Lisey's Story(58)

Lisey began to laugh. It was not exactly normal laughter, but it wasn't entirely hysterical, either. There was genuine humor in it. She didn't need Scott to tell her that a slaughtered cat in the mailbox was too, too Fatal Attraction. That had been no Swedishmeatball movie with subtitles, and she had seen it twice. What made it funny was that Lisey didn't own a cat.

She let the laughter run its course, then lit a Salem Light and pulled into her driveway. VI. Lisey and The Professor

(This Is What It Gets You)

1

Lisey felt no fear now, and her momentary lapse into amusement had been replaced by hard clean rage. She left the BMW parked in front of the locked barn doors and strode stilt-legged to the house, wondering if she would find her new friend's missive at the kitchen door or the one in front. She never doubted there would be a missive, and she was right. It was in the back, a white business-length envelope sticking out from between the screen door and the jamb. Cigarette clamped between her front teeth, Lisey tore the envelope open and unfolded a single sheet of paper. The message was typewritten. Mrs: I am sorry to do this as I love aminals but btter your Cat than You. I don't want to hurt You. I don't want to but you need to call 412-298-8188 and tell "The Man" that you are donatinf those papers we talked about to the school library by way of Him. We don't want to let any grass grow under our feet on this Mrs, so call him by 8 PM tonight ald he'll get in touch with me. Let us finisg this business with no one hut except for your poor Pet about which I am so SORRY.

Your freind,

Zack

PS: I'm not a bit mad you told me to go "F" myself. I know you were upsert. Z

Lisey looked at the Z which was "Zack McCool"'s final bit of communication to her and thought of Zorro, galloping through the night with his cape billowing out behind him. Her eyes were watering. She thought for a moment that she was crying, then realized it was smoke. The cigarette between her teeth had burned down to the filter. She spat it to the brickwork of the walk and ground it grimly beneath her heel. She looked up at the high board fence that went all the way around their backyard...though solely for the sake of symmetry, as their only neighbors were on the south side, to Lisey's left as she stood by her kitchen door with "Zack McCool"'s infuriating, poorly typed missive - his smucking ultimatum - in her hand. It was the Galloways on the other side of the board fence, and the Galloways had half a dozen cats - what were called "barncats" in this neck of the woods. They sometimes foraged in the Landons' yard, especially when no one was home. Lisey had no doubt it was a Galloway barncat in her mailbox, just as she had no doubt it had been Zack in the PT Cruiser that had passed her not long after she finished locking up and left Amanda's house. Mr. PT Cruiser had been heading east, coming almost directly out of the lowering sun, so she hadn't been able to get a good look at him. The bastard had even had the balls to tip her a wave. Howdy, there, Missus, left you a little something in your mailbox! And she had waved back, because that was what you did out here in Sticksville.

"You bastard," she murmured, so angry she didn't even know which one she was cursing, Zack or the crazed Incunk who had sicced Zack on her. But since Zack had so considerately provided her with Woodbody's phone number (she had recognized the Pittsburgh area code instantly), she knew which one she intended to deal with first, and she found she was looking forward to it. But before she dealt with anyone, she had a distasteful housekeeping chore to perform.

Lisey stuffed "Zack McCool"'s letter into her back pocket, briefly touching Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions without even being aware of it, and yanked out her housekeys. She was still too angry to be aware of much, including the possibility of the sender's fingerprints on the letter. Nor was she thinking about calling the County Sheriff's Office, although that had certainly been on her To Do list earlier. Rage had narrowed coherent thought to something very like the beam of the little flashlight she had used to look into the mailbox, and right now that limited her to just a pair of ideas: take care of the cat, then call Woodbody and tell him to take care of "Zack McCool." To call him off. Or else.

2

From the cabinet under her kitchen sink she got a pair of floor-buckets, some clean rags, an old pair of Playtex rubber gloves, and a garbage bag that she tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. She squirted Top Job into one of the buckets and filled it with hot water, using the sink's hand-held spray attachment to make the soap foam up faster. Then she went outside, pausing only to get a pair of tongs out of what Scott had called the kitchen's Things Drawer - the big ones she used on the rare occasions when she decided to barbecue. She heard herself singing the kick-out line of "Jambalaya" over and over again as she went about these small, grim chores: "Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou!"

Big fun. No doubt.

Outside, she filled the second bucket with cold rinse from the hose-bib and then walked up the driveway, a bucket in each hand, the rags tossed over her shoulder, the long tongs sticking out of one back pocket and the Hefty bag in the other. When she got to the mailbox, she set the buckets down and wrinkled her nose. Could she smell blood, or was that only her imagination? She peered into the mailbox. Hard to see; the light was going the wrong way. Should have brought the flash, she thought, but she was damned if she was going to go back and get it. Not while she was strapped and ready. Lisey probed with the tongs, stopping when they hit something that wasn't soft but wasn't quite hard, either. She opened them as wide as she could, clamped them down, and pulled. At first nothing happened. Then the cat - really just a sense of weight at the end of her arm - began to move reluctantly forward.