Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

Max’s terse smile widened into a grin. “But Cyrus Van Burkleo doesn’t know that. And don’t you tell him.”

“So what is my mission at Rancho Van Burkleo?”

“Be on your toes”—Max glanced to the floorboard and at her platform wedge sandals—“which I don’t have to tell you to do. Ask anything, see everything, and make mental notes on it all. If you happen to notice a leopard that isn’t as happy a camper as the big cats you just saw at Animal Oasis…don’t let on. Naive, nubile, and perky should do it.”

“Max, that’s sexist.”

“So is Van Burkleo. I wouldn’t send you in there if I didn’t know he had a blind spot that’s just your size. Think you can handle it?”

If Molina had asked her that question, she would have snarled “Sure” on a knee-jerk impulse. With Max, she was tempted to hedge. And that told her she was getting all too dependent on him.

Time to go face King Kong on her own, hopefully without her hands tied behind her back.

Rancho Van Burkleo was tucked even farther back from the highway than Animal Oasis.

It sported no workshop-lettered sign. Only a desert track that suddenly turned into asphalt running toward the end of the world.

“There’s nothing out here, Max.”

“That’s the idea you’re supposed to have. Slow down and drop me off here. I want to scout the perimeter.”

“Dressed in black?”

“Left my camouflage clothes at home. It’ll be all right. At this point, the security should be mostly to keep the animals in, rather than humans out.

“You seem to have scouted this place before,” Temple observed as she slowed the car to a jolting stop on the rough road.

“No, but the data in Kirby’s files was fairly specific, at least about the perimeter of this place. Van Burkleo is one of those quasi-legal operators every law enforcement unit—state police, DEA, INS, Initials R Us, ad nauseam—would love to catch with his fingers in some illegal cookie jar.”

Temple said nothing more. Max was sending her into a serious danger zone. Either he honestly trusted her instincts or the umbrella of the Crystal Phoenix and the Fontana family was a larger, stronger defense than she realized. She was a little slow on the uptake, but half a lifetime of surviving on animal instincts had made Max a master at weighing danger.

Animal instincts. Number one was self-preservation. Temple had better dial hers up to maximum.

Max had told her to drive until she couldn’t, so she continued along the road more cautiously than usual, in other words, slowly.

Thickets of scrub clustered on the flat land, obscuring what lay beyond. What lay beyond was rougher terrain, crisscrossed by dry washes that could fill up with water breathtakingly fast in a hard Nevada rain, which came seldom but devastatingly.

A lot of washes were damp in their rocky bottoms, despite a long lack of rain. She began to suspect that these washes could be filled mechanically to put off trespassers. Some moat!

Finally, a gate set into piled rocks loomed ahead like a minimountain. An iron fence extended in either direction as far as the eye could see. Must have cost as much as a Strip hotel-casino wet area, and almost nobody would see this. Except for Max’s assumed high rollers. A modest sign read Rancho Exotica. She did a double-take when she read it, because the first time through she’d seen: Rancho Erotica. Las Vegas conditioning at work.

When she stopped at the gate, she noticed a speaker and camera set into the raw, red stone.

It squawked at her, so she squawked back after getting out of the car to get her mouth close enough to the speaker. The high-mounted camera recorded her most unflattering angle: from above she looked like a red-headed mop with no body.

“Temple Barr from the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino. Mr. Van Burkleo’s office is expecting me.”

A voice so distorted it was genderless instructed her to proceed when the gates opened.

She tramped back into the car, irritated at being too short to lean out its open window and submit to this inspection with dignity.

The high, barred gates retracted into their red stone mountains with the slick mechanical ease of ancient tomb booby-traps springing on the wary hero of an Indiana Jones movie.

Another long drive—what was out on the perimeter all those miles back for Max to scout?—finally rewarded her with the sight of a low stone compound built along the base of the mountain.

The road took her to the center of a sprawling construction stabbed with walls of glass and redwood. A wooden door wide and high enough to befit a cathedral provided a focal point.

There the asphalt ended like a thermometer in a fat pool of parking lot-cum-turnaround.

Temple parked and got out of the car, wondering if she looked as dusty as its once-mirror-black surface.

She took off her sunglasses. The surrounding scene lost the vivid color the tinted lenses intensified. To the naked eye, the building seemed like a Bauhaus version of a ’50s ranch-style motel: self-consciously low, long, and modern, a rugged man-made slash underlining the majesty of the mountain behind it.

The big doors entered the cathedral-ceiling main structure at the building’s center. Call it Chapel Central. Temple headed for them.

By the time she got there, a normal-size door at the side of the impressive entrance had opened. A tall, slim woman stood waiting in it.

Tall, slim women always made Temple feel like a truant reporting to a principal, but definitely not p-r-i-n-c-i-p-a-l as in “pal.”

Feeling as fraudulent as a delinquent seventh grader, Temple stomped to the low-profile door on her high-profile wedgies and gave her name and rank again.

In like a safe-cracker’s lock pick.

In and face-to-face with a tiger.

Foot-to-paw, rather.

The quarry-tile floor before her was covered with the splayed hide of a magnificent Indian tiger, only its glassy-eyed head rising in repellant 3-D from the flatness of its glorious skin.

Max had mentioned moneyed scofflaws who would break the rules of God and man, but he hadn’t warned her she was about to deal with people who needed to walk on wild animals to feel tall.

She shot a searing glance at Miss Tall and Slim, who was pausing casually on one flattened foreleg of the tiger.

After having so recently seen the magnificent live beasts prowling and lounging at the Animal Oasis, this scene was like going from a kindergarten slide show to a porno flick.

Luckily, the contrast rendered Temple speechless, or she would have blown her cover.

“I’ll take you to Mr. Van Burkleo’s den,” the supermodel said. “If you’ll follow me—” She moved on without looking back, expecting compliance.

Temple followed, but she walked around the animal skin.

It was a long walk. Like all rich men’s residences, this one required a floor plan to get around in.

It was nice to walk this far indoors in Las Vegas without passing slot machines for once, though.

To take her mind off the tiger rug, she studied Miss T & S’s tasteful sand-colored linen suit, which she accessorized with brown alligator pumps made from a hide so real that Temple expected the heels to start snapping at her if she got too close. Temple thought items like that were banned in Boston, and Austin, and all parts of the U.S.

But she wasn’t current on what wildlife products were banned as imports. Maybe even the poor tiger rug was permitted.

But not permissible in her world. Imagine poor Louie hunted down for his hide and then slapped down on a cold terra-cotta tiled floor for eternity! Well, for a long time, anyway.

Temple’s thoughts churned as she huffed and she puffed her way after Ms. T & S in her alligator shoes. Of course, Temple wore leather shoes, but that was a byproduct of cows that would have been killed anyway and she supposed she would have to reevaluate her whole footwear code shortly. Also fast food.