Don’t Love, Don’t Lose

Chapter 3

Jasmine sat back and rubbed her eyes.

She was tired. She could feel it now.

But she had to admit, it was turning out to be fun. She’d always liked writing tracking software, especially the kind embedded so deep into the OS that it took serious skills to find it. She’d always played around with it, but for fun.

She’d never actually write anything like that for anybody else, or so she had told herself until then.

But, she reasoned, she’d never expected Aunt Della to turn around and ask her to write it for her. It wasn’t like she could tell Aunt Della no.

Maybe she could’ve said no if Rita had asked her to do it for one of her ex-boyfriends. Rita sure could pick them.

“Find a spy. What am I, a reverse spy kid? This is so… A spy! I don’t even know what the spy is looking for. Just a spy who is sabotaging him. Well, how am I supposed to be sure it’s somebody at the Baltimore office? He has offices in other places. It could be somebody at his HQ. Why on earth does Aunt Della want to drag me into this one? It’s not even like one of her charity things, the man has all the money in the world!”

She was blustering to herself. She could find it. And she knew it. She just needed access to the main frame. She could do it without that, too, but it would be easier if she had access to the main frame.

Well, Anthony Malone was the boss, wasn’t he? Surely he could arrange that. Of course, if it did turn out to be the handiwork of somebody who was in Baltimore, it would be easier. Della said there were only four people who’d come down from NYC with Anthony Malone. That would narrow it down considerably.

It would be money, too. She planned to fleece Anthony Malone for all he had.

Maybe she couldn’t do that, but she planned to get a good bit out of him. She had a few plans that he could put into action to find out who his mole was.

He was from New York, wasn’t he? Rich people were mobsters there. They at least had ties to organized crime. She would’ve thought that he had much more efficient ways of discovering and eliminating spies and moles. Getting her to write a surveillance program to track his employees sounded tame in comparison.

No, she was getting carried away and assuming too much. All rich people didn’t have mafia ties. She was being silly.

It was probably lack of sleep.

She’d get some sleep, and once she had the beginnings of the program ready, she’d tell Aunt Della she was ready for a meeting with the man. She wasn’t going to waste her time meeting him when she didn’t have anything to show.

It would probably take her a day or two to get it together, and after that, she’d hand it over to him for a price – this wasn’t how she did business, but for Aunt Della, she reminded herself – and she would go on with her life.

But Jasmine knew the real reason why she was doing this. She wanted to see the man that Aunt Della was working for, and she wanted to find out just why he had made such an impression on her usually pragmatic aunt.

She would see, soon enough.

Jasmine tidied up her work station, and was almost in bed when she realized that she had forgotten dinner.

“Drat,” she muttered and went to the kitchen to hurriedly defrost one of the boxes. She’d just put it in the microwave and turned when she jumped nearly out of her skin.

“Holy mother of God!”

A silhouette – outside the kitchen window.

She was up on the second floor! How did she have a silhouette outside the kitchen window!

A cat burglar!

“Meowwww!”

Almost.

Jasmine undid the catch and opened the window.

She supposed the ginger sitting on the windowsill had, at one point, been fluffy and chubby. He still had plenty of hair, but it was matted.

“Oh, honey, are you lost? Do you have a home, and you’re lost? Do you have a collar or a microchip or something?”

The cat just looked at her as if it couldn’t believe how utterly stupid humans could be.

“Meeeooowwwrrrr!”

“You can roll your Rs the French way, can you? Well, look, that’s the microwave beeping. That means my dinner is ready, and there will be far too much in there for me. I don’t know what it is, but maybe you can have some? I don’t think I have any canned fish anywhere. The last time Aunt Della went on vacation, I finished most of my canned food. Now I get weekly deliveries of fruits and salad vegetables, but that’s all the food I have. I don’t suppose I could interest you in a banana?”

“Meowwwr!”

“All right, I didn’t mean to offend you, you know. Come on inside and let me get you a saucer and some food.”

Jasmine opened the box and grinned.

“Well, you’re in luck, because this looks like a tuna casserole. I’m pretty sure this is a tuna casserole. Aunt Della’s tuna casseroles are out of this world, so you are definitely in luck.”

Jasmine wasn’t sure just how much a cat would eat, so she grabbed a saucer and eyeballed it the best she could. She put it down on the kitchen counter – the cat was still looking at her suspiciously – and she moved out of sight.

She didn’t notice that she was, for once, eating all of her dinner – well, all that was left of her dinner. She was too engrossed in watching the cat make its way to the saucer, warily. The cat ate fast once it got started.

“Sure don’t waste any time, do you,” muttered Jasmine.

Was she really talking to a stray cat that had wandered in? Maybe she was turning into a crazy old cat lady, as Rita teased her. The lack of cats had been her one saving grace until then.

“You’re not my cat,” she told the cat severely, but the cat took no notice of her.

Still, she couldn’t just let the cat go out through the second floor window, could she? She didn’t know how he’d gotten up there, but he couldn’t go out that way.

The cat sat and started washing herself, and Jasmine saw that he was in fact a she, and she had what looked like hard and slightly droopy teats.

“Oh, honey, did you have kittens? You’re not nursing anymore, but you had kittens, didn’t you? Are they gone now?”

The cat made no effort to get up and go out the window. Jasmine took the chance to go and close the kitchen window, and then the cat and Jasmine surveyed each other.

“Well, I suppose you can stay here tonight, and I’ll check if you were lost tomorrow. But you’re going to have to behave yourself. I hope you’ve done your business for the night, because I don’t have a litter box or anything. And you will be off tomorrow, so this is only a temporary arrangement.”

Jasmine got a box, and tried to make it comfortable with an old T-shirt. She left it in the kitchen, assuming that the cat would be comfortable there.

But the cat followed her to the bedroom, ignoring the box.

“Look, I made your bed there. Now you’ve got to lie in it.”

The cat ignored her.

Jasmine frowned and let it go.