They stared at each other. Catwoman blinked first.
"Why do you keep calling me Selina? I'm not Selina Kyle. She's just someone... someone I know."
A long silent moment passed while Bonnie examined the black-clad woman facing her. Except for her eyes, no part of her moved. But the green eyes took everything in, slowly, methodically, and when they were done Catwoman had an entirely different opinion of innocence.
Bonnie swallowed everything she had seen. "Yeah, I understand now." She nodded several times, affirming something to herself. "Catwoman. Not Selina. My mistake. We don't have people like you out in Indiana, you know," she said, as if that explained something important. "I mean, we see the news on television and all, but nothing interesting enough happens in Bloomington to make it worth your while. So I had no idea how you do what you do. I thought it was like acting, playing a part---but I see I was wrong. You're not anything like Selina Kyle. You're Catwoman, pure and simple, right? And I better not forget it if I know what's good for me, also right?"
Catwoman stepped aside. Her mask was no better at hiding things than that guileless shrug and smile. Bonnie was, after all, the young woman who had spliced a black panther into a forest of pine trees and sugar maples.
"I'm ready if you are," Bonnie called from the window.
Catwoman led the way. She had to help her companion in the more difficult passages, but Bonnie understood---without being told---that this was a time for obedience, not conversation. She carried the heavy backpack without complaining, she did exactly what she was told to do, and she didn't say a word until Selina had them inside Eddie's apartment.
"You?" she asked, pointed at the gouges in the door and frame.
With a quick nod of her head, Catwoman bent down and went to work on the lock. It was a delicate chore; she'd damaged the mechanism on her previous visit. Hadn't Eddie been back since then? Finally the tumblers fell into place and the bolt could be drawn. She flipped the light switch and, despite knowing what was there, her heart skipped a beat. Everything was as she remembered it. In the pit of her heart, she believed that no one had been in the room since she'd left it.
"Omygod. Omygod." Bonnie hesitated before crossing the threshold. "Omygod. They won't believe it. Wide-angle won't be enough. I should've brought the camcorder. This needs movement, a slow pan across the entire room to make the eye see everything that's here. And slow freezes starting there... or there... or... Omygod. I don't know where to start."
"Just point and shoot. You're sure to get something illegal. There's a piece, a Siberian tiger box, in the room where we came in. Save a shot for that. I'll take a look in the other rooms to see if there's anything else we should have."
"Just point and shoot," Bonnie repeated. "Point and shoot. Omygod."
She unbuckled the backpack and opened it. When Catwoman left the room, she had both cameras on the floor beside her and was pulling on a pair of lightweight kid gloves. A moderately thorough search of the rest of the apartment assured Catwoman that except for the jewelry box in the bedroom there was nothing outside the now-unlocked room worth photographing. She was also positive that Eddie Lobb had not been back. This made her irrationally uneasy. If Eddie had been gone this long, there was no reason to think he'd be coming through the door any time soon. But reason had no effect on the acid churning in her stomach. She returned to the cat room to tell Bonnie to hurry up. Bonnie was standing on the tiger-bone chair, removing one of the trophy heads from the wall.
"Stop that!"
Catwoman was much stronger than Bonnie. She effortlessly wrenched the head from the other woman's hand and slapped it back on the wall.
"Don't touch things like that! What else have you touched?" Glancing around, Catwoman could answer her own question: everything on the right side of the room was subtly out of place.
"I've done the wide-angle shots in high-speed color; now I'm going for the close-ups in low-speed black-and-white. I'll get great enlargements. I've got to move things if I'm going to get good pictures. I'm wearing gloves. It's not like I'm leaving fingerprints around. Besides, I've never been arrested. There wouldn't be a match on file."
"But he'll know someone's been here."
Bonnie grimaced. "One look at the door and he's gonna know somebody was here, don't you think? 'Course, he won't know who, and he won't dare call the police---'cause if they came and saw this stuff, he'd be in heaps of trouble. Look, I know you said we shouldn't take anything, the proof's all got to be in the pictures, but it seems to me that---since you've already done a number on his door---we should go ahead and shake him up a bit. Move things around. I mean, a guy who has a room like this, he's got to be an animist. I'll bet he thinks these things have mana. You know, he sits here in his tiger-bone chair, works at his tiger-bone table, surrounds himself with tiger stuff. I'll bet he thinks he is a cat. Well, not like you're a cat, of course. But, anyway, he'll go loony tunes if he thinks somebody's messed with his stuff. I mean, I bet he'll really freak. He'll start thinking all these cats are turning against him."
"You think so?" Catwoman said slowly, chewing on a steel claw. Bonnie had a habit of saying things and using words that didn't make a lot of sense to someone who hadn't paid attention in school. Animation? What did cartoons have to do with Eddie Lobb? But, as had happened before, Catwoman liked the conclusions Bonnie reached. "You think he'll get real upset if we move things around?"
"Yeah. Wait. I've got a better idea. Instead of just moving them around, we'll move them around in a pattern. See how he's got everything so it's looking down at his desk here? Well, let's make them look someplace else---the door. The door where you made those scratches. Like all the tigers turned their heads to see you walk in. Oh, it'll be great. I wish I could see his face! I mean, we will see his face eventually, 'cause these pictures are going to make everybody at WW weep blood. I promise you. They'll call lawyers, judges, all kinds of people. This Eddie Lobb guy---by the time we're done with him, he's gonna wish he'd never been born."
Catwoman wasn't listening. She was busy following Bonnie's suggestions, turning all the heads toward the mutilated door once Bonnie had photographed them. It was taking a long time, but it would be worth it. Then Catwoman heard sounds coming from the front door.
Mother of midnight---Eddie Lobb was coming home!
Bonnie was already packing her cameras. The midwesterner's eyes showed white all around and her breath was coming in panicked little gasps, but she managed to keep moving. Catwoman knelt beside her, passing lenses and film canisters in rapid succession.
"I'm scared," Bonnie whispered in the smallest possible voice.
"You'll be fine," Catwoman hissed as the apartment echoed with the sound of a metal bolt withdrawing from a metal socket. "Go down the hall, get out the window. Go to the fire escape and climb to the roof---just the opposite of how we got in here. Can you do that?"
Tears dribbled out of Bonnie's eyes as she nodded solemnly.
"Go. You'll be fine. Wait for me."
Catwoman turned off the lights, pulled the door shut, and guarded the hall. A second lock chinked free. They still had time. Nobody, not even Eddie himself, could get into this apartment quickly. She heard the drapes rustle and an involuntary yelp as Bonnie went out the window. Neither sound was loud enough to penetrate the living room. Catwoman held her breath, waiting for another sound, hoping it wasn't the sound of something heavy hitting something hard. It wasn't. She started moving backward down the corridor. She was in Rose's bedroom---damn, they hadn't gotten a picture of the Siberian tiger box that started it all---when the front door opened. She was scuttling along the ledge below the window when it shut.