The Most Dangerous Time

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 17

  The cat had no hind legs.

  Rickie gazed, at first in disbelief, then in anger, as her emotional climate turned nasty. She knew of no proper response for such a surprise. Dr. Black set her up, delivered to her, on purpose, a damaged cat. Where the hind legs should have been were simple nubs. The tiny feline stirred and meowed from its position inside the cardboard box where it peered up at them.

  Rickie held up a hand and backed off. "This is sure a stinko way to spend Monday night. I want to scream. I want to cry. I'm not going to do all that in front of you two guys. I'm simply not going to. What I am going to do is go back inside and fix myself a very large, very dry martini and while I'm doing that, you two can put this cat in a bag with a rock in it and take it someplace else, maybe out to the canal, I don't care very much where, simply as long as I never have to look at this thing again."

  "Mom?"

  His voice was challenging. "Jesse Edwin, you heard your mother!"

  With some haste, the young man disobeyed his mother and chose, instead of cat disposal duty, to himself disappear, evidently too soft-hearted for the task of cat extermination and not wishing to be in the wake of further emotional blasts he felt might be forthcoming from his mother.

  "Maybe if you let the matter sit overnight--" Shank began.

  Rickie whirled on him. "Then everything will be all right? What do you think I've been doing! I've been going to bed every night hoping it was all going to be okay in the morning. Well, it never has been! If it hasn't been all right for the past five years, why should it be all right tomorrow?"

  "You're a little nervous," Shank said, "what with the poor creature having no hind legs and all; a case of nerves is to be expected."

  "I'm not nervous, I'm angry," she hissed.

  Shank placed a hand--a firm one--on Rickie's shoulder and began steering her towards the damaged cat. "We need to get this done. Pick her up."

  "Get your hand off me. Take that thing outside and get rid of it."

  Shank let her go and reached inside the box and picked up the cat. He placed one hand around its neck and began to squeeze. "You want it dead, you got it."

  "Shank!"

  "Right here, right now, while we both watch." The eyes of the kitten began to bulge as its body writhed vigorously in a vain attempt to throw off the death grip. "You want it dead?"

  Rickie slapped him hard across the cheek. Shank squeezed harder on the hapless feline's throat. "You want it dead?" Rickie slapped him again. "Stop it!" She screamed. "Stop it! I'll take the cat!"

  "Okay," Shank said, releasing his grip and handing over the terrified kitten. She held up the thin wriggling beast, whose lungs, like tiny bellows, worked furiously to reaffirm life to the endangered furry corpus. Shank turned to leave. "Wait," Rickie said.

  "What?"

  "You were hideous just now. You were cruel. I could see you were enjoying yourself."

  "I've been called worse. You're wrong, though. I didn't enjoy that. It was simply something that had to be done."

  She stepped quickly to the man and placed a soft kiss on the reddening area of the slaps. The brief contact bridged the uncrossable gulf between them, leaving them both on the threshold of a fresher, finer grade of mortality, a vulnerability which needed reassuring in a way that would force both of them across the line into a world where the rules were as yet ill defined. Shank put a hand on the place where the kiss landed, a wounded look spreading over his features. She hadn't expected that. His eyes, when she looked fully into them, were uncertain. Suddenly she felt close to tears.

  "Shank, I--” she began. There were no words for what she was feeling.

  "Fine," Shank said. "Fine." His features hardened, and there was a firmness and finality to his voice. With that, he turned and was gone, leaving her alone with her cat, the new edition to the family, the creature which had, only moments before, been contemplating the end of all things. Rickie examined the head of the animal, surprised to find it of sound construction, with wide golden eyes and a mischievous black dot over a snow-white nose.

  "Your name will be ... Dot," she said, her voice unsure. "No, make that Just Plain Dot." She scratched the nose of Just Plain Dot and the creature nuzzled its newfound benefactress, the helpless gesture triggering mixed feelings inside Rickie. Suddenly she wanted Shank. In two quick steps, she was outside, watching Shank enter the Limo, watching until the car disappeared down the street.

  "God, I need a kiss," she said aloud. The cat meowed. "From him, not from you." There would be no kiss coming, not on this night, at least. If there were one coming on some other night, she wasn't sure she could reconcile it with all that had happened in the past forty-eight hours, and even if she could, she was entirely uncertain if she possessed the chutzpah to follow the lead where it was going. Foolish thinking. Would she even see Shank again? Perhaps not. There would be no kiss. Not tonight. Maybe never. So she settled for the next best thing. The martini. Stroking Just Plain Dot thoughtfully, she entered the house, set out a saucer of milk, and began the fixings for the large martini, confident that soon, thanks to the benevolence of a prime double-shot of vodka, she'd be on a flight to another place entirely, where the blackness of darkness reigned supreme, and feelings of wanting a kiss could be felt without damage, or the counting of costs she had no ability to pay for.