What's that smell?

Oh God.

Okay. So. I came home last night from an extra-long gym session. I came in the front door, as I usually do, since it seems so lazy and wasteful (but of what I cannot say) to open the garage door just so I can walk in the house, since I park on the street. Right. Front door. Reuben always comes in through the garage, since that's where he parks, his car being the nicer one. As I walk across the rather large (for Southern California) front lawn, I start to smell something rank. The smell gets stronger and stronger as I approach said front door, although I don't see anything (I was expecting, I dunno, a bag of garbage? near the door? it was trash day, after all). I enter the house, and tell Reuben that there's an awful stank (yes I mean stank) outside the front door. He is thinking "oh come on, it's probably just some cow shit stink wafting over from Chino or Norco or wherever such things waft from). Except then he actually steps outside the door and smells the awful stank.

Oh God. So. We look around, and I see a darker patch of dark in between two of the rose bushes in front of the house. We get the flashlight. We see...

A large, dead cat. Well, presumably dead. I mean, that's what that godawful stank is coming from, and no live or at least no healthy cat could or should ever produce such a horrible stench, and it was lying very, very still. So. We have found the source. But what in the hell to do. The shovel, thank God for the shovel. But what shall we shovel it into, exactly? A trash bag, I suggest. Can I hold it open? Uh-no. I am not not not risking touching that dead cat. Oh hey, the trash can in the garage. That will hold the trash bag open while the (quite stiff, as it turns out) cat is shoveled into it. Ok. So we get the trash bag-and-can arranged, and Reuben (who is in charge of the actual shoveling, since shoveling is man's work) gives the cat a good poke, just to make sure it's really dead (and the terror immediately preceeding the poke, because, you know, it might just be the world's stinkiest sleeping cat, or some kind of even Cujo-Pet Sematary cat, you know, something Stephen King-ish beast, it was very large and fluffy and black). It's really dead. So it gets shoveled into the bag. I am in charge of closing the bag (for which I put on my gardening gloves, because I am absolutely not risking touching the dead cat; I pull the bag out of the can and shake the cat into the bottom of the bag (I did not let Reuben poke it down further into the bag with the shovel, because dear god what if it ruptured? the smell was quite bad enough already), and I tie the bag, and put it in the trash can.

Problem now: the trash was just collected yesterday, and will not be collected again until next Tuesday. So there's a dead cat, probably growing stinkier by the minute, in our garbage can. What does one do about a thing like that?