P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

Caution received, Cam thought as he nodded.

“They get any hairs from those prints?” Grayson asked.

“I believe they did,” Cam said. He remembered the ranger going out to the SUV to get some evidence bags.

“Good,” Grayson said. “We have some mounted specimens from the early nineteen hundreds here in town, in private hands. They can do a DNA comparison, see if we’re talking eastern or western panther. Or rabbit fur stretched over a dinner plate with bear claws glued to it. What’s the connection with White Eye in all this?”

Cam hesitated. He was pretty sure that Grayson’s sudden shift in topic had been calculated, so he decided to take refuge behind the same line he’d given Mary Ellen Goode.

“There’s more to this case than I’m allowed to talk about,” he told the lieutenant.

“No shit,” Grayson said with an amused look on his face.

Cam smiled sheepishly. “Best thing is probably for your boss to talk to my boss. That way, I’m not going to wander too far off the reservation with what I say or don’t say. Personally, I think Mitchell might know something about this cat dancer story, although he says he’s never heard of such a thing.”

“Nor have I,” Grayson said. “Not to mention that that would be a damn fool thing for any man to try with a panther.”

“Exactly. This whole thing is probably a dead lead.”

“Except for the fact that we have you coming all the way out here from Manceford County, asking around about mountain lions, and suddenly we have what looks like the first confirmed evidence of a panther in many years. Quite a coincidence there, and I assume you feel the same way we all do about coincidences.”

“I do,” Cam said. “There is one thing, though.” He described his casual conversation with the two deputies in the Waffle House, and his suspicion that they actually might know something, too. Grayson made a note, said he knew who they were and that he’d pull that string.

Cam thanked him. “Like I said, we’re more than a little bit behind the power curve on this one. And we have feds in our hair just for grins.”

“Is there just possibly an IA angle on this deal?” Grayson asked.

Cam looked at him with as innocent a face as he could muster. “Why ever do you ask that, Lieutenant?”

Grayson smiled and said they’d poke around and get back to him. Cam thanked him again and left.

He got back to the cabin park a little after sunset. The skies were filled with ragged white clouds drifting down off the Smokies and the temperature was dropping quickly. As he turned in, he was surprised to see that the security light on the front of the office was out, leaving the line of cabins in even darker shadows than usual. The gloom was relieved by an occasional burst of moonlight on the hard-packed snow. He pulled into the parking notch by his cabin and let the dogs go. After a day of being cooped up in the truck with only occasional tree breaks, they happily took off into the snowy woods. Cam hoped there weren’t any hungry things out there.

He’d spent the afternoon hitting more of the guide shops and asking around about Mitchell and the wild tale about men tracking mountain lions just for fun. He’d learned exactly nothing. He’d then stopped by the Park Service rangers’ office, ostensibly to see what they’d come up with on the prints, but mostly to see Mary Ellen smile again. The prints had been cast into plaster of paris and were going to UNC for evaluation. Mary Ellen was getting ready to go to a one-day conference in Asheville and, while polite and even friendly, she’d made it clear she was busy. Disappointed, Cam had backed out and returned to his cabin.

He could hear the dogs barking at something up on the slopes behind the cabin as he let himself in, but they didn’t sound frantic about it. They were just making shepherd noise for the sake of making noise. He closed the door and flipped the light switch up. Nothing happened. So now he knew why the security light wasn’t on up front: The power had to be out for the whole complex. The interior of the cabin was almost totally dark, illuminated only by the brief glimpses of moonlight coming through the windows. His breath was visible in the cold air. At least the woodstove ran on wood alone, so while it might be dark, there would be heat. He shucked his coat, hung it up by the front door, and went to reload the woodstove. He was bent over the front of the stove, trying to get a match to stay lit despite a back draft coming from the stove, when he saw something in the corner of the main room that made him become very still. The match began to burn the tips of his fingers, so he dropped it, missing the paper crumpled under the logs completely.

His eyes told him that what he was looking at was a pair of green eyes that were locked onto his own eyes like tracking beams. The eyes disappeared when the clouds covered up the moon, but they reappeared each time the moonlight did. His first thought was, Where are the damned dogs when I need them? They were still outside and still barking, but farther away now. He stared back into the corner, and, sure enough, there was a large feline face surrounding those yellow-green eyes: tawny fur marked with a darker mask and two rounded ears with tufts of white inside. It was a big face, much bigger than he had imagined.

He remained motionless for a long thirty seconds, and then slowly, very slowly, while still down on one knee in front of the woodstove, he fished out another match and struck it up, illuminating the room this time. The flare of light confirmed his worst suspicion: There was a mountain lion in his cabin.

Swallowing hard, he shoved the match into the paper, and it caught this time, sending a yellowish cone of light out onto the floor and into Cam’s face. He kept watching the cat, which kept watching him. His coat with the. 45 was ten feet away, so that was not an option. He’d seen the big cat, and the big cat had definitely seen him. He didn’t have to know much about mountain lions to know that at this juncture, after they’d been staring at each other, any sudden move on his part was going to provoke a similar move from the huge cat, with negative consequences likely. His heart had begun to pound and his face was probably a little whiter than it had been a moment ago.

The fire grew as the stove began to draw, and he had to back his face away from the sudden heat. Just that tiny movement, an adjustment more than a movement, summoned a deep, sustained growl from the corner of the room. He could see the cat’s face clearly, but not its body. Was it crouching, preparing to pounce? Or just lying there, watching to see what he’d do next?

Okay, he thought, have to do something here. He glanced down into the firebox and saw one thin log that was burning brightly on one end. He’d have to reach through the flames to grab it, but if he grabbed it, threw it at the cat, distracted the damned thing long enough to get to the. 45, he might have a chance. The cat growled again, a deep-throated warning rumble, as if it were reading his mind. Those yellow-green eyes never wavered, never blinked. He knew it wouldn’t work. He might be subtle about reaching into the firebox, but then his reflexes would take over as soon as his flesh sensed the flames and he’d jerk that hand out of there, and then that big bastard would be on him in one shrieking leap.

Slap, slap, chow time.

He could no longer hear the dogs, and his legs were starting to tremble. He saw the cat’s shape change slightly in the deep shadows of the corner, as if it was gathering itself. Hell with it, he thought, and began to edge his hand back toward the door of the firebox.

He never saw it coming. One moment, he was trying to watch the cat while positioning his hand to grab for the burning log. The next instant, he was skidding backward, flat on his back, his head bouncing along the wooden floorboards, with two hundred pounds of wet fur and fangs shrieking into his face. The cat’s breath was foul, and two dinner plate-size clawed paws were clamping onto his head on either side. He screamed back, shouting from all the way down in his gut, vaguely aware that he had pissed his pants, his mouth only inches from those long, yellow curved fangs, and then the cat was gone and he was staring up into the rafters, still paralyzed with fear, trying to focus his eyes on something up there. Oh God, not another one. And then he realized he was looking into the grinning face of White Eye Mitchell.