"Asprin, Robert & Abbey, Lynn - Catwoman 02 - Catwoman- Tiger Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asprin Robert)

Catwoman burst into the room at an angle, slamming into the guard by the door before he knew there was a problem. She stunned him with a punch to the solar plexus, then propelled toward the center of the room. The advantages of surprise and purpose belonged to her and she used them fully, taking out two more---the first with a chop across the windpipe and the second with a roundhouse kick to the chin---before the last two had a chance to bellow for reinforcements.
The street-side music finally stopped, replaced by shouts and staccato gunfire. There wasn't time to wonder who'd fired from where, or at what. Catwoman dove across the room at the larger of her remaining targets. He was reaching into his pocket, but he hadn't drawn a gun, nor had his companion. She seized her target by his shirt and spun him around, keeping his body between herself and the door while she rammed her knee into his crotch one, two, three times. His legs buckled, his eyes rolled back. He was deadweight, and crashed to the floor when she let go.
Less than a minute had passed since Catwoman burst into the room.
She leveled her gaze on the fifth punk---there were more thundering up the stairs; she'd worry about them when they came through the door---and observed, peripherally, that the kerosene lamp by which the gang had conducted its business had fallen over. Fuel glistened on the lopsided table and dripped over the edge. She didn't see flames, but flames were inevitable; the knife moving toward her was not.
First things first. Claws extended, Catwoman reached for the hand that held the knife. He got lucky---or maybe he knew something about fighting. Whichever, she clutched air.
"Get him!"
"El Gato Negro!"
"Black Cat! Black Cat!"
"Get him!"
The punks---her prey---saw the costume, but their prejudice kept them from seeing the shape inside it. They never understood that they were being slaughtered by a woman.
Surging inside the knife wielder's reach, Catwoman clouted him under the chin with a sweeping forearm then smashed her elbow into the side of his head as he went down. She looked straight into the eyes of the newcomer in the doorway. There were times for silence and there were times for bloodcurdling shouts. This was one of the latter. Her piercing war cry nailed the punk where he stood. The gun slipped through his fingers.
He didn't try to retrieve it. He and his companions beat a raucous retreat from the flames.
Catwoman watched for a heartbeat. The fire was spreading fast, but it was still less important than the money. She spotted a grease-stained, crumpled paper bag. When it was full, she headed up to the roof.

Selina was back home and out of the costume inside of twenty minutes. She began counting her money. There were three piles. The smallest would go into the poor box at the Mission of the Immaculate Heart: payment on a very private debt. The middle pile would keep her well fed and content for another month. The largest pile she shoved into a plain brown envelope.
Reaching under the sofa, she retrieved an old ballpoint pen. She printed in a neat, anonymous hand: Wilderness Warriors.
The Warriors were a small group of activists dedicated to the notion that if the few remaining wild predators---the big cats, the timber wolves, the eagles, the grizzly bears, and the killer whales---were protected from the greatest predator of all---Homo sapiens---the wilderness and the world would be saved. They were one of many charities clanging the mission bell for Planet Earth, but Selina liked their name and the lion silhouette they used as an emblem, so she sent them her monthly surplus and told herself that the end justified the means.


Chapter Two


The herd of emergency vehicles was thinning. The ambulances left first, followed quickly by the television crews. Who could blame them? The fire had looked promising for the late news, but there were no innocent victims---just body bags and stretchers filled with drug dealers and gang members. No relatives showed up to grieve photogenically. No neighborhood residents wandered by proclaiming that it was about time somebody put a torch to that place.
The fire trucks coiled their hoses and headed back to their stations. Most of the squad cars peeled off when their radios crackled to life with news of the next crisis. There were only two cars left. A black-and-white from the local precinct, and a Fire Inspector keeping watch a little while longer---just in case there was a pocket of fire left inside the smoldering wreck.
They thought they were alone on the scene. They weren't. Five stories up, on a roof, across the street, a black-shrouded, solitary figure watched, waited, and pondered what had gone wrong.
He'd passed through the neighborhood earlier in the night. He'd spotted the abandoned building for what it was: a drug depot, a gang's fortress. It was quiet enough, if you didn't count the four-wheeled boombox parked outside the front door. The gang wasn't going anywhere. He figured to bust it later on, after midnight. Before midnight he liked to stay loose and outside, ready to go where he was needed.
His parents died before midnight. All the years he'd been Batman, and all the years before he became Batman, Bruce Wayne never forgot how his parents were murdered on the Gotham sidewalks because no one was around to come to their defense. The Batman costume and persona were designed to put fear in the hearts of those who walked on the wrong side of righteousness, but Bruce had become Batman because the innocent had to be protected---especially when they got lost in the dark.
So when he'd heard the woman screaming in the next block, he'd gone immediately, tracking it down without the least suspicion until he beat down the door and saw the deceitful videotape player flickering in the middle of the empty room. Empty---except for the message scrawled on the virgin-white wall:

The body's not here. It's in an alley, up the street.
It's your fault---you on the rooftops---you made him jumpy
Drug gangs---terrorists and scum.
Killing them is no loss at all.
I take their money and put it to a better use.
But you don't understand that.
You won't mind your own business.
So you have to be tricked---for your own good.
While the Bat's at bay
The cat's at play.

Batman had crushed the tape player beneath his heel. He would have gotten rid of the message, too---if there'd been any white paint lying around. Catwoman was wrong. Justice must be served, and the end did not justify the means. Catwoman didn't understand---apparently could not understand---and that, in a tortured way, made her one of the innocents. He suspected she was supporting herself by stealing from the drug gangs, where her crimes disappeared in the statistical rounding. And his own passage through the area had probably forced her hand. It didn't make what she did right, but it did mean he didn't have to hurry.
Then Batman heard gunshots. Neither he nor Catwoman carried guns. He had plenty of other gadgets hung on his belt, but so far as he knew, Catwoman had only her claws and her wits. She might be cornered. She might be outnumbered. And she was innocent---at least more innocent than her prey.
Batman headed for the roof. He was standing there, pinpointing the source of the sounds and planning his rescue assault, when he saw her sleek silhouette leap from an upper-story window of the drug fortress. He'd cased out the area earlier. He'd thought he'd known where she was headed, but when he got there she wasn't. So Catwoman knew this part of Gotham's jungle better than Batman did. That wasn't surprising: he knew she lived somewhere in the East End, and that particular hellhole wasn't more than a quarter mile away as the cat ran, or the bat flew.
He didn't pursue her. He'd spotted the flames by them, and the rigid codes that, for him, separated right and wrong mandated that he search for survivors. Justice wasn't served at a barbecue. He was in the building, counting casualties, when the fire trucks roared up. It was time to find the window Catwoman used for her escape---the hardworking men and women of Gotham's uniformed services had precious little use for a loner like him. Life was less complicated when he stayed out of their sights.
In some ways he and Catwoman weren't all that different.
Batman figured he'd stick around a while longer, until all the uniforms were gone. He hadn't looked for the body in the alley yet. It rankled him to think that she might have lied to him. If she lied, she lost her protective innocence and he'd have no choice except to hunt her down. So he waited on the rooftop while the cops and the inspector joked with each other over cold coffee and stale doughnuts.
"Jay-sus, will you look at that!" one of them exclaimed, gesturing with his pastry at the sky over Batman's head. "The Commissioner's got a burning gut again."
Batman craned his neck around, already knowing what he'd see: the beam of carbon arc lamp striking the clouds, framing the sign of the bat.
Catwoman could wait. The body in the alley would have to wait. Another servant of justice needed help.