Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

Batman didn’t really matter. Let him do what he wanted, so long as Eddie saw her first.

The seething stopped, her fists unclenched. She opened the unreflecting wool sack and pulled out a coil of nylon rope.

Let him come over and try to stop her, or even, ask what she was doing. She’d tell him. Maybe they could work out a deal.

She crept over to a ventilation pipe rising from the asphalt. After making certain it was well anchored, she knotted one end securely around it, then ran the rope back to the front wall. Her plan called for getting the drop, literally, on Eddie as he arrived, but the roof was much too high for free-fall. She peered over the edge, mentally measuring the distance to the pavement—about sixty feet. Then she carefully recoiled the rope, wrapping it between her elbow and the palm of her hand, counting by two with each revolution. When she reached forty, she knotted a trio of loops into the rope and laid the entire coil carefully atop the wall. Now the rope would get her safely down to dropping height.

Across the roof, Batman shook his head slowly. He’d recognized Catwoman as soon as she moved toward the pipe. He watched her stand in his full sight and fuss with the rope. He had a pretty good idea what she meant to do. Batman didn’t count Catwoman among his worst enemies, and he would have liked to know how the Moldavians had managed to contact her, but stealing the icon was her kind of job.

Too bad. Considering what he’d already done to the icon, Batman might have been tempted to let her get away with it, but he wanted to follow the box to the Connection, not back to the Commonwealth of Independent States. He’d have to stop her. He figured he could wait until she started to move—no sense risking the noise of a scuffle, although it was hard to imagine that the Gagauzi could hear anything but their own wailing voices.