Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Read Online Free

up some pieces of paper. Then I went back to the bathroom and brushed my teeth again, even though I’d done it earlier at four o’clock. It didn’t sweeten the nasty taste of guilt in my mouth. Even with Patsy Cline belting out lyrics designed to make life seem simple, right now mine seemed more complicated than I could handle.
    In my head, I heard a voice quoting the Bible—or maybe it was Shakespeare—“Let the dead bury the dead,” which doesn’t make any sense at all when you think of it, but then nothing was making much sense right then, least of all me.
    I still had a couple of cats and the iguana to take
care of, so I grabbed my backpack, went out the French doors, and clattered down the stairs while the remote lowered the storm shutters behind me.
    Michael stuck his head out his kitchen door and yelled, “Want some breakfast?”
    Michael cooks the way other people breathe; it’s a necessary rhythm to his life. If the world were poised for a direct hit from a meteor, Michael would probably ladle out soup. Since he’s one of the world’s best chefs, a lot of doomed people would line up to get it and feel a lot more cheerful about their prospects.
    Ordinarily, I would have jumped at the chance to have one of Michael’s breakfasts, but I didn’t want him scrutinizing me this morning. He had been almost as traumatized as I was by the things that happened after I found the last dead man. If he learned I’d found another one, he was liable to insist that I get another line of work. One that didn’t have so many corpses in it.
    I said, “No, thanks. I just came home to get the Bronco. I’ve still got two cats and an iguana.”
    His face brightened. “No kidding? An iguana?”
    “Yep. Haven’t met him yet.”
    We grinned at each other with one of those coded memory-smiles that siblings have. Our grandfather had brought home a near-dead baby iguana when Michael was about twelve, and we had helped give it round-the-clock antibiotics sold for chickens—iguanas and chickens, having evolved from the same reptilian ancestor, have identical respiratory and digestive systems. By the time the baby iguana had gone from sick black to healthy green, Michael and I were both enchanted with it. For reasons that now escape me, we named it Bobby.

    My grandmother never took to Bobby the way the rest of us did, and when he grew to be about four feet long, she banished him from the house. He lived the rest of his life in the trees, just coming down to nibble on the hibiscus and eat fruits and vegetables we left out for him. Except for a time when he sacrificed his tail to some unknown predator, his life was peaceful. His tail grew back darker and shorter than the original, but he seemed quite happy. He lived over ten years and died during an unexpected freeze that wiped out Florida’s citrus crop. When he died, our grandfather wept. Neither Michael nor I had ever seen our grandfather shed a tear before, and his grief over an iguana’s death had been as sobering as losing Bobby.
    In the carport, a couple of great blue herons were sitting on the hood of my Bronco, where they’d taken shelter from the rain. Down on the shore, black gulls were putting on an aerialist show a few feet above the waves, while a few snowy egrets ignored them and made fresh tracks in the sand as they gathered up sand crabs washed in by the rain. I shooed the herons away and pulled the Bronco out of the carport onto the drive that winds to Midnight Pass Road. I told myself I wasn’t going to think about the dead guard again, but I knew I was lying.
    For the next hour, I concentrated on feeding and grooming the two cats on my schedule. I played chase-the-peacock-feather with each of them, and I cleaned their litter boxes. Before I left them, I turned on their TV sets—the wild-life channel, but with the sound muted—and made sure they had plenty of fresh water. They both gave me a couple of tail swishes to let me
know they approved of my