Catwoman - Tiger Hunt

Chapter Ten

Catwoman made her way back to her apartment. She headed directly to the training mats, without pausing to shed the costume. Ever cautious of their benefactor's moods, the four-footed cats made themselves scarce. With glowing, green-gold eyes they watched from safe places as the two-footed cat contorted herself.

Selina intended to work out until she collapsed. Her superb condition fought against her. Her body routinely made the near-magical switch from ordinary physical metabolism to sheer will and determination. Through the dead hours when the city was almost quiet, Selina pursued exhaustion without catching it.

With her palms on the floor, her back arched, and her toes pointed toward heaven, she straightened her arms into a handstand, then flexed them until her skull bumped the floor. She repeated this act---the impoverished gymnast's bench press---ten... twenty... fifty times before swinging her body down for an equally tortured version of a sit-up. In time, lactic acid and dehydration made every move an exercise in pain, but Selina's mind remained sharp. The images she'd brought out of Eddie Lobb's apartment grew more vivid and real, more horrifying with each repetition.

Her vision blurred as sweat trickled across her face. She let her eyes close, then opened them with a shudder. She lost her balance. She tucked and rolled into a cross-legged sitting position with her back curled. With a defeated sigh, Selina relaxed. Her forehead rested against her ankles. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing. Her mind's eye was filled with tigers, lions, cheetahs, panthers, and leopard; skulls and bones; and glowing, reproachful eyes.

What are you going to do about us? they asked in overlapping chorus.

Selina made a fist and pounded weakly on the floor beside her.

"I'll kill him. I swear I'll kill him."

What are you going to do about us?

She knew how to kill Eddie Lobb: stake out his home. His kind---the kind that collected relics and hid them behind layers of locks---always came back to restore itself amid forbidden treasure. All she had to do was watch and wait. She could feel her claws sink into his neck; feel the flesh separate as she pulled upward, outward; see the look in his eyes, just before he died, when he realized that a cat had come to claim him.

Then what? Did she leave Eddie Lobb in his blood, surrounded by his obscene collection, for the Gotham City Police to find? Did killing Eddie Lobb end anything but Eddie Lobb? What about Rose, what about the collection?

One of those questions was pathetically easy to answer. With regard to Rose D'Onofreo, Selina Kyle couldn't have cared less. Rose was an accident, an innocent, insignificant and no longer important. If the nuns could salvage her mind, so much the better; if not, well, that was okay too. What Eddie Lobb had done to Rose was a consequence of his corruption. If it hadn't been Rose, it would have been someone else---it would become someone else if Selina and Catwoman didn't stop Eddie Lobb.

But what about his relics, his fetishes? Did she try to remove them herself? In garbage bags tossed into an alley or dumpster? Should she turn his apartment into a funeral pyre? That would put his neighbors at risk. Were they more or less innocent than Rose?

Selina shook her head violently and growled with primitive anguish.

"I don't know what to do," she confessed, regretting---for a moment---that she lived without friends or family, with only the cats and Catwoman as advisers. For another moment she considered going to the mission. Her thoughts reeled---rather like seeing every scene from a movie simultaneously. She watched herself enter Old MoJo's office, tell her tale, while the veiled woman laughed herself int a frenzy. The humiliation Selina felt was real, even if the scenes she imagined were not.

She sat where she was, not moving but not falling asleep, either---simply waiting for things to change, to get worse.

Worse came in the form of small piece of warm, wet sandpaper rasping her cheek: a cat harvesting the salt of her exertions. Selina cocked her head and squinted. The gray tiger kitten. Had she expected anyone else? Pretty soon she was going to have to give the little guy a name. Slipping her hand beneath his plump barrel-belly, Selina hoisted him into the air. She swiveled her wrist, thinking about names. He gouged the air with half-grown claws and bared his milk teeth.

"Not afraid of anything, are you?"

Selina lowered him to the floor. He arched his back once his toes touched down. His tail shot up and the soft kitten-fur fluffed like milkweed down. He hissed mightily. She reached for him; he stood his ground, undaunted by her larger claws.

"So what if I'm a hundred times bigger than you, right? You're a regular warrior---" Her thoughts nose-dived inward. Selina forgot the kitten attacking her fingers. "A regular warrior. A Wilderness Warrior."

The tension and anguish evaporated. Selina had the solution. She'd had it from the beginning without recognizing it. The militant defenders of predators, the ones who had taught her how to recognize the problem, would surely have the wherewithal to solve it. The Wilderness Warriors would deal with Eddie Lobb's collection while Catwoman dealt with Eddie himself. Possibilities, probabilities, and---she hoped---inevitabilities clamored for her attention.

"Later."

Now that she had an answer, Selina could feel the abuse she'd heaped on her body, and smell the rank costume. She kept it on while she stood in the shower, scrubbing it, then herself, in the steamy water. She quenched her thirst in a final cold rinse. After stamping on the catsuit and wringing it out with her hands, Selina threw it over the shower head and, wrapped in a towel, left the bathroom.

The sun was up. The room was painfully bright and the cats were demanding breakfast. Selina couldn't remember the taste of her greasy-spoon steak, but the effort of opening a can of tuna fish seemed too much to contemplate. She filled a bowl with dry cat food and put it on the floor for the cats to fight over, then dug a handful out for herself. The kibble crunched like pretzels and tasted much better than she expected. After chomping through a second handful, she left the bag propped against the bed.

The room was bright, summertime hot, and stuffy when Selina woke up in the middle of the afternoon. Her head was throbbing; no wonder the cats preferred canned food. Fending off the light with an upraised hand, she navigated to the refrigerator. There was a double-sized container of orange juice in the freezer. She was too impatient to let it thaw properly and ate it like ice cream instead. The effect was indescribable and nearly instantaneous. When her eyes came back into focus, Selina was ready to take on the world.

Despite writing the Wilderness Warriors address on an envelope every month or so, Selina had not wasted much thought on their organization or location. She sent them money anonymously and they did Good Things with it. She didn't feel the need to check up on them, and they had no idea who she was. It had seemed, to Selina, a perfect relationship.

She was somewhat disappointed, then, to find herself on a Gotham side street in a neighborhood that was just a bit cleaner, a bit safer, a bit luckier than the East End. The street was lined with six-story brownstone buildings that looked fundamentally no different than her own---except that the walls weren't covered with profane graffiti, no one was passed out on the steps to the front doors, and every building had a phalanx of garbage cans securely chained to those steps. Trees grew behind stout metal fences at intervals along the sidewalk; someone had taken the trouble to plant daffodils in the soil around them.

These were the differences between poverty and comfort in Gotham City.

The Warriors' banner---black with a central white circle containing the crimson silhouette of a watchful lion---hung from a pole that grew out of a basement-level window. Selina made her way around the ranks of garbage cans to the locked and grated door hidden beneath the steps. A little plastic plaque requested her to look up at the camera after ringing the bell, but aside from the banner there was nothing to tell Selina that this was the button she wanted to push. She was braced for an argument or an apology when the inner door swung open.

"Hi---come in. Don't you just hate those things?" A woman in her twenties with freckles, green eyes, and reddish-brown hair pointed at the camera. "They make everyone feel like a criminal." She stood in harm's way, holding both inner and outer door open. Selina guessed she hadn't been in Gotham more than a month.

"I disconnected the silly thing when I started working, but they"---she tilted her head toward a Pullman corridor of closed doors leading away from the door---"say it's for my own good. I'm not in Indiana anymore. I told them: In Indiana we know that locks only keep the honest people out. If I can't trust the people who come to Wilderness Warriors, then who can I trust in Gotham City? And they said no one."

Selina wedged into the corridor and got the doors shut behind her. The other woman barely paused for breath as she led the way into the front office.

"What can the Wilderness Warriors do for you today? I'm here all by my lonesome, so I hope it's not too complicated. Are you a member? Would you like to join? I've got copies of our newsletter here---" She reached toward one of several precarious piles on her desk and noticed the videotape sitting atop it. "Would you like to see some amazing footage of eagles? There's this woman in Alaska who films eagles flocking to fish the salmon run. Eagles, flocking! This is just video; it's not as sharp as film would be. She's asking us for money to film it next year. She's going to need a ton of equipment to do it right, and a ton of money. We'll probably say no. But this is pretty impressive. There's a VCR set up in back. I could play it for you. If you want---?"

"No," Selina said, seizing the opportunity to get a word in. "I'm not interested in birds. I know of a man, right here in Gotham City. I want to report him. His apartment looks like the Great White Hunter gone berserk. It's all real; none of it's legal. Tigers mostly, Bengal, Sumatran, and Siberian. I want the Warriors to go in there and clean him out."

The girl didn't hesitate before saying: "Real tigers... ? Here, in the city? I don't know, shouldn't you call the police, or the zoo?"

Selina leaned out over the desk, then exploded with descriptions of the relics that she had seen in Eddie Lobb's apartment. By the time she was finished, the young woman behind the desk was speechless. Satisfied that she'd gotten the message and the images across, Selina took a step backward and waited. After a few moments the young woman began fussing uselessly with papers on her desk. Selina's heart sank.

Bonnie---the girl said her name was Bonnie---was sincerely upset, that much was obvious, but, she explained, she was new in the office, in the city. She was here on an internship; the ink on her college diploma was scarcely dry. She thought they'd need proof, pictures at least, sworn statements, and even then, Bonnie wasn't sure what the Wilderness Warriors could do. They'd never targeted an individual. There might be legal complications. The other Warriors---all five of them---were in Washington for the week.

"We're really a lobbying organization, not as activist as I thought we were. But we're going to sign a statement on the Southeast Asian rain forest and the impact of deforestation with a whole bunch of other groups. That's why everybody's gone. Big photo opportunity. But that's no help to you, is it?"

"No," Selina replied, more civilly than she'd expected. She was deeply disappointed. She'd given these people thousands of dollars, and they were worthless when she needed them. Her natural inclination was to take negative feelings out on the nearest target. Heaven knew, Bonnie should have been an ideal target. Her clothes weren't fancy---they even looked comfortable---but they matched, they even matched the eye shadow she was wearing. Bonnie looked like she'd stepped out of a catalog. Bonnie looked like everything Selina Kyle wasn't. She should have been the ideal target. Besides, she never shut up.

But Selina's heart wasn't in it.

"Look, I'm sorry," Selina heard herself saying. "I should've called first. I should've found out more about what you do. I'm sorry for wasting your time."

Three quick steps and Selina was back on the street, back at square one with Eddie Lobb's relics staring into her mind's eye. The Wilderness Warriors had seem the last of her money, but there was no satisfaction in the thought.

"Wait! Hey! Wait---don't go away! I've got an idea."

Bonnie's voice and the sound of running. Selina squared her shoulders and kept going. She didn't need ideas from the phony warriors. She heard the footfalls getting closer, but it never occurred to her that someone, a complete stranger, would presume to lay a hand on her.

"Hey! Stop a minute and listen."

Selina had no choice. It took every mote of energy within her to keep from killing the woman; there was nothing left for benign movement of conversation.

"I've got an idea. If you can get me into this guy's apartment, I'll take pictures. When everybody gets back, I'll just keep on them until they give and decide to do something. I'll plaster the walls with enlargements; they won't be able to turn around without seeing stuffed tigers looking back at them. We're supposed to be Wilderness Warriors. If this is as bad as you say it is, we've got to do something. You and me. You get me in, I'll take photos. I've got all the equipment. Stills, tape, even film-film if we need a pan shot to get the whole effect."

Selina's heart was beating again, and she was breathing. Her voice was still somewhere in the next state. But with Bonnie close by, no one else needed a voice.

"Omygod." Bonnie clapped her hands over her mouth. The skin surrounding her freckles flared blush-red. "The door. Omygod---I'm locked out!" She staggered back a step, colliding with a row of garbage cans. The blush died suddenly; her face was almost gray. "My keys. Everything. I'm locked out of the office, of my apartment. I don't have any money--- Omygod. Omygod. What am I going to do?"

It went against everything Selina had believed since she arrived in Gotham City, and everything that had brought her here, but she reached out and put her arm around Bonnie's shaking shoulders. "Maybe you're not really locked out. Let me give it a try. I have a way with locks sometimes."

A few minutes later the two women were in the Wilderness Warriors office again.

"Wow---I don't believe you did that. You just shook the door a couple times and it opened. Wow," Bonnie repeated for about the tenth time.

"It wasn't anything." It hadn't been quite that easy, but she was certain Bonnie hadn't seen her palm the steel pick. Selina certainly wasn't going to reveal her secrets.

"Oh, it was. I thought I was in real trouble. Now you've got to let me help you with the guy with the tigers. Fair is fair. When can you get me inside?"

Layers upon layers of doubt showed on Selina's face---so many that Bonnie herself noticed.

"I'm not afraid and I'm a good photographer." She spotted the wall clock: a few minutes after five. "I could show you. I brought all my gear from college. I really thought this internship was going to be more than answering telephone calls. I thought they were going to send me someplace..."

Selina shook her head, retreating for the door as she did.

"Please. Please give me a chance... ? What's your name, anyway? If we're going to work together to get this guy, I've at least got to know your name."

The doorknob pressed against Selina's palm, but she didn't turn it. "Selina. Selina Kyle."

"Selina. I like that. Moon goddess. Diana. The Huntress. What a great name for a Wilderness Warrior. Who ever heard of a Wilderness Warrior---or any kind of warrior---named Bonnie? Look, it's after five. I can lock up, leave with my keys, and we can do dinner---I've always wanted to say that: 'do dinner'---and we can make our plans. I'm great at making plans, too... ."

None of Selina's formidable defenses was designed to protect her from friendship. She was completely tongue-tied, which someone else might have noticed, but not Bonnie. She took silence for consent and quickly shut down the office.

"Where do you want to go for dinner? I don't know very many places. I've only been in Gotham a few weeks. I know a nice little Italian restaurant, but it gets crowded. Is that a problem? People might overhear us talking. Do you think we should worry about people listening---I mean, if we're going to be breaking into someone's place? Maybe we should do take-out instead. Or I could cook---"

"Wait." Selina found her voice. "Who said anything about breaking into anything?"

"Well, you picked the lock, didn't you? I mean, I'm not from Kansas. I already tried wiggling it, and it didn't open for me. I know you didn't just wiggle it, but I didn't see what you did do. So you must be good. And how else would you know about this guy we're going after, right? He's not a friend of yours, or even the friend of a friend, right? So---should we go to the restaurant or do take-out? What do you think?"

"Take-out," Selina said meekly, and followed the still-chattering woman out the door.