You Suck: A Love Story

service.” The Emperor believed that the first duty of any leader was to serve the weakest of his people, and he made an effort to pay attention to the city around him, lest someone fall through the cracks and be lost. Clearly he was a loon. “Calm, good fellows,” he said.
    But calm was not coming. The smell of cat was tall in the air and the men were jacked on java. Lazarus barked once and bolted down the sidewalk, followed closely by his bug-eyed brother-in-arms, the two descending on a dark figure that lay curled up around a cardboard sign on the traffic island atBattery Street, beneath a massive bronze statue that depicted four muscular men working a metal press. It had always looked to the Emperor like four guys molesting a stapler.
    Bummer and Lazarus sniffed the man beneath the statue, sure that he had to have a cat concealed among his rags somewhere. When a cold nose hit a hand, the Emperor saw the man move, and breathed a sigh of relief. With a closer look, the Emperor recognized him as William with the Huge Cat. They knew each other to nod hello, but because of racial tensions between their respective canine and feline companions, the two had never become friends.
    The Emperor knelt on the man’s cardboard sign and jostled him. “William, wake up.” William groaned and an empty Johnny Walker Black bottle slid out of his overcoat.
    “Dead drunk, perhaps,” said the Emperor, “but fortunately, not dead.”
    Bummer whimpered. Where was the cat?
    The Emperor propped William up against the concrete base of the statue. William groaned. “He’s gone.
    Gone. Gone. Gone.”
    The Emperor picked up the empty scotch bottle and sniffed it. Yes, it had recently held scotch. “William, was this full?”
    William grabbed the cardboard sign off the sidewalk and propped it in his lap. “Gone,” he said. The sign read I AM POOR AND SOMEONE STOLE MY HUGE CAT.
    “My deepest sympathies,” said the Emperor. He was about to ask William how he had managed to procure a fifth of top-shelf scotch, when he heard a long, feline yowl echo down the street, and looked up to see a huge shaved cat, in a red sweater, heading their way. He managed to catch hold of Bummer and Lazarus’s collars before they darted after the cat, and dragged them away from William. The huge cat leapt into William’s lap and the two commenced a drunken reunion embrace that involved quantities of purring, baby talk, and drool, enough that the Emperor had to fight down a little nausea at the sight of it.
    Even the royal hounds had to look away, the two realizing instinctively that a maudlin and shaved, thirty-five-pound cat in a red sweater was clearly above their pay grade. There was just no doggy protocol for it, and presently they began to turn in circles on the sidewalk, as if looking for a good place to feign a nap.
    “William, I believe someone has shaved your cat,” said the Emperor.
    “That would be me,” said Tommy Flood as he came around the side of the traffic island, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone there. A pale and delicate hand reached out from behind the island, grabbed the collar of Tommy’s coat, and snatched him back around the corner as if he were a rag doll.
    “Tommy?” called the Emperor. The big man stalked around the concrete art bunker. Bummer and Lazarus had headed back down the street toward the waterfront, as if they had just seen a particularly fetching porter house steak hopping around down there that needed to be investigated. The Emperor found his friend C. Thomas Flood, held tight in the clutches of his girlfriend, Jody Stroud, the vampire, who had her hand pressed tightly over Tommy’s mouth and was furiously giving him noogies with the knuckle of her other hand. There was a hollow popping each time she connected, and muted cries from Tommy.
    “Jody, I must insist that you unhand the young man,” insisted the Emperor.
    And she did. Tommy twisted out of her grasp.
    “Ow!” Tommy said, rubbing his head.
    “Sorry,” Jody said. “Couldn’t be helped.”
    “I thought you were going to leave the city with that fiend,” said the Emperor. He had been there, with the royal hounds and Tommy’s crew from the Safeway, when they’d done battle with the old vampire at the St. Francis Yacht Club.
    “Well, yes, of course. He left already and I’m going to join him,” Jody said. “Just like I promised Inspector Rivera. But I wanted to make sure that Tommy was going to be all right before I left.”
    The