Clutching her books to her chest, Jessica nodded doubtfully. When she’d asked for a tutor, the head of the chem department had recommended Kirby, a grad student and teaching assistant, but someone who slept at his desk at ten in the morning? Where she came from, energy was equated with brains. And brains were everything. To be less than brilliant was to be nothing at all.
“Yes. I’m allowed to throw out one grade per year. And since I took classes last summer, I’m ahead on my degree. So I’m going to take organic chemistry again. But I thought a few weeks of tutoring before the semester starts might—”
“Might help you improve a 3.9 average?” He rubbed a chin that could’ve used a shave, made a comic face, then shook his head. “Most people would give their left…arm for a 3.9.”
She shrugged. What satisfied most people had nothing to do with her. What her parents expected of her. What she’d come to demand of herself. “I was ranked second in the class last time. I need to be first.”
“You already look like a first to me.”
She hadn’t known how to take that, or the slow smile that followed when he saw her confusion. From the first day her mother dropped her off at an exclusive day-care school, she’d been too busy earning top grades to learn about boys. Somewhere along the line, the boys had turned to men, but she’d been even busier, with every year a harder grind than the one before.
His boots swung to the floor. “Let’s go get some breakfast, and we’ll talk about it.”
“I had breakfast, um…”
“Quite a while ago? When do you eat breakfast? Seven?” Standing, he topped her by almost a foot.
“Six.” After her five-mile run.
“Well, come have some lunch while I eat my breakfast, then.”
“You always eat this late?”
“Only when I stay up all night.” He steered her through the office door and into the lab beyond.
She shot him a wary glance. There was a note of laughter shimmering beneath his every word. Everything he said sounded like it might be a joke. “Why the overnighter?”
“Was watchin’ some cells divide. Sort of lost track of the time.”
Definitely a joke, she decided. Still, she followed him home. He’d had to do some fancy talking to get her through his door when she realized that was where they were headed, rather than the campus cafeteria. But once he’d coaxed her inside, he cooked her huevos rancheros on a solar-powered grill set up on his back deck—his electric stove being mysteriously disassembled at present.
And after that, he serenaded her with Brazilian sambas on his acoustic guitar, singing what she suspected were wicked, nonsensical suggestions in a soft pidgin mix of Italian and Portuguese, his voice a plaintive whiskey tenor.
Finally, at her insistance, he’d walked her through two hours of organic chemistry with a lucidity and playful enthusiasm that had made the lesson seem more like a romp through Disneyland than her usual teeth-gritted slog.
And someplace in that long, lovely, eye-opening day, he’d seduced her—had seduced her hours before he’d ever laid a finger on her. Oh, they’d been in tune all right, even if they’d spoken different languages, his joyful Texan to her worried WASP.
So he’ll understand me now, if I can just get him alone and listening. She needed to beard him in his den, not out here in the open with people marching by, distracting him. She needed to confront him in the apartment he’d be subletting as of tonight. Harry Neuman’s loft, less than a mile away, in the Jewelry District, Mac had said.
Yes! She sat up, turned to give her spine an automatic lick. That was it. She’d find a phone book, look up Neuman’s old ad—She froze, eyes rounding in horror, tongue touching fur. Oh, God, look at me, licking my—
“Kitteee!” Staggering footsteps cut off the walkway and thumped closer across the grass. “Kitty-Caaa!”
Jessica whirled to see a child, perhaps two, chubby hands extended, smile ecstatic, trundling determinedly toward her. The toddler’s mother looked up from the prescription she’d been consulting, then started after her offspring. “Mia!”
“Kittaeee!”
In your dreams, kid! Bolting for cover, Jessica ran like a scalded cat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEXT TWO DAYS gave Jessica a new perspective on the phrase “run ragged.”
Her search for a phone book the first day had been unsuccessful. Within a quarter-mile radius of the hospital, she couldn’t find one outdoor phone booth with an unstolen book. So much for that plan.
Proceeding to plan two, she decided to try the honey hunter’s approach for tracing Sam to his lair. The hunter watches the bee fly its beeline toward the hive till he loses it from view. He then walks to that point, waits till another bee wings past and tracks that bee hiveward till it disappears. Before long, he’s standing beneath the bee tree almost tasting the honey.
It had always sounded easy in theory. But Sam Kirby was no one-track honeybee. Jessica waited that first evening on a slope just beyond the highway underpass, through which Sam would have to travel to reach the Jewelry District. Given the height of her spy post, she’d be able to follow his route down the seedy avenue that paralleled the bay, with any luck see where he turned off it.
But she waited till dark in vain. Either Sam had gotten lost, or he’d circled the long way around, exploring the tougher side of town, where hole-in-the-wall Southeast Asian cafes sat cheek by jowl with pawnshops and grafittisprayed Laundromats. He’d always had a weakness for exotic foods, and if he was eating Thai nowadays, that was where he’d find it. Or Jamaican. She shivered remembering Raye’s sleazy cafe, then thrust the shrink from her mind. Later.
But if that was the roundabout route Sam had chosen, Jessica couldn’t have followed even if she’d spotted him. He’d cover roughly six miles, circling clockwise over the freeways and back through the city to reach his destination just a mile from her vantage point.
No, she had to go the shorter way. Cats were built for sprints, not distance.
And she couldn’t bear to wait until the next night, then try again. So plan three was to simply walk to the Jewelry District, then search for his parked car till she found it. How hard could that be? The district of defunct mills and costume-jewelry factories, bounded on two sides by freeways and the third by the bay, was no more than a mile square.
But neither the district, nor its approach, proved to be feline-friendly territory. What wasn’t vertical brick or granite building, was horizontally paved—heavily traveled, truck-filled streets. Barren parking lots without a scrap of cover. Dark, dead-end alleyways. Chain-link fences with humorless Dobermans guarding whatever dubious business ventures lay beyond. A hard, stone-cold world, without one sanctuary tree in sight.
Even in human form, Jessica would have hesitated to walk the Jewelry District after dark, though she’d heard the area was also home to tiny jazz clubs, cutting-edge art galleries and hopeful young restaurateurs with more creativity than backing.
As a cat, it was a nightmare, without a clawhold anywhere. But she did what she had to do, scuttling from shadow to shadow, becoming a racing black shadow when she darted past oncoming headlights. And if doing what must be done included staying awake most of each night to hold Cattoo to her purpose, well, Jessica could do that, too. Though she felt like a slave-driving ingrate—the guest who’d come to dinner and long since overstayed her welcome.
Not that Cattoo complained. Much. But the cat was growing bone-weary with all this searching and sneaking, as weary and ragged as Jessica herself. Time spent checking every alley and street and parking lot in the district for Sam’s car was time lost from sleeping and hunting, after all.
At dawn of the third day, Jessica took refuge between two trash cans at the mouth of an alley to examine her sore paws and consider. Perhaps she should have stayed at the hospital? Tackled Sam again there?
But she hadn’t. No use crying over spilt— Her stomach turned over and lunged at the image. She put it hastily from mind.
At the thought of all the hostile miles that might stretch between them, she tipped back her head, closed her eyes and shuddered. Cats didn’t cry real tears—she’d learned that the hard way these past few days. But, oh, on the inside … Sam. Come to me? Please?
When he drove by a second later, headed out of the alley, he was simply an extension of her need—a starvationinspired vision, not a frowning, flesh-and-blood man in a rental car. Jessica blinked at where the car had been only a second before. It had turned left toward RI Gen. That was Sam.
Cattoo didn’t care. She needed sleep. She needed food. She needed a serious, whisker-to-tail grooming. She wanted her spot in one of their ground-floor windows next to a tasty spider plant. The sun always warmed that sill first thing in the morning.
We can’t go back to Prospect Street, Jessica insisted. That’s not home anymore. Home was…home was where Sam was, at least until he’d helped her out of this jam. Beyond that, she couldn’t let herself think.
Cattoo was thinking of sleep. But this spot was too open to be safe.
So let’s see what’s down here. It was a shameless ploy, but it worked. Or perhaps Cattoo simply humored her. Jessica shoved herself stiffly to her feet, padded on aching paws deeper into the shadowed alley.
Cold granite walls reared close on either side—six-story wings of the same mill complex. Up ahead towered a cylindrical brick smokestack with the words “Clarke Street Mill” painted on its side. Beyond the stack loomed the blind face of the factory that intersected the two wings. The alley ended below the stack in a tiny, rectangular courtyard, with two parking spaces to either side.
A sign was fastened to the wall above each empty parking space. “Miller” and “Feldman,” read the signs to Jessica’s left. On the right, the spots were reserved for “duPrey” and…“Neuman”!
Yes! Legs shaking, Jessica sat and heaved a sigh. This was the converted mill Mac had described. The place to which Sam must surely return.
If I could just go upstairs and wait for him…
Not a chance. The entrance to each wing was a massive, eight-foot, modernistic glass door with an impressive lock. The two polished brass buttons beside each door would be the means by which visitors gained admittance. A day before she could have managed the leap up to ring the bell with the neat Neuman placard beside it, but today? Hypothermia, she diagnosed, exacerbated by not nearly enough food. And when had they last found something to drink? She remembered and immediately tried to forget. No wonder cats needed nine lives.
Besides, what use would it be to ring the bell? she reminded herself. Sam was gone, probably till this evening.
Climb to his loft? She sat and looked up, scanning the walls overhead. Black iron fire escapes zigzagged their way down both wings. But they ended in up-folded ladders one floor above the ground. Besides, even if she could have scaled the first twenty feet of these sheer stone walls, she had no idea where Sam’s loft lay.
I’ll have to wait here.
That resolution brought an instant protest from within. There was no sunlight here. Not a scrap of food. Worst of all, no cover. This place was a deadly trap if a dog came along.
In the end, they compromised by hunching behind the garbage cans at the head of the alley. It wasn’t much safer, but at least they had a choice of two directions to flee if danger discovered them. But it was too precarious a position to sleep. So Jessica crouched there hour after hour, eyes wide open, but glazed from exhaustion, nerves jangling, ears flinching at every passing sound.
By sundown, Cattoo was in full rebellion. They must go. Somewhere there would be mice, or something else to eat. There must be something, somewhere. But to find it they couldn’t stay here, they must hunt.
No, safety is here, if you’ll only be patient, Jessica pleaded. Trust me.
Still she found herself on her feet, peeking out past the cans at the barren street, every feline instinct demanding that she move or die.
A pair of headlights turned the corner in the distance, coming from the direction of RI Gen.
Oh, please. She wouldn’t be able to hold Cattoo here more than a minute more. Oh, please, let this be…
The car slowed, then swung into the alley, its headlights sweeping across the cans, blinding her when she peered around them. It rumbled on down the passage toward the courtyard. As it turned into its parking space, she made out the vehicle’s shape and color. This car was white and low slung. Not Sam’s blocky gray sedan at all. Not deliverance.
That’s it, then. This wasn’t a worded thought, but nevertheless, it was a decision carved in stone. Jessica found herself padding away from the alley, her own tottering hope no match for Cattoo’s determination, Cattoo’s resolution growing with every foot of distance she gained between them and Jessica’s obsession.
Another set of headlights turned the corner and approached. Wait, Jessica pleaded, stopping as the lights slapped her full in the face.
The car slowed, its driver seeing two blazing emeralds embedded in a crouching black shadow, she supposed. Oh, please.
The car picked up speed. Drove on by.
That was it, then. She had no right to demand that Cattoo stay and starve, no way to make her see that waiting was the wisest choice. But if they left now, something told her they’d never make it back here at all. Weakened as they were, this could well be the night they became the hunted, rather than the hunter.
Hardly slowing, the car wheeled into the alley.
Jessica turned, staring back over her shoulder. Had it been gray? Oh, let it be gray! “Sam!” she cried, hurrying back to the alley’s mouth.
Two red taillights glowed at the end of the passage. They turned as the car parked on the right.
Sam! Because it must be he, she was sure it was. “Sam!” Trilling a cry of desperate welcome, she scurried down the alley. Her body was too weak to break out of a trot. “Sammmmmmerrrrrrowww?”
Up ahead, a car door slammed shut.
Sam, I’m begging you! Don’t go. Wait for me!
A tall silhouette moved out into the center of the courtyard and stared back toward her hurrying shape.
“Oh, Sam!”
“You!” He stared down at her, then started and lightly slapped his temple. “No, what am I thinking? It can’t be you.”
“Oh, but it is! It really is me! I know it’s crazy, I can’t begin to explain, but—” She let out a little rippling cry of relief. Thank God, he could see her at last! And with Sam on her side…
He laughed to himself and shook his head. “No way could you be the same black cat that was hustling me back at the hospital, could you? That’s over a mile away.”
He didn’t see her. Saw nothing but another cat. She let out a sound that was as close to a sob as a cat could come. “Sam, just look at me!”
“All cat’s look alike in the dark, huh?” He took a step toward the glass door, then jabbed a finger at her when she followed. “Uh-uh. Stay away, cat. I’ve had ’bout all the bad luck I can handle. Last thing I need is a black cat crossing my trail.”
“You haven’t a clue what bad luck is…you…you…” She sank to the frigid ground. It was useless. He couldn’t see past the fur. Never would. “If I’d turned into a damned poodle, would you take me in, damn you? Or is it just that you don’t have a heart?”
Sam stirred uneasily, glanced back toward the door. He slapped the paper bag he held against his thigh and swore softly.
“I know you, even if you don’t know me. I bet I’m the only one in the world, outside your family, who knows your middle name’s Antonio. It was your mother’s brother’s name and your dad’s idea of a joke. Your mother nearly killed him when she realized he’d let her name you for a city.”
“
Look—” Sam backed another step toward the door “—I really don’t like cats. Can’t you go put the moves on somebody else?”
“There’s nobody else, Sam. There’s only you.” She’d always known that. Not that knowing it had done her much good. Love was a tie that must bind both. Let only one be stupid enough to feel, and it became a noose, drawn tight around the heart.
Sam sighed, then dropped to a crouch. “Ever tried General Tzo’s chicken, cat?”
“That’s not what I want!” she yelled, even as her mouth started to water. General Tzo’s. She’d have burst into tears if she could have. That had been their special treat. They’d sampled that dish in every Chinese restaurant they’d ever tried. A white box of General Tzo’s was what Sam had brought home most nights when it had been his turn to cook.
“Haven’t tried it myself in about eight…oh, for a long time,” he muttered, opening the bag. “I’ve probably lost my taste for it entirely. You can’t go home again no matter how you…” His words trailed away.
“You missed me, too?” she asked in a tiny voice. There was no particular reason that should make her feel good. Of course, he would’ve missed her. They’d had some wonderful times together. But Sam was such an extrovert he could’ve enjoyed the company of any of a hundred different women. Would’ve missed any one of them after the relationship ended.
He tore open the bag, spread it out on the ground, opened the white box. Using a pair of chopsticks, he raked out two hunks of steaming chicken, then a puddle of the pungent sauce. “If I’d known you were dropping by, I’d have brought you some chopsticks.” He closed the box. “Guess you’ll just have to lick your fingers.” He grinned at her. “Your toes. Whatever.” He rose to his feet.
Crouched, Jessica stared from the food up to his face, then back down. “This isn’t what I want, Sam. I mean, thank you, but—”
“That’s another thing I can’t stand about cats,” he said without rancor. “Every one of ’em’s a blasted five-star gourmand, with his nose stuck in the air. You wouldn’t catch a dog wasting General Tzo’s.”
You Again Page 11
