Shirley Murphy: Cat to the Dogs

Joe dropped his armored paw and sat down, watching them, amused.

Puppies.

They were only puppies. Huge puppies, each as big as a full-grown retriever. Big-boned, big-footed pups. And thin. Two bags of canine bones held together by dry, buff-colored pelts, their black-and-white faces so fleshless they appeared skeletal, their whipping tails so skinny they looked like two snakes that had swallowed marbles.

Two oversized puppies, starving and harmless.

They had stopped barking. They grinned up at him, wagging and prancing spraddle-legged around the boulder, their skinny tails whipping enthusiastically.

They had no notion of eating him. Probably they were too young and stupid to imagine that a dog could kill and eat a cat; the idea would not have occurred to them. They simply wanted to be friendly, to be close to another animal. Now that they'd stopped barking, even their doggy smiles were incredibly downtrodden and sad.

They couldn't be more than four or five months old, but were so emaciated that even the weight of their floppy ears and floppy feet seemed to drag them down.

He wondered if they belonged to the dead driver, if somehow they had managed, as the car went over the cliff, to leap free?

But the crash happened in a split second; they would have had only an instant to escape. These clumsy mutts didn't look like they could get out of their own way in twenty seconds.

Maybe they'd been following the car, running along behind. Had the driver been running his dogs the way some country folk did, exercising them down the nearly empty highway? Joe sneezed with disgust. Any man who ran his dogs behind a car-to say nothing of starving them bone-thin-deserved a violent death.

He gave them a gentle growl to make them move back and dropped down from the boulder. They backed away two steps, fawning at him, bowing on their front legs and grinning in doggy obeisance. They seemed, actually, like rather nice young pups. Though only youngsters, they were already as big as Rube, Joe's aged Labrador retriever housemate. And though they were puppy-silly and disgustingly eager, with their stupid baby grins, Joe thought perhaps the expressions in their bright, dark eyes hinted at some possible future intelligence.

He thought they might be half Great Dane, and maybe half boxer. The smaller of the two had the happy-go-lucky grin of a young boxer. Actually, if they were fed properly and groomed, if their faces filled out a bit, and their ribs ceased to protrude, they might become quite handsome-as far as a dog could be handsome.

Too late Joe Grey saw where his thoughts had led him. Saw that he had reacted with no more common sense than a mush-hearted human do-gooder, sucker for a pair of starving mutts-realized that he had actually been wondering where to find these beasts a meal.

Well, he'd been around Clyde too long; Clyde Damen was such a sucker for stray animals.

Not yours truly, Joe Grey thought I'm not playing animal rescue for these two bags of bones.

The fact that he himself had been a rescued stray had no bearing on the present situation. This was entirely different. Turning his back on the gamboling pups, he studied the wrecked Corvette, wondering if anyone at all had heard the crash and called the cops. There were no houses near Hellhag Canyon, only the empty hills and, atop Hellhag Hill, to the north, the Moonwatch Trailer Park.

The instant he turned to look at the pups again, they were all over him, slobbering and whining, soaking him with dog spit.

"Stop it! Get off! Get back. Get off me!"

They ducked away, staring at him white-eyed with alarm.

Obviously they had never been spoken to in the English language by one of feline persuasion. Whining and backing, they watched him with such deep suspicion that he had to laugh.

His laugh frightened them further. The poor beasts looked so confused that he ended up reaching out a gentle paw, patting the smaller pup on his huge white foot, then lifting his own sleek gray face to sniff noses.

He knew he was acting stupid, that he was being suckered. Joe Grey, PI, taken in by a pair of flea-bitten, mange-ridden mongrels.

"Get on out of here! Go on back to the highway!"

They cowered away, crestfallen, and Joe turned his attention to the crash victim, peering in at the dead driver, thinking about the severed brake line.

The cops were needed here, the sooner the better.

He studied the twisted dashboard and the dark hole of the sprung-open glove compartment, but could not see a car phone. Where was the driver of the other car? How could he not have heard the crash? Was he clear down the coast by this time?

Behind Joe, the pups began a cacophony of heartrending whines. Joe ignored them. Whoever had cut the brake line must have known approximately how long it would take the brakes to fail. The car could not have skidded at a more dangerous spot. He pictured the driver hitting his brakes on the first curve, forcing out the last of the fluid, emptying the line, rendering the brake pedal useless when he hit the second twist.

He didn't know the dead driver, though he knew by sight nearly everyone in Molena Point. Peering in at the man's unsettling blue eyes, at his waxen face streaked with blood, he wondered where this guy had last stopped, maybe to get gas? Maybe the brake line had been cut then?

Letting his imagination go to work on the scene, he wondered if that other driver had been following the Corvette, waiting to startle the driver with sudden honking and make him hit his brakes at just the right moment, waiting to be sure the driver went out of control and careened over the cliff, before he went on his way.

That faint honking and the squeal of brakes formed, for Joe Grey, a frightening scenario.

Leaving the wreck, he bounded up the canyon wall, trying to ignore the whining pups, who clambered up beside him, stepping on his paws. If he'd had a tail- more than just a two-inch stub-the mutts would have stepped on it, too. He hadn't been troubled with that appendage since he was a gangling kit. The drunk who stepped on and broke his tail had, in that moment of careless cruelty, really done him a good turn. Life without a tail to get caught in doors and pulled by small children suited Joe Grey just fine.

Before the three animals reached the narrow road that wound precariously a hundred feet above the sea, Joe Grey knew, and the pups knew, that they were not alone. An unseen man stood silently somewhere on the opposite canyon wall-they could smell his heavily perfumed shaving lotion, and a whiff of shoe polish. Sniffing the scents that seeped through the mist, the pups cowered silently against Joe Grey; and Joe himself crouched low against the bushes, looking.

He waited for some time, but even though the fog was thinning above him along the road it was pea soup in the canyon. He could see nothing. The tiny sounds he heard from below, the small crackle of a twig or a dry leaf, could be a person moving around the wrecked car or it could be only a ground squirrel or another wood rat, venturing out to investigate the metal monster that had fallen into their canyon.

When nothing larger stirred, when he could detect in the mist no one climbing back up the cliff, he leaped impatiently up to the narrow two-lane to search the wet black macadam for tire marks.

IT'S GOING to be hard to dump these mutts, Joe Grey thought. They clung to him like road tar. When he tried to drive them back into the ravine they nearly smothered him with slurping kisses. Even his lancing claws no longer deterred them. They licked their noses where he'd slapped them and bounced around him like a pair of wind-up toys, fawning and trampling him, grinning with the delighted assumption that he was their dearest friend; they were so stupid and innocent that even if he could have ditched them and made his escape, something within Joe rebelled. He knew he couldn't abandon them; puppies and young dogs have no more notion of how to find food for themselves than does a human baby.