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And she knew she wouldn’t rest until she’d nailed the bastard who killed her.

Chapter 12

Gran was watching one of her daytime soaps. Duane Packer,General Hospital’s head of gynecology, had just been unmasked as a fraud and a cheat. He’d never even graduated from high school, his medical knowledge gleaned from textbooks he’d gotten at a garage sale. Not only was he a fraud, he’d also been wearing a toupee for the past ten years. One of the nurses had snatched his toupee, revealing his shiny bald dome. Gran didn’t know what was worse: the knowledge that General Hospital’s most popular gynecologist had been looking up women’s vajajays for the past decade without a license, or the fact that he had no hair. At any rate, she was glued to the television as Dr. Packer was arrested by Port Charles’s Chief of Police Jeb Strong and was being outfitted with a nice pair of shiny cuffs, paraded through the hospital in a long scene, for everyone to see what a cheat he was.

“Look at that bald pate,” muttered Gran. “Look at the way it reflects the light. My God, what kind of a monster do you have to be to pretend to have a full head of hair while you’re as bald as Kojak.”

Next to her, Harriet made a dismissive noise.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re too young to remember Kojak. Let me tell you, Telly Savalas was a fine specimen. He was bald but he was gorgeous. His baldness made him even sexier. Not like this asswipe Duane Packer,” she added, gesturing at the screen.

“Men are scum,” Harriet intoned listlessly.

“You’re damn right about that,” said Gran. She studied her feline couchmate for a moment. “Trouble in paradise, toots?”

Harriet shrugged.“I caught Brutus sniffing another cat’s butt. He claims it wasn’t what it looked like.”

Gran roared with laughter.“A classic! How many times have I heard that before!”

In actual fact she hadn’t heard it all that often. Her husband had said it, obviously, when she’d caught him with his pants down boning her best friend Scarlett Canyon. Jack had been bald, too, which might be where her intense dislike for bald men stemmed from. She wasn’t going to delve too deeply into the matter. She was, after all, not a frickin’ shrink.

“I mean, it wasn’t as if they were actually canoodling or anything.”

Gran winced. She preferred to keep the mental picture of her cats strictly PC. Her own motto was that if it wasn’t something Disney would approve of, she didn’t want to know about it. Just imagine Bambi canoodling with Bambo. Or the Lion King with the Lion Queen. Stuff like that was enough to spoil the one thing in her life that remained unspoiled.

“So where is Brutus now?” she asked, without taking her eye from the screen, where Dr. Packer was still being paraded through the hospital, at a snail’s pace, subjected to the scorn of the entire staff and a full wing of patients who, for some reason or other, suddenly had gained the capacityto raise themselves from their sickbeds for this special event.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Harriet, intently scrutinizing a nail.

Gran knew better than to persuade Harriet to give Brutus a second chance. She knew for a fact that Brutus and Harriet were mates for life—just like Odelia and Chase. And her own daughter and that moron Tex. Even though she liked to project an image of grating irascibility, Vesta Muffin was a lot more sentimental than she liked to admit. A good love story never failed to bring a tear to her eye. And the love story of Harriet and Brutus was near and dear to her. “So who’s the bimbo?” she asked instead.

“Darlene. I’ve seen her around. She’s in cat choir, of course.”

“Of course.” Cat choir was the hub of Hampton Cove’s cat population’s social life. Not much singing went on, as far as Gran could ascertain, but a lot of schmoozing and yapping did, much to the neighbors’ discontent. “So what are you going to do about it?”

Harriet shrugged.“What can I do? I’d like to bury my claws in his face. Rearrange his features. But then what? It will give me a fleeting moment of satisfaction but his wounds will heal. If there’s a god they will turn into vicious, nasty scars, and the world will move on. Brutus will live happily ever after with his redhead bimbo, always providing she doesn’t dump him on account of his new facial arrangements, and I’ll be left to wonder why.”

Christ, Gran thought. Her cats’ lives were even more complicated thanGeneral Hospital.“Forget about Brutus,” she said. “There’s plenty of good cats for a babe like you.”

Her words didn’t seem to buck Harriet up. On the contrary. They seemed to darken the cloud that had appeared over her head. “I could always cut his throat when he’s sleeping,” she said, pondering ways and means as she spoke. “Or I could gut him. Make him drown in his own blood. And then when he’s screaming and choking, he’ll look into my eyes and know it’s me who did that to him. Or I could cut off his—”