CHAPTER FOUR

“She’s gained two more pounds,” Melissa said with a grimace. “Almost a full pound just since yesterday. That’s eleven pounds altogether since we started, with no change in her diet. She’s ballooning.”

She lifted She Cat from the scales and carried the hissing, clawing feline back to her cage. She had barely gotten the door shut before She Cat charged at it, making the entire cage shake violently.

With a weary sigh, Melissa peeled off the wire-enforced gloves and the welder’s mask and the industrial apron—all the protective gear that She Cat’s nasty temper required. She replaced the cover on the cage and unbuttoned her white smock. “Why don’t we make an early night of it, okay?” she said. “How’s the blood work looking?”

“It’s not good,” Janet said, her expression worried. “The serum levels are up by nearly seven and a half percent.”

“They should be dropping, not increasing,” Melissa said. There was a note of growing concern in her voice. She took off her smock and hung it on a peg on the wall and took her coat off another. “She should be excreting the injections, actually, but she’s not. They are all staying in her.”

Janet helped her with her coat. “It isn’t just staying in her, Melissa. It’s increasing,” she said. “The injections alone do not account for that much of an increase. Which means that her body has somehow begun producing it on its own.”

They exchanged anxious glances. Janet was the first to look away. “She’s getting bigger every day,” she said. “Look at her: she’s the size of a small cougar already. That cat could probably bring down a grown man. And she’s not just getting bigger, she’s getting nastier, too, every day more aggressive. Melissa, we have to face facts. She Cat is mutating.”

After a worried moment, Melissa said, “Yes. But into what?” She glanced at the cage. As if on cue, She Cat gave a vicious yowl and attacked the door of the cage again, making it rock perilously on the edge of its table.

We’ll have to get a bigger cage, Melissa thought. And soon. A much stronger cage. That one isn’t going to hold her for much longer.

“Aggressive indeed,” she said aloud. “Janet, have we created a Franken-pussy?”

* * * *

In the elevator, the lab carefully locked behind them, everything properly put away this time, Janet pushed the button for the basement garage. To her surprise, Melissa pushed the one for the lobby level.

“Aren’t you coming home?” Janet asked.

Melissa avoided her gaze. “I meant to tell you, honey. I have to meet Caleb.”

“Caleb?” Janet was incredulous. “What does that bastard want now?”

“He said he had to meet with me. He said it was urgent. And he is the owner of Wald-Med Pharmaceuticals, after all, the one paying for our experiments. And our boss, need I remind you.”

“He is also your ex boyfriend,” Janet said. Her voice dripped venom. “Your married ex boyfriend. The one who used to slap you around for kicks, in case you have forgotten that. Why would you want to meet him? You aren’t getting any ideas about getting back with that SOB, I hope.”

“Absolutely not. I promised you when we started...well, when you and I got together, I promised you that was all over for me. And it is, I mean it. He swore this was strictly business, though. He said he only wanted to talk about something important related to the Alley Thing project.”

“Of which I am co-developer, may I remind you? I am coming with you,” Janet said.

“No.” Melissa said quickly, firmly. “He was very specific. He said, ‘me alone’.” More gently, she added, “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be all right, really. I insisted on some place public, so I would not have to be alone with him. He is a bastard, but he’s not a complete fool. He wouldn’t try anything funny in public. If he did, and it got in the papers, his wife would hear about it, and he would be out of a job, just like that. She’s the one with the bucks, and she gave him an ultimatum when she found out about him and me. Believe me, he won’t want to do anything that would further jeopardize his meal ticket.”

“If she’d been smart, she’d have given him the old heave-ho then and there,” Janet said. The elevator slowed to a stop and the doors opened onto the empty lobby. “And where exactly is this urgent one-on-one meeting going to happen?”

“At the Copa Club. On Hayes.”

Janet snorted her disdain “That dump?” she said. “You are not walking there, not at night. I will drive you.” When Melissa looked doubtful, she said, “No ifs, ands, or buts; I will drive you.” She pushed the elevator button. The doors closed again with a whoosh.

Melissa had a glimpse of their janitor, Peter Warren, hurrying through the lobby doors, looking very worried about something. He waved when he saw them. Melissa waved back as the elevator doors closed.

* * * *

Peter had just the briefest glimpse of the two scientists as the elevator door closed. He was too late. Despite the fact that he had rushed to work and come in earlier than usual, practically jogged the whole way, the women were already gone. He stood watching the indicator as the elevator dropped to the garages, trying to think what he should do.

Maybe he could catch them the garage, he thought; but by the time that possibility occurred to him, the slow moving elevator was already on its way back up. They would surely have driven off before he could even get to the lower level.

He went morosely upstairs instead, let himself into the lab and looked about, but he had no idea what he hoped to find. They certainly were not likely to make the mistake of leaving something out a second time, and of course he was right. The empty counters seemed to mock his frustration.

And anyway, what if they had left the syringe and the vial out on the counter again, he asked himself, what good would that have done him? He had no idea what they might have contained, if not vitamins. It was the two women he needed to talk to, to demand explanations from, and he had missed them.

A noise from the row of cages reminded him of the nasty cat who had bitten him the night before.

Cat. The word popped into his mind. Alley Thing, he thought, and then, a second later, Alley cat. Was the cat somehow the key to it all? It seemed preposterous. How could a cat’s bite have caused what had happened to him—if it really had happened, and wasn’t just a bad dream? And yet...cautiously, he approached the cage where he had seen the cat the night before and gingerly lifted the cover from it. He didn’t want any more cat bites.

He gasped at the sight of her. Even with his naked eyes he could see that the cat was larger than she had been just one night ago. Larger and wilder-looking in some way he could not quite define. She looked truly savage, and certainly dangerous.

The moment she saw him, the cat ran at the door of the cage as if to prove how dangerous she was, but midway there she came to an abrupt halt. She crouched down instead and regarded him with unblinking topaz eyes. The look she gave him was one of pure evil, but of something more as well, something he sensed without really understanding it. The cat almost seemed to be sizing him up in some new, some unexpected way.

He glanced past her. There was something else in the cage with her, littering the floor: bits of hair too dark to be hers and—it almost looked like pieces of a dead animal. Something she had been eating, apparently. A small bit of raw meat clung to her whiskers. His dinner rose in his throat threateningly.

They locked eyes and he felt an odd sense of some communication between them, something she almost seemed to be trying to tell him, something he could not put into words. Not kinship, exactly, but it seemed like a recognition of some sort. The look she gave him now was more speculative than threatening. He could not take his eyes from hers.

After a spellbound moment, he seemed to be falling into their eerie yellow depths.

* * * *

The neon sign outside the Copa Club—a giant cocktail glass with an olive on a spear—flashed yellow and green, green and yellow in the murk of the fog.

Janet pulled up to the curb in front of the club and said, “I’ll wait for you.”

“No, don’t, please,” Melissa said, opening the car door. “You go on home and I’ll call a taxi when I’m finished. It won’t be long, I promise.”

For a moment Janet was about to argue but she thought better of it. She knew the look Melissa got when she had set her mind on something.

“Okay, then,” she said, “But forget about a taxi. You call me on your cell when you are finished with whatever it is that son of a bitch wants. And I warn you, if you do not call in an hour, I will come looking for you, and if that creep has laid a hand on you, he will not live to laugh about it.”

“Have no fears,” Melissa said with a grateful smile, and got out. She waited by the curb until Janet had driven away. Watching the Mustang’s taillights disappear, she thought of Caleb Wald, waiting inside, and immediately flashed back on that remark Janet had made the night before, about her longing for her father’s approval, the approval that had never come.

It was true. Janet had hit the nail squarely on the head: that had always been the great void in her life. Her mother had died when she was little more than a baby, so it had been just her and her father as she was growing up. He had not been a bad man, either. In all fairness, she supposed he had done as good a job as he was capable of in raising her. If anything, she was the one at fault.

At least, that was how she had seen it when she was a child. She just never seemed to quite satisfy his expectations. She so needed to know that he loved her in full and what she got instead had always been a partial payment. He told her often that she was “doing better,” and she was “getting there,” she was “going to make him proud some day.”

Unfortunately, that day had never come. He died of a sudden stroke five years ago, and the unconditional, the all-embracing approval that she had longed for, went to the grave with him.

The emptiness that had left in her had made her vulnerable to other men, particularly to an older, manipulative man like Caleb Wald. She could see now that Caleb even looked a lot like her father, and he too had instinctively recognized her pressing desire for approval and used that as a means of controlling her.

“I just want everything to be perfect with us, Melissa.” How many times had he said that to her?

“What I ask is not so difficult, is it?” She had heard that over and over again as well.

“A man expects the woman who loves him, who says she loves him, to try to please him. That’s only normal.”

“It seems to me as if you go out of your way at times to make me unhappy.”

She had heard those lines, and dozens more like them, hundreds of times in the months they had been seeing one another. And, always, they had spurred her to work harder and harder to please him, to earn his approval.

In the end, it was Janet who had made her see that what she had thought was her love for Caleb was nothing more than need, the need that had been left unsatisfied in her relationship with her father. And what she had fooled herself into believing was his love for her was nothing more than control. Abusive control. And it was Janet who had helped her to summon the courage to end that control, and the relationship.

To be fair, there was one area, at least, in which she had to give Caleb the credit he was due: though as the head of Wald-Med he was her boss and Janet’s, he had never interfered in their work, had never even come to the laboratory. That had been one of the chief conditions she had put upon their working arrangement, and he had always abided by it. This would be the first time, in fact, that she had seen him since the breakup of their romance two months ago. For a moment, standing on the sidewalk, she felt a twinge of anxiety. From inside the bar, Tammy Wynette faintly urged every woman to stand by her man.

Did I fail Caleb Melissa asked herself, listening to the words of the song? Should I have stood by him? The thoughts, guilt laden, came into her head uninvited.

“I just want everything to be perfect with us,” he had insisted time and time again. It had not been, of course, and the implication had always been that it was she who had fallen short. Was it true?

“If only you would try a little harder.” His voice, like sweet thick cream, taunted her. Then he would smile that smile, the one that told her better than words ever could how very much he did want things to be perfect for them.

If only she had tried a little harder. If only....

She tossed her head angrily derailing that train of thought. No, she would not fall into that trap again. Those honeyed words, that bewitching smile, were no more real, no more wholehearted, than her father’s had been, and ultimately no more fulfilling.

She had someone now who truly did approve of her, who loved her without reservation, just the way she was. She gave thanks again that Janet had come into her life to reveal the truth to her. She squared her shoulders and marched through the yellow and green glow of the fog, toward the entrance to The Copa Club.

Janet was right about one other thing, she thought with a grim smile, giving the door a forceful shove: this place is a dump.

* * * *

Even Caleb Wald would have admitted that The Copa Club was a dump. Despite the city’s no smoking laws, the air smelled of cigarette smoke, blended with the odor of stale beer and too many bodies bathed too seldom.

The bar’s chief virtue—really, it’s only virtue apart from its proximity to Wald Med Pharmaceuticals—was that it had been one of the places where he and Melissa had safely met in the past, a place where he was not in the least likely to run into his wife or any of her uptown friends.

He was still smarting from the fact that Melissa had broken off their affair. Not that it had not long since grown stale for him, too. In his opinion, which he considered an expert one, she had always been something of a cold fish. At the time, that had really puzzled him, since he knew that he was gorgeous to look at as well as spectacular in the sack. Women invariably adored him. They just could not help themselves. Who could?

Of course, now he understood why Melissa had been so cold with him. He had simply been too much of a man for the lesbian in her.

Still, he always liked to be the one who ended those things. Worse, in this case it had not even really been Melissa who had broken it off, it was that dyke girlfriend of hers, sticking her nose in where it did not belong. Janet Jackle had even done the unthinkable and called his wife, Alice, to tell her what was going on. It had caused him no end of hell.

He would have liked to kill the bitch. Would have liked, at the very least, to toss her from her job at Wald-Med but, to his surprise, Melissa had been absolutely firm on that score.

“If Janet goes, I go,” she had said resolutely, and no amount of arguing had been able to budge her from that threat.

As much as he would like to have given Janet Jackle the old heave-ho, he could not afford for Melissa to go with her. He had far too much riding on their Alley Thing project. Ultimately it was going to make a rich man of him, he was sure of it. Rich enough that he could tell Alice where she could stuff her precious money. He would be glad to be done with her, too. It was her money that had attracted him in the first place, and it was only her money that kept him married to her. He was counting on Alley Thing to change all that.

And, like it or not, Alley Thing was Melissa. There was no question that she was brilliant. It was her mind that had initially brought them together. When she had first submitted her proposal for the project, he had seen its potential at once, and had snapped it up, and her with it, before he even thought about how beautiful she was.

He was sharp; he knew that. He was clever at making things happen. With his wife’s money and his smarts, he had parlayed Wald-Med into a company that would soon contend with the biggest of the pharmaceutical giants. Particularly if Alley Thing was the success he envisioned.

A lot of his success up to this point had come from phony government grants. If you knew how to present the proposal, you could get government money for almost any study. Take his male hormone pill, for example, marketed by a subsidiary company that it would be nearly impossible to trace back to him and sold over the counter for a fraction of the cost of Viagra. The results of the governmental study, conducted at one of his own labs, which also could not easily be linked to him, had been inconclusive.

Of course the results of the study were inconclusive; the pill was nothing but a clever hoax, but all the media attention had turned it into an overnight best seller. Stores couldn’t keep it in stock, and even with production cranked up to the max, he could sell every pill he could produce and then some. The real bottom line was, you just had to know how to milk the system, and he was good at that. He was better than good. He was brilliant.

It was not only business, either. He was just as good, too, at handling people. He was especially good at handling women, and bending them to his will.

He was just smart enough, however, to know that he was not in Melissa’s league when it came to brainpower. Her intelligence was something he admired at the same time he envied and resented it. In some vague way he could not quite articulate, it threatened him, which was why he had found it necessary to sometimes bring her down a peg or two.

Women sometimes needed a bit of slapping around, he was convinced of it. They weren’t really happy without it. Especially a woman like Melissa. So many times it had seemed to him that she was lording it over him, showing off her brilliant mind to make him feel dumb. It never failed to infuriate him. Even now, as he thought about her, his fists, resting on the table, clenched and unclenched of their own accord. How he would dearly love to have another whack at her.

There was a quick gust of cold air as the street door swung open and Melissa stepped inside, a wisp of fog following her in. He was relieved to see that she had come alone, as he had insisted. He had half expected the bull dyke to come with her regardless of his instructions. Melissa could be bull-headed.

Heads turned toward her. Even the din of the bar—the too-many-voices-talking-too-loudly, the clink of glass on glass, the wail of the jukebox, the clack and thump from the pool table—seemed to dim as she paused in the doorway.

She was a looker, no doubt of that: petite, with soft brown hair almost to her shoulders and the kind of slim waisted, full busted figure they put on pin-up calendars or centerfolds.

Not a little pleased by the attention she received from the men in the room, which he thought reflected well on him, Caleb got up from his table and hurried across the bar to meet her. He threw a quick glance at the three men who sat at the corner table. They nodded that they had gotten his message.

When he tried to kiss her, however, Melissa turned her head so that his kiss landed on her cheek instead of her lips. He seethed inwardly. The intended kiss wasn’t just a matter of showing off for the benefit of the bar patrons, though he did enjoy letting other men see how successful he was with women. He would have liked the three dark-suited men to get a better impression of his ongoing relationship with her. The putzes had really been riding his ass lately. One of these days he would straighten them out.

He would straighten her out as well, as he had sometimes had to do in the past. She might put up a brave front, especially when her lezzy friend was around, but he knew how to deal with difficult women. They just needed a strong hand, applied in the right places.

For the moment, though, he needed her cooperation with the project, and he needed the putzes for their money. Patience, he cautioned himself. With women and with business, timing was everything.

He took her arm and steered her to a table, and seated her in view of the men in the dark suits, but with her back carefully turned toward them, so they wouldn’t be able to see any reaction on her part. Just in case. Melissa could be difficult, especially now that she had linked up with that restroom groupie. He didn’t want them getting the wrong impression from her expressions.

* * * *

At this hour of the night, the ladies’ restroom at Wald Med was empty. Drag Thing seated herself on a little stool and spread her paraphernalia out on the counter before her. She sighed. Really, it was much harder than one could imagine, being a woman. Whoever had written that song just didn’t know the half of it. The brassiere alone had taken her the longest time to manage, and she had ended up by putting it on backwards and then tugging it around, though at the moment she could see in the mirror that her breasts were decidedly off center.

I will deal with that later, she promised himself. The garters too had gone on backwards. At least the dress, the lovely blue one, had been simpler, though it was a bit snug. It almost seemed as if she had gotten bigger since the night before. She would have to do some alterations before she wore it again.

Never mind. Now for the makeup, she told herself. In her opinion most women just did not get that right. She had always entertained the notion that, given the right opportunity, she could improve upon what she saw on others, and here was her chance. She was dead certain that, when she was done, plenty of women would be envious of what they saw.

When she started on the job, it turned out to be more difficult than she had imagined, though. The moisturizer was simple enough: you just smeared it on, the more the better, but the problems began with the foundation. Despite a liberal application, a five o’clock shadow showed through stubbornly.

She put on a second and then a third coat, and topped it with blush. By this time her face felt gelatinized. For the moment, however, no beard could be seen. That was the important thing, after all.

It will be fine for night-time, she decided. Moonlight is always flattering. I will try a different color for day wear. One challenge at a time, that was the sensible approach.

Her mouth was next. She wanted a symmetrical effect, perfectly balanced. She smeared the color, a vivid coral shade, on her mouth generously and studied her reflection in the mirror.

Hmm. She squinted. Yes, the right side of her mouth was definitely fuller than the left. She added more color to the left side, with exactly the opposite result. She continued adding to first one side and then the other, until she grew alarmed at the size her mouth had become.

I’ll do the eyelashes instead, she told herself, confident that they would be easier, and come back to the mouth when I’ve got the eyes right.

The eyelashes turned out to be no easier, unfortunately. The results were horribly streaky. Hmm, she thought again. Maybe the brows. Probably one should get the brows right before tackling the lashes. That made sense, didn’t it?

She penciled the brows in heavily and, on a sudden whim, curled them upward at each end in elaborate curlicues.

Exotic, she thought with a burst of inspiration, grinning broadly at her image in the looking glass. I have always thought exotic women were especially attractive. I will go exotic.

Having thus freed herself from the constraints of ordinary make-up, she went to work with a vengeance. More lipstick, more mascara, more eyebrow pencil, still more lipstick. By this time, the foundation looked as if it were cracking, so she slathered on another coat of that as well.

She was really in the spirit of the job now. Delighted with herself, she daubed vivid circles of rouge on her cheeks. Lovely. She brightened them up just a bit and applied a beauty spot to one corner of her mouth. Finally she splashed perfume lavishly over her throat and bosom, pausing to read the label: Nuit d’amour. French. She did think a little foreign tongue added so much to a romantic moment. She added another generous splash.

I shall go for a smart cocktail, she decided. She felt ready now to face the world outside.

Truth to tell, now that she thought of it, she did feel a bit parched. Maybe she was coming down with something. She frowned, but when she caught sight of her reflection it sent her spirits soaring again.

Definitely exotic. She giggled at her image and blew herself a kiss. Oh, it’s going to be a wonderful night, she thought, positively beautiful.

* * * *

“Some beautiful babe, huh?” Lawrence said.

The three dark-suits watched every move at Caleb Wald’s table, their eyes practically boring into Melissa Hyde’s back.

“For sure,” Curly agreed. He was of a mind just at the moment to agree with anything Lawrence said.

Sylvester, a tall, emaciated-looking man, sniffed and decorously sipped his Shirley Temple through a straw.

“What, you don’t like beautiful babes?” Lawrence asked him.

“We are here on business,” Sylvester said primly. Cretins, he thought. Those two, in his opinion, would sell their souls to get a woman in bed. It made them vulnerable, which was something a Homeland Security agent simply could not afford to be.

Fortunately, he had no such weakness, nor even any time for that sort of thinking. Not that he didn’t have sexual urges himself, of course he did. He was certainly normal in that respect, but he did have a customary—and utterly safe—outlet for when the urges got too powerful. One good thing about San Francisco, you could find just about anything you wanted or needed without any problem.

Anyway, the point was, Homeland Security wasn’t paying them to indulge their sexual appetites, a fact that he felt had eluded the two next to him, despite the example he tried so hard to set for them. Their mission was far too important to jeopardize with any shenanigans. Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyes remained fixed on the couple at the nearby table. He pursed his lips tightly.

Lawrence and Curly exchanged amused glances. Curly wore a ring in one ear lobe which, with his shiny shaved head, thick neck and burly build, made him look like Mister Clean come to life. Lawrence had hair in abundance, dark ringlets that framed what might have been a handsome face but for his piggish, mean-looking eyes and thin, severe lips.

Underneath the table, his groping hand found Curly’s and gave it a firm squeeze. Curly farted noisily. Pffft. Sudden excitement always did that to him. This particular excitement had started just the night before, when a mix-up in hotel reservations had put him and Lawrence into the same room together, a room with only one king-sized bed. The excitement, as it turned out, had lasted nearly the entire night, and it was still very much with him. Remembering, he farted again.

The other two pretended not to notice the sound or the acrid smell that wafted upward. At a table next to them, two young women in brightly colored tank tops and hair the color of daffodils wrinkled their noses, but the Dark Suits ignored them.

Curly squeezed Lawrence’s hand back. Sylvester sipped and sniffed, and his mouth did “the chicken thing.” Lawrence had told Curly the night before, while they were resting together between what Lawrence had called “training regimens”, that when Sylvester pursed his tiny mouth like that, it looked like a chicken’s butt hole. They had laughed themselves into a near-stupor over that.

Now Lawrence nudged Curly with an elbow and nodded his head in the direction of Sylvester’s puckered mouth. Curly looked and nearly choked on his drink. PFFFT again, louder than before.

The two young women at the next table got up, drinks in hand, and moved to the bar.