Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“And in the meantime, your life is not your own.”

“That’s true. But isn’t free will often an illusion?”

“I don’t know. I’m just an artist, not a theologian. I’m going to miss you,” she said, lifting her beer glass for a toast.

He touched glass rims with her. “Me too. I guess I’ll find out a lot about free will in the next few weeks.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“I’m glad too.”

She smiled. He smiled. Maybe this evening could have ended differently, but not now.

Chapter 12

Caged Meat

The smell of blood and bone spewed all around him .

He paced back and forth, trying not to think about it, but the odor was too strong to ignore .

The night was panther dark. No lights except the vague overhead glimmer of most nights in this harsh land .

He had water at least. Not blood .

The smell was maddening! The smell of slaughter .

He couldn’t understand why he was being tormented like this: caged and affronted with the stench of bleeding meat .

Or was it a dream? He had dreamed these dreams before .

How long in this prison?

How long since he had been stung into sleep and taken from his home?

No one knew where he was. He knew no one here. The blood wasn’t the only smell. There was the reek of urine and dung. His grounds had always been cleared quickly .

In the hot sun flies buzzed around it all: filth, raw meat, his eyes and ears .

At night the smell was the overpowering assault .

He heard others move in the night. He heard a rhythmic scraping sound .

And sometimes he heard footsteps, as the keepers with the barking whips moved back and forth, as he did in his prison, only they were free .

He lurched up from a prone position on the cold concrete to the corner opposite the rancid hay that was his bed and marking place .

Water at least. He drank thirstily, satisfying no craving .

Without water he would have died in the day’s heat. So they did not mean to kill him. Not yet. He knew that much, and no more .

But the smell, all around!

He lunged at the bars with a guttural cry of anguish .

He would go mad!

Why had they done this to him?

Chapter 13

Trial and Error

Louie lunged at the closing grille of the cat carrier, growling.

“I’m sorry, boy. This is lousy timing, but we have an appointment with the long arm of the law. Just think of it as stardom calling again,” Temple told him.

She was still panting from the effort of cornering and corralling twenty pounds of reluctant feline. “We’ve got a media date. Tape will be rolling at ten A.M. sharp.”

What a ham. As if hearing a magic formula, the big cat quieted down. Now apparently reconciled to the need for this odious means of transportation, Louie tucked his big black paws underneath him and settled into the folded Martha Stewart towels Temple had gotten for Christmas from her mother. There were bunnies on them, just as there were bunnies on her Christmas bedroom slippers.

Was her mother not-so-subtly trying to tell a thirty-year-old daughter that it was now time to breed like a rabbit?

First, to do the trick, Temple would need to find a jackrabbit. Louie was her only live-in male of the moment, and he was the wrong species.

Temple sat beside the carrier to catch her breath and pull the back straps on her sandals into place on her heels again. She’d nearly dislocated an ankle wrestling with Louie.

He should be ashamed, the big lug, giving his ever-loving roommate such a fight when she was only enhancing his performing career.

She checked the address she had written on the margin of the neighborhood weekly shopper when the television producer had called with the good news. “Tomorrow at ten A.M., all right?”

Being a freelance PR specialist, Temple could always crowd this appointment into that day, or that bit of hooky into this schedule. That was the beauty of being self-employed; sometimes you were self-liberated.

“That’s right, Louie, groom that foot, but not too much. You have to look abused for the camera.”

He eyed her dubiously, whether in distaste at the redundancy of urging him to groom himself, or the impossibility of twenty well-fed pounds of glossy black fur looking abused.

“Helpless would be a huge help too,” she added hopefully.

His yawn showed a maw of white fangs that would have done a rattlesnake about to be milked of its venom proud.

Temple shivered a little. Louie was big, but she’d hate to meet one of the real big cats face-to-fang. Unless they were the tamed variety provided to weekend warrior-hunters eager to bag a proud head for their office or home theater wall.

This sort of cowardly lion hunter was so common that Van Burkleo had called his pride of former pets and zoo residents MGM lions.

Mascots, in other words, ready to be pierced with bullets or arrows, hounded wounded against a wall and nibbled until dead with nonlethal hindquarter shots, all to preserve the handsome head for some creep’s wall.

Temple was not surprised to find her fingernails dimpling her palms in pent-up fury.

Good. Fury was useful. All she had to do was think of Savannah Ashleigh as one of these canned-hunt impresarios, kidnapping a favorite pet, confining it to a cage, doing what she would with it.

From Louie’s carrier came a low growl that climbed and descended a scale or two in a minor key before it was done. Was he trying to tell her something?

The Judge Geraldine Jones show was videotaped at a local sound studio. Temple and Louie saw not so much as an extension cord for the first two hours they spent there.

The green room, lovely term that smacked of theatrical tradition, although it was seldom green anymore, was a cavernous studio filled with folding chairs and people filling out forms on clipboards balanced on their knees.

Temple sat down, put Louie’s carrier beside her on the cold concrete, and began doing likewise.

The forms, which released the producers from responsibility for every eventuality from act of God to hangnail, were duly signed and delivered to the perky teenage assistants who made the rounds of the plaintiffs and defendants, handing out paper cups of bad coffee and unbottled water when not collecting the signed sheets.

“Oh, who have we got in here?” one ponytailed assistant asked, crouching beside Louie’s carrier and peering inside with little luck. “Oh. This must be the mutilated cat.”

Temple was pleased that her spin on events had made its way into the backstage language, but she wasn’t pleased to have Louie labeled so publicly. Not that the actual show wouldn’t be a lot more public, but at least they got paid for the indignity. If they won the case.

“Yes,” Temple said, sighing heavily. “Careful. He’s a little people-shy now. As you can imagine.”

“Oooh, the poor little boy,” she cooed into the grille that was all she could see of the shadowy contents.

“Well, he’s not a little boy in any sense now,” Temple added direly.

“His name is”—the assistant frowned at the clipboard she had confiscated from Temple, along with the mostly nonfunctioning ball-point pen attached with a metal chain—“Louis.”

“Louie,” Temple corrected. “He’s a very informal, friendly cat. Or was, before he was cruelly kidnapped.”

“I don’t want to get your hopes down,” Miss Perkiness confided, her tender face softening with sadness, “but animal cases don’t do too well here. They’re only worth what the animal is, and that’s not much.”