Page 2 of The Tiger in the Sack

Green light. We moved.

Vito heard the cry for help before I did.

Not screaming, exactly. Higher than that. More indignant. The kind of sound something makes when it has been genuinely wronged by the universe and wants the universe to know it.

In operatic vibrato decibels.

Coming from up ahead and to the right.

Vito’s tail flicked in the right direction and I slowed as we rolled down my street.

The oak tree out front was old. Cincinnati’s OTR neighborhood kept trees like this around as proof the city had existed before concrete. Beautiful. Massive. The kind you could actually climb. Currently occupied by one extremely unhappy orange cat and one woman with a stick up her ass.

Kind of literally.

The cat was ten feet up on a branch and announcing his feelings about it to the entire block. The woman was two branches below him, arms wrapped around the trunk, legs at angles that suggested she’d made some questionable choices and was actively reconsidering her life, and her cat’s.

All her attention was on the yowler.

Her feet were bare, and I didn’t see any shoes around. Which meant she’d probably left her building in a hurry, done something genuinely impractical in service of an animal that was currently ignoring her with professional commitment and zero apology.

There was something about that which made me like her already. I pulled over, popped the kickstand and threw my leg over the bike seat.

The sudden quiet made her look down. She took in the motorcycle, the helmet, the leather jacket in the summer heat, and then slower, with a look that was trying very hard to be a nonchalant and was not quite pulling it off she stared over at the cat on the front of the motorcycle, with his own helmet and his own jacket, sitting very straight, observing the situation below with focused feline attention.

Vito did not look away. He had located the problem and he was assessing it. I unlatched him from the harness and he jumped down, darted over to the tree and circled it.

The big orange cat reprised its earlier operatic song of their people. Vito’s tail swished and he plopped down directly at the base of the tree.

My dark and curly-haired Rapunzel opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

“Your cat,” she said carefully, “is wearing a helmet.”

“Safety-conscious,” I said. “He’s a very responsible guy.”

Vito tilted his head at the woman, decided she wasn’t the problem and went back to the kind of tail swishing that meant the orange-striped noise machine was his new object of affection.

She watched him for a moment.

Then she looked back up at her own cat, who I swear narrowed its eyes and released a sound of profound betrayal at her. With the flat exhaustion of obviously having this exact argument for twenty minutes, she stuck out her tongue at the orange menace and looked back down at me.

“He got out through the door and onto the porch, and somehow into the tree from above. I thought if I climbed up I could get him down. But then he went out further on the branch, and I’m not—” She stopped. Made a face at the branch. “I’m not great with trees, or pokey branches, or getting out of trees with pokey branches, it turns out.”

“Tough time to find that out.”

“I had a theory about my tree climbing abilities that was incorrect.”

I glanced up at the cat. He had the whole branch to himself and the full attention of two humans and a well-dressed cat consultant. Living the dream, man.

I respected that.

“What’s his name?”

She hesitated. That was interesting.

“Tig,” she said.

Definitely not just Tig.