Tiger cate, p.2
Tiger Cate, page 2
I don’t know how to do this and not have it be a disaster, she thought, gingerly stroking Levi’s tousled hair.
For a moment, neither moved. Then a ticking clock in Cate’s mind started up, and she pulled away. Texts. Margaret. Ranch. Joseph?
“Come on,” she said, pulling on his arm. “I’ll walk with you over to the hospital. They should have that shot you need, and probably even a spare cot in the staff room.”
He withdrew his arm and gave her a wide, valiant smile, a hint of humor back in his eyes.
“Nah, I can make it to the VA, Cate. No worries. You should — you should do whatever you have planned to spring Max. Just, you know, be careful.”
She flashed him an I’ve - got - this smile, but it was all for show. In reality, she didn’t have anything. Hunching her climbing harness over her shoulder, she took a few steps and turned.
“I’ll text you when I get my stuff and know something about Max, okay?”
“Don’t text. Call,” he said, massaging his forehead again.
“Okay.” She managed a smile for his sake. Phone calls were hard for her. Then she turned and headed up the street.
#
Three hours later, Cate was staring at the Northwest Valley Impound with its imposing hurricane fencing topped with razor wire.
She spotted her truck right away, parked against the far wall. Jingling the keys in her shorts pocket, she saw the surveillance camera setup and abandoned her plan to sneak on the lot after closing. Instead, she walked straight into the office prepared to say whatever she needed to get her belongings.
Once she had her backpack and her finished artwork, she’d surrender the rest of it, Max included. Much as she loved that truck, updating the paperwork — let alone affording the repairs — was out of the question right now.
The solitary man behind the desk was the same tow truck driver from earlier. Death metal screamed from his phone, forcing Cate to raise her voice.
“Hi. I need to get into my truck, please.” She mustered her most winning smile, but her face felt as fragile as a china plate. The guy looked up, seemed to recognize her, and then went back to his scribbling.
Cate heard the growling hiss of a big cat fill her ears as she felt heat spread from her chest, through her shoulders and neck, and into her face.
I will rip his throat out, came the voice in her head. She shook it off and lowered her gaze. Time for a different tack.
Suddenly her eyes and nose were leaking, and a loud sob escaped her open mouth. Startled, the guy shot her another look as she struggled to catch her breath.
“Look, you can see that … um, that I’m homeless,” she gasped, the tears flowing freely now. “Please don’t make me … beg … just let me get my stuff!” It felt humiliating to use them, but tears might work at this point, so she let them flow. Resting her forehead on the counter she let out one more sob.
Had she overdone it, scared him maybe, and was he now dialing the cops? Her head still down, she saw the man’s track shoes out of the corner of her eye as he got up and walked over to the counter. A clipboard with a sign-in sheet slid toward her. She looked up at his deadpan face as he spoke.
“You got exactly ten minutes. Put the truck keys on this desk — in ten. And here,” he pushed a tissue box toward her, avoiding her gaze. “Mop up that mess.” Then he sauntered back to his paperwork.
Cate wiped the counter dry and made a dash for the door. Thirty seconds later, she was inside the camper, surveying her belongings. She changed into jeans, grabbed a handful of running shorts and a few t - shirts from the closet, and tossed them into the backpack. Then she carefully lifted each of her twelve finished eight-by-ten-inch canvas panels and placed them inside an oversized black portfolio. Scanning the space once more for any of Levi’s belongings, Cate saw none and exited.
Ten seconds later, she was back and grabbing a plastic Goodwill bag from below the sink. She yanked a black knit sheath off a hanger in the closet, jammed it in the sack, and added strappy sandals and a zippered makeup bag. Because you never knew when you might need to clean up your act.
Chapter 3
Seated next to a wall outlet in a mid - valley coffee house, Cate sipped from the steaming cup in front of her and waited for her phone to come back to life. Eventually, the screen glowed white and then chirped as it flashed the menu. There were the two texts, but no new ones and no phone calls. She reread the messages and set the phone down on the table.
It could be a trick, but someone would have to know her history to pull that off, and she hadn’t told anyone in L.A. the truth about where she was from. It might even be her sister Margaret playing a weird mind game on her.
Cate had communicated with Margaret exactly three times in the last two decades. Five months into living in New York, sixteen-year-old Cate had been deep in crisis, facing a potentially life-changing decision. She reached out for help, instinctively calling the number where her mother Fiona had always answered. Instead, she got Margaret’s flat voice telling her the only possible choice she’d support, financially or otherwise. It hadn’t been the one Cate wanted to hear and she’d hung up.
The second time, almost a decade later, Cate had called from a hospital bed, gravely injured and desperate to make amends and return home. Nothing … crickets … It was true, there was bad blood between them. Cate had stolen money, run away to New York, and had hung up on her sister the last time they’d spoken. But what kind of family just doesn’t respond to a stricken member?
The third and last call had been eighteen months ago, when Max broke down in Omaha, on the trip out to Los Angeles. Standing in the blazing sun outside a noisy automotive shop, Cate had left a voicemail pleading with her older sister to send money to her online CashPay account so she could fix the truck. She hadn’t expected a response and indeed Margaret hadn’t returned her call. But a thousand dollars had miraculously turned up in the account later that day.
So, were these Margaret’s texts now? If so, why this pretense? Cate picked up the phone and called the texter’s number. The recorded female voice that answered wasn’t her sister’s.
“Hi, this is Brownie. Sorry, I’m not able to answer … ” Cate ended the call. The name, the voice — none of it was familiar, and it alarmed her this person had her cell number.
With a sigh, she went in search of a bus stop. She needed to sell the paintings and then she’d decide what to do.
An hour later, Cate was standing on Ventura Boulevard in front of the high - end pawn shop that fancied itself an art gallery. There was quite a crowd for eight-thirty on a Saturday night. Dexter, an artist friend from her early days in New York, looked surprised to see her peeking in the window at what appeared to be a private party. He raised his hand in an elegant gesture to come around to the alley. A moment later, he opened the back door and ushered her into the office.
“Hello, darling, what’s up?” he asked with concern, after deciding against an embrace. Cate felt him appraising her grubby attire and taking in the current state of her hair — six inches of dark chestnut roots followed by a foot of scraggly, pink - tinged platinum, pulled into a high messy ponytail.
“Love the extreme ombré, but what happened to last spring’s fuchsia?”
Normally she’d banter with him about her hairstyle choices, but she needed to get to the point.
“Max got towed and I … I need some cash. Remember those portraits the gallery bought? I’ve been working on some more.” She lifted one carefully out of the portfolio and laid it on the table.
Dex gazed at the richly detailed study of an elderly homeless man with a beautiful smile holding a half-eaten sandwich, who had sat for Cate in exchange for some food and good conversation. As with the other portraits, she’d captured his face in her trademark hyperrealism, the super - saturated skin tones popping out of a graffiti-splashed background.
Dexter carefully pulled out and examined each canvas before finally looking up and smiling.
“Cate’s babies … I would know them anywhere. It’s the moisture in their eyes.” Now she was daubing at her own eyes because, well, the day. He pulled her in for a hug and patted her back.
“The not-so-good news is, small isn’t selling along the coast right now. It’s gargantuan wall - high work — more like those building murals you paint — that’s really taking off. These are more, well, bathroom art.” He wrinkled his nose, smiling ruefully.
“And worth nothing?”
He sighed, eyeing the canvases again and calculating.
“I can front you, uh, two-fifty against future sales. Will that help?”
She mentally added up her mural paycheck and the advance, plus the fifty in cash shoved in her backpack. She shook her head, feeling tears well again.
“I need to bail out and fix Max, then drive home to Arizona.” Seeing Dex’s eyes widen, she went on quickly. “My sister is … is in some trouble there and,” she took a breath, “this might be a good time for me to get out of town for a while.”
Dex nodded, looking more alarmed. They’d met her first year in New York, and he was well aware of the threat that had chased her out of that city. In fact, Dex had been the one who’d encouraged her to come out west.
Walking to his desk, he removed a metal box and began counting some bills into his hand. Then he turned to her with a new thought.
“Hey, maybe you could take the bus? Shouldn’t be too long a trip, and it’s got to be cheaper than buying gas for that thirsty truck.” He handed her the money. “Geez, I had no idea you came from Arizona.”
Cate smirked. “Long ago in a galaxy far, far away … ”
“Bet it’s hotter than hell right now.”
More like heaven, she thought, as childhood memories of the monsoon season began to float through her mind. The summer mornings with luminous gray clouds that built to thunderstorms by afternoon. Air shimmering like gossamer while cicadas sang their eerie love songs from the trees and cattle grazed in jade - hued fields … heaven.
She felt Dexter’s stare and tried to shake off this strange wave of nostalgia.
“We, um … we live up north in the high country. Cold enough to snow in the winter, and summers aren’t nearly as hot as Phoenix.”
Cate folded over the cash and shoved it into a back pocket. Before today, she hadn’t thought of her childhood home in years. But saying “we” just now had been effortless, like riding a bike again after two decades. We — I live somewhere. I belong somewhere. That felt good, like a missing puzzle piece finally sliding into place.
Just then, her phone chirped a text and she checked it nervously. It was Tyson, the lawyer friend who kept her up on his uncle, Joseph Russo.
He knows we talk and he’s pissed. I can’t help you with this anymore. So sorry. Be safe.
A familiar clock had started ticking in her brain. He knows … be safe. It really was time to run.
Chapter 4
Dex dropped her off outside the downtown L.A. bus terminal at just past one a.m. At the counter, Cate bought a one - way ticket to Copperton, Arizona via Phoenix, and then dragged herself over to a line of seats. Was she really starting a new day without the benefit of a night’s sleep?
Two hours into her wait, sprawled across three seats in the nearly empty bus terminal, Cate awoke to someone groping her. A man with obscenely large biceps waved the small roll of cash he’d just lifted from her jeans pocket.
“You can earn this back if you’re nice — ” was all he could whisper before getting a face full of aerosol deodorant from the travel - size can she’d been clutching when she dozed off. No doubt the guy had mistaken her for a teenage runaway in her jeans, t - shirt, and scraggly two - toned hair. She lunged for her money roll as he wiped at his eyes, but he jumped back just in time and sprinted out of the terminal. She looked around for the terminal guards, but they were apparently all on a coffee break. Grimly, she pulled her pack into her lap and sat upright, as she waited for her bus to arrive. You’ve been scrounging for money your whole adult life, she thought bitterly. Shouldn’t you be used to the feeling by now?
Another hour later, Cate had boarded and was tucked into one of the transport’s generous seats. As the bus rumbled forward, city lights blurred outside her window while old memories began to visit.
In truth, Cate had never thought much about money until her parents’ private plane crashed while returning from their anniversary trip to Baja. Doc and Fiona Finley’s deaths had put thirty-year-old Margaret in sole charge of ranch management, family finances … and her younger sister Cate’s immediate future. And Margaret had managed all of it like she managed the thousand - pound horses she rode — with an iron fist.
At the time, Cate had been a carefree fifteen-year-old, a budding young artist finishing her sophomore year at Copperton High and winning art awards at the county and state fairs. Carefree right up to the moment she’d stood in the late afternoon sun and watched a sheriff’s SUV roll up the driveway. It had been Sheriff Mack Griffin himself — not one of his deputies — who had stepped out and looked up at the sisters standing on the patio. She’d felt a kick in her stomach like nothing she had ever experienced. Before any words were spoken, her body had told her the news would be terrible.
Mack had looked near tears himself, as he spoke to the sisters. He and Doc had been as close as brothers.
“Girls, I’m sorry to tell you your parents’ plane went down — ” was all he got out before Cate had begun wailing and grabbing onto Margaret, who stayed still and silent.
Rosa, their cook, had tearfully urged Cate to eat some dinner that night, but she had no room for it. She had cried for four hours straight, lying on the sofa in the high - ceilinged great room. Alone.
At some point, Cate had wandered outside in search of her sister. A single light shone at the stables and she headed for it, the full moon illuminating her path. In the farthest paddock stood Margaret with her arms around her favorite mare, her body heaving. Of course, Margaret had preferred to grieve in the presence of her cherished horses. “Her place of worship,” their mother had called it.
The sisters never did share their grief about their parents’ death. Cate would have loved to confide in her older sister, but by then she’d grown fearful of Margaret’s increasingly dark, alcohol-fueled moods. The funeral came and went, with Rosa and her husband Diego preparing the ranch house for the memorial service and cleaning up afterward. Dozens of neighbors and family friends hugged and fawned over Cate at the funeral, but Margaret was not among them.
Halfway through that summer, Margaret had announced one evening that Cate would be going off to a boarding school outside Flagstaff for her junior year. Shocked and heartsick after their parents’ death, Cate lacked the energy to resist. Besides, living under her domineering sister’s rule had already crushed her social life. How much worse could boarding school be?
That year away from the ranch where she’d been born and raised, felt to Cate like she was doing hard time. But it had also been the true start of her real education. Loneliness gave birth to a feeling of independence, bringing out the fighter in her. In her mid-semester evaluation, the school counselor wrote that Cate didn’t “mesh” with the other girls in her class and appeared to have “anger issues.”
Without a doubt, she felt angry, hostile, sad, and guarded. Her coddled classmates, whose doting parents showed up every Friday to whisk them away for fun weekends, considered Cate a whiny, boring bitch. At least that’s what she’d once overheard from a bathroom stall.
By Thanksgiving, Cate had stopped trying to get a ride home on weekends. Instead, she began to look forward to the dorms clearing out for Saturday and Sunday. She ate stale oatmeal cookies in the cafeteria, where she sat at whichever empty table she liked and sketched or painted from morning until dark. When she wasn’t doing art, she was plotting her great escape to New York.
Then it was late May, the prison sentence at school had ended, and Cate arrived back at the ranch with a plan to get out of her sister’s hair for good. Attending a New York art school after graduation was a goal that she and her mother had set years earlier. Over the past year, Cate had begun to wonder, what if I could just make it happen sooner? Late at night, holed up in her bedroom at the ranch, she went to work on an action plan.
A decade later, while cleaning out an old satchel of sketchbooks, she came across her neatly printed list.
What I Will Need to Get to New York City
1. $$$ for travel and housing
2. Job. Look in Mom’s address book for her NYC friend’s (Brent? Brenden?) restaurant (Foxy something?)
3. ID proving I’m 18, for job apps. (Create on Mom’s laptop.)
4. Transportation to the bus station in Flagstaff.
5. Good enough excuse to leave here without setting off the Margaret alarm.
The last item had fallen into her lap: a summer internship teaching art to kids at a special needs camp in the White Mountains.
Predictably, her sister had rejected the idea.
“Nope. If you do anything this summer it’ll be summer school to improve your GPA so you can get into that accounting program at the community college. None of that art crap Fiona indulged you in.” Margaret had an annoying habit of using their parents’ first names. “That way, you’ll have some skills we can really use around here,” she’d growled, swigging from her beer as if to punctuate.
Curled up on the buck - stitched leather couch in the great room, opposite Margaret’s overstuffed chair, Cate had laughed at first, thinking she was being teased.
“Accounting? You’re kidding, right? You’ve seen my math grades, right? … Right?”
Margaret had remained silent and stony-faced. Cate felt herself losing control.
