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

And if Selina had spoken to Mother Joseph, what then? If Old MoJo had known anything useful about Rose, would she have invited Selina to bring a kitten to dinner? For all that the nuns had been in the East End much longer than Selina herself, they were women who had chosen to live without men. What did any of them know about the real world—the man-dominated world where Selina and Rose lived?

Catwoman landed between the carved stone gargoyles overlooking the mission. Her body flexed from toes to neck, absorbing the impact, keeping her balanced for whatever the next moment required. Crouched in the shadows, she listened to the city noises, straining to hear anything that meant she had been spotted jumping from the tenement to the church roof. She could have been spotted and she could have been heard. Whatever else the Catwoman was, she was not endowed with uncanny powers, but most people had no notion of the untapped potential within their bodies.

Gotham was never quiet. At best the auditory chaos ebbed to an ignorable drone from which the alert ear could always discern sirens, screams, and the occasional gunshot—four of them, small-calibre semiautomatic over by the docks. Catwoman’s lips parted in an unconscious snarl. With her mind’s eye she could see the lightweight, lethal, and almost certainly foreign-made weapon. She knew the hardware by sight and sound, though she shunned it personally. She’d heard the old men—survivors from the sixties—mutter about the days of zip guns and Saturday night specials that were as likely to blow up in your face as take out your opposition. Those days were gone long before she got off the bus. Since the Gulf war, a Saturday night special was an army-surplus grenade.