LOVE AT FIRST DATE

Chapter 19: Her Hero

Tony looked at the 9mm already in his hand, unconscious of even having drawn it, but his speed of draw nonetheless serving, as it always did, to give him an approximate measure of the threat level afoot.

His brain instantaneously replayed the last few seconds. Something had flashed peripherally. His eye had picked it up and his body had robotically reacted, sending him diving backwards for the scant cover of the caddy-cornered shelves.

The first thought that had flashed through his mind was the 2004 silver Mitsubishi Montero SUV with California plates, which had begun to tail him the minute he'd pulled out of his building's parking lot earlier. Tony had ditched it with surprisingly little difficulty, but he was still certain that it had indeed been tailing him; that it wasn't something he had simply misread. For one thing, the driver had been careful to keep himself tucked back behind the standard three car lengths and had made all the usual moves, as well, to keep his plates carefully concealed. Tony had only been lucky when he'd noticed the California tags at the last split second, when the SUV had veered onto a side street after apparently sensing that he had been made.

Now Tony found himself realizing that if the presence in the room was, indeed, the same Mitsubishi perp, the guy would've had to have scoped out Michelle's alarm system and entryway at some earlier point in order to have entered so seamlessly, now, without having made so much as a sound.

With his heart clipping at twice the recommended rate, his back still firmly against the wall, and his semi-automatic perched to come out spitting fire, Tony's first instinct was to call out a warning to Michelle. But he resisted, fearing that it might do more to provoke, than deter, the intruder to act before he had even gotten a fix on the guy's location.

Sweat increasing and hands clenched tightly around the grip, he raised his weapon up from its five o'clock position and cautiously peered around the corner, requiring only a second to soak in the full layout.

The presence was indeed still in the room.

Tony felt it in his every molecule.

He tasted it.

He just needed a visual lock on it, now.

His brain studied the mental snapshot that his eyes had just taken, scanning for an alternate position to take up, with a better visual advantage and hopefully more cover than the caddy corner just barely offered. He settled on a position in the far-south quadrant, over by the windows, noting that a wing chair positioned at the midway mark would at least create a modicum of cover in the events bullets began to fly before he had reached his final destination.

Another peripheral flash... this one a little more to the right...

His firearm instantly snapped in the movement's direction, like metal to a magnet, his eyes moving in tandem. Though the target continued to remain well-cloaked, at least Tony had secured its basic location. But his instincts were ordering him to hold his fire, so he watched and listened for another few seconds, patiently awaiting a "go" from his gut.

"Has Fluff-Fluff introduced himself to you, yet, dear?" Michelle's voice rang out sweetly from her room.

Tony's jaw dropped down to his chest, followed by his weapon to his side, as he alternated between sighs of relief and disbelief, watching the perp casually stroll out from behind an antique trunk.

It was a big, fat, pure-white, furry-looking creature, with searing blue eyes, which Tony could only assume was a cat, though couldn't swear to it, since he'd never seen one quite that fat before.

He watched the thing as it took its sweet time waddling over and halting only inches away from him, staring up, directly into his eyes, with an attitude.

"Be a good cookie-boy for Mommy and say hello!" Michelle called out again, this time in a radically altered voice, with a heavy-duty cooing quality embedded deeply within. He prayed she hadn't been talking to him.

Sweating like a beast from the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush, Tony dropped his revolver onto the couch and tore his jacket off, still engaged in the eyeball war with the fat, white furry thing. He scowed under his breath, waiting for it to fearfully scamper away, the way cats on TV always did whenever threatened or intimidated. But this cat just continued looking him over like he had leprosy, or exceptionally poor taste in clothing, or was nuts if he thought he was taking "Mommy" away from the apartment without a fight this time.

He'd never been a big fan of cats. Every one of them he'd ever come across had always struck him as unnecessarily snotty. There was nothing huggable or comical about them, like dogs, or the least bit friendly that he could see. There was also no fun to be had with a feline, he'd decided long ago after tossing a frisbee at a neighbor cat that had strolled into the yard one afternoon while he had been home on military leave. The cat had similarly stared him down, as though he'd had some kind of nerve haphazardly tossing a foreign element at him like that, which could've easily put an eye out. Tony, in fact, recalled feeling convinced at the time that if the cat could talk, it would've told him that he desperately needed to get a life, or grow up, or at the very least, find a slightly more productive hobby than tossing circular plastic discs around, for seemingly no logical reason and certainly no effect or result.

"What the hell did ya just call that thing?" he hollered out at coincidentally the same moment Michelle came breezing in to deliver her tapestry overnight bag to him.

"He's not a 'thing,'" she immediately and defensively tsk-ed, dropping the bag and rushing to scoop the big, fat, white monstrosity into her maternal embrace. "He's a schweet little cookie-boy who missed his Mommy. Yesssssh... Yessssh, he did. Mommy can tell," she kissy-faced and cooed the cat in one of those whacko-pet-owner voices, which wasted no time in sending a chill careening through him.

Please, Lord, no. Not Michelle. Please don't let her turn out to be one of those crazy cat-people, Tony silently begged, calling upon every god and high-holy figure he could think of, from Jesus to Zeus to Buddha to Hare Krishna and Billy Graham, envisioning himself someday in a t-shirt she would make him wear, with an idiotic cartoon of a cat on the front and a saying encased within a thought bubble that was twice as moronic as the picture. At that point, he'd be left with no other choice but to eat a bullet, much the way a disgraced Samurai ritualistically gutted himself with own sword for the sake of preserving his family's honor.

"That doesn't answer my question," he grumbled, immediately sorry he had ever asked after Michelle repeated the name "Fluff-Fluff" with that bone-chilling, sing-songy coo ringing in her voice.

"And he's not an 'it.' He's a he" she sternly rebuked him before returning to her demented cat conversation. "Yesshhh. Isn't that right, pumpkin chops? Mommy's little Fluff-Fluff is a cookie-boy, not an 'it'... Yesh, he izzzzz... Yessshhh..."

There wasn't even any such thing as a pumpkin chop, Tony frowned in pain and disgust, making an executive decision on the spot to immediately impregnate her on their honeymoon night, possibly before he'd even gotten his clothes off, in the hopes that a human son might make her lose interest in her fat-as-hell facsimile. Tony could then sneak the thing out of the house and over to the Animal Shelter some afternoon while Michelle was tied up with the real baby, and with any luck, she wouldn't even notice the thing was missing until their kid left the nest for kindergarten. By that time, he figured, the cat would be old enough for him to invent a plausible lie about it having died of natural causes mere days earlier, and how he had selflessly buried it in the backyard, under the cloak of the darkness, to spare her the heartache of having to see her beloved, faithful companion laid to its eternal rest.

"Why'd ya give it a name like that?" he came back to reality and asked, wincing on behalf of all malekind. "Is he gay, or something?" he innocently added, recalling having read somewhere that the animal kingdom had gays, too. He remembered that fact because it had compelled him to wonder at the time if plant life had gays, as well.

"Of course he's not gay. What kind of an absurd question is that?" Michelle scowled. "For your information, he just happens to be the son of the two-time Best-of-Breed Grand Champion Himalayan 'Catzmeow Royal Sultan Fluff-Fluff.' Perhaps you've heard of him?" she curtly inquired, as though the news had dominated headlines coast-to-coast at the time.

Tony thought it only fair to take a brief moment to glance up to God and warn Him that if Michelle turned out to be one of those head cases who entered their cats into shows, He'd be smart to fire up His infinite wisdom and find Himself a really good place to lay low for awhile, lest He wished to find his infallible butt riddled with 9mm bullet holes.

"How could that mean man say such a thing about Mommy's schweet little macho bunny-boy, hmmm?" she asked the thing with a sympathetic, oogly-googly voice as she carried its fatness back to the bedroom with her. "Did you hear the way the mean man speaks to your Mommy?... Hmmm?... Is that a polite way to talk?" her voice trailed off as Tony's hand moved up to his stomach, hoping the sick sensation was only temporary and not the early warning signs of a new and deadly Asian flu.

He quickly snatched the tapestry bag and headed for the front door, feeling the sudden need for a little air. He paused at the window first to scan the perimeter for loitering 2004 Mitsubishi Montero SUV's before approaching the door.

"Perfect, Michelle! It's raining now!" she heard the mean man roar out a bulletin, like some kind of TV weatherman-turned-serial-killer, scaring her bunny-boy half to death with the thunderous pitch and volume of his voice. "Ya sure you've got everything?" he roared again, gesticulating with the tapestry bag, as if she could even see it from inside her room. "We're not coming back for some... some eyelid surger ya can't live without. I'm telling ya that right now!"

"I've already double-checked," she calmly called back with the patience of a saint, listening to him jostling the locks and muttering things about "going to get the car" and how she'd "better be ready" when he pulled up, and not to forget that he was "already still angry with her" as it was.

"Just be careful Fluff-Fluff doesn't run out the door," she called out as Tony watched the white fur ball shoot past him, like a flash of fat lightning, straight out into the great wilderness.

"Uhh..." was all he could think to say as Michelle emerged from the bedroom and froze in her tracks. Horrified at the sight of the door wide open, she quickly put two and two together.

"Well... don't just stand there! Go after him!" she shreiked, hurriedly explaining in a complete panic that Fluff-Fluff wasn't an outdoor cat; that he didn't have any front claws and therefore couldn't defend himself against the marauding gang of strays that hung out on the next block; how he'd wound up with six stitches in his ear after they had mugged him the last time he'd gotten loose. "Go! Go now!" she wailed, half in tears, as Tony stared out at the cold rain.

"Can't we just leave a revolver on the doorstep for him?" he suggested, hoping to calm her hysteria with a little light humor, but coming up a bit short of his goal.

"Oh... Oh, never mind!" Michelle wailed in tears, darting out into the rain herself at a speed rivaled only by her bunny-boy's escape.

Before Tony could even react, she was already scurrying in and out between parked cars, wearing nothing but a longish kind of lightweight, flowy dress, with a thin little cardigan sweater she had decided to slip on at the last minute while dressing, knowing how chilly the air always got after a rainfall.

Somebody had to have put some kind of voodoo curse on him. Tony was convinced of it by the time he'd caught up with her, only to now have to literally pull her along by the wrist behind him, the rain driving down and picking up speed with every passing second, it seemed. A voodoo curse was the only logical explanation to be had.

"Dry yourself off and stay in there, for cryssake! I'll find it!" he insisted from the doorstep after depositing her inside.

He shut the door behind himself a little harder than he had intended to and headed back into the cold, driving rain.

"He's not an 'it'!" he heard her faint, muffled wail from behind the closed door as he turned his collar up and peered around for the fat white freak.

Michelle fretted as she rubbed the rain from her hair with a bath towel, dividing her time between nervously pacing the floor and visiting the window.

She tried not to worry. After all, Tony had extremely sharp field instincts, she reminded herself a thousand times over. He'd had excellent, specialized training as a Marine, not to even mention Quantico and his years of tactical field experience as a Fed. He was a former sharpshooter, as well, with eyes that knew where and how to look and focus and scrutinize. If anybody could zero in on her poor, defenseless cookie-boy, it was him.

"I can't find it," Tony snarled minutes later as he burst through the door, soaking wet and thoroughly annoyed.

Michelle instantly broke down in tears.

"Did you call out to him?" she cried.

"Huh?"

"Fluff-Fluff! His name!" she bellowed. "Did you call out his name?"

"Uhh... no," Tony truthfully responded, horrified by even the thought of running around in public, hollering "Fluff-Fluff" in full throat. Not only was it conduct unbefitting a former Marine Lieutenant, but he was certain it would affect his sperm count for life.

"What do you mean, 'no'?" she railed in mental agony. "You have to call out his name! How is he going to know you're even looking for him if you don't call out his name!"

"I can't do that, Michelle," he calmly, but sternly, enlightened her. "The Marines have an unwritten code against that kinda public behavior."

She could barely breathe, she was so upset with him, snatching the yellow slicker that hung on the antique coat rack to the side of the door.

"All right, all right!" he angrily relented, tugging his soaking collar back into position as she returned her slicker to the hook and yanked the door open for him, trying to control her bottom lip from quivering itself clear off her face. "But if the local Marine recruitment branch calls, tell them that I'm..."

"Just go!" she barked like a rabid dog.

In truth, he preferred going out there again, himself, rather than having her running around in the event that SUV was laying in stealth somewhere.

He had also just had a mental flash of his Golden Upper Hand slipping directly through his fingers. If the cat got hurt, or lost for good, Michelle would be the one wielding the Hand with more than ample, legitimate reason, completely wrecking the grand plans he'd already devised for the afternoon.

Thoroughly annoyed to find himself hitting the soaking-wet streets again, but wholly determined and committed to heroically bringing the damned thing back this time, Tony peered east and west, wondering where he himself might go if he were a gay cat.

He headed east upon spying an alley about half a block away. "Alley cat" was a common phrase. The alley made logical sense. He also scanned the trees along the way, recalling images in childhood storybooks of firefighters with hook-and-ladders, rescuing kittens out of trees. That fat freak was going to be in a load of trouble if Tony ended up having to shimmy up a tree, which he hadn't been forced to do since Quantico. At least Mommy's gay boy had white fur, which was the easiest color to spot, he comforted himself as he got on all fours to check beneath a row of cars, soaking the knees of his jeans in the process.

Call his name. Yeah, right. No way was he calling out that name. He'd rather die at the hands of terrorist interrogators than flagrantly, egregiously violate the unwritten, unspoken, time-honored Marines code in such a manner.

"Get out here, goddammit, ya dopey, flea-bitten piece-a—" he roared aloud in utter frustration into the grey, dreary distance. "Show yourself before I kick your fat—"

He was shocked when he heard a gay-like "mew" emanate from the alley in prompt response to his direct order. It had taken him by complete surprise. He wasn't at all accustomed to having a Dessler obey a direct order. He was even more shocked when he scooped the thing up from behind a couple of trash cans and realized that, with its fur soaked and matted down, it actually weighed about fifty pounds less than it looked when its fur was all poofed out, like a sissy-boy.

Tony quickly examined the skinny, shivering body for blood or signs of attack. Satisfied that the thing hadn't been "mugged" again, he deposited it inside his jacket, leaving only enough buttons open for its head to stick out.

"I should kick your butt for upsetting your mother like that!" he grumbled angrily, as if finally locating a wayward teenaged son he'd just spent the past 24 hours searching the neighborhood for, high and low.

Michelle had heard him hollering at Fluff-Fluff from a half a block away and, though grateful to no end that he'd found her little pumpkin chop, nevertheless prayed that her neighbors were all out buying shoes for their children and missing the spectacle. She knew he would find Fluff-Fluff this time around. She had seen a commitment in his eyes that hadn't been present the first time out.

Recognizing a premiere dote-fuss opportunity when she saw one, she quickly scooted around the apartment, laying some dry bath towels out and preparing to make a hot pot of coffee. She changed it to hot cocoa, instead, remembering his fondness for chocolate. It would flatter and please him, she knew, to know that she was studying him and picking up on his likes so quickly.

She was also sure that he must be worried half-sick by now about losing his precious Golden Upper Hand to her after carelessly allowing Fluff-Fluff to get out like that, and she wanted to reassure him that the opposite had just occurred; that his heroic rescue of her cookie-boy had at least doubled, if not tripled, the mystical power and might of his Hand.

"For a cat with no claws, he managed to do enough damage!" Tony roared, exploding in from the rain and unbuttoning the soaking creature into its Mommy's arms. "I'm bleeding here, Michelle! One more bite and I was gonna have to draw my weapon and defend myself!" he informed her, foisting out his hand to show her the scratch as proof.

His head actually snapped back in shock when he saw her immediately drop the soaking-wet cat to its feet and come rushing to his own aid, fretting and fussing like Opie's Aunt Bea on amphetamines.

He stared down at the cat who was already staring up at him with more shock and confusion on its face than he himself had on his own. The thing looked a little annoyed, too. Even jealous. Tony would've snickered in its face if he didn't feel it would compromise his ability to project severe pain.

"Oh, please don't let this have to be stitched," she purposely prayed to herself aloud, brushing away the single drop of blood on the top of his hand that had already crusted over. "All I need is to be sitting in an emergency room all afternoon..." she continued aloud to herself, her voice reeking of dread and gloom.

"I don't need any stitches, honey. Don't worry," his voice softened, seeking to allay her worst nightmares. "It's not that bad..."

"Yes, well... I think I'll just be the judge of that, thank you," she said, executing a perfect harried-and-annoyed, allowing her elbow to not-so-accidentally knock a towel down from it's perch on the shoulder of the chair, knowing how much Fluff-Fluff liked to roll around in them, which would simultaneously dry him off at least enough until she could tend to him properly. "If it were up to you men, you'd be walking around with bullets inside you, claiming that everything was fine and dandy, and that it was nothing but a scratch," she tsked as if completely ticked off, hustling him toward the kitchen.

Panicking as he approached the doorway, he thought of what Jack would do at a time like this: He would take a deep breath and forge straight ahead, Tony knew.

"Come in under the light where I can get a decent look at this," Michelle nudged him forward after he had come to a dead standstill at the kitchen's doorway.

He hadn't even meant to stop; something reflexive had kicked in when the first blast of gleaming stainless steel had assaulted his irises. His mind seemed to have been somehow tricked into thinking that he was back in Marine Medic Training, where the first thing he'd been taught was never enter an operating room without scrubbing up first.

"Can we please get this under some running water, before I end up having to deal with a raging infection?" she muttered as if only barely able to tolerate the inherent recklessness of the man's daredevil heroics.

"I'm gonna drip all over the place," he heard his voice croak, shocked to see that after she had gotten him out of his ringing wet jacket, she'd simply dropped it, with a loud, wet splat, directly onto the floor.

"Well, it looks like you've gotten yourself off easy," she announced after positioning him under the ceiling's track light and closely examining his scratch. "Where else are you bleeding? Tell the truth," she demanded to know, quickly opening a few buttons on his shirt to examine his chest and stomach area. "I'd love you to at least try to be a little less reckless in the field," she gently scolded him, elevating his cat-search to the danger and importance levels of a field operation.

"There wasn't very much I could do about it, with it fighting me like a wild animal, y'know," he slightly exaggerated as she flipped the faucet on and finessed it into a warm, gentle stream.

Tony glanced at the creature now standing in the doorway and glaring up at him, its fur sticking out in a thousand different damp directions after rolling and romping around on the towel.

As if she had so many things to do all at once—with one task just as vitally important and urgent as the next—racing to beat the clock before the man up and expired, on top of it all, Michelle quickly parked him upon a kitchen stool she had dragged from the counter and positioned his wounded hand under the stream of water. She then headed toward the kitchen door to retrieve the towels inside, then swing by the bathroom cabinet to pick up the first aid kit.

"Did you remember to say 'thank you' to the nice man for saving your life?... Hmmm?" she admonished the cookie-boy as she whisked right past him on her way to fetch the towel for the hero-boy.

Tony felt his head jerk back in shock again.

"Shouldn't you be drying it... drying him off, honey?" he reminded her with a nod of his chin in the shivering creature's direction, as shocked to find himself feeling concerned as he was to see Michelle basically ignoring it—and at a time when the pumpkin-chop needed its mother's attention the most. "He's kinda wet, don't ya think?" he added, his nose just now sensing the presence of chocolate wafting through the air.

"He's the one with nine lives, not you," Michelle firmly stated, though pausing on her way back in to drop another fresh towel over Fluff-Fluff, knowing he would instantly begin rolling around all over again, and that he'd only stopped because the other towel had become a little too damp for his finicky liking.

"Take that wet shirt off, please," she tsked, shutting the faucet off and moving to the stove to pour the heated cocoa-fied milk into a cup.

A few minutes later, Tony sat with a fluffy towel around his bare shoulders, a cup of scalding hot chocolate warming his palms, eyes closed, his face aglow with rapture, and head sightly tilted back while she quickly and methodically dried his hair, ticklishly sweeping over his ears in the process, as if frantic to get it done before he came down with a case of pneumonia worthy of mention in "Ripley's Believe It or Not." He thought his throat would literally burst wide open from that great sensation that percolated deep inside; that same sensation he always got when the lady at the haircutter's towel-dried his freshly washed hair.

He peeked at the cat for not even a full second; just long enough to notice that about half of its fur had already boophed itself out again, and to flash a universal male-to-male message that basically amounted to "Suffer, sucker."

He couldn't determine which sensation felt more blissfully overwhelming: her light "all done" kiss against the side of his forehead as she crinkled the torn wrapper from the huge band-aid she'd just placed upon his disinfected injury; or her breasts pressing lightly against his back as she leaned in to kiss his cheek this time; or the surge that rushed throughout him when she ordered him out of his wet jeans.

A strange calm came over him upon realizing that his Golden Upper Hand hadn't had any hand at all in eliciting this luscious level of doting he was receiving from her; that he hadn't even needed to employ it to snap Michelle into high-fuss gear; that for all the time he'd invested in fretting over losing his Hand, when the chips were down, he hadn't even needed it.

There was some kind of sublime lesson going on in all of that, he knew. Exactly what, he wasn't sure, but promised himself to give it some thought. Not now, of course; Michelle would be done any minute with the sandwich he hadn't even commanded her to make. She had somehow known, out of nowhere, that he was suddenly starving. It was as though she had mind-melded from clear across the kitchen and felt his pain.