The Emerald Cat Killer by Richard A. Lupoff

She’d disobeyed Bobby once on that score, and she remembered the lesson he’d taught her about doing what he told her never to do. She still had a little sore where she’d touched that cigar lighter against her face, trying to get warm the night she got them the laptop. It was mostly healed, though, and the laptop had brought some nice money at a flea market.
    Actually, Red knew, Bobby kept two things in that drawer. She knew what they were, too. She was afraid of them both. The only thing was, she couldn’t decide which one she was more afraid of.
    Maybe the knife.
    One was the knife. It was a Marine Hunter. It was eleven inches long. The blade alone was six inches long. Bobby had lifted it from a sporting goods store in Albany. They planned the lift when there was only one clerk behind the counter and no other customer in the store. It was Red’s job to get the clerk’s attention and keep it while Bobby made the lift.
    She’d done her job. The clerk was a college kid, looked like a college kid anyway, and Red came on to him with both tits blazing. She had him turned away from the door, and Bobby was in and out with the knife, and the clerk never even saw him. Talk about a clean lift! She actually felt sorry for the college kid, gave him a little before she left so he wouldn’t feel so bad when he discovered he’d been robbed. Or his boss did.
    Bobby was mad about that. “Never give away what you can sell,” he insisted. “Never give it away.”
    But he was pleased with the job she’d done. He even said so.
    Maybe the gun.
    Red never knew exactly how Bobby got the gun. She was fascinated by it. She went to the library and got online with a public-access computer and looked it up. It was something called a Beretta Stampede Thunder revolver. It was a little thing, only three and a half inches long, and it fired .357 Remington ammunition. She found one on a gun dealer’s site and it was expensive.
    Bobby would never tell Red much about how he got the Beretta Stampede but she managed to pry a few hints from him. A couple of big guys had been fighting it out in Oakland’s Jingletown. There was some shooting, wheels, somebody had a police scanner going, and everybody got out of JT before even the first black-and-whites arrived. No, not quite everybody. A couple of bangers were dead and another one was alive but not moving, and nobody was going to stick around to try to help him.
    Bobby came back from that with the Beretta. He never told her what he was doing there. The fight was strictly black on black. Whose side was Bobby on? What was he doing there?
    He told her never to touch that dresser drawer and she never did except when she figured she could get away with it. Then she would open the drawer, pick up the old shirts, look at the knife and the gun, and pet them.
    She would pick one of them up. Sometimes the knife. Sometimes the gun. They competed for her love. She would tease them. She would reach toward the knife and the gun would say, No, don’t love her, love me, love me. And she would pull back her hand and reach toward the gun and the knife would say, No, don’t love him, love me, love me.
    Somehow she felt as if the knife was a girl and the gun was a boy.
    She would lift the knife in its leather sheath out of the draw and take the knife out of the sheath and look at the blade, and hold it against her cheek, against her throat, not the sharp edge but the flat of the blade, it was so smooth, it felt so good. She would love the knife. She would hold it in front of her face, press her tongue against it, and run her tongue along the length of the blade until she reached its point, and press the point against her tongue until she could taste her own blood.
    Or she would take the gun out of the drawer, out of the little holster that Bobby had somehow got for it. The gun fit so cleverly into the holster, so snugly, it was almost sad to take it out, but it