a lot of things, but they’re rarely boring. Unfortunately for me, there’s a very fine line between crazily interesting and interestingly crazy, and it occasionally gets me in trouble.

The point is, I had liked Mr. Hoskins right away. He just seemed to have a good soul. The idea that he might have been busily hiding a dead body in the back of the store while I browsed around the aisles made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It just wasn’t possible. It’s true that Mr. Hoskins had seemed a little eccentric and odd, but he certainly didn’t seem capable of that kind of evil, not to mention hoisting a deadweight over the railing of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

Then again, I know from firsthand experience that with a strong enough dose of adrenaline pumping through its veins, the human body is capable of almost anything.

I decided to make a quick stop at the drugstore across the street from the diner. Murderer or not, Mr. Hoskins had an agreement with me, and I felt like I’d let him down. The fact that he was wholly unaware of our agreement didn’t deter me in the least, and I had a plan to fix it. All I needed was some supplies: a pack of bright construction paper, some big markers, and a staple gun.

My plan was to put signs up all along Ocean Boulevard, and maybe all over the Key. I didn’t have a picture of Cosmo, but I felt as if I’d gotten a pretty good look at him, or at least good enough to come up with a fairly accurate description of his two main traits: big and orange. I didn’t much like the idea of putting up signs with my phone number for every loony-tune on the street to see, but I didn’t think I had much of a choice—I had to do everything in my power to find that cat.

I even considered calling Detective McKenzie and asking if she might consider getting me back in the bookstore to look for a picture of Cosmo I could use for the signs. Perhaps Mr. Hoskins had a photo in that desk in the back

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