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

“I’d hate to find out what happens when he doesn’t,” Bruce replied dryly. Every nerve was ringing like a bell or a rotten tooth.

“Don’t worry about it. You and me, we’re gonna work well together. You got smarts. He likes that, but you gotta be careful talkin’ up the way you did. The boss don’t like you to get ahead of him with ideas. He thinks he’s got all the brains around here.”

The van slowed to a stop. Tiger pulled a cord to open the rear access door. The two men stepped out into a dark, narrow alley. The van sped away. Batman recognized the angles of Gotham’s Old Town, the twisted maze of streets were the city had begun almost three hundred years earlier. He would need a few moments to orient himself precisely. Tiger didn’t need that long.

“I gotta take care of the Bess-arabs right away,” he said. “Those damn sheepherders have been nothing but trouble from day one.”

“Why did the boss bother?” Bruce asked innocently as he followed Tiger out of the alley.

“I dunno why he does anything, but he never does it the easy way. It’s always a little here, a little there. I guess he wants those pictures for something else, maybe something real big. I don’t know when a deal ends and another begins. Sometimes I think, maybe, he’s playing the shell game. You know the shell game?”

Bruce nodded. “Except he does it with ships and paint.”

Tiger paused before a metal door. Suspicion twisted his scarred face. “Yeah. He has the ships painted while they’re out at sea. How’d you guess that?”

“Just lucky,” Bruce replied easily.