The Case of the Mysterious Voice. John R. Erickson

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Okay, we need to have a little talk. We know each other pretty well, right? And you’re aware that I’m not fond of admitting mistakes, right? Well, what would you think if I told you that I made . . . that is, what would you think if I announced . . . This is really tough, so let’s come at it from another angle, and this time I’m just going to blurt it out.

      I shouldn’t have uttered the word “swimming” in the presence of the cat.

      There, it’s all out in the open and now you’re ready to hear the second piece of bad news. Our plans for the cat blew up like a can of hair spray in a burning garbage barrel, and fellers, it happened so fast, none of us saw it coming.

      Okay, let’s take a deep breath and reset the stage. There we were, Alfred and Drover and I, standing on the cement in front of the stock tank, and Alfred was cuddling Mister Kitty Precious in his arms. All three of us were quivering with antiseptic and trying to bite back our grins, for you see . . .

      Wait, hold everything. We weren’t quivering with antiseptic. Antiseptic is that stuff you dump on a cut or wound. It kills creepy little bugs that can make your finger swell up and eat your liver, and that’s why mommies run for the medicine cabinet when little children get cuts, scratches, and aberrations.

      Abrasions, there we go. Aberrations are something else, and they don’t require anything you might find in a medicine cabinet.

      Words are interesting, aren’t they? I kind of enjoy playing around with ’em.

      Now, where were we?

      I have no idea. Huh.

      Seems to me that we were talking about something pretty exciting, but all at once . . . boy, one second you can be as focused as a laser bean, and the next, everything just goes to seed.

      Wait. Beans are seeds, right? Maybe that’s a clue that we were discussing seeds. Okay, here we go. Your average ranch in the Texas Panhandle has a whole bunch of weeds and plants, and every year they produce about ten zillion seeds. We have your grass seeds, your milkweed seeds, your cottonwood seeds, and your wildflower seeds.

      We have other objects on the ranch that never make seeds, such as your rocks, your fence posts, and your . . . Wait, we weren’t talking about seeds.

      This is frustrating. Could I have been talking about Miss Beulah? Maybe so, because . . . well, I won’t say that I think about her all the time, but several times during the course of an average day, I find myself staring at her picture on the bookshelf of my mind.

      Refined nose, gorgeous eyes, perfect ears. What a woman! But you look into those deep, intelligent eyes and you wonder . . . HOW COULD SHE LOVE A BIRD DOG? If she’s so smart, why can’t she figure out . . .

      Wait, hold everything. The cat. We were about to launch the cat into the stock tank, remember? Try to work on your concentration, and please don’t interrupt me again.

      Okay, now we’re cooking. There we stood at the edge of a stock tank full of stinking moss-water, trying our best to keep from laughing out loud, because we knew what was coming next.

      Hee hee. Kitty would go flying into the tank and we would enjoy several minutes of good, wholesome family entertainment.

      But before that could happen, I made a . . . before that could happen, Drover made one of the dumbest mistakes he’d ever made. He said (and this is a direct quote), he asked the cat, “Have you ever considered swimming?”

      Oh brother. I couldn’t believe my ears. Of all the bone-headed things he could have said! Do you have any idea what happens to a cat when you mention swimming?

      A lot. Within mere seconds, Kitty transformed into a helicopter, a buzz saw, a meat grinder, a hissing, yowling explosion of arms, legs, paws, and nasty little cat-claw razors.

      He gave Little Alfred the scratching of his young life, and then the little lunatic . . . I’m not going to tell you what else he did.

      I mean, there are some things we can report and some things that . . . uh . . . need to be shielded from public scrutiny, shall we say. Our main concern is the little children, no kidding. How would they respond if they ever found out that one of their heroes got buzz sawed by a rinky-dink little ranch cat?

      It could have a terrible effect. They might not be able to sleep for weeks. They might forget to brush their teeth. Some of them might make puddles in the bed. We just can’t risk it, and that’s why you will find a big hole in the middle of this story.

      I’m sorry to take such extreme measures, but our Security Division has pretty strict rules about this stuff. You’ll never know all the details of this case, because we’ve slapped Top Secret on all those files and they’ll stay in the vault for two hundred years.

      Please don’t whine about it. Believe me, you don’t want to hear all the grizzly details.

      But the port we can repair . . . the part we can report, let us say, is that Little Alfred gained important information about bathing cats: It’s something you might not want to try very often. I mean, he had red marks on one cheek, both arms, both hands, and the left side of his neck.

СКАЧАТЬ