Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page A

out. Other than that, he looked his usual self—more like an Italian playboy than a homicide detective.
    When I first met him, I’d thought he really was Italian, but he’d told me once that Italian was one of the few things he wasn’t. I’d also learned that his easy elegance came from growing up wealthy in New Orleans. I knewhis whole name too, but I’d had to prize it out of him. Everybody called him Guidry, but when I pushed he’d admitted that his mother called him Jean-Pierre. Which made him some kind of New Orleans French. That was all I knew, other than the fact that his father headed a big law firm in New Orleans and that his mother was a soft hearted woman. Not that I’d pried, or that I was overly curious. I had merely asked very casually. And I would never try to get any more information because it was absolutely none of my business. None whatsoever.
    After Judy brought him coffee, he said, “Tell me about the boys who accosted you this morning.”
    “They didn’t exactly
accost
me. They came in Reba Chandler’s house and scared me.”
    “The fingerprint people got a good print from the jar, but we haven’t got a report back from IAFIS yet. Deputy Morgan said one of them had a knife?”
    “Switchblade. I imagine they all had them, but he was the only one who got nervous and showed it.”
    Guidry pulled out his notebook and flipped some pages looking for notes, probably searching for what he’d got from Deputy Morgan.
    He said, “This girl they were looking for, you didn’t hear a last name at the vet’s office?”
    I shook my head. “Dr. Layton just took the dead rabbit from her. Jaz was crying, and the receptionist was calming her. They didn’t have her fill out any forms with names and addresses.”
    “Dead rabbit?”
    “The man had run over a rabbit. It was wrapped in a towel, but it was dead.”
    Guidry gave me the blank look he always gets when I mention animals.
    I said, “Last time I looked, you were a homicide detective. I’m pretty sure you’re not investigating the death of a rabbit, so why the interest in Jaz and those boys?”
    I could see him debating whether to tell me, and if so, how much.
    He said, “An elderly man was killed in his house last night. He lived alone and apparently woke up and surprised somebody in the act of burglary. There was a tussle, and he got stabbed. One of his neighbors reported seeing three young men loitering near the house earlier in the evening. Their description fits your guys.”
    I shrugged. “Lots of young guys look like them. Half the boys on the street have baggy drawers.”
    Guidry drummed his fingertips on the table. “Most of those guys showing their underwear are just high on the fumes of their own testosterone. That’s normal stuff that kids do just to outrage adults. Robbing and killing is not normal, it’s gang behavior.”
    I hated to think of gangs in our lovely part of the world. Most people think of gangs as swaggering street thugs shooting at one another, but today’s gang member is just as likely to be the teenager next door, the one whose parents are too busy or too dumb to notice that their kid suddenly has a lot of spending money. Gang leaders recruit kids to rob or sell drugs, relatively small-time stuff, but a lot of those kids who aren’t killed or put in prison go on to big-time drug smuggling, big-time fraud, sometimes big-time assassinations.
    I thought about the kid with the knife at Big Bubba’shouse. Yes, he had been stupid enough and weak enough to be recruited by a gang. So had the others. And they had asked for Jaz. I thought about the tattoo on Jaz’s ankle and wondered if the dagger was a gang symbol.
    I said, “Guidry, that man with Jaz wore an underarm holster.”
    He made a note in his little black book. “Anything else?”
    “When I was leaving Big Bubba’s house, I think I saw Jaz’s face through the bushes. She and her stepfather didn’t look like they could afford that neighborhood.”
    He