blanket. The extra weight on a person who's weak to start with ..."
Drogan trailed off, and Halston thought about it. Carolyn
Broadmoor asleep in her bedroom, the breath rasping in and out of
her damaged lungs, the sound nearly lost in the whisper of special
humidifiers and air conditioners. The cat with the queer black-and-
white markings leaps silently onto her spinster's bed and stares at
her old and wrinkle-grooved face with those lambent, black-and-
green eyes. It creeps onto her thin chest and settles its weight there,
purring.., and the breathing slows ... slows ... and the cat purrs as
the old woman slowly smothers beneath its weight on her chest.
He was not an imaginative man, but Halston shivered a little.
"Drogan," he said, continuing to stroke the purring cat. "Why don't
you just have it put away? A vet would give it the gas for twenty
dollars."
Drogan said, "The funeral was on the first day of July, I had
Carolyn buried in our cemetery plot next to my sister. The way she
would have wanted it. On July third I called Gage to this room and
handed him a wicker basket.., a picnic hamper sort of thing. Do
you know what I mean?"
Halston nodded.
"I told him to put the cat in it and take it to a vet in Milford and
have it put to sleep. He said, 'Yes, sir,' took the basket, and went
out. Very like him. I never saw him alive again. There was an
accident on the turnpike. The Lincoln was driven into a bridge
abutment at better than sixty miles an hour. Dick Gage was killed
instantly. When they found him there were scratches on his face."
Halston was silent as the picture of how it might have been formed
in his brain again. No sound in the room but the peaceful crackle of
the fire and the peaceful purr of the cat in his lap. He and the cat
together before the fire would make a good illustration for that
Edgar Guest poem, the one that goes: "The cat on my lap, the
hearth's good fire/ ... A happy man, should you enquire."
Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford,
beating the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker
basket beside him - a picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is
watching traffic, maybe he's passing a big cab-over Jimmy and he
doesn't notice the peculiar black-on-one-side, white-on-the-other
face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out of the driver's
side. He doesn't notice because he's passing the big trailer truck
and that's 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 Lincoln's big motor and the other paw is
hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite,
damning pain - maybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path
of the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares ear-shatteringly, but Gage can't
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 man's 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 ... that's
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 don't know. But I'm afraid of it. I feed it, or rather, the woman
who comes in to do for me feeds it. She doesn't like it either. She
says that face is a curse of God. Of course, she's local." The old
man tried to smile and failed. "I want you to kill it. I've 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 I'm going to wake up one early 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 you'd 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 his long-
fingered, muscular hands were lingering above the cat's neck.
"I'll do it now, if you want me to," he said softly. "I'll snap its neck.
It won't 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 cat's
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 didn't 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 Placer's 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 crew-cut 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.