Purrfect Trap Read online

  I gulped, and so did Dooley. Vena Aleman is Hampton Cove’s number-one veterinarian, and Odelia always finds some excuse to take us there and have us turned inside out by Vena’s gloved hands. More often than not discomfort and pain is involved, not to mention needles and all manner of torture gear. Suffice it to say we don’t like Vena, and we don’t like this habit of Odelia of dragging us there, even when we’re not sick.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, raising my paws. “Why can’t she just leave us alone?!”

  “Right?” said Harriet. “All of us are the picture of health, but still she insists on having us checked out over and over and over again. And Vena never finds a thing!”

  “Exactly!” I cried, indignation making me sound squeaky. Like a squirrel.

  “You have been having trouble chewing lately, though, Max,” said Dooley.

  “No, I haven’t,” I said quickly.

  “Yeah, you have,” said Brutus. “You told me so yourself.”

  “Yeah, and you keep favoring your left side, because of the pain on the right,” said Harriet.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, my paws breaking out into a sweat. “It will pass.”

  I should never have told Dooley, or Harriet, or Brutus! Of course they would go blabbing to Odelia and now she was taking me to Vena’s and I was for it! For it!

  “You should have that tooth checked out, Max,” Dooley said now. “It’s not good for you to keep walking around with a bad tooth.”

  “You guys, I keep telling you, I don’t have a bad tooth! It’s all good, I’m fine!” They gave me a look of pity that almost hurt as much as my tooth was hurting. “I swear!” I said. “It doesn’t hurt. Look!” I chewed down on the comforter. “Do you think I would do this if my tooth hurt? Huh?”

  “It’s very soft, this comforter,” said Harriet skeptically. “Try biting down on this.”

  She pointed to Gran’s wooden footboard. I flinched, then decided to accept the challenge, and bit down on the board, which was about half an inch of laminated chipboard. Immediately I regretted my initiative, as a sharp pain shot through my jaw, then blossomed into my head like a full-blown headache. Ouch! I let go of the board and had to grit my teeth to keep from uttering a yelp. Of course by gritting my teeth I only made matters worse, and when the faces of my friends contorted in a vicarious pain response, I cried, “Okay, so my tooth hurts a little bit! But so what? It will heal, right?”

  “Wrong,” said Harriet, who was quickly becoming the voice of unreason. “Teeth don’t heal by themselves, Max. They should be looked at by a professional.”

  “Like Vena,” said Dooley helpfully.

  “So you’re going to the vet, buddy,” said Brutus. “Whether you like it or not.”

  “In fact we’re all going,” said Harriet, patting my back.

  “To give you the emotional support you need,” Dooley added.

  I shook off Harriet’s paw. “I’m not going and that’s my final word,” I said. “In fact if I never set foot in Vena’s office ever again it will be too soon!”

  Chapter 2

  Vena was making a face, which told me things with my tooth weren’t as good as I’d imagined.

  “This isn’t good,” she said, as if she’d read my mind. Then made a tsk-tsking sound.

  “Oh, poor Maxie,” said Odelia. She still had a few splashes of paint on her face, and wallpaper glue in her hair. Also with us at the doctor’s office were, as promised, Dooley, Harriet and Brutus. For moral support, though judging from their faces and the rapt attention they now paid to the procedure, they were more there as rubberneckers and disaster tourists. You know. The kind of cats that enjoy train wrecks and car crashes.

  “Is it bad?” I finally asked around Vena’s gloved fingers as they probed my gums and caused me no small degree of discomfort and pain.

  “Oh, how sweet,” said Vena, who could only hear my meows.

  Odelia, on the other hand, understands what cats are saying, and she translated my thoughts to the medical woman. “Is it bad, Vena?” she asked.

  “You better believe it, baby,” said the large woman. Vena is cut from the same mold that produced the likes of John Cena and Arnold Schwarzenegger and could probably have been a pro wrestler if she hadn’t decided to become a professional pet torturer instead. She was shaking her head in abject dismay. “He must have been in a lot of pain for a long time. Three teeth are beyond salvage. Broken off, protruding roots, infected gum, pus dripping from an abscess. Here. I’ll show you,” she said, and probed my painful gum with obvious delight. “See? And here. See how swollen his gums are?”

  I had half a mind to bite down on her fingers, but decided not to. Not out of the goodness of my own heart, mind you, but because I didn’t want to risk hurting my teeth even more. Vena was right. I had been suffering quite a bit of pain lately, but had simply favored the other side of my mouth until the pain went away all by itself. Unfortunately it looked as if Harriet might be right after all: toothaches don’t simply go away, the way other aches and pains often do. They need a professional’s touch to get better.

  “So is she going to fix my teeth now?” I asked, speaking a little unclearly as one does when a veterinarian has her fingers jammed practically down one’s throat.

  “You’re going to have to leave him with me,” said Vena, finally dragging her eyes away from the devastated area that apparently was my mouth.

  “What?” I said, aghast.

  “I need to pull all these,” she said, as she raked her finger along my painful teeth, in the process drawing a whimper from yours truly. “And to do that I need to sedate him, of course, and then when he wakes up I’d like to make sure he’s fine before I send him home.”

  “But I don’t want to stay here!” I said.

  “It’s necessary,” Vena said, as if she could actually understand my heartfelt lament.

  “Of course,” said Odelia, immediately caving like a true wimp!

  “I’m also going to draw some blood,” said Vena, and proceeded to bring out a huge lawnmower!

  Well, not a lawnmower, maybe, but one of those contraptions Chase likes to use in the morning to remove the stubble from his chin and cheeks.

  And before I knew what was happening, she’d planted the contraption against my arm and was using it to remove my precious fur!

  “Oh, my God!” Brutus cried, holding his paws up to his head in consternation.

  “I can’t watch this,” said Harriet, turning away from the horrid procedure.

  “Does it hurt, Max?” asked Dooley, the third one in the peanut gallery to make a comment.

  “No, it doesn’t hurt, but it’s not much fun either!” I said. “Any more stupid questions?”

  They all winced as they watched how Vena, with practiced ease, removed a large swath of perfectly fine fur from my arm, then plucked away the remainder and threw the whole lot into the garbage!

  “Hey, I need that fur!” I said, aghast. “That’s my fur! You can’t just go and—”

  “Just a tiny little prick,” said Vena, and suddenly jabbed a needle into my arm!

  “Owowow!” I cried. That wasn’t a tiny prick, you liar!

  “Normally I sedate them at this point,” said Vena, “but since Max is always such a good boy…” She casually extracted about a pint of blood, then attached a second tube!

  “Is that… blood?” asked Harriet, and promptly passed out.

  “Oops,” said Vena. “Yeah, this is not very pleasant, is it, Maxie, darling?”

  “No, it’s not!” I cried as I stared at my blood draining away into the tube.

  “Harriet!” Brutus squealed. “Harriet! Say something! Doc! Harriet dropped dead! My snuggle bug just dropped dead on me! She’s dead, I’m telling you. Doooooc!”

  “Harriet?” said Odelia as she rubbed Harriet’s back. “Are you all right, sweetie?”

  In response, Harriet merely muttered something about blood.

  Vena adroitly extracted the second tube,
removed the needle from my arm, then checked Harriet. She smiled. “She’ll be fine. Maybe you shouldn’t have brought them, Odelia. Cats are sensitive creatures, and it looks a great deal worse than it feels.”

  “No, it doesn’t!” I said. “In fact it feels a great deal worse than it looks!”

  “Since they don’t know what’s happening, and don’t understand, all they see is me poking their friend with a needle, so they must all be pretty upset right now.”

  “I’m not upset,” said Dooley. “I just wonder where all that red stuff is coming from?”

  “That’s blood, Dooley,” I said tersely. “My blood!”

  “Oh,” said Dooley, frowning. “You mean, Vena is a vampire?”

  “Just give her a minute,” said Vena, placing Harriet on a chair. “Now let’s continue, shall we?” She had spilled a drop of blood on her metal operation table, and now pressed some sort of contraption against it. “Let’s check his blood sugar level…” she murmured. She keenly eyed the device and nodded. “Looks good. He doesn’t have diabetes.”

  “Diabetes!” I said.

  “Now let’s have a listen to his heart…” And she pressed some cold thingamabob into my chest! “Mh…” she said, listening intently at the other end of the weird-looking device, and proceeding to poke me all over my tender corpus! Finally she smiled. “No. No problems there. His heart is fine. Now let’s put him on the scale.”

  And before I knew what was happening, she’d carried me over to a corner of her consulting room, and placed me on a big metal plate and held me in place with her gloved hand. I have to confess I wasn’t giving her friendly glances. But she paid me no mind.

  “Mh,” she said after a moment. “He’s still a little heavier than I like to see.”

  “I’m not heavy!” I said, indignant.

  “How much do you feed him?”

  “Well…” said Odelia, thinking.

  Basically she feeds me however much I like to eat. As she should!

  “Does he get a lot of exercise?”

  “He does move around a lot,” Odelia confirmed.

  “Where am I?” asked Harriet, emerging from her malaise. “Blood!” she cried when she saw me, and immediately became woozy again. Only this time, at least, she didn’t pass out on us.

  “I would like him to lose at least three pounds,” said Vena now, the spoilsport. “We don’t want him to get diabetes, or heart disease.”

  “And I would like to state, for the record, that I feel perfectly fine,” I said.

  “You should limit his portions,” said Vena, “and perhaps switch back over to the diet kibble. That seems to have done the trick last time.”

  “He doesn’t like the diet kibble, though,” said Odelia, and I gave her two paws up for coming to my defense!

  “Yeah, well, that can’t be helped, I’m afraid,” said Vena with a truly wicked smile. “I’m going to run some more tests right now, and then later tonight I’ll do the procedure.”

  “Thanks, Vena,” said Odelia, then turned to me, still sitting on that sneaky scale. “See you later, sweetie,” she said, grabbing my cheeks between her hands and pushing them together, like humans tend to do with babies and toddlers.

  “Do I really have to stay here, Odelia?” I asked with a groan.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” she said. “You need to have this operation, Max. But I promise, you’ll feel so much better afterward. No more pain. And you’ll be able to chew again.”

  “Diet kibble,” I muttered darkly.

  “He won’t be able to eat kibble for three weeks, though,” said Vena now. “Only soft food for a while.” And she proceeded to pick me up, and inject something into my back.

  “Ouch!” I cried. “When is this torture ever going to stop?!”

  “Just some antibiotics,” she explained. “Against the infection.”

  What did I tell you? A visit to Vena is like a visit to a torture chamber, or the place where that guy from Saw lives. Needles, needles, more needles and diet kibble!

  And to add insult to injury, Harriet, Brutus and Dooley filed out of the room, giving me waves with their paws, and then Odelia closed the door and it was just me and Vena…

  Chapter 3

  “I don’t like this, you guys,” said Dooley, shaking his head. No, he didn’t like this at all.

  Odelia was driving them back to the house, all three cats ensconced on the backseat. The mood wasn’t festive, to say the least.

  “Never leave a cat behind,” he continued. “Isn’t that what being a cat is all about? And here we are, leaving our best friend in the hands of the enemy.”

  “Vena isn’t exactly the enemy,” said Harriet. “Well, maybe a little.” She still looked a little white around the nostrils. Then again, Harriet is a white Persian, so she always looks white around the nostrils.

  “Did you see how Vena was poking needles into Max as if he was a pincushion?” said Brutus, who looked as if he’d enjoyed the show.

  “Brutus!” said Dooley. “How can you say such a thing? That’s our friend you’re talking about. Our best friend and housemate.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Brutus said without a hint of contrition. “But you have to admit it was quite the spectacle.” He grinned. “Max looked so mad I thought for a moment he was actually going to bite Vena.”

  “Max would never do such a thing,” said Dooley. “Max is a gentlecat, and he would never bite a human unless they deserved it.”

  “Looked to me like Vena deserved it plenty,” said Brutus.

  “Let’s not forget that everything Vena does, she does for a good reason,” said Harriet. “All she wants to do is make Max better. And he did have a lot of pain in his tooth.”

  “Teeth,” said Brutus. “Is she really going to pull three teeth? Ouch!”

  Ouch, indeed, Dooley thought. He felt for his friend. Not only was Max going to be forced to spend the night at Vena’s—the last place in the world he would voluntarily have chosen to be—but he was going to suffer the indignation of having no less than three teeth pulled.

  And as they sat there, Odelia’s car wending its way home, it suddenly occurred to him that maybe one day they would be driving home like this, and Max wouldn’t be with them, as he wasn’t with them now, and in fact he wouldn’t be joining them ever again.

  The thought actually saddened him to a great degree.

  So he made the jump from the backseat to the passenger seat, which was conveniently empty. “Odelia?” he asked.

  “Yes, Dooley?” said Odelia, while she kept a close eye on the road.

  “Is Max going to be okay?”

  “You heard Vena, honey. Max is going to be perfectly fine. Once those bad teeth are gone, he’s going to be right as rain, and he won’t be in so much pain anymore.”

  Dooley thought about this for a moment, then swallowed away a lump of uneasiness. Thinking hard always made him uneasy. “Odelia?”

  “Mh?”

  “What if Max doesn’t come back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if something happens and Max… dies?”

  Odelia gave him a quick sideways glance. “Oh, honey. It’s so sweet of you to worry about your friend. But I can promise you that he’ll be fine. Vena is an excellent vet. The best. She won’t let anything happen to your best friend.”

  He nodded, but was still not fully convinced. Being without his friend was almost like being without a body part, but he found it very hard to put those feelings into words. So he simply stared out the window, while Harriet and Brutus talked in the backseat, and Odelia directed the car to the homestead.

  He couldn’t quite place his finger on it, but for some reason he felt a twinge of worry. And no matter what Odelia said about Vena’s skills, that twinge of worry wouldn’t go away.

  Not that far from where Dooley sat worrying about his friend Max, Albert Balk was thinking dark thoughts about his wife Lenora. She’d sent him out on a fool’s errand. She’d told him to go and fetch
her the latest Cosmopolitan, but when he arrived at the newsagent they’d assured him the next Cosmo didn’t come out for another couple of days. Darn it, he thought. It wasn’t as if he had all the time in the world. Then again, maybe she was planning a surprise? His birthday was coming up soon, so…

  He perked up considerably at the thought of finding all of his friends and family yelling ‘Surprise!’ the moment he walked through the door. Ha ha. He loved surprises.

  He parked the car in the drive and got out. Hurrying up to the door, key in hand, he had a spring in his step. And when he entered the house he was smiling in anticipation. No one jumped out at him, though. They were probably in the living room. Ha ha. Funny!

  “Lenora?” he said as he carefully poked his head through the door. “Honey?”

  And that’s when he got the shock of a lifetime. Lenora was on the couch, but she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t even dressed, and neither was the hunky male lying on top of her. He pushed his glasses further up his nose, just in case he was seeing things.

  “Lenora?” he said, his voice suddenly weak and his knees wobbly.

  Lenora had the decency to look appalled by this sudden intrusion into her extramarital activities. “Bertie—I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

  “They didn’t have the new Cosmo,” he muttered.

  Lenora produced a feeble smile. “Um… this is Hank,” she said, introducing the man with whom she was closely entangled. “Hank, meet Bertie, my husband. Hank is a traveling salesman for Berghoff,” she told Bertie, as if passing on an interesting little tidbit of information. “You should see the quality of his pots and pans. Really remarkable.”

  “Oh?” said Bertie, staring at Hank, who gave him an uncertain grin, then held out his hand. It was a firm hand, with a lot of dark hair on the back. The same color of his hairy chest. His head, though, was fully bald, which obviously didn’t seem to bother Lenora.

  “Nice to meet you, buddy,” said Hank the traveling Berghoff salesman.