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I approached the site of the meeting with all my senses on high alert. I hadn’t forgotten the slightly sneering quality of the bird transmitting the missive, and it struck me as particularly sinister that a derelict shack on a weed-infested field would be the place for this peculiar meet. All around, crickets were producing their signature buzzing sound, but apart from that, no sound reached my ears except the occasional lawnmower going off in the distance. In other words, the sounds of summer. I was suddenly reminded of those old westerns, where John Wayne or Gary Cooper are lured to a showdown with the bad guys in the middle of nowhere. Only I didn’t have a gun in my holster. Heck, I didn’t even have a holster! Still, I had my three friends nearby, and I had my catlike reflexes, which hopefully would save me in the event of an ambush, which was a definite possibility.

When you’ve been fighting crime for as long as I have, instrumental in collaring numerous criminals, there’s no doubt that you make a certain number of enemies. So perhaps one of those enemies had decided to get some of their own back and exact revenge on the feline who had put him or her behind bars?

Odelia has a tendency to write editorials in theHampton Cove Gazette, joking about how her cat assists her in solving crime. I’ve already told her she shouldn’t draw attention to our unusual cooperation, but she says it puts a smile on people’s faces to imagine how a cat could collar a criminal. She says it’s droll.

And while that may be true, I would think that there is at least one person who wouldn’t be smiling or thinking it was droll: the one nibbling on a piece of moldy bread and swigging tap water in the local pen! They’d be plotting their revenge, and the one who’d get it in the neck, more than likely, is little old me!

I swallowed away a lump of unease, and tried to discard the myriad thoughts of doom and gloom swirling in my noggin, and instead pricked up my sensitive ears, tweaked my even more sensitive whiskers, and generally readied myself for a possible showdown. If Odelia had been there, she probably would have been inspired to call her latest editorial Bad Day at Black Rock, if only there was a black rock in the vicinity! As it was, there wasn’t any rock, black or otherwise, only waist-high weeds and plenty of dog excrement dotting the arid landscape.

And of course that derelict shack, which didn’t inspire cheery thoughts either. I finally arrived at destination’s end, and took up my vigil, nervously awaiting coming events, darting anxious glances in the direction of the bushes where my friends were lying in wait, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice, or so I hoped.

The crickets droned on, as did that lone lawnmower, and soon the suffocating heat began to thoroughly suppress my joie de vivre, as did the prospect of being like Cary Grant in that movie where he’s being chased across the fields by a crop duster. The moment the thought entered my mind, I glanced up. Lucky for me, not a single crop duster marred the perfect azure of the summer sky. And I must have been sitting there for what felt like hours, though in actual fact only ten minutes had passed, when suddenly a soft squeaking sound reached my ears.

I frowned and glanced around, trying to pinpoint the source of the odd sound. I glanced to the left, I glanced to the right, but couldn’t immediately locate where that squeaking sound was coming from. Finally I happened to glance down, and there, sitting between my paws, its sharp nose poking out from between the grass, a tiny creature sat. I immediately recognized it as a member of the murine family. In other words: a field mouse, which was apt, since we were in a field.

“Hey there, little fella,” I said. “Careful now, I could have stepped on you.”

“Are you Max?” asked the mouse now. “Greatest detective that ever lived?”

I would have demurred, but even though I’m a modest cat, I’m also only feline, after all, and not immune to praise, so I grinned and said, “Yup, that’s me.”

The little mouse’s face cleared. “Oh, joy!” he said. “Oh, happy day! Am I glad to meet you, Max. There’s something I want you to do for me. At least, if you’re not too busy with one of your many, many highly important cases.”

“I guess I could squeeze you in. Are you the one I was asked to meet here?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” said the mouse. “I didn’t know how to reach you, and then I happened to meet Francis, and he said he knew where you lived, so I asked him to deliver you a message, and here you are! Oh, joy, Max! Oh, happy, happy day!”

“And Francis is…”