The Defective Detective : Cat Chaser Read Online Free PDF Page A

stood in front of a service elevator.  Ray leaned forward and slid the outer cage door, the diagonal bars folding flat, and carefully stepped inside.  I waited for a moment as he adjusted himself into the tiny space, at first not quite sure if I would even fit in there with him and then turned around and reversed into the space.
    “If you don’t shut the door then it won’t move,” Ray grunted, the force of his words blowing the hair on the back of my head.
    I slid the cage door shut.  This didn’t feel right, I didn’t trust any of these people and I was letting one of them take me down to a deserted car park in a building the police couldn’t get into even if we could call them.
    Ray contorted his body, freeing his arm and putting it over my shoulder, readying himself to put me in a headlock.  I moved backwards to avoid it and bumped into his Santa-gut as he reached even further forward, avoiding the headlock and instead pressing the ‘B2’ button on the panel to my right.  He retracted his arm, folding it down by his side once more.
    “You’re not my type,” he said then grimaced a smile at me.  I raised my eyebrows and smiled back then the lift lurched into life and began to drop.
    And when I say drop I do mean drop.  My arms shot out to brace myself on its sides as a feeling rose in my stomach.  A familiar feeling, but one I would usually only expect to feel if was on a roller coaster and certainly not in a plummeting metal cage.
    I stared about me and tried not to think about it but everything about this contraption seemed designed to intimidate, from the cage door to the low ceiling to the metal sign screwed to the wall warning that no more than seven persons should be allowed in at one time.  Since it was extremely unlikely that you could fit three people in this space without them becoming intimately acquainted with certain areas of one another’s anatomy, presumably the only way to fit seven in would be if they were dwarves and the lift was fitted with some sort seven-tier bunk bed affair.
    With a snap the lift reached the bottom of the shaft, Ray and I were both lifted a few inches into the air and the lights of the lift went out.  For a moment I thought it was the narcolepsy and then the light blinked back on and we dropped down and I shakily reached forward and slid the reluctant cage door open, stepping out into an unlit corridor.
    “It always does that,” said Ray, walking out and flicking a collection of light switches on the wall next to the lift.
    As the lights came on I could see that we were inside the car park itself and that it was practically empty.  I suppose it was to be expected but for some reason I’d thought there would be a collection of cars in there.  Instead there were just one or two around the edges and one blue van sitting alone in the very centre.  I looked at Ray, he nodded and started walking towards it.
    The van itself was nothing out of the ordinary, exactly what you would expect of a security guard I suppose.  Over ten years old, bits of rust here and there and once Ray opened it up the inside was much the same.  It was clean.  Very clean. But scruffy  from a decade of heavy use and Jacob seemed to have an obsession with air fresheners, with ten or more hanging from the partition that separated the cabin of the van from the back.
    “So what made you think there might be something here?” I shouted out to Ray as I took a bunch of papers from the compartment in the door.
    “Dunno,” he walked in front of the car so I could see him from where I sat in the driver’s seat.  “You said about taxidermy so… ”
    There was nothing of any interest in the papers, just junk.  I leaned over and opened the glove compartment but all it contained, strangely, was a pair of gloves.  I took them out and mused briefly on the fact that Jacob may be the only person I’d ever met who actually used his glove compartment for gloves.  If you could call them gloves,