Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“I want that panther. Alive. Let’s hope he still is. Take me there.”

“You’re crazy. It’s out on the desert. We can’t walk there.” She looked down at their strappy, high-heeled sandals.

By some bizarre stroke of fate, Temple realized, they were both wearing the same model of Onyx sandals. Talk about walking in someone else’s shoes…The realization almost knocked her off her feet, which the desert would do later if shock failed now.

Max was counting on her to improvise.

“Then we’ll drive.” Temple grabbed Leonora’s stringy arm and shoved her into the passenger side of the Storm. It was like maneuvering a puppet.

Luckily, she had left her keys in the ignition, so was saved the time of dredging her tote bag for them. “Which way?”

“Left at the fork.” Leonora pointed, her taloned hand shaking. She glanced at Temple quickly, aslant, like a feral animal. “What do you know?”

Temple jerked the steering wheel and set the Storm rocking down a rutted trail made for four-wheel-drive vehicles painted desert-ratchic camouflage.

“I know why you’ve had your face remade. It had to be, to hide the damage. Not hide, camouflage. You don’t have to buy into Cyrus’s violence and obsessions anymore. He’s gone. You can start doing things your way now.”

“I have no way,” Leonora said bitterly. “No way but his.”

“You have the money.”

She shook her mane as if dislodging flies. “Money. I suppose so, but I don’t care. Isn’t it odd that a leopard named Osiris did Cyrus in?” she asked dreamily. “Maybe it was karma.”

“It was coincidence,” Temple said. “And maybe the leopard is innocent.”

Leonora was suddenly quiet.

“I just don’t get why you stayed, put up with it.” Temple had to watch the—“road” was too good a term—ruts. “How far do we go? Is the panther still alive?”

“I haven’t heard shots,” Leonora said in a monotonous voice. “You usually hear shots. Unless the client is a bow hunter.”

Temple gunned the motor, making the Storm buck like a turquoise-painted pony. “Just get me to where it’s happening. That’s all I ask.”

“I don’t know. This is a big place. It may be fenced, but the animals have room to roam. I don’t know where they’re doing it this time. Besides, what can you do about it?”

“Something. Buy the panther back from the hunter.”

Leonora’s slitted amber eyes slid Temple’s way again, wary, challenging. “You don’t know hunters, or you wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t ask why I stayed.”

“So why?”

“Because he would have tracked me down if I left. Hunters never stop hunting. And it’s a rule of the chase. If you wound something, you follow it until you can finally kill it.”

Her toneless words made Temple shiver despite the heat. She had never heard such an apt description of domestic abuse in her life. The analogy of the hunter and prey fit the situation like a throttling glove. About now she was ready to kill Cyrus Van Burkleo.

“There.” Leonora was pointing to a line of squat, scraggly trees.

One of the dusty little Jeep Laredos the security staff drove was parked nose-first in the shade the brush provided.

Parked and empty. It meant the riders were on foot, and had become stalkers.

Chapter 45

The Most Dangerous Dame

I sit down in the dust.

“Now I wish I had those two little beetle-noses.”

“Beetle-noses?” Midnight Louise inquires.

“They are shiny and black, are they not? The Yorkies’ noses.”

“Ours are shiny and black as well,” she says.

“Ours are matte and black. Much more elegant. But ours do not smell as well.”

“What kind of smelling do you require?”

“The Gees and I trailed our way all night, for miles and miles, all the way to the Animal Oasis, where I then interviewed the suspect in the Van Burkleo murder, Osiris the leopard.”

“And while you were off doing that, someone absconded with your secret witness. Now that the witness is missing, perhaps you will tell me what or who it is.”

I paw disconsolately at a cage bar. “It is Butch.”

“Butch? I am glad you are on a first-name basis with one and all, and thankful that you are not so with me. But who the Devon Rex is Butch?”

“Your lunch pal.”

This gives the kit pause. She frowns prettily, but I dare not tell her so.

“My lunch pal…oh, you mean the panther from between whose paws I nipped the treat for Osiris.”

I nod, not enthusiastically. I am not about to tell her of the high regard in which she is held by both victim and beneficiary of her meal-exchange scheme. Nor am I about to tell her about a new worry of mine: I have spotted my Miss Temple’s small aqua car in the driveway as we were working our way to the compound. Apparently she arrived here after us. Why, I cannot imagine.

“Well, if we cannot track him like the Yorkies,” she says briskly, “we will have to use our superior feline brains and deduce where he has gone. Do you notice a significant absence around this cage area, Pops?”

“Besides the Yorkie noses?” I snap.

She dodges my flashing teeth, and my sarcasm. “People. I do not see one keeper or guard. Which tells me they are off doing something else. Something more important than watching the stock.”

“And I know better than you on how many thousand acres they might be off doing that more important something.”

She has already turned and started trotting around the sprawling ranch house. “We will start with the nearest acres, then.”

I do not like following Miss Midnight Louise, so I manage to catch up and sprint past her by the time she reaches the front of the house.

But I stop cold, frozen by another inexplicable absence.

“My Miss Temple’s Storm,” I squall, dismayed. “It is gone! This was supposed to be a simple deposition mission. Now I have her to look after too.”

Miss Louise’s eyes narrow to mean-business dimensions. “I presume that ‘too’ means that you feel obligated to ‘look after’ me as well.”

“Not at all. I would not look after you if you came by carrying the queen of England’s train in your teeth.”

“Good,” she says. “What is that vehicle still squatting on the driveway?”

“Big?” I suggest.

A withering glance. Dames have no sense of humor.

“It is an in-town off-road model of SUV, which I suppose means Suburban Uppity Vehicle.”

“ Hmmm .” Miss Louise goes to sniff the giant tires, doing a pretty good imitation of a scent hound. Her matte-black beetle-nose wrinkles. “Creosote bushes, sagebrush, and prickly pear. I suspect that there is where we will have to head.”

“The bush, you mean.” I am ahead of her. I am already heading that way.

She scampers to catch up.

“It is a hunt,” she suggests a bit breathlessly.

I enjoy making the kit hustle to keep up with the mature operative, and pedal faster.

“Yes, it is a hunt. But I suspect that there is more dangerous game and more hunters out there than the driver of that Suburban Uppity Vehicle has dreamed of.” Why else were Mr. Max Kinsella and my Miss Temple conspiring at the Crystal Phoenix not four hours ago?

Now I know what must be done, and I am just the dude for the job…once I have managed to stow Miss Temple Barr and Miss Midnight Louise out of harm’s way.

That is the real most dangerous game.

Chapter 46

Stalemate

“We’ll have to hoof it from here,” Temple said, eyeing desert and brush untracked by tires.

Speaking of hoofing it, a doe-eyed eland gazed at her through the palo verde thicket before vanishing. Not only hunters might cross their paths out here, she realized, but prey. Some of it pretty big prey.