The Last Coin Read Free

there wasn’t a window screen to remove.
    He listened—to the snoring, to the sounds of distant, muted traffic, to the faint music coming from a tavern somewhere down the Pacific Coast Highway, probably the Glide ’er Inn. It drifted past him on the warm night, reminding him of the world, stealing away his nerve, his resolve. The moon was just rising over the rooftops. He’d have to hurry.
    “Nice kitty,” he whispered, making smacking noises at the cat. They liked that, or seemed to. He’d decided that he wouldn’t throw the cats into the salt marsh after all. A half hour ago, when he was crazy with being kept awake, it had seemed like the only prudent course. Now that he was up and about, though, and had put things in perspective, he realized that he had nothing against cats, not really, as long as they lived somewhere else. He couldn’t bear even to take them to the pound. He knew that. Cruelty wasn’t in him.
    He hadn’t, in fact, entirely worked out what he
would
do with them. Give them away in front of the supermarket, perhaps. He could claim that they’d belonged to a celebrity—the grandmother of a movie star, maybe; that would fetch it. People would clamor for them. Or else he could give them to the neighborhood children and offer them a dollar-fifty reward for every cat they took away and didn’t come back with, and another dollar apiece if the kids hadn’t ratted on him by the end of the month. That would be dangerous, though; children were a mysterious, unpredictable race—almost as bad as cats. Pulling a smelt out of his shirt pocket, he dangled it in front of the open flour sack. The cat inside the window wrinkled up its nose.
    He smiled at it and nodded, winking good-naturedly. “Good kitty-pup. Here’s a fishy.”
    The cat turned away and licked itself. He edged up a rung on the ladder and laid the fish on a shingle, but the cat didn’t care about it; it might as well have been an old shoe. Andrew’s shadow bent away across the shingles, long and angular in the moonlight, looking almost like a caricature of Don Quixote. He turned his head to catch his profile, liking that better, and thinking that as he got older he looked just a little bit more like Basil Rathbone every year, if only he could stay thin enough. He squinted just a little, as if something had been revealed to him, something that was hidden to the rest of mortal men. But the shadow, of course, didn’t reveal the knowing squint, and his nose needed more hook to it, and the cat on the sill sat as ever, seeming to know far more than he did about hidden things.
    He reached for the pole, jumping it up through his right hand until he could tilt it in through the open window. The pole wasn’t any good for close work. The cat in the window would have to wait. He peered into the darkened room, waiting for his eyes to adjust, listening to the snoring. It was frightful. There was nothing else like it on earth: snorts and groans and noises that reminded him of an octopus.
    He had been tempted at first, when he was seething, to poke the pole against her ear and shout into the other end. But such a thing would finish her. She’d been ill for ten years—or so she’d let on—and an invalid for most of them. A voice shouting into her ear at midnight through a fifteen-foot pole would simply kill her. The autopsy would reveal that she’d turned into a human pudding. They’d jail him for it. His shouting would awaken the house. They’d haul him down from the ladder and gape into his ash-smeared face. Why had he shouted at Aunt Naomi through a tube? She owned cats? She’d been snoring, had she? And he’d—what?—got himself up in jewel-thief clothes and crept up a pruning ladder to the attic window, hoping to undo her by shouting down a fiberglass tube?
    Moonlight slanted past him through the tree branches, suddenly illuminating the room. There was another cat, curled up on the bed. He would never get the noose over its head. There was