Phantoms

radio. The girl said, “Food and coffee’s ready if anyone wants anything.”
    “I’m starved,” Wargle said, licking his lips.
    “We should all eat something, even if we don’t feel like it,” Bryce said.
    “Sheriff,” Gordy said, “Lisa and I have been wondering about the animals, the pets. What made us think about it was when you said you heard dog and cat sounds over the phone. Sir, what’s happened to all the pets?”
    “Nobody’s seen a dog or cat,” Lisa said. “Or heard barking.”
    Thinking of the silent streets, Bryce frowned and said, “You’re right. It’s strange.”
    “Jenny says there were some pretty big dogs in town. A few German shepherds. One Doberman that she knows of. Even a Great Dane. Wouldn’t you think they’d have fought back? Wouldn’t you think some of the dogs would’ve gotten away?” the girl asked.
    “Okay,” Gordy said quickly, anticipating Bryce’s response, “so maybe it was big enough to overwhelm an ordinary, angry dog. Okay, so we also know that bullets didn’t stop it, which says that maybe nothing can. It’s apparently big, and it’s strong. But, sir, big and strong don’t necessarily count for much with a cat . Cats are greased lightning. It’d take something real damned sneaky to slip up on every cat in town.”
    “Real sneaky and real fast ,” Lisa said.
    “Yeah,” Bryce said uneasily. “ Real fast.”
     
    Jenny had just begun eating a sandwich when Sheriff Hammond sat down in a chair beside the desk, balancing his plate on his lap. “Mind some company?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Tal Whitman’s been telling me you’re the scourge of our local motorcycle gang.”
    She smiled. “Tal’s exaggerating.”
    “That man doesn’t know how to exaggerate,” the sheriff said. “Let me tell you something about him. Sixteen months ago, I was away for three days at a law enforcement conference in Chicago, and when I got back, Tal was the first person I saw. I asked him if anything special had happened while I’d been gone, and he said it was just the usual business with drunk drivers, bar fights, a couple of burglaries, various CITs—”
    “What’s a CIT?” Jenny asked.
    “Oh, it’s just a cat-in-tree report.”
    “Policemen don’t really rescue cats, do they?”
    “Do you think we’re heartless?” he asked, feigning shock.
    “CITs? Come on now.”
    He grinned. He had a marvelous grin. “Once every couple of months, we do have to get a cat out of a tree. But a CIT doesn’t mean just cats in trees. It’s our shorthand for any kind of nuisance call that takes us away from more important work.”
    “Ah.”
    “So anyway, when I came back from Chicago that time, Tal told me it’d been a pretty ordinary three days. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said there’d been an attempted robbery at a 7-Eleven. Tal had been a customer, out of uniform, when it went down. But even off duty, a cop’s required to carry his gun, and Tal had a revolver in an ankle holster. He told me one of the punks had been armed; he said he’d been forced to kill him, and he said I wasn’t to worry about whether it was a justified shooting or not. He said it was as justified as they come. When I got concerned about him , he said, ‘Bryce. It was really just a cakewalk.’ Later, I found out the two punks had intended to shoot everyone. Instead, Tal shot the gunman—although not before he was shot himself. The punk put a bullet through Tal’s left arm, and just about a split second after that, Tal killed him. Tal’s wound wasn’t serious, but it bled like hell, and it must’ve hurt something awful. Of course, I hadn’t seen the bandage because it was under the shirt-sleeve, and Tal hadn’t bothered to mention it. So anyway, there’s Tal in the 7-Eleven, bleeding all over the place, and he discovers he’s out of ammo. The second punk, who grabbed the gun the first one dropped, is also out of ammo, and he decides to run. Tal goes after him, and they have themselves a knock-down-drag-out fight from one end of that little grocery store to the other. The guy was two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Tal, and he wasn’t wounded. But you know what the backup officer told me they found when they arrived? They said Tal was sitting up on the counter by the cash register, his shirt off, sipping a complimentary cup of coffee, while the clerk tried to stanch the flow of blood. One suspect was dead. The other one was unconscious, sprawled in