And as much as I wanted to examine that flash drive, after a short visit with Lily, I stuck it in my pocket and drove over to the county shelter. I was probably on a fool’s errand, and I knew it. Plus, I was putting more miles on my little Toyota than I’d done all summer. But I was running short of paying clients, and nobody was racing to pay my overdue bills. Besides, now that I’d met Eleanor Shrift, I felt even more for her beautiful mess of a cat. I could have saved myself the trip. The black Persian didn’t know I was there. Didn’t know he was there, either, I suspected. That hard-looking Eleanor Shrift must have gotten through to Doc Sharp, or else the vet was desperate to stop the cat from hurting himself further. He was so loopy on some combination of antidepressants or tranquilizers that I couldn’t get any sense out of his smooth black head. “Here, here, here,” he kept repeating, his third eyelid half closed, masking unfocused eyes. “Here.”
