Cat In A Leopard Spot

She smiled. He smiled. Maybe this evening could have ended differently, but not now.

Chapter 12

Caged Meat

The smell of blood and bone spewed all around him.

He paced back and forth, trying not to think about it, but the odor was too strong to ignore.

The night was panther dark. No lights except the vague overhead glimmer of most nights in this harsh land.

He had water at least. Not blood.

The smell was maddening! The smell of slaughter.

He couldn’t understand why he was being tormented like this: caged and affronted with the stench of bleeding meat.

Or was it a dream? He had dreamed these dreams before.

How long in this prison?

How long since he had been stung into sleep and taken from his home?

No one knew where he was. He knew no one here. The blood wasn’t the only smell. There was the reek of urine and dung. His grounds had always been cleared quickly.

In the hot sun flies buzzed around it all: filth, raw meat, his eyes and ears.

At night the smell was the overpowering assault.

He heard others move in the night. He heard a rhythmic scraping sound.

And sometimes he heard footsteps, as the keepers with the barking whips moved back and forth, as he did in his prison, only they were free.

He lurched up from a prone position on the cold concrete to the corner opposite the rancid hay that was his bed and marking place.

Water at least. He drank thirstily, satisfying no craving.

Without water he would have died in the day’s heat. So they did not mean to kill him. Not yet. He knew that much, and no more.

But the smell, all around!

He lunged at the bars with a guttural cry of anguish.

He would go mad!

Why had they done this to him?

Chapter 13

Trial and Error

Louie lunged at the closing grille of the cat carrier, growling.

“I’m sorry, boy. This is lousy timing, but we have an appointment with the long arm of the law. Just think of it as stardom calling again,” Temple told him.

She was still panting from the effort of cornering and corralling twenty pounds of reluctant feline. “We’ve got a media date. Tape will be rolling at ten A.M. sharp.”

What a ham. As if hearing a magic formula, the big cat quieted down. Now apparently reconciled to the need for this odious means of transportation, Louie tucked his big black paws underneath him and settled into the folded Martha Stewart towels Temple had gotten for Christmas from her mother. There were bunnies on them, just as there were bunnies on her Christmas bedroom slippers.

Was her mother not-so-subtly trying to tell a thirty-year-old daughter that it was now time to breed like a rabbit?

First, to do the trick, Temple would need to find a jackrabbit. Louie was her only live-in male of the moment, and he was the wrong species.

Temple sat beside the carrier to catch her breath and pull the back straps on her sandals into place on her heels again. She’d nearly dislocated an ankle wrestling with Louie.

He should be ashamed, the big lug, giving his ever-loving roommate such a fight when she was only enhancing his performing career.

She checked the address she had written on the margin of the neighborhood weekly shopper when the television producer had called with the good news. “Tomorrow at ten A.M., all right?”

Being a freelance PR specialist, Temple could always crowd this appointment into that day, or that bit of hooky into this schedule. That was the beauty of being self-employed; sometimes you were self-liberated.