Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 11)

“Kidnapped?” Lily asked.

It was after school that same day. Lily and I had met at HQ like we always did. I explained the situation to her. We weren’t going after Teabone anymore. Our true goal here was to solve the pun preventing her safe return to the karate non-club’s side.

“That’s right,” I affirmed with a nod. “Kidnapped.”

That was my working theory anyway: that Teabone wasn’t just missing…

“She’s been kidnapped. You know. Taken. Snatched. Stolen.”

“I am well aware of the meaning, Boss. But what makes you think this all of a sudden?” As we spoke, Lily was watering one of the plants I had brought to the HQ the other day to liven things up a bit. A bit of green to get our spirits up, you know? Crystal clear droplets cascaded from the watering can onto the matte of the plant’s smooth green skin, dripped off its sharp spikes. That’s right: she was watering a cactus. I would’ve stopped her, but we had more important things to discuss. Thanks to my recent revelation, my mind was moving a mile a minute, and my mouth could hardly keep up. Talk of proper cactus care could come later.

“I noticed it when I woke up in the nurse’s office today. Sheldon was there. You know, my classmate, the one who was grilling me with those questions the other day?”

Lily nodded.

“Apparently my language arts teacher sent him to the nurse’s office cause he couldn’t stay awake in class.”

That’s what Greg and Evan had told me at lunch anyway. We’d graduated from using the least public public restroom stall in the history of public restroom stalls and begun using the HQ for lunch. It made a perfect hideaway from all the glares and snickers that were still being sent my way everywhere I went. I was just glad I had somewhere I could eat without having to tiptoe around piss puddles. I was serious about never setting foot in the cafeteria again, so HQ did the trick.

Anyway, I had to hand it to Ms. Flamberge. Any other teacher I knew would’ve given Sheldon detention. And any other kid caught sleeping in Ms. F’s class would’ve been in for the rudest awakening ever. Or at least the sweatiest, as they ran laps around the building with Ms. F’s signature cinder block of punishment in hand. Frankly, Sheldon couldn’t handle the former emotionally, or the latter physically, and I bet Ms. F knew it. Letting him get some rest in the nurse’s office made much more sense. Ms. F had made the right choice. It was moments like these when I remembered why everyone loved her so much as a teacher, myself included.

“And yeah,” I continued, “Sheldon was dead tired, as usual, so he rolled over on his bed and said he was just going to take another quick cat nap. That’s when it all clicked. What if the reason we haven’t been able to find Teabone out and about is that…

I paused for dramatic effect, but it didn’t really affect Lily at all.

“...she’s been kidnapped?”

Lily cocked her head to the side. She was all ears now. And that meant she was barely paying attention to what she was doing. That poor cactus was under a waterfall.

“Good thinking, Boss. If Teabone were, for example, confined to a building or a room, then it comes as no wonder that our efforts thus far have been in vain.”

“Exactly. If Teabone’s been kidnapped, then maybe she’s not outside to begin with. Maybe she hasn’t been for days. Maybe she’s inside, secreted away somewhere as we speak, just waiting to be rescued.”

“What makes you so sure though, Boss?”

“Good question. I’m still not completely sure. Call it an educated guess. I didn’t notice it myself at first. But once I did, I couldn’t ignore it. It all came down to Sheldon, really. Well, came down more to what he said to me earlier today.”

Lily  still didn’t seem to get what I was getting at. I didn’t blame her. We had been missing this for an entire week. “Still don’t see? Let me ask you, Lily. What do you call a kidnapped cat?”

I could see her eyes go glassy, just like they had before when she was scanning Sheldon, and I guessed she was thinking. Something quite a bit more powerful than hamster wheels was whirring in that head of hers. Then, her eyes went wide, and I couldn’t help breaking into a smile just as wide in response. She got it.

“Catnapped,” she said.

I nodded, and repeated after her. “Catnapped. Teabone’s been catnapped.”

A kidnapped cat is a cat who’s been kidnapped, and a cat who’s been kidnapped’s been, for short, catnapped.

Catnapped.

Catnapped.

Catnapped.

I thought it a million times, said it a million more, rolled it around the inside of my mouth, on my tongue, like I was tasting it.

The single word was the source of all our problems. Lucky for us, it was also our solution. Following Teabone’s trail from here on out meant following the trail of a catnapping. And that would be easy. Because I knew someone who, for the past week, had shown the strangest, most suspect proclivity for napping all day, just like a cat. He had even said so himself: “All I need is another quick cat nap.”

In other words?

We didn’t just have a lead. We had ourselves a suspect.

#

And that was it. That was how we arrived at the present day, present time. Well, more like present predicament. I yawned and checked my phone as I stepped out my front door, locked it behind me. 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday. My destination was about a 20-minute walk away. Intermittent streetlamps lit my way as I stole down residential streets still dark with sleep.

“Might I suggest a stakeout, Boss?” Those were the words, the innocuous, unassuming words, that had started all this, not 12 hours ago.

It had sounded like as solid a plan as any at the time. I could picture it already. Thick, juicy, succulent — but still sufficiently chewy.

“Boss?”

A nice medium-well, cooked to pinkish-brown perfection.

“Earth to Boss.”

That’s right. I was a medium-well kinda guy. I wondered how Lily liked hers.

“Boss!”

“Wh-what?” I stammered, snapping out of the meatiest daydream I’d had since I nearly broke my toe in a bout of cerebral sign flipping.

We were still at HQ, trying to come up with a plan for how to find out whether Sheldon really had nabbed our cat or not. The evidence I’d happened upon may have been sufficiently punny, but it was still circumstantial. We had no way of proving Sheldon had done anything at all.

That was when Lily suggested a steakeout... I m-mean stakeout.

Good thinking, I told her. Staking out Sheldon’s place would give us the chance to gather valuable intel.

“It would behoove us to see this through as soon as possible, Boss.”

Our plans were set. All that was left was for us to set them in motion.

“Great,” I said, honestly psyched up about the whole thing. “When do we start?”

“About 3:50.”

“...A.M?”

“A.M.”

“Why so early?”

“Why not?”

Damn, I thought. She has a point.

And that was how it came to pass that I showed up outside Sheldon’s place at 3:50 A.M. sharp on the appointed day. It was a misty, mid-October Saturday morning. Perfect for sleeping through, preferably under the warmth of blankets numbering more than one.

Instead, I was here.

So was Lily. As usual, she had arrived early. By the time I dragged both myself and what little remained of my enthusiasm to be doing literally any of this to the side of the street directly opposite Sheldon’s place — Lily had accessed his records and found out where he lived — Lily was already there. She looked like she had been for ages. Like she practically lived there. She was like this when it came to HQ too. On the days I went to HQ in the mornings, before school, she was already there no matter how early I checked in. How anyone could be so prompt was beyond me, but more power to her. Maybe it was a robot thing.

Though now that I thought about it, what was that she had said about waiting in HQ on “standby?” Could that have meant that she just hung out there in that dusty old room in a state of suspended animation when we weren’t working? That couldn’t be the case… right?

“There you are, Boss.”

“Hey.” I waved. We were on a wide street lined on either side with upscale houses. According to the address Lily had sent me, we were directly across the street from Sheldon’s place, a multi-story standalone unit with a porch leading to a big door, and a roof that dated the entire structure. The plan was to camp out here, scope out the situation, and see if we could spot any incriminating evidence from a distance.

“For example,” Lily had explained, “if Sheldon decides to take Teabone out for a walk, then we will know that he is the culprit.”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”

Her expression sagged to a pout. “And why not?”

“People don’t take cats for walks.” The chances that Sheldon would take a cat — and a stolen one at that — out on a walk with a leash were lower than the deepest reaches of the Mariana Trench.

“But,” I added, “in theory, you’re right.” And I meant it. If we could catch even the tiniest glimpse of Teabone, then that was it. Problem solved. That was why this stakeout was worth trying in the first place.

I looked around. Other than me, Lily, and a huge — and I mean seriously gargantuan — backpack resting neatly, despite its massive height and uncompromising girth, on the sidewalk, nothing really seemed out of the ordinary. I wondered what was inside the pack. It seemed like Lily had brought it with her.

“So, uh where are we going to hide?” I asked. Good stakeouts needed good hiding places to work after all.

“Right here of course,” said Lily, like it was obvious and I was stupid for not knowing. I resented the tonal insinuation. That wasn’t why I was stupid at all. Err… I worded that poorly, but you get what I mean.

“I have heard tell,” Lily continued, “that the best place to hide something is in plain sight. Thus we will be hiding right here” — she gestured broadly to the sidewalk and the street — “where everyone can see.”

Nothing about this could possibly go right.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 11)!
To be continued in Part 12!