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

“Okay—I’ll make tapes of everything. You can tell me how stupid and wrong everyone is. It’ll be our secret.”

“Maybe,” Selina said as she hung up the receiver. She lingered beside the phone, expecting it to ring again, expecting that she would have to ignore it, but it remained inert.

The costume was nearly dry. Selina pulled it on carefully and folded the mask hood under the neck band and wrestled with the white seams. The gloves could be folded up under the sleeves, although she could count the number of times she’d bothered to do so on the fingers of one hand. She rarely layered the costume beneath her mundane clothes; even in the dead of winter she preferred to shed one identity completely before adopting the other. But not today. Today Selina wanted Catwoman with her.

Batman was alone in Commissioner Gordon’s City Hall office. The raid had been ruled a success, despite the gunplay. The two policemen who fell from the rafters were in the hospital; their lives had been saved by the elasticity. The officer who’d taken the fatal neck wound was being named a hero who’d fallen in the line of duty. Today that didn’t lessen the anguish of his grieving family, but in time it might.

As for the others: Khalki, the Gagauzi leader, was in temporary serious condition. The remaining three Gagauzi had been arrested, but the story of their tiny community’s struggle for identity and independence was capturing the hearts of those Americans who could always be counted on to root for the underdog. Even the Moldovans—the other men in the rafters whose unexpected presence had reduced Commissioner Gordon’s carefully planned raid to chaos—garnered some sympathy for their desire to forge a reunited Rumania.