"Beat it, slime, while you still can."
He tugged on the bill of his cap. Maybe he thought he'd regain the advantage if he met the crazy lady's eyes. If he had, he was wrong. Selina was waiting for him. She showed real teeth through a real smile and started toward him, then walked on by. As she had hoped, his erstwhile companions hurled insults until she was out of earshot.
Another hundred yards and she began to relax.
Only a man can make a woman forget everything but fear.
The thought spread through her mind along with Rose's face. The punk's eyes were astonished. Like the druggers, he couldn't quite believe that a woman---a bitch---had overwhelmed him. But there was no astonishment, surprise, or disbelief in the memory of Rose's face, only fear, then a victim's acceptance of inevitable fate.
Chapter Six
Selina let herself into her apartment. The kitten escaped before she got the door shoved shut. The locks reset automatically.
A case of tuna fish was stacked in the kitchen cabinets. As easy to prepare and serve as it was to store, tuna was one of Mother Nature's almost-perfect foods---especially when each can was certified dolphin-safe. She opened a can and, leaning over the sink, began eating the contents with her fingers.
Her hunger knots loosened; her thoughts wandered back to the mission. Selina was angry at Old MoJo and the others. They'd used her, they'd used the kitten, and they'd cheated her out of a meal. It was a superficial anger, though, and would be gone before the tuna can was empty. There was a deeper layer of anger, though, that was not so easily erased. The world was full of people who didn't like cats. Dislike could turn to hatred, but, in adults, it rarely showed itself as stark fear. Rose's fear of cats wasn't something she'd carried around since childhood.
Licking tuna slivers from her fingers, Selina set the almost-empty can on the floor for the cats to scour.
There was only one conclusion that felt right: There was a man behind Rose's terror, but somehow he'd managed to displace her fear from him to an innocent cat.
Selina held her breath as a familiar but not quite comfortable sensation passed over her. She let her breath out raggedly. The transformation from her ordinary self to Catwoman was complete before Selina left the alcove that her landlord called a kitchen. She shed clothes with every step toward the bed and was nearly naked by the time she reached it. The sleek costume fit like a second skin---as well as it should. The garment had been obscenely expensive.
In the beginning she tried using secondhand costumes from theatrical supply houses. She'd even tried making one herself. Nothing stood up to the punishment her alter ego gave it. Then one day a clumsily written letter slid under the door. The outside hall was eerily empty. The paper bore a sketch, a price, and an address where the transaction could be completed. It scared Selina witless, but she was ready to try anything. She assembled the asking price in gold and other specified substances, left it on a bench in a deserted courtyard, and found the leather costume laid across her bed one evening two weeks later.
As she smoothed the costume over her arms and legs, Selina Kyle vanished. The simpler Catwoman stood in her place.
"I'll be back before dawn," she whispered to the assembled pairs of glowing eyes. "Don't wait up." She eased along the ledge, around the corner, and was gone.
Between the tuna fish and the costume, Selina had considered other ways of resolving her curiosity. She briefly pictured herself at the mission. The doors of the mission were never closed, but the nuns weren't foolish enough to stay downstairs after dark. If Selina went there now, she'd have to explain herself to the brawny ex-addicts who ran the night shelter like a marine boot camp. Not likely. She thought of telephoning Mother Joseph directly, but Old MoJo wouldn't be in her office taking calls at this hour. Besides, Selina's phone wasn't working... again. One of the cats---she didn't know which---had developed a taste for plastic wire insulation. It probably wasn't good for the cat, but it was fatal for the phone.
And if Selina had spoken to Mother Joseph, what then? If Old MoJo had known anything useful about Rose, would she have invited Selina to bring a kitten to dinner? For all that the nuns had been in the East End much longer than Selina herself, they were women who had chosen to live without men. What did any of them know about the real world---the man-dominated world where Selina and Rose lived?
Catwoman landed between the carved stone gargoyles overlooking the mission. Her body flexed from toes to neck, absorbing the impact, keeping her balanced for whatever the next moment required. Crouched in the shadows, she listened to the city noises, straining to hear anything that meant she had been spotted jumping from the tenement to the church roof. She could have been spotted and she could have been heard. Whatever else the Catwoman was, she was not endowed with uncanny powers, but most people had no notion of the untapped potential within their bodies.
Gotham was never quiet. At best the auditory chaos ebbed to an ignorable drone from which the alert ear could always discern sirens, screams, and the occasional gunshot---four of them, small-calibre semiautomatic over by the docks. Catwoman's lips parted in an unconscious snarl. With her mind's eye she could see the lightweight, lethal, and almost certainly foreign-made weapon. She knew the hardware by sight and sound, though she shunned it personally. She'd heard the old men---survivors from the sixties---mutter about the days of zip guns and Saturday night specials that were as likely to blow up in your face as take out your opposition. Those days were gone long before she got off the bus. Since the Gulf war, a Saturday night special was an army-surplus grenade.
Though the docks were a dozen blocks away, Catwoman listened for answering fire. She didn't expect to head that way before going home, but one never knew. A wise person, no matter where they were or how they were dressed, paid attention to night sounds. The next sound she heard was a police siren screaming down Ninth Avenue, going somewhere in a big hurry, but not to the docks.
Selina relaxed and lowered herself onto the mission roof. Her claws made short work of the skylight's security. She dropped into the stairwell, then froze and waited breathlessly. The noise had seemed horrendously loud in her own ears, but it raised no alarm.
Two hours later, after fruitlessly inspecting every nook and cranny into which a body could fit, Catwoman returned to the stairwell and sprang upward toward the open skylight. The molding sagged when her fingers clamped over it, but the old wood held and she pulled herself easily onto the deserted rooftop. Blending with the night sky and the satiny black of the asphalt roof, Selina pushed the mask back from her face. A gentle breeze, scented with salt from the riverfront, refreshed her as she considered her predicament.
Rose D'Onofreo wasn't inside the mission. Remembering how she'd tried to hide under the sink, it was hard to imagine that she'd recovered and gone home.
The warble of an ambulance---markedly different from the whoop or shriek of a squad car or the airhorn belch of fire equipment---echoed off the nearby buildings. Before coming to Gotham, Selina would count the seconds between the sight of lightning and the sound of thunder; now she listened to the changing pitch and guessed which of the huge hospitals was its destination. The siren faded straightway; the vehicle hadn't turned toward Gotham General. It was going all the way downtown to the university medical center. Whoever was inside was in a world of hurt.
Could the nuns have sent Rose to Gotham General? The mission had its own infirmary. Selina had checked it out along with everything else and found it occupied by a noisy, but harmless, drunk. The sisters would have kept Rose in the infirmary unless they thought she'd die before Sunday morning, because on Saturday night there wasn't an emergency room in the city that had time or room for a minor emergency.