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“Fine, fine,” he cuts in brusquely. “You don’t have to give me the full sob story. Just get in your car and head south. I’ll get you more details as I have them.”
“Thank you, Al. Thank you so much.” I end the call without waiting for his response and sprint toward my SUV.
Chapter Twenty-Six
NORA
We pull up to the warehouse complex just as it starts pouring again, making it almost impossible to see out the front windshield. I can’t tell if there are any other people around or not, but I doubt it. Aside from the poor retail workers forced into work for Black Friday, most people have the entire Thanksgiving weekend off.
“Which bay?” Rex demands, leaning forward to squint through the rain-smeared glass.
“That’s right, you did great, Mama,” Bear murmurs to Clyde, who answers with a meow and a series of belches. “Yeah, you did. And we’ll get you some medicine soon, I promise.”
“Which bay?” Rex repeats, turning to shoot Bear a frustrated look. “The faster you cooperate, the faster you and your cat family can get out of here, man. I’m trying to make this as painless as possible, but you gotta pay attention.”
Bear looks up from the kitten box, where our champion of childbirth has managed to deliver five perfect kittens during the drive. Three of the sweet babies are white with gray accents like their mama, one is gray all over like a tiny storm cloud, and one is a mix of orange and white like its daddy.
In my mind, I have already claimed the gray and the orange babies, who I desperately want to name Sunshine and Rainn—after Rainn Wilson who played Dwight on The Office, one of my favorite comedians of all time—but I haven’t said that out loud. This isn’t the time or place, and I don’t want to distract the babies as they’re trying to find their way to Clyde’s nipples to nurse.
I’m also not one hundred percent sure Bear will still want me to be a kitten adoptive parent after all this. He might want to put today, and everything that reminds him of the time he was kidnapped and forced to sign over thousands of dollars’ worth of product to a criminal organization, behind him.
“I’m not sure,” Bear says. “I always find it by sight, and I can’t see shit. Can you? Shouldn’t we pull over and wait until the rain slows down enough for the windshield wipers to actually work?”
“Right or left?” Wimpy curses as he slams on the brakes too hard at a stop sign, and the van hydroplanes a few feet into the thankfully abandoned intersection. “Fuck this rain. I’m so fucking over it. It never seemed to rain this much when I was a kid.”
“It didn’t,” Rex says. “The ten warmest and wettest years in the history of Minnesota have been recorded in the past twenty-five years. It’s climate change, man. Warmer oceans mean more water in the air and more intense precipitation on land.”
Wimpy snorts. “What are you now? A weatherman?”
“No, but I read Scientific American, dumbass,” Rex says. “Not all of us want to stay uneducated just because we dropped out of high school our senior year to join the family business.”
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” Wimpy says with a sniff. “I probably just didn’t notice the rain when I was a dumb kid because I was a dumb kid.”
“You’re like the human embodiment of that meme,” Rex says, sounding increasingly annoyed with his cousin. “The one where the dog is sitting in a building that’s burning down all around him, sipping a coffee, saying, ‘this is fine.’ This ain’t fine. Ross just texted that there’s three feet of water in the basement in his house on the west side of the property. If this keeps up, our entire compound is going to be underwater by the time we get back to town.”
Wimpy shoots him a sharp look. “No shit? But my baseball card collection is in the cabinet at Nana’s. Should I call and ask someone to take it up to the attic, just in case?”
“Yeah, Wimps,” Rex says in a sarcastic tone that seems to go right over Wimpy’s head. “You should. We should take a time-out in the middle of our criminal enterprise here, and call home about your baseball card collection.”
Wimpy pulls out his cell. “Okay, it won’t take—”
Rex slaps the phone out of his hand with a disgusted sound. “You’re not calling anyone, you dumbass. We’re in the middle of a job and we’re going to finish it and get rid of these people before this gets any messier than it has already.”
A shiver runs up my spine at the phrase “get rid of these people.”
That didn’t sound like he plans on dropping us at the nearest emergency vet…
I shift my gaze Bear’s way. Our eyes meet and I can tell he’s worried about that phrase, too. I give a small nod, he nods back, and a silent understanding that we’re going to make a run for it the first chance we get passes between us.
I turn back to our kidnappers, pulse jittery as I say, “Maybe you should let Bear drive. If that’s how he usually finds the warehouse, then—”
“Shut it, Blondie.” Wimpy glares at me over his shoulder, the eye Matty blackened for him a little narrower than the other. “We’ve got this under control. This ain’t our first rodeo.” To Bear he says, “Look up the address. In your email or whatever. I’m sure you’ve got a record of it somewhere.”
Bear subtly perks up. “Sure, give me my phone, and I’ll see what I can pull up.”
They took our phones and turned them off as soon as we left the hotel parking lot, obviously concerned about us texting for help or our movements being tracked by loved ones or the police.
Rex snorts. “Yeah, no, my man. You can sign into your email on my phone.”
