'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
