Page 8 of Dark Obsession

“What kind of sound was it?”

“If you’d shut your yap a second, I might be able to hear it again.”

“Damn, you taking lessons from Aggie?”

Cody had to clench his teeth hard to keep from responding. He cocked his head and listened. It came again, a soft squeak that almost sounded like a question. Cody slowly turned his head and said in a soft voice, “Get the cage ready.”

Jugs nodded and descended out of sight.

Turning back, Cody let out a yelp of surprise as something wriggled toward him out of the shadows along the base of the wall. He fell on his ass and scooted backwards. The critter squeaked in surprise and scurried away into the shadows. In the brief glimpse he’d caught, however, he’d recognized it, and his muscles loosened as he laughed quietly.

“You okay?” Jugs was back, having lifted a small wire cage into the attic.

“It’s a ferret.”

“A ferret?”

“Yeah, a ferret.” Cody got to his feet. Hunched over to avoid knocking himself out on a rafter, he returned to the attic entrance for the cage. “Seems friendly enough. Do you know what they eat?”

“Human fingers?”

Cody squinted at him. “You’re in a really dark place. What’s going on?”

Jugs widened his eyes and pointed to the brace around his neck. “I don’t know, Bonker, what’s going on with you?”

“All right, all right. Calm down. Let me corral this thing, and we can go get lunch.”

“Talk nice to it,” Jugs said as Cody carried the cage across the attic. “Not like you talk to your employees.”

“For the love of…”

He adjusted the pads before getting on his knees again, grunting at the aches that flared up and down his body. He was much too young to be feeling this old.

After a few fumbling attempts with the cage door, he managed to get it open then settled in to wait. His knees protested the position, but he maintained it.

Waving to activate the headlamp, he made quiet kissing sounds. More squeaking floated out of the shadows. A moment later, the ferret scampered toward him. It sniffed around his knees and hands, whiskers and tail twitching, then entered the cage, going round and round inside to sniff all the corners and bars. Cody closed and latched the door then pushed to his feet, narrowly avoiding banging his head.

“That’s how you catch a critter,” he said as he carried the cage to Jugs.

“You did that real well.” Jugs took the cage then nodded back the way he’d come. “What about those three?”

“What?” Cody turned and discovered three more ferrets sitting up on their hind legs and studying him with dark, bright eyes. “It’s a goddamn colony.”

“I’ll get more cages,” Jugs said as he disappeared down the ladder. “You keep them occupied.”

Cody took another thirty minutes to round up the remaining ferrets. By the time he’d handed the last cage down the ladder to Jugs, he guessed he may have sweated out at least five pounds. The heat pressed against him, and the inside of his mask stunk like coffee breath.

After a final circuit of the attic, directing the headlamp into all of the corners to make sure he hadn’t missed one of the critters, he was satisfied they’d all been accounted for. He checked along the base of the roofline but found no obvious entry points. The ferrets had come from inside the house.

The ladder shuddered under his boots as he descended. When he reached the bottom, he pulled down his mask and wiped his face and neck, sighing at the touch of the house’s cooler air. After folding up the ladder and pushing the door into the ceiling, he went downstairs. Their client, Gerald, was in the kitchen, hair a wild cloud of gray and a tight-fitting, high-necked track suit clinging to his thin frame.

“I had a roommate a few weeks ago who rented one of the upstairs bedrooms,” Gerald said. “He bought the ferrets from some guy at a county fair or something. When I discovered them, I made him move out. I thought he’d taken them with him, but apparently I was wrong. Were they starving or dehydrated?”

“They need baths and some food and water, but they seem okay,” Cody said. “We’ll drop them off at the animal shelter. Sounds like he was a pretty crappy roommate.”

“That’s a kind description. Do you accept credit cards?”

“Absolutely.”