Strange Life of a Cat

Zheng Tan eventually decided to head over to the warehouse.

Wei Ling saw the black cat run towards that direction, so he quickly focused on the men behind the wall. With the cat over there, Walnut should notice what was going on outside.

Zheng Tan looked at the exhaust fan. It was a bit high; he couldn’t jump to that height from the ground. He climbed up a wooden board sitting next to the wall and used it to jump to the opening.

He looked through the gaps…There was nothing in there except broken stuff that was abandoned.

The room with the exhaust fan was not large. Zheng Tan surveyed the room after he jumped in. The door was jammed shut by wooden boards and boxes of packaging bottles. Otherwise, someone would have come in here to steal the bottles and sell them for money. He didn’t see any insects, probably due to the scattered preservatives around the room.

Though the door was shut, there was a hole in the wall that Zheng Tan reckoned he could just about squeeze through. It was a bit difficult, but he made it.

That was the thing with cats. Their bones and limbs were flexible without needing to practice yoga. Unfortunately, getting covered in dust was unavoidable.

Outside the small room, Zheng Tan shook the dust off his fur and looked around. This was where they actually stored things in the warehouse, except it was empty at the moment. The light was dim inside, and a few wooden beams lay in a mess on the ground. The beams were not from the warehouse, but taken out from under the fallen building next to here.

His vision was blocked by all the junk laying around and his sense of smell was affected by preservatives. He had only his listening to rely on.

He traced the sounds he heard and navigated through all the junk. If it were a human here, he would have a much more difficult time. Zheng Tan took advantage of his body to move quickly.

The warehouse was quite large; it took him a while before he traced the voices he heard to the source.

The area was cleared of junk and three people were lying on the ground. ‘Walnut’ was looking around for ropes to tie the hands and feet of those people. Their mouths were stuffed with packaging paper, and they were making muffled whimpering noises.

Walnut was not wearing his police uniform today, probably to not alarm his suspects.

Next to him stood a woman. Judging by her looks, she almost seemed like the girl next door. She was wearing red glasses with a jacket that was cinched at the waist and showed off her curves. If this was the woman Wei Ling suspected, Zheng Tan had a hard time linking this average-college-student-like kid with the ruthless murderer.

However, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Zheng Tan had learned that from the thieves in the Eastern Quarters earlier. Looking harmless did not equal actually harmless.

Zheng Tan did go out of hiding immediately. He stayed behind a wooden board and watched the woman intently. Walnut clearly had his guard up too. He never turned his back against her.

Zheng Tan saw Walnut take out his phone after tying the three guys on the floor.

“No signal?”

Walnut frowned and looked around. He held his phone up and paced in a circle. He still didn’t get signal, so he decided to go out to take make the phone call. After walking two steps, he turned around and said to the girl who didn’t move:

“Follow me.”

The girl still did not speak but followed him obediently. However, she made sure to stay a meter or two behind him. This was the ‘safety distance’ between humans according to psychologist.

Not only did Walnut have his guard up, she had hers up as well.

Zheng Tan followed them quietly. He maneuvered through the piles of junk. He had to be fast and silent. He had to pause once in awhile to calculate his next move and to survey his surroundings. But when he took off again after every pause, he was fast.

It was like when cat owners sometimes play with their cats. They would see their cats seven or eight meters away, but in a blink of the eye, the cats would be only five meters away.

Zheng Tan did not know that he looked awfully like Sheriff when he hunted. He followed his prey in silence, waiting for his chance.

There was less junk near the door; maybe the three people who came in first had already cleared the path. Walnut did not have a hard time walking out. He only had to push away obstacles in their path. He used these chances to check up on the girl behind him.

As Walnut was picking up a wooden board, Zheng Tan saw that the girl, who looked like a regular college student, took a tube like thing out of her sleeve and started to walk towards Walnut.

Zheng Tan instinctively felt that the thing she had was dangerous.

This was the chance he was waiting for.

Keeping his eyes on the girl, Zheng Tan shot towards them.

The girl held onto the syringe in her hand. She had a cold gleam in her eyes that were hidden by her glasses. Just as she was about to succeed, she felt a strong force hit her in the chest and lost her balance. The syringe was knocked out of the way.

Before she could realize what just happened, Walnut, who was walking in front of her, caught her arm and pinned her onto a wood beam nearby.

Bang!

The girl hit the beam, and her glasses flew off.

Zheng Tan sat next to a board after his successful strike. He flexed his paws and thought that she was not that well-endowed in the chest area. It didn’t feel that great.

Walnut took out some ropes. He had remembered to keep some on hand earlier when he was searching for it. He didn’t think, however, that he would need it so soon.

“I’ve being watching you. So this is how you strike.” Walnut looked at the syringe that got knocked onto the board. It had been modified. When pushed, the syringe would shoot out the needle head through pressure. The needle probably contained some sort of tranquilizer.

“I see you’re all done here.” Wei Ling, who just came in through a window said.

Zheng Tan traced his voice. Behind Wei Ling was a large window which he remembered was closed earlier, maybe locked even. To make thing worse, the window was at least five meters off the ground. How did Wei Ling come inside without making any noise?

Walnut, however, was not surprised to see Wei Ling. “Thanks to the black cat here, I escaped being hit by her syringe. Didn’t think she would have something like this.” He shrugged.

Wei Ling looked down at the person who remained calm even after being caught. “I told you this woman was suspicious. Test her DNA, it should match that of the culprit.”

“Shouldn’t the culprit be male? Are you saying she’s a transvestite? It can’t be; I checked.”

“It is her. She’s just a bit special. You need to ask a biologist or someone who studies genetics.”

With Wei Ling here, Zheng Tan didn’t need to do anything else. He jumped on to the piles of junk and looked out the window from which Wei Ling came in. There was only an electricity pole beside it.

Zheng Tan did not think he could jump out using only a pole that was slightly far away to get out like Wei Ling. So he went back to where he came in from and left through the exhaust fan opening.

Outside were four people. All of them tied up, all knocked out. Clearly this was the work of Wei Ling.

Zheng Tan looked around. He used a tree to climb into a five story building. The lower two floors were offices. There weren’t a lot of preservatives and additives there. The walls were lined with charts and graphs.

The upper floors were dormitories for the workers. On one window sill sat a simple vase made from a plastic bottle. The soil inside was dry, and in it grew a dead cactus.

Zheng Tan didn’t linger, but went right to the rooftop.

He could see most of the factory from up there. Not only that, he could see two of the factories nearby. One of them had relocated like this one. The other was a bit livelier.

Right after Zheng Tan left, Wei Ling and Walnut opened the warehouse doors and brought out the people inside. They put the people on three sides together. One side was the people doing a drug deal inside the warehouse; one side was the woman; and one side was the people outside who were planning a heist on the drug deal.

“I heard the IOC did DNA test on all competing female athletes. Apparently, athletes with Y chromosome had an advantage against normal female athletes. This person here probably fits into that criteria. You have some luck, running into such a rare event in a case.”

Wei Ling and Walnut chatted and smoked while they kept an eye on the criminals. Walnut had already called someone, so backup would be there soon. All they needed to do now was wait.

He Tao smiled bitterly after hearing Wei Ling’s ridicule. “F*cking hell. Oh! I forgot to ask. Why did you bring that cat with you?”

“Our master told us cats bring good luck. When you don’t know what to do, a cat might bring unexpected change. So I brought it.”

He Tao shrugged. He still could not accept this theory of his master’s.

“Now I owe the cat a favor. God, I hate this feeling!”

“Don’t worry about it. This isn’t the first time you owed a cat a favor. You have experience in how to pay them back.”

“F*ck!”

They were silent for a moment. He Tao asked: “You mentioned you decided on a job. Where do you plan to work? What kind of a job?”

“I plan on being a security guard.”

“Wha…” He Tao coughed violently. He was so agitated he choked on smoke.

When he finally finished coughing, he started yelling. “You refuse to enter the police force, you don’t want to go to a company, instead you become a security guard? What is in that brain of yours?”

“This is a decision I made after careful consideration.”

“Did you bang your head before your careful consideration?”

“I was completely sober and sane, and I already told the master.”

“What did the master say?”

“He said ‘oh’, but I heard the sound of him breaking a table after he said that.”

“He broke a table with his bare hands again?”

The emphasis was on the word ‘again’.

“From the sound of it, he would be needing a new one. This was the seventh this year, yet he gets angry when we suggest a metal table.”

“Of course he would be angry. He likes to break tables when he is upset.”

“It’s good. Letting off steam is better than holding it in. Er Mao prepared a warehouse of tables for him anyways. It would last him a few years.”

“Now that you mention it, have you heard from Er Mao?”

“No.”

When these two chatted, Zheng Tan was checking out the soda factory next door. This factory was moving at the moment. Trucks were lined up to transport goods away.

Zheng Tan watched a truck that was being loaded. Workers were carrying containers of glass soda bottles onto the truck. As they were working, police cars drove by. One of the workers watched the cars and speculated the reason why the police was here. He didn’t notice a bottle cap by his foot and stepped on it. He twisted his ankle and dropped the container he was carrying.

The soda bottles that were being moved around made quite a commotion after being dropped. Glass shards exploded and flew everywhere.

Zheng Tan heard a bang. Workers close to the accident were hurt by the flying shards of glass. Their clothes were slashed and their hands and wrists, which weren’t covered by clothes, were cut.

The hurt workers were taken inside, so Zheng Tan focused back on the factory he was in. Policemen were getting out of their cars and were talking to Wei Ling and his senior.

By the looks of it, Wei Ling wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

Zheng Tan yawned and stretched. He decided to take a nap first.