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So when I heard our humans stumble about upstairs, still busy doing whatever it was they were doing up there, I decided to take my chances and satisfy my raging curiosity and hopped down from the couch, waddled over to the living room table, hopped up onto a chair, then onto the table to take a closer look at Randy Hancock’s phone.

Odelia doesn’t like it when we sit on top of the table. She says it’s unhygienic. I have no idea why she would think that, since the table usually looks pretty clean to me.

I’d arrived at my destination and was closing in on the fitness guru’s phone, when the thing suddenly started to ring out a cheerful tune! Something from the disco era.

I jumped up in surprise and promptly toppled from the table and to the floor below. Luckily I managed to—more or less gracefully—turn in midair and land on all fours then scamper off back to my couch, much embarrassed.

Moments later Randy came hurrying down the stairs and when he saw his phone went white as a sheet. He even recoiled at the sight of the thing, as if it had suddenly developed a set of razor-sharp teeth.

“Randy!” said Odelia, who’d followed the fitness man. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s them!” said Randy, gesturing to his phone. “Look at what they sent me!”

And then Odelia did look, and she, too, gasped in shock and reeled.

“What’s going on?!” I cried, beyond frustration now. “What’s the message? What’s in that video? What’s happening!”

But of course Odelia blithely ignored me. She can’t very well go and blab to all and sundry that she belongs to that rare species of humans who can talk to their cats, and Randy, certainly, probably wasn’t in the frame of mind to take this news well. The man was under a great deal of stress already, after all, and didn’t need the added aggravation.

“Probably his doctor,” said Dooley. “Sending him his latest prognosis. The cancer must have spread, Max.” My friend shook his head sadly. “I don’t think he has four days. Four hours, maybe. Or four minutes.”

“Oh, Dooley,” I said with a sigh as I sank back down on my couch. Looked like I’d have to practice the most difficult thing in the world for a cat: patience!

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“Vesta! Fancy meeting you here!” cried Scarlett Canyon when she caught sight of her friend Vesta Muffin. Scarlett had just spread out her beach towel and was smearing her bronzed skin with a thick layer of sunscreen. She was the same age as Vesta, but looked a decade younger. Good genes, Vesta liked to say, and not having had to raise two kids.

“I’m taking my cat and his pet turtle to the beach,” Vesta announced as she glanced around.

“Of course you are,” said Scarlett with a grin. Wherever Vesta was, her cats were usually not far behind. She caught Vesta staring at her. “What?”

“You’re not going to sit there dressed like that, are you?”

“Dressed like what?” asked Scarlett, glancing down at herself. She was wearing a minuscule bikini, that barely held her sizable assets in place, and an equally tiny thong.

“You’re practically naked!” said Vesta, who was dressed in her usual tracksuit and sensible white sneakers.

“We’re at the beach, Vesta,” she pointed out. “The whole idea is to get a tan.” She gestured to her friend’s outfit. “You’re not seriously going to keep that on, are you?”

“Of course I’m going to keep my clothes on,” said Vesta. “It’s dangerous to expose your skin to those toxic sun rays, or didn’t you know?”

“Oh, puh-lease. I’m using sunscreen so I’m perfectly fine. It’s you who’s not going to be fine in that outfit. You’ll boil to death!”

“I’m okay,” said Vesta as she took a seat right next to her friend and watched her cat and the turtle in question toddle off toward the ocean.

“Take that off,” said Scarlett, who hated to see her friend dressed as if she was ready to fly to the North Pole, and started tugging at Vesta’s vest.

“Leave it!” said Vesta, slapping her hands away.

“Give that skin of yours some air, woman!”

“My skin is fine! It’s your skin you should be worried about. You look like a crocodile with that leathery skin of yours!”

“I do not!”

“Yeah, you do. You’re too tan.”

“There’s no such thing as too tan.”

“You’ll get skin cancer if you’re not careful.”

“And you’ll get vitamin D deficiency.”

For a moment, both women sat side by side, a companionable silence hanging between them. They might have turned bickering into an Olympic sport, but they’d been best friends for a long time, except for the fifteen years they fought tooth and nail after Vesta caught Scarlett doing the horizontal mambo on her kitchen table with Vesta’s husband.

“So are we on for patrol night?” asked Scarlett, having finally finished lathering up her right boob and now starting on her left one. She’d probably need a second bottle soon.

“Oh, yeah,” said Vesta. “Ready and raring to go.”

“Good. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s about Wilbur.”

“What about him?”

“I think he’s got the hots for you, Vesta.”

Her friend glanced over, her eyebrows shooting up into her white fringe.“What?!”