Chapter 12: The Angel

"Dilly!"

I leaned out the window.

The porch roof ran under it, and a rose trellis went down the side of the house.

There were small muddy prints on the shingles.

Teo was already shouting for his men.

Lights came on all over the grounds. Somebody's radio crackled.

The guard on the back gate came running with his tie undone and his hair flat on one side.

He'd been asleep.

Teo looked at him once, and the man went white.

"Later," Teo said. "Find her."

The gray cat shot past my legs, down the stairs and out the front door, which somebody had left open.

She didn't run around the house. She ran straight down the drive and out the gate and turned left onto the street.

"Teo. The cat."

"What about the cat?"

"She knows where Dilly is."

He looked at me.

Then he grabbed his keys.

I ran after the cat in my socks.

A moment later his car pulled up alongside me with the passenger door open, and I jumped in without it stopping.

"Follow the cat," I said.

"I'm following the cat."

"Faster."

"It's a cat, Etta."

The cat ran under the streetlights, a fat gray shape with her tail up.

Down past the park. Across an empty intersection against the light. Under a parked bus and out the other side.

Teo drove behind her at fifteen miles an hour with his jaw locked, and three black cars followed us with their headlights on.

It must have looked like a funeral for a cat.

We went down the hill into Bloomfield, along Liberty, past his own dark restaurant.

I knew where she was going before she got there.

The cemetery's back gate was open.

The cat slipped through it and was gone down the hill.

Teo stopped the car and we ran.

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