Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“The compound.”

Stalking like shadows on ice, we pad over the hot sandy dirt toward the now-familiar row of cages in the outbuilding.

“Looks like you have been busy,” Louise concedes. “You seem to know your way around this place.”

“I have hoofed this terrain from here to the Animal Oasis.”

“Animal Oasis. What is that?”

Before I can answer her, I stop to stare in shock.

It is the same old, same old, all right. Lions and tigers and…and bare cages.

Two of them.

Not just Osiris’s but the one that contained my secret witness.

Even Midnight Louise is frowning at the lineup, counting noses and coming up one too few.

“Looks like another Big Boy is AWOL,” she notes. Then she looks over and sees my expression. “Oh, no, Daddio Darnedest! Is the missing person your secret witness?”

I nod glumly.

The witness is definitely not here to see us.

I can only hope that is not a permanent condition.

Chapter 43

The Black and Blue Max

Four-thirty.

Max had been watching the world through the view screen of a video camera for so long that he felt like he was looking through the Cloaked Conjuror’s mask.

At the moment he was basking snakelike atop the artificial rocks forming the skeleton for a simulated waterfall, his black clothing so dust covered it had gone gray.

He had managed to procure a Jeep Laredo the color of mud. Driving a security-force vehicle look-alike got him fairly close to the compound. The Laredo was parked in a thicket of paloverde trees. His circuitous way to the ranch house area had been booby-trapped by so many fellow prowlers that it was almost laughable, like a scene in a Pink Panther film farce.

The three earnest hunt breakers were out there, armed with binoculars and flare guns. They too had managed to come very close, despite the patrolling security guards. That made Max more nervous than the pairs of guards that rode or walked both near and far from the ranch house. The protesters were as unpredictable as lizards, and in their safari khakis, as easy to overlook.

Once ensconced where he was least likely to be expected, on a perch well greased with bird droppings, he had recorded various wheeled arrivals. A white van proved to be a meat delivery truck and left after unloading. A bronze Ford Expedition, that held the title for biggest dinosaur in the outsize SUV world, was the second arrival. It had disgorged a man in an Aussie-style hat, not pinned up on one side, so that Max couldn’t see his face. Obviously the hunter. Shortly after that had come Temple’s aqua Storm, now parked by the house’s soaring entry door in front of the bulbous behemoth that was the Expedition, looking like a mislaid turquoise chip in this dun-colored setting.

Meanwhile…Max switched the camera for a pair of binoculars that were both surprisingly powerful and incredibly petite. Kind of like Temple.

His vulture’s-eye view of the scene showed the trio of hunt protesters hunkered down sixty yards away in the desert and creeping ever closer.

Not thirty yards away one of the rifle-bearing security guards scanned the terrain like a point man.

Max raked the magnifying lenses over the compound and spotted a cluster of feminine hair colors by the ranch’s soaring entrance doors: Temple’s cocklike comb of red, the tawny mane of the widow Van Burkleo, the assistant Courtney’s slick yellow poll.

He lowered the binocs, disturbed to see the guards stationed all around the area, like beaters. Now that he had inventoried the forces assembling, he was sorry he had asked Temple to be on hand. He was even sorrier that she didn’t have the Colt pocketlite he had offered her. Although in a crisis she was more likely to draw her cell phone than a gun.

He swooped the binocs back to the hunt breakers: more unarmed innocents in a nest of vipers.

A movement in the desert between the compound and the nothingness that stretched to the horizon caught his eye. Something black like him, but smaller.

Wait a minute. He swept the binocs over the empty horizon again. Not quite empty. Max saw something else he didn’t like. Something he never would have noticed had he not taken the high ground to look around. Odd how earthbound people thought, in terms of miles and roads and fences. Not as the crow flies, though…or the vulture. The vulture was a far more appropriate image for this situation, with so many human vultures gathering around for what human vultures crave…not dead flesh, but the material remains of the dead flesh.

His heartbeat accelerated. In disbelief? Or disappointment? Or did he just not want to tangle with this particular opponent? Damn! He was less interested in finding a murderer than a missing leopard, but now he’d managed to do both. Just this minute, just when he was trapped in this perch, watching and recording.

But was there any new danger? The worst was over, wasn’t it? Van Burkleo was dead. That’s what everyone had wanted, each in his own way. Van Burkleo dead. The hunts were over. The beatings ended. The ranch was about to be sold. The money made and taken away. The animals dead or dispersed…

Then why one last hunt?

Was there one last victim?

Chapter 44

Pretty Please Don’t!

“ I can’t have the panther? ”

Temple managed to sound both astounded and indignant. Your typical disgruntled customer.

She had been pretty pleased with herself for using the panther as an excuse for her latest visit to Rancho Exotica. She didn’t have another pretext to hand or in brain. She would have to ride that panther until it dropped.

And it was warm out here. Temple blew upward to lift her curls from her damp forehead. She hated being the only curly-haired woman in the girl group.

Leonora and Courtney exchanged pointed looks.

“My heart was set on the panther,” Temple said.

“I thought your heart was set on Mr. Maximilian.” Leonora glanced pointedly at Temple’s ring finger.

Oh-oh . She had been much too rash in throwing the trinket back.

“Sapphires,” Temple said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We decided I looked better in sapphires. A new ring is on order. Now. About that panther—”

“I’m sorry, but we had scheduled one final hunter and he chose the panther.”

“ You’re shooting it? ”

Leonora stiffened. “Not personally.”

“When? Where?”

The two women turned to look at the Expedition parked behind Temple’s Storm in the driveway like Godzilla poised over Mighty Mouse.

“ Now? ”

Temple had never pictured her panther, her Midnight Louie in an extra-large cat suit, as the object of the hunt Max wanted to stop. Where was that nasty little gun when she needed it?

“What is the swine who’s doing the shooting paying for the privilege?” she asked.

“Really, Miss Barr, this is our business and your friend was willing and eager to buy it—”

“I’ll double the fee.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Is it easier to let them take potshots at poor dumb animals, instead of you?” Temple asked, goaded beyond empathy. “Is that why you don’t care about these helpless animals being gunned down without even a fighting chance? Your husband is dead. You don’t have to live like you did. You’re not just another hunted-down trophy. You can stop it now.”

Leonora went white, her bizarre feline face a ghost of itself, like the white lions that Siegfried and Roy trained. “You…you—”

“I’m out of this.” Courtney turned on her Anne Klein heels and stamped away.

Leonora’s narrow catlike nostrils flared as her breath huffed out of her body like a noxious exhalation. “What do you know? What do you want?”