Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford, beating the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker basket beside hima picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is watching traffic, maybe hes passing a big cab-over Jimmy and he doesnt notice the peculiar black-on-one-side, white-on-the-other face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out of the drivers side. He doesnt notice because hes passing the big trailer truck and thats when the cat jumps onto his face, spitting and clawing, its talons raking into one eye, puncturing it, deflating it, blinding it. Sixty and the hum of the Lincolns big motor and the other paw is hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite, damning painmaybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path of the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares ear-shatteringly, but Gage cant hear it because the cat is yowling, the cat is spread-eagled over his face like some huge furry black spider, ears laid back, green eyes glaring like spotlights from hell, back legs jittering and digging into the soft flesh of the old mans neck. The car veers wildly back the other way. The bridge abutment looms. The cat jumps down and the Lincoln, a shiny black torpedo, hits the cement and goes up like a bomb.
Halston swallowed hard and heard a dry click in his throat.
And the cat came back?
Drogan nodded. A week later. On the day Dick Gage was buried, as a matter of fact. Just like the old song says. The cat came back.
It survived a car crash at sixty? Hard to believe.
They say each one has nine lives. When it comes back thats when I started to wonder if it might not be a a
Hellcat? Halston suggested softly.
For want of a better word, yes. A sort of demon sent
To punish you.
I dont know. But Im afraid of it. I feed it, or rather, the woman who comes in to do for me feeds it. She doesnt like it either. She says that face is a curse of God. Of course, shes local. The old man tried to smile and failed. I want you to kill it. Ive lived with it for the last four months. It skulks around in the shadows. It looks at me. It seems to be waiting. I lock myself in my room every night and still I wonder if Im going to wake up one early morning and find it curled up on my chest and purring.
The wind whined lonesomely outside and made a strange hooting noise in the stone chimney.
At last I got in touch with Saul Loggia. He recommended you. He called you a stick, I believe.
A one-stick. That means I work on my own.
Yes. He said youd never been busted, or even suspected. He said you always seem to land on your feet like a cat.
Halston looked at the old man in the wheelchair. And suddenly his long-fingered, muscular hands were lingering just above the cats neck.
Ill do it now, if you want me to, he said softly. Ill snap its neck. It wont even know
No! Drogan cried. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. Color had come up in his sallow cheeks. Not not here. Take it away.
Halston smiled humorlessly. He began to stroke the sleeping cats head and shoulders and back very gently again. All right, he said. I accept the contract. Do you want the body?
No. Kill it. Bury it. He paused. He hunched forward in the wheelchair like some ancient buzzard. Bring me the tail, he said. So I can throw it in the fire and watch it burn.
Halston drove a 1973 Plymouth with a custom Cyclone Spoiler engine. The car was jacked and blocked, and rode with the hood pointing down at the road at a twenty-degree angle. He had rebuilt the differential and the rear end himself. The shift was a Pensy, the linkage was Hearst. It sat on huge Bobby Unser Wide Ovals and had a top end of a little past one-sixty.
He left the Drogan house at a little past 9:30. A cold rind of crescent moon rode overhead through the tattering November clouds. He rode with all the windows open, because that yellow stench of age and terror seemed to have settled into his clothes and he didnt like it. The cold was hard and sharp, eventually numbing, but it was good. It was blowing that yellow stench away.
He got off the turnpike at Placers Glen and drove through the silent town, which was guarded by a single yellow blinker at the intersection, at a thoroughly respectable thirty-five. Out of town, moving up S.R. 35, he opened the Plymouth up a little, letting her walk. The tuned Spoiler engine purred like the cat had purred on his lap earlier this evening. Halston grinned at the simile. They moved between frost-white November fields full of skeleton cornstalks at a little over seventy.
The cat was in a double-thickness shopping bag, tied at the top with heavy twine. The bag was in the passenger bucket seat. The cat had been sleepy and purring when Halston put it in, and it had purred through the entire ride. It sensed, perhaps, that Halston liked it and felt at home with it. Like himself, the cat was a one-stick.
Strange hit, Halston thought, and was surprised to find that he was taking it seriously as a hit. Maybe the strangest thing about it was that he actually liked the cat, felt a kinship with it. If it had managed to get rid of those three old crocks, more power to it especially Gage, who had been taking it to Milford for a terminal date with a crewcut veterinarian who would have been more than happy to bundle it into a ceramic-lined gas chamber the size of a microwave oven. He felt a kinship, but no urge to renege on the hit. He would do it the courtesy of killing it quickly and well. He would park off the road beside one of these November-barren fields and take it out of the bag and stroke it and then snap its neck and sever its tail with his pocket knife. And, he thought, the body Ill bury honorably, saving it from the scavengers. I cant save it from the worms, but I can save it from the maggots.
He was thinking these things as the car moved through the night like a dark blue ghost and that was when the cat walked in front of his eyes, up on the dashboard, tail raised arrogantly, its black-and-white face turned toward him, its mouth seeming to grin at him.
Ssssshhhh Halston hissed. He glanced to his right and caught a glimpse of the double-thickness shopping bag, a hole chewedor clawedin its side. Looked ahead again and the cat lifted a paw and batted playfully at him. The paw skidded across Halstons forehead. He jerked away from it and the Plymouths big tires wailed on the road as it swung erratically from one side of the narrow blacktop to the other.
Halston batted at the cat on the dashboard with his fist. It was blocking his field of vision. It spat at him, arching its back, but it didnt move. Halston swung again, and instead of shrinking away, it leaped at him.
Gage, he thought. Just like Gage
He stamped the brake. The cat was on his head, blocking his vision with its furry belly, clawing at him, gouging at him. Halston held the wheel grimly. He struck the cat once, twice, a third time. And suddenly the road was gone, the Plymouth was running down into the ditch, thudding up and down on its shocks. Then, impact, throwing him forward against his seat belt, and the last sound he heard was the cat yowling inhumanly, the voice of a woman in pain or in the throes of sexual climax.
He struck it with his closed fist and felt only the springy, yielding flex of its muscles.
Then, second impact. And darkness.
The moon was down. It was an hour before dawn.
The Plymouth lay in a ravine curdled with groundmist. Tangled in its grille was a snarled length of barbed wire. The hood had come unlatched, and tendrils of steam from the breached radiator drifted out of the opening to mingle with the mist.
No feeling in his legs.
He looked down and saw that the Plymouths firewall had caved in with the impact. The back of that big Cyclone Spoiler engine block had smashed into his legs, pinning them.
Outside, in the distance, the predatory squawk of an owl dropping onto some small, scurrying animal.
Inside, close, the steady purr of the cat.
It seemed to be grinning, like Alices Cheshire had in Wonderland.
As Halston watched it stood up, arched its back, and stretched. In a sudden limber movement like rippled silk, it leaped to his shoulder. Halston tried to lift his hands to push it off.