From the novel The Nine Lives of Cat Lancing by William Hammett
Copyright William Hammett 2017, 2022
All Rights Reserved
Cat Lancing
slammed the front door of her home after throwing Jason’s suitcase towards the
curb. He was still trying to load his
SUV with his personal effects, the ones that Cat had hurled at him for the past
hour. CDs, framed pictures, sports trophies,
clothes, soccer balls, a beat-up guitar—everything had been unceremoniously
tossed into the yard on the front walkway after Cat had confronted her live-in
lover, Jason Gardener, with his infidelity.
She’d hired a private detective a month earlier after Jason started
arriving home from the office—he sold copy machines—later and later. It turned out that Jason had been sleeping
with his perky blond secretary named Dawn Durango, a Texas transplant who liked
to two-step at cowboy bars.
Cat had shown
Jason all the pics taken by her P.I., and the responses had been clichés. “But honey, she doesn’t mean a thing. It was just a one-night thing. I was drunk.”
Then he had done the old turn-the-table routine. “Cat, you’re just not interested in me anymore. We only have sex three times a month. You used to be all over me. I just don’t feel loved anymore.”
That’s when Cat
went ballistic. Jason was a manipulative
thirty-two-year-old man who was a consummate salesman. He knew what buttons to push, what speeches
to pull out of his mental archive. He
always had an answer for everything. Cat
responded by sucker-punching her man on the right cheek, causing him to reel
backwards. He’d looked up in disbelief,
rubbing his face like a wounded third grader in the schoolyard. Then he’d started to backpedal to the front
door when he saw fire in Cat’s eyes, fire so hot and filled with rage that he
knew his tenure at her home was over for good.
“Okay,” he
said. “I get it. We’re over.
Just let me come back tomorrow and pick up my things.”
“Sorry,” Cat said
unapologetically. “You get out to your
Ford, and we’ll have everything out of my house faster than you can say Dawn
Durango, cowboy.”
That’s when
Jason’s personal belongings began to fly though the air like debris in a Kansas
tornado. Neighbors came out on their
front porches and or peeked through curtained windows. This was first-rate entertainment, and Cat
wasn’t holding back. People up and down
the block loved her, although everyone knew that the twenty-eight-year-old
newspaper reporter was a spitfire.
“Did you think I
was stupid?” Cat asked as Jason crammed clothes into the back seat of his
Bronco. “I’m a journalist, for God’s
sake. Did you think I can’t tell when
someone’s lying to me? Did you think I
didn’t have the resources and know-how to track you down late at night?”
Jason had claimed
as much as possible from the lawn and was now scrambling into the driver’s
seat. A hiking boot hit the driver’s
side window just as he closed the door.
Cat was running towards the street as he turned the ignition, the Ford’s
engine roaring to life. She had a huge
bowling trophy in her right hand, and he was afraid she might try to shatter a
window. The Bronco sped down the street
after leaving rubber on the pavement next to the curb.
Cat lowered the
trophy and laughed. She turned around,
walked back into her house, sat on the sofa, and broke down. She cried for the next two hours. Jason was
out of her life—Jason, who was the father of her unborn baby.
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