The cashier scowled when Selina slid into the booth. She scowled right back, and resolved to get herself some new clothes, even if it meant going where she had to look in a mirror before she bought them. The cashier scaled a plastic-sheathed menu onto the table.
“Four-dollar minimum. You still wanna order?”
“A steak—the biggest one you’ve got—and make it rare, bloody.” Selina dug all the money out of her pockets and dribbled it onto the table. The cashier counted eighty dollars and change. “Stop staring and move your butt if you want a tip.”
“Yeah, lady. Sure, lady.”
Selina turned away and looked out the window. She could hear the cashier muttering as he approached the trench window separating the so-called dining room from the so-called kitchen: “Screw you, bitch . . .”
Sometimes it didn’t pay to have extraordinary senses. If she’d been in costume the cashier would have four gashes across his throat. Or, more likely, he wouldn’t have opened his mouth in the first place. She pondered the rules of appearances until the food began to arrive and eating was the only thing she cared about. When the last stream of juice had been sopped up by the last morsel of bread, Selina was ready to forgive, forget, and settle into a serious examination of the Keystone.
Its facade was a wedding-cake nightmare. Selina knew next to nothing about architecture, but she knew next to nothing about architecture, but she knew the building had to be at least a hundred years old. No one today could afford that much god-awful gingerbread masonry, even if they could find the artisans who knew how to make it. The whole place was layers of ledges, and there was a comfortably wide one beneath each rank of windows, probably put there for the convenience of future generations of window washers and cat burglars. There were wrought-iron flower baskets around the windows and widgets that looked like coat hooks sprouting randomly through the walls. Selina didn’t know these were the remnants of Victorian scaffolds—and she wouldn’t have cared; what she saw was a veritable highway of handholds. With all that helpful metal, there wasn’t a window in the Keystone Condominiums that Catwoman couldn’t reach.
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