the Tri-Dormal-G testing program twenty years ago. They enjoyed
teasing me, baiting me with it." He looked at Halston grimly. "But
they paid."
In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and found
Amanda Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of
broken crockery and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up
at the ceiling. She had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose.
Her back was broken, both legs were broken, and her neck had
been literally shattered like glass.
"It slept in her room," Drogan said. "She treated it like a baby ...'Is
oo hungwy, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos!'
Obscene, coming from an old baffle-ax like my sister. I think it
woke her up, meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam
didn't really like his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a
little milk. So she was planning to go downstairs. The cat was
rubbing against her legs. She was old, not too steady on her feet.
Half asleep. They got to the head of the stairs and the cat got in
front of her ... tripped her .. ."
Yes, it could have happened that way, Halston thought. In his
mind's eye he saw the old woman falling forward and outward, too
shocked to scream. The Friskies spraying out as she tumbled head
over heels to the bottom, the bowl smashing. At last she comes to
rest at the bottom, the old bones shattered, the eyes glaring, the
nose and ears trickling blood. And the purring cat begins to work
its way down the stairs, contentedly munching Little Friskies ...
"What did the coroner say?" he asked Drogan. "Death by accident,
of course. But I knew."
"Why didn't you get rid of the cat then? With Amanda gone?"
Because Carolyn Broadmoor had threatened to leave if he did,
apparently. She was hysterical, obsessed with the subject. She was
a sick woman, and she was nutty on the subject of spiritualism. A
Hartford medium had told her (for a mere twenty dollars) that
Amanda's soul had entered Sam's feline body. Sam had been
Amanda's, she told Drogan, and if Sam went, she went.
Halston, who had become something of an expert at reading
between the lines of human lives, suspected that Drogan and the
old Broadmoor bird had been lovers long ago, and the old dude
was reluctant to let her go over a cat.
"It would have been the same as suicide," Drogan said. "In her
mind she was still a wealthy woman, perfectly capable of packing
up that cat and going to New York or London or even Monte Carlo
with it. In fact she was the last of a great family, living on a
pittance as a result of a number of bad investments in the sixties.
She lived on the second floor here in a specially controlled,
superhumidified room. The woman was seventy, Mr. Halston. She
was a heavy smoker until the last two years of her life, and the
emphysema was very bad. I wanted her here, and if the cat had to
stay ..."
Halston nodded and then glanced meaningfully at his watch.
"Near the end of June, she died in the night. The doctor seemed to
take it as a matter of course ... just came and wrote out the death
certificate and that was the end of it. But the cat was in the room.
Gage told me."
"We all have to go sometime, man," Halston said.
"Of course. That's what the doctor said. But I knew. I remembered.
Cats like to get babies and old people when they're asleep. And
steal their breath."
"An old wives' tale."
"Based on fact, like most so-called old wives' tales," Drogan
replied.
"Cats like to knead soft things with their paws, you see. A pillow, a
thick shag rug... or a blanket. A crib blanket or an old person's
blanket. The extra weight on a person who's weak to start with ..."
Drogan trailed off, and Halston thought about it. Carolyn
Broadmoor asleep in her bedroom, the breath rasping in and out of
her damaged lungs, the sound nearly lost in the whisper of special
humidifiers and air conditioners. The cat with the queer black-and-
white markings leaps silently onto her spinster's bed and stares at
her old and wrinkle-grooved face with those lambent, black-and-
green eyes. It creeps onto her thin chest and settles its weight there,
purring.., and the breathing slows ... slows ... and the cat purrs as
the old woman slowly smothers beneath its weight on her chest.
He was not an imaginative man, but Halston shivered a little.
"Drogan," he said, continuing to stroke the purring cat. "Why don't
you just have it put away? A vet would give it the gas for twenty
dollars."
Drogan said, "The funeral was on the first day of July, I had
Carolyn buried in our cemetery plot next to my sister. The way she
would have wanted it. On July third I called Gage to this room and
handed him a wicker basket.., a picnic hamper sort of thing. Do
you know what I mean?"
Halston nodded.
"I told him to put the cat in it and take it to a vet in Milford and
have it put to sleep. He said, 'Yes, sir,' took the basket, and went
out. Very like him. I never saw him alive again. There was an
accident on the turnpike. The Lincoln was driven into a bridge
abutment at better than sixty miles an hour. Dick Gage was killed
instantly. When they found him there were scratches on his face."
Halston was silent as the picture of how it might have been formed
in his brain again. No sound in the room but the peaceful crackle of
the fire and the peaceful purr of the cat in his lap. He and the cat
together before the fire would make a good illustration for that
Edgar Guest poem, the one that goes: "The cat on my lap, the
hearth's good fire/ ... A happy man, should you enquire."
Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford,
beating the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker
basket beside him - a picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is
watching traffic, maybe he's passing a big cab-over Jimmy and he
doesn't notice the peculiar black-on-one-side, white-on-the-other
face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out of the driver's
side. He doesn't notice because he's passing the big trailer truck
and that's when the cat jumps onto his face, spitting and clawing,
its talons raking into one eye, puncturing it, deflating it, blinding it.
Sixty and the hum of the Lincoln's big motor and the other paw is
hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite,
damning pain - maybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path
of the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares ear-shatteringly, but Gage can't
hear it because the cat is yowling, the cat is spread-eagled over his
face like some huge furry black spider, ears laid back, green eyes
glaring like spotlights from hell, back legs jittering and digging
into the soft flesh of the old man's neck. The car veers wildly back
the other way. The bridge abutment looms. The cat jumps down
and the Lincoln, a shiny black torpedo, hits the cement and goes up
like a bomb.
Halston swallowed hard and heard a dry c
lick in his throat. "And
the cat came back?"
Drogan nodded. "A week later. On the day Dick Gage was buried,
as a matter of fact. Just like the old song says. The cat came back."
"It survived a car crash at sixty? Hard to believe."
"They say each one has nine lives. When it comes back ... that's
when I started to wonder if it might not be a...a..."
"Hellcat?" Halston suggested softly.
"For want of a better word, yes. A sort of demon sent ..."
"To punish you."
"I don't know. But I'm afraid of it. I feed it, or rather, the woman
who comes in to do for me feeds it. She doesn't like it either. She
says that face is a curse of God. Of course, she's local." The old
man tried to smile and failed. "I want you to kill it. I've lived with
it for the last four months. It skulks around in the shadows. It looks
at me. It seems to be ... waiting. I lock myself in my room every
night and still I wonder if I'm going to wake up one early and find
it ... curled up on my chest ... and purring."
The wind whined lonesomely outside and made a strange hooting
noise in the stone chimney.
"At last I got in touch with Saul Loggia. He recommended you. He
called you a stick, I believe."
"A one-stick. That means I work on my own."
"Yes. He said you'd never been busted, or even suspected. He said
you always seem to land on your feet.... like a cat."
Halston looked at the old man in the wheelchair. And his long-
fingered, muscular hands were lingering above the cat's neck.
"I'll do it now, if you want me to," he said softly. "I'll snap its neck.
It won't even know-"
"No!" Drogan cried. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. Color
had come up in his sallow cheeks. "Not... not here. Take it away."
Halston smiled humorlessly. He began to stroke the sleeping cat's
head and shoulders and back very gently again. "All right," he said.
"I accept the contract. Do you want the body?"
"No. Kill it. Bury it." He paused. He hunched forward in the
wheelchair like some ancient buzzard. "Bring me the tail," he said.
"So I can throw it in the fire and watch it burn."
Halston drove a 1973 Plymouth with a custom Cyclone Spoiler
engine. The car was jacked and blocked, and rode with the hood
pointing down at the road at a twenty degree angle. He had rebuilt
the differential and the rear end himself. The shift was a Pensy, the
linkage was Hearst. It sat on huge Bobby Unser Wide Ovals and
had a top end of a little past one-sixty.
He left the Drogan house at a little past 9:30. A cold rind of
crescent moon rode overhead through the tattering November
clouds. He rode with all the windows open, because that yellow
stench of age and terror seemed to have settled into his clothes and
he didn't like it. The cold was hard and sharp, eventually numbing,
but it was good. It was blowing that yellow stench away. He got
off the turnpike at Placer's Glen and drove through the silent town,
which was guarded by a single yellow blinker at the intersection, at
a thoroughly respectable thirty-five. Out of town, moving up S.R.
35, he opened the Plymouth up a little, letting her walk. The tuned
Spoiler engine purred like the cat had purred on his lap earlier this
evening. Halston grinned at the simile. They moved between frost-
white November fields full of skeleton cornstalks at a little over
seventy.
The cat was in a double-thickness shopping bag, tied at the top
with heavy twine. The bag was in the passenger bucket seat. The
cat had been sleepy and purring when Halston put it in, and it had
purred through the entire ride. It sensed, perhaps, that Halston
liked it and felt at home with it. Like himself, the cat was a one-
stick.
Strange hit, Halston thought, and was surprised to find that he was
taking it seriously as a hit. Maybe the strangest thing about it was
that he actually liked the cat, felt a kinship with it. If it had
managed to get rid of those three old crocks, more power to it ...
especially Gage, who had been taking it to Milford for a terminal
date with a crew-cut veterinarian who would have been more than
happy to bundle it into a ceramic-lined gas chamber the size of a
microwave oven. He felt a kinship but no urge to renege on the hit.
He would do it the courtesy of killing it quickly and well. He
would park off the road beside one of those November-barren
fields and take it out of the bag and stroke it and then snap its neck
and sever its tail with his pocketknife. And, he thought, the body
I'll bury honorably, saving it from the scavengers. I can't save it
from the worms, but I can save it from the maggots.
He was thinking these things as the car moved through the night
like a dark blue ghost and that was when the cat walked in front of
his eyes, up on the dashboard, tail raised arrogantly, its black-and-
white face turned toward him, its mouth seeming to grin at him.
"Ssssshhhh-" Halston hissed. He glanced to his right and caught a
glimpse of the double-thickness shopping bag, a hole chewed - or
clawed - in its side. Looked ahead again..,and the cat lifted a paw
and batted playfully at him. The paw skidded across Halston's
forehead. He jerked away from it and the Plymouth's big tires
wailed on the road as it swung erratically from one side of the
narrow blacktop to the other.
Halston batted at the cat on the dashboard with his fist. It was
blocking his field of vision. It spat at him, arching its back, but it
didn't move. Halston swung again, and instead of shrinking away,
it leaped at him.
Gage, he thought. Just like Gage -
He stamped the brake. The cat was on his head, blocking his vision
with its furry belly, clawing at him, gouging at him. Halston held
the wheel grimly. He struck the cat once, twice, a third time. And
suddenly the road was gone, the Plymouth was running down into
the ditch, thudding up and down on its shocks. Then, impact,
throwing him forward against his seat belt, and the last sound he
heard was the cat yowling inhumanly, the voice of a woman in
pain or in the throes of sexual climax.
He struck it with his closed fists and felt only the springy, yielding
flex of its muscles.
Then, second impact. And darkness.
* * *
The moon was down. It was an hour before dawn.
The Plymouth lay in a ravine curdled with groundmist. Tangled in
its grille was a snarled length of barbed wire. The hood had come
unlatched, and tendrils of steam from the breached radiator drifted
out of the opening to mingle with the mist.
No feeling in his legs.
He looked down and saw that the Plymouth's firewall had caved in
with the impact. The back of that big Cyclone Spoiler engine block
had smashed into his legs, pinning them.
Outside, in the distance, the predatory squawk of an owl dropping
onto some small, scurrying animal.
Inside, close, the steady purr of the cat.
It seemed to be grinning, like Alice's Cheshir
e had in Wonderland.
As Halston watched it stood up, arched its back, and stretched. In a
sudden limber movement like rippled silk, it leaped to his shoulder.
Halston tried to lift his hands to push it off.
His arms wouldn't move.
Spinal shock, he thought. Paralyzed. Maybe temporary. More
likely permanent.
The cat purred in his ear like thunder.
"Get off me," Halston said. His voice was hoarse and dry. The cat
tensed for a moment and then settled back. Suddenly its paw batted
Halston's cheek, and the claws were out this time. Hot lines of pain
down to his throat.
And the warm trickle of blood.
Pain.
Feeling.
He ordered his head to move to the right, and it complied. For a
moment his face was buried in smooth, dry fur. Halston snapped at
the cat. It made a startled, disgruntled sound in its throat - yowk! -
and leaped onto the seat. It stared up at him angrily, ears laid back.
"Wasn't supposed to do that, was I?" Halston croaked. The cat
opened its mouth and hissed at him. Looking at that strange,
schizophrenic face, Halston could understand how Drogan might
have thought it was a hellcat. It-
His thoughts broke off as he became aware of a dull, tingling
feeling in both hands and forearms.
Feeling. Coming back. Pins and needles.
The cat leaped at his face, claws out, spitting.
Halston shut his eyes and opened his mouth. He bit at the cat's
belly and got nothing but fur. The cat's front claws were clasped on
his ears, digging in. The pain was enormous, brightly excruciating.
Halston tried to raise his hands.
They twitched but would not quite come out of his lap.
He bent his head forward and began to shake it back and forth, like
a man shaking soap out of his eyes. Hissing and squalling, the cat
held on. Halston could feel blood trickling down his cheeks. It was
hard to get his breath. The cat's chest was pressed over his nose. It
was possible to get some air in by mouth, but not much. What he
did get came through fur. His ears felt as if they had been doused
with lighter fluid and then set on fire.
He snapped his head back and cried out in agony - he must have
sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't
been expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud
down in the back seat.
A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his hands,
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