He'd helped out with that minor war one time, for a trip to the vet for shots. They'd finally ended up catching the cat under a horse blanket. The cat had torn three holes in the blanket by the time they finished.
Those cats were not tame. They weren't totally wild, but they weren't tame. He made a mental note to never get between Jane and the nearest exit. If she sensed a trap closing around her . . . .
He stood up and grabbed his shirt, tucking the museum catalog disk in one pocket and the list of possibilities in another. "I'm going cross-eyed staring at that damn typeface. It's Saturday, the rain's stopped — let's go over to the Union and score some ice cream."
She glanced at her wrist. "Sounds good. The football game should have started, so all the lemmings should be piled up in the stands." She pulled on a pair of pants, buttoned her shirt, and shoved the computer into her backpack. She stopped, glanced at him, and stowed that pistol back in the milk crate.
Outside in the stairwell, he noticed a shallow spall in the concrete foundation, with a dimple in the center about half an inch in diameter. It lined up with the peephole. "You find the slug?"
"Yep. And tossed it. Mommy knows about rifling marks." She paused before locking the deadbolt. "Just a second." And she vanished back inside her rooms, pulling the door shut behind her.
Probably moving the gun, hiding it from him. Barn cat.
*~*~*
They strolled across the grassy mall in front of the Undergrad Library, autumn sun golden in the sugar maples under breezy blue sky, standard-issue laughing college couple except they weren't watching the big game. And Gary thought about barn cats, soft and cute and furry and purring except when they turned into screaming buzz-saws.
She scared him. She fascinated him. And she liked sex. A lot. She carried everything she valued in that backpack. She even kept a change of clothes with her at all times, clothing a different style and color from whatever she was wearing. He'd found that out after a short interlude in his dorm room between classes.
He didn't think she kept another gun tucked away in there, but she'd never given him a chance to check. The only times she hadn't been carrying it, they'd been someplace she had to leave it in a storage locker, like checking out the museum. He doubted if she ever left it in that basement apartment.
Anyway, this girl lived on the edge of cut-and-run. If she never went back to those two musty rooms, she'd lose some trash furniture that had cost her nothing in the first place and a few changes of clothing straight from the Goodwill store. That fit in with the gnawed fingernails.
He'd thought maybe he'd ask her about the Paramount Hotel fire. Now he thought maybe he wouldn't.
Still, she'd let him pretty far inside her fences. Not just the sex. He knew her true hair color, for example, black, almost as thick and glossy as Caroline's. The green and orange and purple were more paint than dye. She'd slept in his bed, actually just sleeping there while trusting him to stand guard. And sometimes she cried in the middle of the night when she thought he was sleeping. He'd seen some scars he didn't think she intended him to notice, small old puckered spots the size and shape of a burning cigarette under the hair of her unshaved armpits.
Those had looked like torture, not just abuse. Torture done years ago by someone who cared about leaving marks where they could be seen. Might be that somebody had needed killing.
And Gary was still getting his head around the fact that his whole family lived just as far outside the law as she did. Five hundred years of pirates, complete with loaded artillery on the roof of their stone tower. Sir Henry Morgan had been a cousin, left about three tons of loot in Stonefort when he sailed back to England for the pardon and respectability. When piracy turned unprofitable, they switched to robbing land-lubbers and sneaking goods past Customs. Now they raided banks by computer and ran a thriving trade in looted art and antiquities. And if anyone threatened them, they killed. His true father Ben served as capo di capi of a Welsh mafia.
Three months wasn't really enough time for him to digest that, but he'd worked through it far enough that a murder or two in her past didn't send him screaming. He still woke up sweating, remembering that he'd killed a man with his bare hands, a man that needed killing.
So they walked across the grassy mall shuffling through drifted gold and crimson maple leaves and they dipped plastic spoons in plastic bowls of ice cream courtesy of the high-butterfat pedigree cows of the Ag School farm. Band music drifted across from the stadium, sour notes and staggering beats and all.
She slipped loose and turned in front of him, licking French vanilla off her lips, and pulled his head down until her breath tickled his ear. "Hey, all the jocks will be watching the game. How about we stick our noses into the gym, check out the security system and the stairs down to that anthro storage in the basement?"
Just a typical pair of undergrads.
"Nah." He shook his head, automatic response. "Caroline's the one for that. She's got the 'in' with her grad studies, just checking pottery fragments to chart the distribution patterns from a particular Anasazi site. Or something. Typical boring thesis research, livened up by a little espionage. And she warned me to stay away from her dolly. It doesn't like men."
He winced, suddenly realizing how much he'd just told her. Dad and Ben were
