Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 48

Men in Beige

Max watched the hunt breakers edge closer like animated mushrooms.

Their clothing and movements were properly stealthy, but they were pushing nearer their human prey. Too close for Max’s comfort.

He eyed the two huntsmen in beige below, who faced a sand-scoured shack open to the sky and wind about twenty-five yards in front of them.

The client carried a rifle. But so did the Rancho Exotica guide/security man.

The desert wind skittered across the sand, creating a constant microdermabrasion tattoo on any exposed skin surfaces. Max had been suffering that soft scouring for over an hour now, and it was getting on his nerves.

No, that wasn’t what was getting on his nerves. It was the sleek 9-mm gun on the rock beside him.

Max hated guns. He hated bombs even more, but he hated guns too. He’d taken perverse pride in rarely carrying them during a decade-plus of serious undercover work, and never using them.

Now he might have no choice. He would never have suggested that Temple come to this scene without having the backup of a loaded gun in his pocket. The Colt he had offered her weighed down his jacket pocket, but it was superfluous, not suitable to this distance and this situation.

Against rifles, of course, either weapon was useless, the movies aside. Amazing how many film heroes held off whole armies of heavy artillery with endlessly firing pistols.

Max was a fine magician, but he wasn’t that good.

A basso growl gritted across the sands with the wind.

The guide pointed with his left arm, the rifle still cradled in his right.

The client was a taller man, wearing the same style khaki clothing, except his shirtsleeves and pants were full-length. Despite his amateur status—and he certainly seemed awkward holding the rifle—he was the more sinister figure. The security boyos in Bermuda shorts always struck Max, like Las Vegas’s similarly attired bicycle police, as overgrown Boy Scouts.

Both men wore short boots and new bush hats, the guide’s rakishly snapped up on the right. The client’s hat still shaded his face all around, as did a pair of wraparound sunglasses. The guide scorned sunglasses, and squinted professionally at the shack.

Suddenly he lifted his rifle and shot to the right of the structure. The sharp report, the shooter’s body jerking at the recoil, the ping of a bullet hitting stone, startled Max despite himself.

It also startled something hiding inside the shack. A low black form streaked out of the shade and the shelter.

Max felt his gut tighten as he saw it: a panther, black as midnight, but its coat shining slightly rusty in the glaring sunlight. It could be Kahlúa, the panther he had borrowed once for a stunt. This was a beautiful, bright animal, sculpted like an art deco onyx, crouched and vigilant, knowing something was wrong. But also knowing only rewards and kindness from the hand of mankind so far. Until today.

Max scowled at the “client.” At least the bastard wasn’t a bow hunter. Not that a “hunter” who needed fenced and tamed prey could be expected to kill with one well-placed shot.

Max filmed the cat, still crouching, but now exposed. Filmed the two men conferring, moving closer.

The client lifted the rifle, placed it awkwardly against his right shoulder.

Max found his hand on the 9-mm Glock on the stone beside him, itching to touch the trigger. Shoot into the air, scare the panther off. And give away his own position.

He looked for the protesters. They were belly-crawling along a wash behind the fence, nearing the shack and the panther, inching into the rifleman’s shaky range.

And Temple?

His binoculars found no flash of red. Good. Something had delayed her, thank God. At least she was safe.

All these actions, thoughts, took scant seconds, as they always do in a crisis.

The guide nudged the client’s rifle barrel a shade to the left, lifting it a trifle too.

Paint-by-numbers shooting.

The panther, panting, eyed the two men, perhaps hoping for food or water, not death.

Max gritted his teeth, not knowing whether to lift his video camera or binoculars or gun.

Suddenly the crouching panther backed up, snarling, staring to the side as if stung.

A small black banshee came screeching out of the bushes, charging the big cat’s face, swiping at the long, thick muzzle whiskers.

The panther, more shocked than angered, backed up farther, growling.

The small animal leaped to harry its rear, dashing in, then away, spitting and screeching, sparring at the creature’s huge haunches.

Before Max could blink, the tiny spitfire had herded the panther back into the shack like a lion tamer maneuvering the king of the jungle onto a one-foot-diameter circus pedestal.

Max glanced at hunter and guide. Their rifle barrels drooped toward the ground in their slack grasps like agape jaws.

Before the impotency image could harden, the guide rallied, lifted his rifle, and shot into the shack. Wood splintered from a Big Bang that reverberated across the desert and drilled into Max’s ears.

Apparently the staff of Rancho Exotica aimed to please.

The guide stalked toward the shack, ratcheting another bullet into the chamber, determined to drive the animals from their shelter.

He came right up to the shack, rifle raised and pointed, ready to fire again.

This time the black banshee fell from the sky…fell from the branches of a palo verde tree leaning over what was left of the shack’s roof. The plunge knocked the guide’s jaunty bush hat to the ground, exposing his face to a whirlwind attack of slugging claws. The man went down on one knee, but the rifle hit the ground and discharged….

Directly into the shack, at just-above-ground level.

A roar seemed to explode the rotten wood structure, then the black panther itself exploded snarling into the sunlight, muzzle drawn back to expose stalactites and stalagmites of teeth gleaming ice white in the sunshine.

Thirty feet away, the hunter lifted his rifle again, walking toward his distracted target, who was posed like a ’50s porcelain panther, muscular and frozen, a sitting duck….

The protesters, seeing the inevitable, wailed as one and lurched up from the cover of the wash, charging and climbing the fence until it broke under their weight.

To Max in his observation post, it was like watching diverse blips on a radar screen converging for a spectacular, fatal meeting in the middle.

There was no humanly possible way he could intervene. Disaster on a converging course. The determined hunter with his rifle bearing down on the panther, the guide rolling and screaming and nursing his blood-blinded face, the bloody-fool protesters surging to put themselves between hunter and prey…good God, Max thought in slow motion, this was not just a showdown between hunter and prey but between murderer and…and witness!

He gathered himself for the most spectacular athletic vault of his career, down into the middle of it all he would plunge…

And was beaten to the punch by the same black banshee that had corralled the panther and savaged the guide.

The black cat ran out from the shadows in which he had circled behind the hunter. He leaped up to land on his neck like a vampire leech, a nightmare even Edgar Allen Poe couldn’t have dreamed of in his most fevered hallucinations.

The man dropped to the ground just as Max landed in front of him—knees bent to absorb the punishing shock, hands out to wrest the rifle barrel from his grasp and smash the butt into the man’s suddenly exposed jaw, the bush hat and sunglasses flying away to reveal…

Max had no time to linger.

He looked around. The guide’s face was a road map of claw marks. He was out of it.

The protesters had circled the still-crouching, growling panther, singing “We Shall Overcome” off-key.

Max spotted an oncoming flash of red through the palo verdes. He grabbed the hunter by the khaki lapels, looked into the dazed face.

“Why?” Max asked.

The bleary eyes focused on his, then went AWOL.

Max looked up. Temple was almost here. He would have to get the answer to that question later.

Best he be gone now.

He looked around for the black cat.

Midnight Louie had made the same, split-second decision.

Great minds and all that…

He was thinking of Louie, of course.