A Small Matter Read Free Page B

flagship of LAPD’s SWAT
Division.
    He assisted her climb into the jump seat and
shut her in. As soon as she clipped her belt, a hoarse cough from
behind made her aware she was not alone. She turned to face a
wide-eyed feline peering through the grill of a big carry cage. The
beast was the largest of it’s kind she’d ever seen, with a head the
circumference of a dinner plate. A single paw, claws extended to
clutch the grill, easily outsized her own clenched fist. For a
brief instant, she had the feeling she belonged to the cat, as
though it had sized her up and mentally rehearsed her as a mealtime
possibility. Her instinct was to flee the vehicle, a sensation
interrupted by the intrusion of Mulroney’s massive carcass coming
through the driver’s-side door. He popped into the pilot’s seat
with an ease which seemed to defy gravity, considering his raw
bulk.
    “What is that?”
    “That’s Kilkenney,” Mulroney said. “He’s a
cat.”
    “What do you feed him--small dogs?”
    “Kilkenney’s a Maine Coon. They were first
sent to the U.S. by Marie Antoinette, shortly before she got the
blade. I won him in a dice game last week.”
    “He looks like a raccoon.”
    “I think they’ve been interbred with ‘coons,
because they use their paws just like hands. You should see him
sitting up with a chicken leg.”
    “I hope I never do.”
    Mulroney waited for a break in the busy
morning traffic, didn’t get one, so instead bullied his way across
the six-lanes in an outrageous U-turn before heading down Tampa to
Burbank and turning eastward into a short, sharp sun. Vickie
settled back. It would be a long overland haul over a varied and
sundry terrain across the Valley to North Hollywood.
    “What’s Kilkenney doing in the car?”
    “I’m introducing him to travel,” Mulroney
said. “Although you’ll never see a cat hanging out the window of a
moving car like a dog, it’s a fact that cats who are introduced to
travel often learn to enjoy it. We’re going to do some cage work
this week before going cageless.”
    “What if he freaks out and rips your face
off?”
    “Awww, he’s a big cream-puff. Although he’s
designed for survival in tough conditions, he’s a great
family-style pet.”
    She glanced back at the glaring cat. There
was nothing in that wild visage which remotely suggested
family-style anything.
    “What’s after going cageless? Restaurant
training?”
    “Only if I think he’d feel comfortable doing
so.”
    Vickie hit the radio--Janis Ian--Society’s
Child. “I can’t believe it. Every song I hear lately takes me back
to 1967. I was only a kid.”
    “I love Janis Ian,” Mulroney said. “She was
only fifteen when she did this song.”
    “I hate people like you who know something
about everything. You’re like an encyclopedia of Oldies--it makes
me feel like I’ve done nothing with my life.”
    “You’re doing something now.”
    The Suburban crossed through the crammed and
jammed Balboa Boulevard intersection and entered a curving,
car-stalled swoop of roadway which presented a different world from
the apartment/strip-mall zone they’d just left. The Sepulveda Dam
Recreation area--a patchwork ecological menagerie comprised of a
golf course, wetlands, ballparks, bike trails, and other amenities
finding their terminus at the edge of a massive Thirties-era
concrete flood control bunker erected--via a U.S. Government
work-relief project--by the emigrant dust-bowlers. The bunker and
its floodgates were part of a city-wide network of concrete
channels, an array which collectively dwarfed, in both size and
weight, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall combined.
    As they made the crawl, Vickie found herself
surveying the wonders of the basin as though for the first time.
“When I first met Jack, he took me hiking around here. We’d start
right here at the Dam and make our way across the spine of the
Santa Monica mountains and down through Rustic Canyon all the way
to the Pacific. One