with lighter fluid and then set on fire.
He snapped his head back and cried out in agony - he must have
sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't
been expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud
down in the back seat.
A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his hands,
to raise one of them and wipe the blood away.
They trembled in his lap, but he was still unable to actually move
them. He thought of the .45 special in its holster under his left arm.
If I can get to my piece, kitty, the rest of your nine lives are going
in a lump sum.
More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and
surely shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his
legs - it felt exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when
it's starting to wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about
his feet. It was enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that
he wasn't going to finish out his life as a dead lump of body
attached to a talking head.
Maybe I had a few lives left myself.
Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the
wreck - maybe someone would come along, that would solve both
problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road
like this one, but barely possible. And-
And what was the cat doing back there?
He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it
behind him and out of sight, either. He tried the rearview mirror,
but that was useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it
reflected was the grassy ravine he had finished up in.
A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.
Purring.
Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.
And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder,
what could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all
of four pounds soaking wet. And soon ... soon he would be able to
move his hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it.
Halston sat and waited. Feeling continued to flood back into his
body in a series of pins-and-needles incursions. Absurdly (or
maybe in instinctive reaction to his close brush with death) he got
an erection for a minute or so. Be kind of hard to beat off under
present circumstances, he thought.
A dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird
sang.
Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an
inch before they fell back.
Not yet. But soon.
A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head
and looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their
huge dark pupils.
Halston spoke to it.
'I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a
