Page 58 of Puck You Both

I shrug. "No rush."

"You're the only one not saying anything interesting anyway." He scrolls. "Someone on this feed keeps whispering about perimeters."

I could tell him which channel to check. I've been watching the situation develop for ten minutes.

It started, as most things on this site have, with content. Becker's podcast needed a thumbnail. The concept, as far as I could reconstruct it from across the room was, Becker in a hard hat, one foster cat on his shoulder, caption to be determined. The shelter's foster program had exactly one cat on the premises today, a long orange thing named Gary, and the only person Gary tolerated holding him turned out to be Theo.

This surprised nobody. Animals treat Theo like one of their own. Which, honestly, he might be.

So Theo held Gary, and Becker adjusted his hard hat, and Theo art-directed with the hand that wasn't full of cat, and somewhere between "lift your chin" and "no, heroically," Gary poured himself out of Theo's arm like water finding a drain and was gone.

I watched all of it happen and I said nothing, because my mic was dead. And also because I wanted to see where this was going.

What they did was approach me, together, wearing the matching neutral faces of two men who have rehearsed being calm.

"No," I said.

Becker scoffed. "We haven't said anything."

"No."

"Patrick." Theo stepped closer, dropping his voice. "We need a supervisor. Someone with authority. Someone the grandmothers trust."

"You lost the cat."

"We misplaced a cat," Becker corrected. "Briefly. Locally. He's contained by the building."

"Probably," Theo said.

"Probably contained by the building."

The correct move was to walk twenty feet in any direction and inform Wanda. The correct move died quietly, because Becker said, "If the content crew finds out, it's a segment." He's right. Five cameras, both teams miked for content, one missing shelter animal at a shelter fundraiser. That's a headline with legs.

Which is how I’ve now ended up coordinating a covert search operation with a dead microphone and two of the least covert men in the sport.

They are catastrophic at it.

Theo commando-crawls behind the kennel row to avoid a camera pan, which attracts the camera instantly, because nothing draws a lens like a grown man crawling. Becker creates what he calls a diversion by loudly interviewing Petrov about roofing, which works too well and nearly puts Petrov back on the ladder. Their whisper discipline is nonexistent. Twice I hear Theo's voice drift over the kennels, hissing "flank the water heater," directly into his live mic.

Across the room, the audio tech slowly removes his headphones and stares at the middle distance.

The grandmothers know, of course. They've known longer than I have. Mama Paws intercepts me by the paint station, tilts her hard hat back, and says, "Looking for something, sweetie?" with the serene menace of a border agent, and Wanda, beside her, holds up the intake clipboard and taps the line that says GARY, then taps her watch.

They let us keep searching anyway. I believe it's for their own entertainment.

It ends the way I should have known it would.

"He's in the crate," Wall says from the top of his ladder, without turning around, in the tone of a man reporting the time. "Third from the left. Been there an hour."

The search party converges on the finished kennel row. In the third crate from the left, the one I watched Wall assemble this morning, Gary lies curled on a folded hoodie, asleep, tail over his own nose, looking like promotional material.

Wall's hoodie.

"You knew!" Becker says, aiming a paint stirrer at the ladder. "You watched me spiral for an hour."

"You needed the cardio."

"He could've been anywhere! He could've been in a wall!"