be mine.”
Darla had endured a similar scenario when she’d had to take Hamlet to the vet for his annual exam a few months earlier. Her first attempt to load him into the plastic crate had dissolved into a contest of strength, with Hamlet gripping the carrier’s opening with all four paws and stubbornly refusing to be pushed inside. A second try had ended much like the first, save that Hamlet had cut short that round with a swipe of claws that nicked one of Darla’s fingers and left her muttering bad words as she sucked on that bloody digit.
She’d finally resorted to donning elbow-length oven gloves as protective gear. Then, sneaking up on him from behind, she managed to grab Hamlet and stuff him into the carrier before he had time to react. She doubted he could be fooled with that tactic a second time.
Jake grinned, apparently familiar with Hamlet’s aversion to being transported via crate. “Let me grab my keys and phone, and I’ll go up with you,” she said and then packed the vial back into her evidence-collecting case.
Not surprisingly, Jake’s trip upstairs took a couple of minutes longer than Darla’s, since she paused outside for a few clandestine puffs on a cigarette before heading into the store. By the time she walked in, Darla had already taken stock of her employees. James was in the reference section assisting two college boys—in what Darla could only assume was an homage to ghosts of students past, they wielded briefcases rather than the requisite backpacks—while Robert was busy rearranging the new arrivals table. As for Hamlet, he was still in classic p.o.’d mode, sitting on the register counter, tail tucked around him, ears flat. But Darla took the fact that he hadn’t stalked back up to the apartment as a positive sign.
“Robert,” she called out, “Jake and I need your help for a minute.”
“Sure.” Carefully squaring off one of the stacks, Robert sauntered over, fists crammed into the pockets of his black vest. “Hi, Ms. Jake. How’s the PI biz?”
“Not bad, kid. Say, do you think you could hold Hamlet still for a minute while I rub a little something on his paws?”
Robert looked alarmed. “What, like, medicine?”
“Nothing bad,” Darla hurried to assure him. The last thing she wanted to tell the teen was that they were swabbing her cat for a dead man’s blood. Though, knowing Robert, he would probably find that pretty cool. “We’re afraid he got out last night and stepped in, er, something he shouldn’t have. We need to clean him up.”
“Oh, okay, then.”
He scooped up the cat and cradled him so that all four paws were sticking out. “Hey, little bro,” he comforted Hamlet, who was giving Darla a suspicious look, “don’t get all bent. They just want to wash your feet.”
“This will only take a minute and a little bit of water,” Jake added as she dug into her metal box. She pulled out four test sticks and an ampoule of clear liquid. While Darla watched in interest, Jake applied a drop of water to the pad on the first test stick and then rubbed the dampened strip against Hamlet’s right-front paw pad. The “little bro” squirmed, but to Darla’s relief he let Jake repeat the process on his other three feet, using a fresh stick each time.
“All finished,” Jake cheerfully said as she set the final strip on the counter. “You can let the witness, er, cat, go now.”
“Good job,” Robert praised him and set him down on the floor.
Hamlet hissed and shot the youth a narrow green look that said, Yeah, bro, and this better not happen again. Darla suppressed a smile, feeling vindicated. Apparently, even Robert was subject to dropping a notch down Hamlet’s ever-sliding scale of acceptable human behavior.
Jake, meanwhile, was comparing each strip against a little chart on the side of the bottle that reminded Darla of a swimming pool chlorine test.
“Anything there?” she anxiously asked her friend. Then, recalling that Robert was still standing there and listening in while pretending ennui, she reached under the counter. She dragged out a three-ring binder the size of a New York City phone book—assuming such a thing was even printed anymore.
“Here you go,” she said and thrust the manual in his direction. “These are the instructions to the security system. Why don’t you thumb through it for a few minutes while I finish up with Jake, and then we’ll do a test run on how to do a replay?”
“Sure, boss,” he