She heard no noise from the dining room, which probably meant she hadn’t managed to trap the elusive beast. If he’d been in there, he would have been squealing with rage and scratching at the inside of the closed door by now. Most likely, she had only wasted time and energy with her little trick. But at least there was now one downstairs room to which she could turn her back with impunity.
Repeatedly glancing left and right, forward and back, she crept to the kitchen door, hesitated, then stepped through it, the gun thrust out in front of her. She looked the room over slowly, thoroughly, before venturing farther. The small table and chairs. The humming refrigerator. The dangling, cat-chewed phone cord. The gleaming chrome fixtures on the oven. The double sinks. The white countertops. The small countertop wine rack. The cookie jar and the breadbox lined up beside the wine.
Nothing moved.
The refrigerator motor shut off, and the subsequent quiet was deep, unbroken.
Okay, she thought. Grit your teeth and move, Gracie.
She walked silently across the room, her eyes sweeping every niche, every nook: the opening under the built-in writing desk, the narrow space beside the refrigerator, the blind spot beyond the end of one row of cabinets. No cat.
Maybe I hurt him worse than I thought I did, she told herself hopefully. Maybe I didn’t just lame the bastard. Maybe he crawled away and died.
She reached the back door.
She didn’t dare breathe for fear her own breathing would mask whatever furtive sounds the cat might make.
A ring of keys, including those for the car, hung on a small oval pegboard beside the door. She slipped it off the hook.
She reached for the doorknob.
The cat hissed.
Grace cried out involuntarily and swung her head to the right, in the direction of the sound.
She was standing at one end of the long row of cabinets. At the far end, the wine rack and the bread-box and the cookie jar were lined up side by side; she had seen them from a front-on angle when she had first come into the room. Now she had a side view. From this angle she saw something she couldn’t have seen from in front: The cookie jar and breadbox, which usually rested snug against the wall behind the counter, had been moved out a few inches. The cat had squeezed in behind those two objects, muscling them slowly out of its way. It had crouched in that hiding place, its butt against the wine rack, facing out toward the kitchen door. It was approximately twelve feet from her, and then it wasn’t even that far away because it launched itself across the counter, hissing.
The confrontation was over in a few seconds, but during those seconds, time seemed to slow to a crawl, and Grace felt as if she were trapped in a slow-motion film. She stumbled backwards, away from the counter and the cat, but she didn’t get far before she collided with a wall; as she moved, she raised the gun and fired two rounds in quick succession. The cookie jar exploded, and wood chips flew off one of the cabinet doors. But the cat kept coming, coming, in slow-motion strides across the slippery tile countertop, its mouth gaping and its fangs bared. She realized that hitting such a small, quick target was not easy, even at such short range as this. She fired again, but she knew the gun was wavering in her hand, and she wasn’t surprised when she heard the bullet ricochet—making a high, piercing eeeee—off something wide of the mark. To her terror-heightened perceptions, the echoes of the ricochet continued to infinity: eeeee, eeeee, eeeee, eeeee, eeeee…. Then the cat reached the end of the counter and leapt into the air, and Grace fired again. This time she hit the mark. The cat yelped. The bullet had sufficient impact to deflect the animal only an instant before it would have landed, scratching and biting, on her face. It was pitched back and to the left as if it were a bundle of rags. It slammed into the kitchen door and dropped stonelike to the floor, where it lay silent and motionless