Shirley Murphy: Cat to the Dogs

His brown hair was neatly trimmed-a better haircut than Joe's housemate, Clyde, would ever spring for. The dead man's bloodstained shirt and torn, camel hair sport coat looked expensive. The scattered items that had fallen onto the inverted headliner included a suede leather cap, a California road map, a Styrofoam coffee cup spilling coffee across the fabric of the headliner, and bits of shattered safety glass decorating the bloody pools and clinging to the dead man's clothes like diamondbright sparkles for some gory costume party.

The car was a '67 Corvette, a collector's car-you saw many antiques around Molena Point. It was pale blue and, until its mishap that morning, looked to have been in mint condition. The sticker on its license plate indicated that it had been purchased from Landrum Antique Cars in L.A. The wrecked windshield was marked by tape residue where a small piece of paper must have been affixed. He could see no tag ripped away or lying on the floor.

Carefully, Joe reached a paw though a hole in the crazed glass. Pushing out some of the rounded jewellike bits, he squeezed his head through, then his muscled gray shoulders, and eased down onto the dead man's bent knee, his weight shifting the body and startling him; but then the victim settled again and was still.

Pressing his nose uneasily to the young man's nose, Joe sought some hint of breathing. But even as he crouched he could feel, through his paws, a faint drop in temperature as the body began to cool.

Grimacing at the smells that accompanied human death-very different from the smell of a dead rat-he backed away and crept out again, panting for gulps of fresh air. This stranger's death unleashed all manner of past associations for Joe Grey: visions of the police working a murder scene as he crouched watching from the roof above; of a dead man bathed in the green light from a computer terminal; of a man struck suddenly with a bright steel wrench, a memory so vivid that Joe heard again the crack of me victim's skull.

But those deaths had been murders. What he was viewing here was an accident, the result of careless driving on a fog-blind mountain road.

Except that something tickled at him, a puzzled unease, some detail of the crash-something he had heard before the car skidded and came thundering down into the ravine.

Frowning, the white strip down his gray face pinched into puzzled worry lines, the big tomcat padded along a fallen sapling between the upturned wheels.

What had he heard?

Dropping down on the far side of the wrecked car, his mind played back the crash in a quick rerun: the squeal of brakes, then the skid just about where Deadman's Curve began. Hellhag Hill was famous for that double twist. If a driver lost control on the first bend, he was hard put, when he hit the second one, to regain command. The too-sharp turn was on him, the canyon dropping straight down away from his front wheels. The locals took that road slowly. The warning signs were numerous and insistent-but in the fog a driver wouldn't see them. Even a local might not realize just where he was on the hairpin road.

Had he heard another sound before the squeal of brakes? Had he heard a horn farther away, muffled in the fog? The faint, quick stutter of a warning horn?

He squinched closed his eyes, trying to remember.

Yes. First a faint triple beep, then the skid and the crash and the car careening down at him-but had that earlier honking come from a second car, or had this driver honked at something looming out of the fog? Had there been one car or two, moving blindly along that narrow road?

He thought he remembered the hush of two sets of tires; but had they been coming from opposite directions? Then the faint stutter of the horn, then the scream of brakes and the heart-jolting thunder as the car came careening over.

The other car must have had gone on. Why hadn't it stopped? Hadn't the other driver heard the wreck?

Padding back across a sapling above the car's greasy innards, Joe studied the right front wheel with its thick discharge. The drip was abating now, only an occasional drop still falling, its viscous pool seeping down into the dead leaves. The same syrupy liquid coated the bent wheel. He crouched to look more closely.

The drip came from a short piece of black hose attached to the wheel and to a metal pipe that ran to the engine. The brake line. Padding back and forth along the sapling, studying each wheel with its corresponding hose, he found it interesting that only this one brake line was broken and leaking.

Living with Clyde Damen, his human housemate and a professional auto mechanic, Joe Grey had grown from kittenhood exposed to the insides of every possible motor-driven vehicle, subjected to endless photographs in automotive magazines and to countless boring articles on the intricacies of car engines; as he drowsed in Clyde's lap, he was treated to interminable, mind-numbing hours of Clyde's detailed dissertations on the subtleties of matters mechanical.

He had a clear picture of this car's master cylinder, empty now where the fluid had drained away.

No brakes when the guy hit that curve. Zilch. Nada.

He found it most interesting that the broken plastic tube was not ragged as if it had worn through naturally, but was separated by a knife-sharp incision, a cut slicing straight through the hose.

He was debating whether to climb the canyon wall and check the skid marks on the road, to try to get a picture of just what had happened up there, when a noise from above made him crouch.

Someone was descending the cliff, moving downward unseen but noisy, crashing through the fog-blurred tangles in a frenzy, rattling bushes and dislodging stones.

Maybe somebody had heard the crash; maybe the other driver was coming to render assistance after all.

Except, this didn't sound like a man descending. Even a man in a great hurry wouldn't break so many bushes; a man hurrying down that steep bank would be more collected so that he, himself, wouldn't fall. This sounded more like a wild creature running and sliding full out, though the sound was so distorted in the fog that he couldn't really be sure what he was hearing. One minute the approach was loud enough to be a bear, the next instant the noise faded to nothing.

A bear. Right, Joe thought, disgusted. There hadn't been bears on the California coast for a century. A bobcat? No bobcat would follow and approach a wrecked car; no wild beast would do that. Warily, he leaped onto a boulder, ready to fight or run like hell, whichever the situation suggested.

Straining to see above him through the disturbed patches of water-sodden air, he wondered if it could be a horse.

But a horse, escaped from one of the small local stables, wouldn't choose, on its own, to descend the rough and fog-bound canyon. A horse, breaking through his paddock fence, would prefer the slopes of Hellhag Hill above, where the grass was rich and nourishing.

He was considering that perhaps a local horseman had heard the wreck and saddled up to come and render help, when the beast charged out of the mist-not one creature, but two.

Two huge dogs plunged straight at him. Panting and baying, they leaped up the boulder, scrabbling to reach him. Joe, hissing and snarling, prepared to bloody them both. Their eyes were wild, their white teeth flashing.

The boulder wasn't large. It protruded out of the cliff in such a way that if the dogs had thought about it, they'd have gone uphill again and jumped straight down on him. But they didn't think; they were all bark and gnashing teeth, fighting to reach him, their big mouths snapping so close that he could taste their doggy breath. He had raised his steel-tipped paw, ready to rake to ribbons those two invading noses, when he did a double take, studying their thin canine faces.