If Catfish Had Nine Lives(10)

            “I think so.” Jerome smiled. “I haven’t left yet.”

            Actually, he’d left me a few times now, but he had come back, so I didn’t point out that nitpicky and self-involved detail. For now, at least.

            I tried to “feel” him one more time, but my hand went right through his shoulder again. I didn’t want to leave him. I wanted to talk to him more, find out more, but I wasn’t even sure what my exact questions were.

            “I’ll see you later,” I said before I hurried to the jail.





Chapter 4




            “I wasn’t in town,” I said. “I was back there, fishing.” I pointed toward the back wall of the jail. I wished I was still there, beyond the wall and the crowd, with the fake worm in the water or hunting down the evil catfish. “I heard a gunshot, but I couldn’t tell you if it was from a popgun or from something real.”

            “Catch anything?” Cliff asked.

            “Yep. It was huge, but it freed itself, gave me the evil eye, and took off,” I said with a sad smile.

            “The one that got away, huh?”

            There was no good reason for the two of us to have stepped back from the crowd for a moment just so we could both make sure the other one was okay. Cliff had a job to do, and taking time away from that job wasn’t fair, but we’d done it anyway. He’d told me he was glad to see me, because he hadn’t been able to find me in the crowd after the shooting.

            “Do you think we were all in danger or just Norman?”

            Cliff shrugged. “We don’t know, Betts. This is bigger than anything we’ve ever dealt with. I won’t say that Jim and the rest of us are in over our heads, but we simply don’t have the manpower to effectively deal with something like this—someone shot out in the open who was in the middle of a larger crowd. We’re doing the best we can, and we’ve called in some help.”

            “Do you know where the shot came from?” I asked.

            Cliff nodded. “Yes, we think so, but we can’t find any solid evidence; we’re basing our knowledge on measurement and distance guesses, and Jim’s the only one who has had any training with that stuff. Someone more experienced from St. Louis will be here soon to evaluate what we’ve come up with so far.”

            I bit my lip. Were we dealing with someone on the loose who was going around killing randomly, perhaps just building a list of victims, or had someone wanted Norman dead? How in the world could the police begin to figure that out with only measurements and distances?

            As if reading my mind, Cliff said, “Betts, there are ways to investigate this. I don’t want you to think we’re standing around wondering what to do next. We do have some ideas.”

            “I know,” I said, even though I hadn’t until he’d said so.

            For a long moment, Cliff held my eyes with his. Though we were in a corner of the room, there was no real privacy. There were people everywhere. I’d been nudged by the elbows of passersby as we’d attempted the somewhat discreet conversation. And he was a police officer. Even though he was one who’d taken the casual-wear idea seriously, everyone still knew he was an officer. We had to keep it professional. A comforting hug would have been weird.

            Cliff squinted. “I’ll call you later, but it will probably be much later.”

            “I expected as much.”

            He put his hand on my arm, smiled, and then turned to get back to work. I watched him melt into the crowd.

            “Betts! Hi! Is this crazier than a three-horned toad?”

            Cliff’s cousin Jezzie squeezed her shoulders through a small crowd on my other side.