Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Poor Carmen,” he finally said when he had finished chewing, looking amused.

“I guess the only one of us who isn’t ‘poor’ something is that blamed PR whiz.”

“Temple’s doing okay,” Matt said. Serenely.

She tried not to grit her teeth. There wasn’t a thing she could do with serene people.

“So.” She started all over again. “It doesn’t bother you that Kinsella was on the scene of the crime-to-be?”

“The scene where the victim of the crime-to-be had last been seen before dying. A lot of people must have been there that night.”

Molina nodded. She had come here to disarm any suspicions Matt might have had. Instead, he was developing some of his own.

“I just wanted to warn you,” she said.

“About what?”

“If it should turn out that Kinsella is as dirty as I think he is—”

“He’s no murderer. Quite the contrary.”

“If he were, he’d be out of your hair, Devine. Don’t you care?”

“I do care. That’s why I don’t need to rise if someone else falls. You have chili on your chin.”

“What!”

“Here’s a napkin.”

“I don’t want a damn napkin, I want an understanding.”

“You’ve said before that your nailing Kinsella would force Temple to turn to me, but you’re wrong.”

“About Kinsella being nailable?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can charge him with something serious. But that wouldn’t force or free Temple to do or be anything other than she is. And she’s committed to Max Kinsella. I’ve come to terms with that. Isn’t it time that you did? You can’t use her, and you can’t use me.

“Poor Carmen.”

He handed her a paper napkin.

Chapter 20

Feast

He lay sated.

Relieved.

The cub had come, playful, pushing its tiny paws between the bars of his lair.

All black, the same midnight color he had seen in some adults and fellow performers of his kind.

It was tiny, the cub, and for a moment his hunger was so sharp he had considered…

But it danced away before he could think any more about his hunger, his huge, black hole of hunger, gnawing at every thought and every instant like nothing he had felt before.

Where were the kind ones? Who brought food and water and reward?

Where were the two-legs he relied upon for everything?

Two-legs there were here. He had seen them shoveling food into the other cages, the aroma massaging his huge nostrils like his mother’s tongue, creating a sense of want and fulfillment at the same time that he had not felt since his cub days.

Mother. She would feed him. Where was she, the constant presence, warm and purring as loud as a two-leg’s machine?

But now he was not hungry. He heard an echo of his mother’s purr within himself.

The cub he had spared, that he had been too hunger-dulled to threaten, had come back. Dragging meat! Food. Fresh.

It had struggled to push the trophy between the metal poles of his container with its tiny forefeet. Then it had sat and watched him eat. Asking nothing for itself. A very well-behaved cub! No pulling and fighting with it, small as it was.

He had eaten and eaten, and then gnawed bare bone. Eaten a great deal for a single sitting, as he had heard the Forepaws had done in the Far Place before meeting the two-legs. Feasting. You did not understand a feast until you had known want. Until you had known hunger gnawing at your innards like a predator, like a tiger or a lion at its meal.