Cat's Eye

Book 2: Cat

by William W. Johnstone

Genres: Horror; Supernatural suspense; Suspense

Synopsis

Book by William W. Johnstone

Release date: October 1, 1999

Publisher: Pinnacle

Print pages: 400

Sample

The lightning woke him.

He sat up in bed and rubbed the sleep from his disbelieving eyes.

Strangest storm he had ever witnessed. Lightning, but no thunder. Fierce lightning that lit up the skies and lashed at the earth with hard, sulfurous bolts. Maybe the thunder was hidden behind the terrible barrage of lightning striking the earth, Carl thought. Yeah, that had to be it, ’cause the lightning was pounding the earth like incoming artillery rounds, coming in without a break between the shatteringly bright flashes.

There had to be thunder. Right?

Sure. The thunder was there. Had to be. The sounds of lightning slamming the ground were covering the thunder, that’s all. Something was damn sure causing the windows in the house to rattle.

Then the lightning struck so close it crackled the young man’s hair as the electricity danced over his flesh.

The lightning ceased as abruptly as it began. But that last hard thrust had knocked out the lights. Carl looked at his radio on the night stand. Where the digital numbers had been there was nothing but black.

Just like the room.

Black. Silent.

Then a very soft and odd sound reached the young man. A throaty sound. He couldn’t place it. He listened. The sound stopped. Probably the wind, and nothing more.

He grinned in the darkness. Quoth the Raven.

Carl stopped grinning and tensed as the loud scratching began in the room next to his bedroom. Cold goose bumps suddenly began spreading all over his flesh as he remembered.... No! He fought that memory away. And stay away, damnit! he shouted in his mind.

He’d just moved into this house. That room was empty. There was nothing in that room. Absolutely nothing.

The scratching continued. Harder this time. A frantic sound to it.

Carl tossed back the covers and swung his feet to the floor.

He almost cried out as his bare feet touched the floor.

The hardwood floor was like ice.

The bedroom suddenly turned cold. Very cold. Carl sat on the edge of the bed—forgetting momentarily the cold floor beneath his feet—and stared in astonishment as his breath frosted the air when he exhaled.

In June?

That strange sound—the first strange sound—began as soon as the scratching stopped.

It was louder now, and Carl knew what it was. He wished he didn’t.

It was a slow, steady, ominous purring, the low vibratory sound causing Carl to grind his teeth together.

Steady now, boy, he told himself. Just calm down. All that is over and done with. Several years back.

But the memory of that time had not and would never completely leave his mind.

The purring stopped. No more scratching was heard. The room temperature became normal. The floor was no longer ice cold. The electricity came back on, the digital hands on the clock radio blinking on—blink, blink, blink. He would have to reset the damn thing.

Blink. Purr. Scratch.

It started again.

Carl picked up his watch from the nightstand. Five o’clock. He had a pre-arranged meeting with a client at ten, and it was a good hour-and-a-half or two-hour drive, so it was about time to get up anyway.

Blink. Purr. Scratch.

He jammed his feet into his house slippers and stalked into the hall, throwing open the door to the empty room and clicking on the lights.

The room was empty. No cats or rats or mice or squirrels or any other little furry critters.

He stepped further into the room, his eyes wandering over the baseboards, searching for scratch marks. There were none that he could see.

The door slammed closed behind him.

The lights went out, plunging the room into darkness.

Purr. Scratch.

Daphne (“For God’s sake call me Dee”) Conners opened her eyes as her radio clicked on, filling the darkness with music. She lay in bed for a few moments with her eyes closed, enjoying that time between sleep and being fully awake. She vaguely recalled being awakened just before dawn by a strangely silent lightning storm. Or had she dreamed it?

Then she remembered that her father had set up a meeting for her that morning. At ten A.M. Here at her A-frame in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her father worried too much, she thought, pushing back the covers and slipping from the warmth of the bed. She was very capable of taking care of herself. Besides, all writers get crank calls and ugly, nasty letters. Sometimes fans became obsessed with their favorite authors and said and did things they didn’t mean. But they really didn’t want to hurt anybody.

Or at least that’s what she kept telling herself. Over and over. What had been happening was so damned weird she wasn’t even sure it was happening. Maybe what she needed was a long rest.

But the very idea of her father hiring a private detective to watch her for a few weeks! He’d probably be some seedy sort with little beady eyes and bad breath, she thought as she walked to the bathroom to shower.

Dee was that rarity in the writing business. At the very young age of twenty-three she had two bestsellers in the historical romance field behind her, and had just signed a very lucrative contract for five more novels.

Dee was headstrong, extremely independent, basically a loner, and very pretty. Not beautiful, but more than cute; “pretty” summed it up. She had grown impatient with college—the University, of course; unthinkable to go anywhere else—and dropped out her sophomore year. Her mother had cried and her father had stomped around and blustered and hollered . . . none of it to any avail. Dee had started writing full-time.

She certainly didn’t have to work. At anything. She was independently wealthy, having come into her inheritance from her grandfather at age eighteen. But she wanted to write, and by God, nothing was going to keep her from that. She wanted to write about Virginia—warts and all. And Virginia had just as many warts as any other state.

Her first book brought that out. Painfully so. She was immediately dropped from membership in several clubs she belonged to in and around Charlottesville. Which was fine with Dee, since she never attended any of the functions anyway. The stuffy, snooty, insufferable bitches bored the hell out of her. And their yuppie husbands were even worse; they reminded her of lapdogs.

Hell with them all.

She thought briefly of that strange, silent lightning storm she’d witnessed just before dawn. Odd, she thought, as she fixed toast and a poached egg for breakfast. With a fresh cup of coffee at hand, she went into her office and turned on the computer. She could get a couple of hours’ work done before Sam Spade showed up.

Then the phone rang.

Carl leaned against the hall wall, sweat pouring from his body and his chest heaving. He had been forced to kick the door open. Now his foot hurt. The damn knob just would not turn. And that scratching and purring had seemed to intensify in the closed and pitch-black room.

He had panicked. And that was not like Carl. He was too much like his dad to lose control the way he’d done.

He pushed away from the wall and looked at the shattered door. The lights had clicked back on as he had bolted into the hall.

He forced himself to calm down. He walked into the bedroom, made up his bed, and laid out the clothes he would wear that day. His boss had told him he would probably be staying over—maybe for a week, or longer—and to pack accordingly. He packed while the coffee was brewing, then showered and dressed. There had been no more purring or scratching.

He put his suitcase and garment bag in the car and went back into the house, turning off the coffee machine and checking to see that all the lights were off. He stepped out onto the front porch, hearing the door lock as he closed it.

He also heard something else.

Purr. Scratch.

“Hell with you,” Carl muttered, and stepped off the porch, putting his back to the strangeness.

Or so he thought.

It was her mother.

Dee had braced herself for another obscene call. Relief flooded her when her mother’s voice sprang into her ear. They chatted for a time.

No, the private detective had not yet arrived.

Yes, the guest cottage was ready.

She would be just fine.

She was sure he would be a very nice man.

Thank you.

Goodbye, Mother.

Pushing her slight irritation aside, Dee returned to her computer and lost herself in work. Two hours passed quickly and she was satisfied with her work. She had found the hook and the manuscript was coming along nicely.

She looked at the clock. Nine-thirty She didn’t want to start another chapter only to be interrupted by Charlie Chan, so she shut the computer down and walked out onto the porch of the A-frame and sat down.

She caught a glimpse of something moving at the edge of the timberline just as a very foul odor reached her. The movement was probably made by a deer, but that odor was something else. It wasn’t from a skunk, she knew that. The smell was . . . filthy, obscene. The word evil came into her mind.

A breeze sprang up and the odor was gone.

Dee settled back into her chair to wait for the private eye.

“She sure likes seclusion,” Carl said to himself as he guided the car up the grade, deep timber on both sides of the road.

But it sure was beautiful country.

He had left the Interstate just before reaching the Blue Ridge Mountains and cut south on a state road. Following the directions given him, he turned onto a county road and drove deeper in the mountains. He knew only the name of the person he was to meet with. Nothing else about her.

Daphne, for Christ’s sake!

Probably seventy years of age and an old maid, he had speculated. Looks under the bed every night for spooks and things that go bump in the night . . . secretly hoping to find a man under there.

Carl Garrett had wanted to be a cop all his life; to be just like his father, Dan Garrett, who had been the sheriff of Ruger County. But his life had been shattered by his father’s death. And Carl had yet to pick up all the shattered pieces. He had dropped out of college at the end of his junior year, where his major had been law enforcement, and gone to work for a private investigations firm in Richmond, with offices all over America and in a dozen foreign countries. The firm specialized in criminal investigations. Carl found he had a flair for the work and moved up rapidly within the firm. He had done a little bodyguard work—escorting, as they called it—but not much. The firm had only taken this new job, according to his boss, because Mister Conners was one of the richest men in the world and hadn’t even blinked at the fee, inflated by the boss because he didn’t like his men acting as babysitters and had hoped to discourage Conners.

“I should have known better,” he had told Carl over the phone.

Conners had handed the boss a signed check and told him to assign his best man to it and fill in the numbers.

Carl got the nod.

He turned into the driveway and headed up to the A-frame structure built on the flats. The house and about an acre of land was surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence. He smiled when he spotted the young woman sitting on the long front porch. If that was Daphne Conners, he had a feeling he was going to like this job. As he got out of the car and drew nearer, getting a better look at her, he was sure of it.

“Miss Conners?”

“Yes. You’re the private eye?”

Carl laughed. “I guess some people still call us that. I’m Carl Garrett.”

“You don’t look like a keyhole-peeker.”

“We don’t do much of that, Miss Conners. Ninety-five percent of our work is in the criminal field.”

“But money talks, right? Especially my father’s money.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Miss Conners. I’m a field investigator, not the head of the firm.”

“Stop calling me Miss Conners.” She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side. “How do I know you’re not the man who’s been . . . bothering me?”

Carl removed his credentials from a back pocket and laid them on the porch floor, then backed away. His I.D., with photo, showed him to be a bonded and licensed private investigator in the state of Virginia. In addition there was his VHP gun permit. Also included, thanks to his dead father’s connections in certain government agencies, was a Federal gun permit, allowing him to carry a concealed weapon in any state in the Union.

“Very impressive.” Dee brushed back a lock of light brown hair as she waved him on up to the porch and pointed toward a chair. Handing the leather case back to him, she said, “You sure are young to have all those credentials. Nothing from INTERPOL?”

Carl caught the twinkle in her pale blue eyes. “Oh, I’m working on that, Miss . . . ah, Daphne.”

She grimaced. “For God’s sake, call me Dee. Coffee?”

“That would be nice.”

“Sugar and cream?”

“Just sugar. One.”

“Sit still, I’ll get it.” She smiled at him. “Enjoy the view.”

He did, as she walked into the house, but it wasn’t of the Blue Ridge Mountains. About five-five, he guessed; very nicely put together. And he accurately pegged her as a person who would speak her mind whenever she got damn ready to do so.

He wondered why her father had insisted she have a bodyguard. Not that she didn’t have a lovely body to guard, mind you.

In the three and a half years that he’d worked for the agency, Carl had acted as escort for perhaps half a dozen or so very rich people. And he had come to the conclusion that with most of them, their elevators didn’t go all the way to the top.

A foul odor drifted past his nose, and he grimaced. “Jesus!” he said. “That cesspool sure needs some work.”

Carl did not see the figure standing at the edge of the woods, looking at him through eyes of reddened rage.

The coffee was very good, and unlike any that Carl had ever drunk. He guessed that she ground her own beans and they were very expensive.

“The name Garrett is somehow familiar to me,” she said, looking at him.

“My father was sheriff of Ruger County. He was killed several years ago.”

“Ahhh! Yes. I don’t think anybody ever got the full story of that . . . incident. Yeah, I was a junior at the university when that happened.”

“So was I.”

“No kidding! What house?”

Carl grinned. “None. I never went in much for that fraternity stuff. What sorority were you in?”

She returned his grin and her face was suddenly pixyish. “None. Much to the mortification of my mother. One of Virginia’s first families and all that,” she said, acquiring a pretty good English accent, “don’t you know?”

“Oh, quite!” He managed a passable cockney accent.

“I dropped out,” she told him.

“So did I.”

They shared a laugh on the porch and both of them leaned back in the chairs, enjoying the coffee and each other’s company and the quiet of the mountains.

“I hate to bring up business,” Carl said, breaking the silence. “But I am on your father’s payroll—in a manner of speaking.”

“He can afford it.”

“I imagine.”

She took a sip of coffee. “Do you have a gun with you?”

“I have a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun in the car.”

“Ever shot anybody?”

“On the job or in self-defense as a civilian?”

More to this young man than meets the eye, she thought. “Either.”

“Yes, I have.”

One, or more? she thought. “Did they, uh ... ?”

“Die? Yes. One was a rapist who jumped bond and the bonding company hired us to get him. I had him cornered in an old shack down on the Virginia-North Carolina line. He came at me with a knife.”

She silently absorbed that for a moment and decided she would not pursue that line of questioning any further. Instead she blurted out, “I’ve been receiving obscene phone calls now for about three weeks. I’ve come home, here, and found that someone has been in the house, rummaging through my things. They’ve taken . . . very personal items. Bras, panties, that sort of thing.”

“Your father was right to hire us. You’re dealing with a nut. What did the police say?”

“Well, living out here, it’s the sheriffs department. They were very nice and cooperative. They believed me at first.”

“At first?”

“They did something at the phone company’s main switcher, or whatever they call it. Whenever my number rang, they could do some sort of electronic search and find out where the call came from. And I was taping everything here. I’d get a call, but nothing would show up at the terminal headquarters. And when I’d play them the tape, I heard everything very clearly, but believe it or not, the police couldn’t hear anything. They finally wrote me off as a kook.”

“Are you a kook?”

“No. I’m a best-selling author of historical romances. That isn’t to say there aren’t some kooky writers. But I’m not one of them. I write under the name of Daphne LaCrosse.”

“Daphne LaCrosse! My sister and my mother read your books! They’re big fans of yours!”

A smile danced around her lips. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“But getting back to business, I would like to hear one of these taped calls after you’ve told me everything.”

“All right.” She slanted her eyes over his long, lanky frame and mop of what she guessed would always be slightly unruly brown hair. An attractive young man. More rugged-looking than strictly handsome. Certainly not one of those blow-dried, buttoned-down types that she detested. And he wasn’t a jock, either. Those turned her off completely. Carl Garrett looked like he could take care of himself, and would back up from very little—if anything.

It was her nature to make up her mind quickly about people, and she decided that she liked this long, lanky young private investigator.

“I’ve also been followed—many times over the past month. By kids, would you believe, always kids. Well. . . seventeen, eighteen years old, I’d guess. But no, no one has tried to hurt me or make any kind of physical contact. And I also get the feeling that I’m being watched, from the woods. I’ll admit to you what I have not and will not admit to my parents: I’m scared.”

“With good reason. Do you like animals?”

“What?” The quick shift took her by surprise. “Oh. Yes. Very much. Why?”

“You need a dog. A trained guard dog. They’re expensive, but well worth the money. I know a man who trains them. I can have one up here this afternoon if you’re agreeable.”

“If you think it’s necessary. Of course. Yes. I think I’d like that.”

“Use your phone?”

“Certainly. Come on,” she said, rising from the deck chair, “I’ll show you where it is.”

The interior of the A-frame was impressive. Expensive chrome lighting and lamps and leather furniture. Tasteful paintings lined the walls. And the A-frame was much larger than Carl would have guessed from the outside. One very large bedroom upstairs created the ceiling for the modern kitchen in the rear. The den was massive, the fireplace huge.

“My office,” she said, pointing to a closed door.

Carl spotted the phone and made his call. The dog would be there by early afternoon. Carl gave the man directions and hung up.

“Where do I bunk?” Carl asked.

Dee hesitated, then said, “The guest cottage is ready. But I think I’d feel better if you were closer. Use that bedroom there.” She pointed to the second closed door on the lower level and smiled impishly. “Providing I can trust you, that is.”

“I was a Boy Scout,” Carl said with a straight face.

She rolled her eyes, and smiled.

Carl knew instantly that he didn’t like the deputy. He had spent his entire life around law enforcement and could pick a hotdog out of a crowd—an officer who lived and breathed law enforcement, who was only too ready to bust anybody for anything at anytime, who made the kind of comments designed to provoke resistance in the hope that force would become necessary.

“Never did have much use for private detectives,” Deputy Harrison said.

“I never had much use for hotdogs,” Carl replied calmly.

Both young men were about the same age. Harrison was heavier and several inches shorter, and his mouth was stuffed full of chewing tobacco.

The deputy flushed and looked hard at Carl. “If you carryin’ a weapon, you gonna be in a lot of trouble, boy.”

Carl handed him his Federal gun permit. Most cops, both urban and rural, never saw a Federal gun permit, for the simple reason that they were very difficult to obtain.

Harrison shifted his cud and returned the permit. “First time I seen one of them,” he admitted.

Carl handed him his VHP gun permit. Harrison glanced at it and a little more of the bluster went out of him. “I get the picture,” he said. He looked at Carl. “You Sheriff Garrett’s son?”

“Yes.”

“Sheriff Rodale and him didn’t get along.”

“So my father said, several times.” Rodale, Carl knew, had to be dragged screaming and kicking into the twentieth century. His style of law enforcement went out about the same time as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Virginia Highway Patrol rated Reeves County as having the worst record of law enforcement in the entire state. And, off the record, Sheriff Rodale was rated as being the worst sheriff in the entire United States.

“Phew!” Harrison said, as that foul odor drifted under his nose. “Y’all better get that septic tank looked at.”

“It isn’t the tank. I checked it just before you drove up. I don’t know what it is or where it’s coming from.”

Harrison had appeared while Carl was just about to get a pistol from his car. News of a stranger in the county had spread very fast. Carl knew, from reading intelligence reports about Reeves County and Sheriff Rodale, that the sheriff was on the take from a dozen different places and had a spy network of assorted good ol’ boys and rednecks that would rival the CIA. The state of Virginia had tried for years to put the man in prison, but Rodale had sidestepped each move with the grace of a ballet dancer slipping on owl shit.

“That woman in yonder is a nut!” Harrison said, looking at the house.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you ain’t as smart as you think you are.”

A dozen rejoinders sprang into Carl’s mind. He checked them and smiled at Harrison. “I’m smart enough to know that being hassled is against the law. And that Edgar Conners is plenty irritated with the sheriffs department in this county.”

Those were evidently the magic words. Harrison forced a very thin smile and said, “See you around, boy.”

“ ’Fraid so.”

Carl watched the patrol car leave and knew he had made an enemy. But he detested Harrison and all his breed. Harrison was the kind of man who threw away everything in the newspaper except the sports page. He could tell you the third-string quarterback of his favorite team, but didn’t have the foggiest idea what continent Peru was on. On the back bumper of his pickup truck, with chromed roll-bar and fourteen lights and at least three antennas, there would be several bumper stickers: I WILL GIVE UP MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS. COON HUNTERS ARE GREAT LOVERS. ANYONE WHO DON’T LIKE FOOTBALL SUCKS.

Harrison would kill a deer out of season in a heartbeat and tell you that was his right, but would give an out-of-towner a ticket for going three miles over the speed limit.

“I can’t stand that man,” Dee called from the front porch.

Carl turned. “I can understand why.”

A slight rustling sound came from the nearby woods. Carl frowned.

“How much of this land do you or your father own, Dee?”

“About ten thousand acres. The reason so many people around here don’t like my father is because he won’t permit hunting on any of his property. It’s all fenced and posted, but some still slip in and hunt. The house has been shot at more than once, and before I put the fence up, the tires on my car were cut several times.”

“You think it was connected to what’s been happening to you recently?”

“No.”

Carl had changed into jeans and hiking boots and he now slipped into a shoulder holster rig and checked his 9-mm Beretta. Every other round was killer ammo, bullets that exploded upon striking soft tissue.

“Why are you putting that on?” Dee asked.

“Because I’ve got a very strong feeling someone’s out there. I’m going to check out the woods. You get back into the house. Please,” he added.

Carl left the fenced-in area, carefully closing and securing the gate, and walked into the deep timber. Immediately a strange sensation hit him. He could not quite identify it.

Then it came to him, bringing with it old memories of those terrible days just before his father died fighting the evil that had sprung up in Ruger County several years back.

Carl remembered the terror that had spread like wind-whipped wildfire through the town and the surrounding area. He vividly recalled the hideous metamorphosis that had changed humans into drooling subhumans who stalked the countryside, seeking human flesh. And the ordinary house cats that had attacked their owners in a frenzy of blood lust.

Carl leaned against a tree and struggled to put all that out of his mind. Right now he needed to concentrate only on the job at hand.

A twig snapping within the forest alerted him to danger.

The foul odor that he had smelled several times that day now enveloped him. It was so putrid he had to fight back nausea.

What in the hell was out there, lurking—rotting was probably more like it—in the shadows of the forest? It was his job to find out. He was being paid to protect Miss Daphne (“For God’s sake call me Dee”) Conners, a.k.a. Daphne LaCrosse, famous writer. So get on with it, he told himself.

The young man moved deeper into the timber, avoiding the areas where the sun managed to weakly penetrate the timber.

Something dark flitted through the timber. Carl caught only a glimpse of it.

It did not seem human, but then neither was it like any animal he had ever seen.

What the hell was it?

Carl headed in the direction the fast-moving and elusive shape had taken. The foul odor became stronger. Another shape pranced through the timber. Again Carl could only catch a glimpse of it.

Pranced?

Yes. That’s what it did. An arrogant strut, almost as if he—it, whatever—was deliberately mocking Carl. But this figure had a more human shape to it.

He heard faint singing.

Singing? In the middle of a forest?

Carl paused, listening. Not singing. It was . . . chanting, male and female voices together.

Carl walked on, deeper into the forest. He guessed he had walked about a quarter of a mile from the A-frame, and still he did not seem to be getting any closer to the chanting.

Hell, now it was behind him!

He turned around. The chanting now seemed to be coming from near the house. He hesitated, then decided to return to the house; Dee Conners’s welfare was his first concern.

But, as if in a dream, he could find no landmarks. The woods seemed to have changed, becoming more swamplike than forest. Nothing looked familiar. Carl stopped and took several deep breaths, calming himself. He looked . . .