Re: [The Cat: Nishka & Cat & Jack]
Nishka. With a name like that, the town gossips could work quickly. Social security, maiden name (if she didn't still hold onto it) and possibly dress size by the end of the week. She was new, clearly or by now Cat would know her if she drank anywhere that didn't involve nudity and Jack looked at her assessingly as Nishka looked into her glass with a wistfulness that looked far too familiar to be comfortable. A buffer, given that Jack found it impossible to predict Cat's reaction turning up at the bar himself. Except a buffer with a lover with a taste for Irish whiskey.
Dead. Clearly, no one mourned a break-up in whiskey. Perhaps they did, but the tastes of the departed lover rarely came into it. Nishka turned her glass and Cat looked ready to float on, consummate host. Jack raised eyebrows, "I imagine we'll be drinking still, I now owe a round," he said to Cat then before she slid along the bar toward the massed drinkers.
The cop would be easier soused, if at all possible. That made this convenient, if rather uncomfortable topic on which to dwell. "Good taste in whiskey, then." Jack didn't inquire about sobriety, which was the implicit question, nor the dead lover. It was a chasm of space in which Nishka could speak if she felt like discussing the Irishman but with a dead spouse Jack wasn't mourning on Valentine's, it felt utterly inappropriate to press.