Sally had intended to just feed the fish, pick up a few personal items she had left in the store and be gone within five minutes. She hadn’t realized how much of the shop’s toolkit was actually bought with her own money. Most of it, now that she came to think of it. The consumables were shop-bought, but just about everything else here she had acquired over a decade of running this weird combination of fish spa and salon. Everything from a backup pump for a fish tank to her favorite monogrammed scissors. Examining the number of boxes she had lined up to carry to her car, she supposed the spare pump could stay behind.

  When Mr Whiskers returned to the shop, Sally had finished packing her stuff and had moved on to examining the expiry dates on an eclectic plethora of beauty products and googling one by one to see if, for example, there were any expected side effects to using revitalizing shampoo that was six years out of date.

  “Okay, does everyone understand their roles?” asked Dr Flibbles. “Let's go through them one more time. Spots, you first.”

  “I stay in the tank,” answered Spots enthusiastically.

  “Correct. I also stay in the tank,” responded Dr Flibbles. “Mr Whiskers?”

  “At 3:00 AM sharp, I knock over Sally’s landline, call the police and then use my paw to tap out the address of the drug den in morse code. Then I escape from Sally’s apartment, walk the two blocks to the drug den and wait until the police start their raid. After they bust down the door and put all the evidence in one room, I sneak in, collect Murder from the tank and pick up as many bucks as I can with my two front paws, then run out of there on my hind legs,” answered Mr Whiskers.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Dr Flibbles suggestively.

  “I’m not bringing you an iPad – I’ll have my paws full as it is,” replied Mr Whiskers.

  “Come on, Mr Whiskers,” called Sally. “Say goodbye to the little fishies, Mommy has to go. Hold on, I don’t remember bringing you here this morning…”

  “Good luck,” called Spots as Mr Whiskers was picked up and carried out of the room.

  Spots turned to Dr Flibbles. “That was a bit rude, wasn’t it?” asked Spots.

  “What was?” asked Dr Flibbles.

  “He didn’t wish us good luck on our part of the plan,” answered Spots.

  At 4:46 AM, practically 3:00 AM in cat time, Mr Whiskers sprang into action. He groggily walked into the kitchen, past an ancient wall-mounted landline on which a receiver dangled precariously at the best of times, and then, tired and bleary-eyed, walked straight into a broom that had been left leaning against the wall. The broom slid down the wall with a scrape, stopping with a crack when it hit the phone and sent the receiver flying off its holder. Dangling like a bungee jumper, the phone quietly beeped to itself as it bobbed up and down on the end of its tether.

  “Oh yeah,” meowed Mr Whiskers, “the plan.” The cat proceeded to swat at the dangling phone until Sally came, picked him up and threw him outside. Part one of the plan had been a complete success.

  ***

  Mr Whiskers arrived at the out-of-the-way property to find no sirens or flashing lights, only a house pumping out loud dubstep and an acrid gas that made his eyes water as he neared. The lights were on inside and three distinct voices could be heard, however Mr Whiskers couldn’t make out anything they were saying.

  The old fish’s plan hadn’t worked. It was time for Mr Whiskers to show them how a cat gets things done. Style would be his calling card, dexterity and grace his modus operandi. The cat clambered up the exterior brick wall and plunged headlong into the silver tube, which rattled and echoed as the cat came tumbling through, only to land on a dish of foul chemicals that burned his skin. Shouting intensified, but he couldn’t open his eyes. Blindly, Mr Whiskers ran until he hit a table leg that folded the cheap table in on itself, sending glassware and chemicals clattering, shattering and spattering all over the floor. Running in circles, Mr Whiskers sprinted into the toppled table which acted as a ramp, then scrambled up onto the second table, sending more glassware and mysterious liquids flying. Mr Whiskers ran until he hit a wall, turned, then kept running through what seemed like a never-ending laboratorial forest.

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  The blind, frantic and yowling cat apparently did not mix well with the other chemicals. The combination of petrol, aether, phosphorus, iodine, alcohol, acetone and a dozen other accouterments of meth cooking quickly promoted the property from an accident waiting to happen to very hot real-estate indeed.

  “Mr Whiskers! Over here!” cried Murder.

  The poor cat couldn’t see, but he could hear. Mr Whiskers ran in the direction of Murder’s voice and into the leg of the table holding up the aquarium. It too was of the cheap foldable variety and was near enough to toppling on its own time. Given a solid nudge from a bolting cat, the table bent the knee as if to thank the cat for releasing it of its burden. Water from the aquarium spilled everywhere, soaking Mr Whiskers and sending Murder sliding along the floor for the second time that week.

  “Pick me up! Pick me up! Pick me up!” yelled Murder.

  Following the sound of his voice, Mr Whiskers picked up Murder, who was still wearing his… ‘suit’.

  “I canh shee,” cried Mr Whiskers.

  “Okay, I have a plan,” said Murder, thinking on his feet – okay his fins… okay, technically, if you’re a pedant, they were somebody else’s fins. “You hold me in your lips and if I lean left, you go left. If I lean right, you go right. Up, means jump. Down means crouch. And if I wiggle my tail, start running.”

  “Eehs go!” mumbled the cat hurriedly.

  “Right, right, little wiggle and jump,” said Murder aloud, making their body-language code somewhat redundant, but steering the cat with his body like a tiny joystick was too fun to stop.

  The cat landed awkwardly on the narrow nightstand but quickly found his balance.

  “Swipe, Mr Whiskers, swipe like you have never swiped before!” said Murder.

  Using his paws, Mr Whiskers blindly batted at the unplugged television on the wall until there was a crash and a thud, revealing a small safe with a keypad set into the wall.

  “Hit four-two-zero-hash,” said Murder.

  “Canh shee, rhememha?” mumbled Mr Whiskers.

  “Right,” said Murder. “No! I mean left, now up and to the right a bit. Good. Now down. Good. Now a bit left, and there we have it!” The door of the safe swung open. Inside it was a blue tote bag with the words ‘I heart Kazakhstan’ on one side and a yellow sun and eagle on the other. The bag was full of bucks and something metallic that Murder found terribly exciting. Murder negotiated the cat’s head through the handle of the tote bag and the pair turned to leave.

  From his seat at the helm of a cat, Murder took in the rapidly deteriorating state of the house and the rapidly growing conflagration. Calling it an inferno would not have done it justice. A simple inferno entirely fails to convey the toxicity of a fire in a meth lab; it was a burning holocaust in there.

  Murder looked for a way out. The air duct through which they entered now lay flaccid at the center of the blaze; the plastic ribbing that gave the foil tube its shape had liquefied and was burning in a puddle beneath its opening.

  The overpowering smell of a thousand unidentifiable carcinogens filled the air. Murder tried to retreat inside the cat’s mouth, but that only made him walk backwards until they ran into a wall.

  “Whoh ar yhu hucking oing?” mumbled Mr Whiskers.

  Murder stuck his head back out and felt the nauseating chemicals absorbing through his skin and whiskers. His head started to spin. It felt like he was in two places at once, and there was an odd sensation of distance, like somebody had lopped off a small piece of his brain but somehow kept it alive and connected to the rest of him.

  Is this what doing drugs is like? thought Murder.

  “We hav oo go. Rie ow!” mumbled Mr Whiskers.

  The sensation didn’t fade, but Murder ignored it as best he could. He looked into the main room and saw two unconscious and tracksuited meth cooks. One of them was being dragged towards the open front door by an arm as one of his rubber sneakers burned. The one doing the dragging wore a threadbare tan suit and looked like the gopnik who had chased Mr Whiskers out of the room the day before. Murder recognized something about the man. Maybe it was his clothes or the man’s build, but he was somehow familiar. Then something clicked in Murder’s mind. Here was the bastard that had thrown a brick at his tank and killed his whole school. Murder made up his mind: that man was not leaving this house alive.

  The two-inch fish being carried in the mouth of a blind cat considered his options. He could use Mr Whiskers to jump on the man, then Murder could leap from the cat’s mouth and dive straight onto the man’s neck, where he could go for the jugular. Perhaps he could jump into the bag and try to work the trigger mechanism of the exciting metallic object, but he disregarded that idea when he realized he couldn't very well aim the thing.

  Murder had one more idea. He walked to the door with Mr Whiskers and turned to the tall stack of kitty litter. “Eeny, meeny, miny… moe,” he said with a sly smile.

  Then the cat sliced at the lowest bag in the stack, causing its contents to start spilling out. A moment later and the whole tower began to lean precariously towards the front door.

  Murder wiggled his tail and Mr Whiskers bolted out the door, which slammed shut behind them with a crash as hundreds of pounds of kitty litter piled up behind it.

  From a water-filled pothole in the middle of the street, Murder shed his Siamese fighting fish costume and watched the flames grow while Mr Whiskers licked furiously at his paws on the road beside him. Murder washed, and Mr Whiskers preened, and they waited until the screaming stopped. Eventually, Mr Whiskers picked up Murder one more time and they began to walk. The cat walked with its sore eyes closed, while the fish leaned this way and that, steering them both home, his strange new sensation of distance growing stronger with every step closer to the salon. A fireball burst behind them with a bang and a whoosh, briefly turning night into day, but Murder didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to. The ensuing silence had told him all he needed to know.