Cat Breaking Free by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

she’d been able to see more clearly, to offer up some description of the men. How many had there been? Maybe even the two cats hadn’t seen the robbers clearly. Thank goodness they were on the roofs now, and not down there! Safety, with those three, never seemed a prime concern.
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    As Lucinda watched the captain and detective enter the jewelry store, up the hills north of the village two of the thieves, free of danger now, slipped into a darkened house. They carried no loot from the job, no little bags filled with diamonds, no pockets bulging with Cartier watches, though Marineau’s was the most prestigious jewelry store in Molena Point, the kind of shop where every entering patron was treated with courteous respect but even the most elegantly dressed among them, if they were not regulars, were carefully observed.
    The house they entered was dark, tall, built against the hillside, the drive climbing steeply up beside it. The thieves had not emerged from a car—there was no car in the drive or on the street. They appeared out of the shadows, moved halfway up the drive and onto the little porch, and slid noiselessly in through the front door. They did not speak until the door had closed softly behind them, then the two resumed arguing, but quietly; dark-haired Luis angry and cursing in whispers, his redheaded partner snickering until Luis turned on him with cold rage, grabbing him by the collar.
    â€œShut up, Tommie! He’s not your brother!”
    â€œYou said you’d as soon be rid of him! You’ve said ita hundred times, he’s a damn screwup! Now he’s out of your way. What trouble can he get into, in jail? Safest place for him!”
    â€œWe don’t need a screwup in the hands of the cops, you dummy!” Luis pulled off his dark windbreaker, dropped it on a chair, and headed down the hall through the dim house toward the kitchen. “Cops hassle Dufio enough, he’ll spill everything.”
    â€œNah. He knows better. Even Dufio ain’t that stupid.”
    â€œKeep your voice down.”
    â€œKnows damn well,” Tommie muttered, “stoolies die in jail.” He followed Luis into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them as Luis turned on the light. Luis didn’t call his sister to the kitchen as he usually did, to fix their meal. They stood at the counter, eating what Maria had left out for them—cold beans, cold tortillas, a dozen small cold tamales, a twelve-pack of beer. Around them in the silent house the other residents slept, or pretended to sleep.
    Only in the back of the house, in the smaller bedroom, did anyone make a sound. There, from within a cage, came the faintest mewl as one of the captive cats woke. The men didn’t hear her, nor would they have paid any attention as long as the beast didn’t yowl loud enough to wake the neighbors. In the shadowed bedroom, the cat looked around her. She listened to the two women’s breathing. She listened to the men’s harsh arguing from the kitchen, her ears catching small sounds that the women, even awake, would not have heard.
    She stared at the crusting food dish in the corner of the cage, but she didn’t approach it. She drank a little water, listened shivering to the voices, then curled uptightly again on the wadded cotton towel and stuck her nose under her tail, trying to get warm.
    She was a pale calico color, her white coat marked with bleached gray like pussy willow buds, and with pale orange, a subtly colored cat with a rather long, distinctive face, and a look of distrust in her green eyes. The three cats had been in the cage for two weeks. They kept careful count of the days, not that it did them much good. In all that time, they had not been able to breach the lock. They had tried every way they could think of, but no cat, not even one with their talents, could open a padlock. Even if they’d had the key that Luis kept in his pocket, even though they understood