the big sleep (a.k.a. WTMCK-WITW #6)

Ray was a square-jawed black cat with a sign outside his cage that said, “Warning: Do not let Ray out unsupervised. He gets aggressive with other cats.”

You would too if you’d been raised on the mean streets of Los Angeles, a land of brown rivers, pink smog and a fallen angel on every corner. Ray didn’t give much thought to his hardscrabble life or the fact that, by some estimates, he’d turned it around, becoming a cub reporter for the Times—the old rag, before they cleaned it up—when he was barely litter-trained.

By other estimates, it was that gig that messed him up for good. He took his job as investigative reporter seriously, and technicalities like “the law” less seriously. He looked corruption in the eye and, as everyone knows, cats always win staring contests. But after he looked a little too long and a little too hard at a crooked cop’s wife in the alley behind the Shortstop, he acquired a permanent bump on his nose and a barbed wire fence around his heart.

He continued to trot out the news in his signature, no-frills style: a short, sweet “Mrar” that told it like it was and not much else. He lived alone in a third-floor bachelor pad with a fleece blanket and a plain white water bowl for company. No one bothered him and he liked it that way.

He was thinking of the cop’s wife late one night when Cheryl came to his digs. She was a tall dame, towering over him by four and a half feet. Dressed in corduroy pants and a Manhattan Beach 10K T-shirt, she was hardly his type, which was blonde with knock-‘em-dead gams and a fondness for whisky. But it had been a long day and even a jaded man needs companionship now and then.

She opened his cage door. He climbed onto her shoulders. She led him to a folding chair, where he curled up like a spare tire in a sun-drenched junkyard, closed his eyes and purred.