Cat To The Dogs

1

FOG LAY so thick in Hellhag Canyon that Joe Grey couldn't see his paws, could barely see the dead wood rat he carried dangling from his sharp teeth. Moving steeply down the wall of the ravine, the tomcat was aware of a boulder or willow scrub only when his whiskers touched something foreign, sending an electrifying jolt through his sleek gray body. The predawn fog was so dense that a human would have barged straight into those obstacles-one more example, Joe Grey thought smugly, of feline senses far keener than human, of the superiority of cat over man.

The fog-shrouded canyon was silent, too, save for the muted hushing of the sea farther down and the occasional whisper from high above of wet tires along the twisting two-lane, where some early-morning driver crept blindly. Joe had no idea why humans drove in this stuff; swift cars and fog were bad news. As he searched for a soft bit of ground on which to enjoy his breakfast, another car approached, moving way too fast toward the wicked double curve, sending a jolt of alarm stabbing through Joe.

The scream of tires filled the canyon.

The skidding car hit the cliff so hard, Joe felt the earth shake. He dropped the wood rat and leaped clear as the car rolled thundering over the edge, its lights exploding against the fog, its bulk falling straight at him, as big as a hunk of the cliff, a mass of hurtling metal that sent him streaking up the canyon wall. It hurtled past, dropping into the ravine exactly where he'd been crouching.

The car lay upside down beneath a dozen young oak trees broken off and fallen across its spinning wheels. The roof and those tons of metal had likely flattened his wood rat into a bloody pancake-so much for his nice warm breakfast.

Where the careening car had disturbed the fog, and the rising wind swirled the mist, he could make out the gigantic form easing deeper into the detritus of the canyon, the car's metal parts groaning like a dying beast, its death-stink not of escaping body fluids, but the reek of leaking gasoline.

This baby's going to explode, he thought as he prepared to run. Going to blow sky-high, roast me among these boulders like a rabbit in a stone oven.

But when, after a long wait, no explosion occurred, when the vehicle continued only to creak and moan, he crept warily down the cliff again to have a look

Hunched beneath the wreck's vast, dark body-its ticking, grease-stinking, hot-breathed body-he looked up at the huge black wheels spinning above him and listened to the bits of glass raining down from the broken windows that were half-hidden among the dry ferns, listened to the big metal carcass settle into its last sleep. He could hear, from within, no human utterance. No groan, no scream of pain or of terror, only the voice of the sea pounding against the cliffs.

Was no one alive in there? He studied the overturned car, listening for a desperate and anguished cry-and wondering what he was going to do about it. Wondering how a poor simple tomcat was going to render any kind of useful assistance.

He had been hunting Hellhag Canyon since midnight, first at the shore, dodging the rolling breakers, and then, when the fog thickened, moving on up the ravine. He had tracked the wood rat blindly, following only the sound of its scrabbling, had struck and killed it before the creature was ever aware of him. But all night he'd been edgy, too, still nervous from the quakes of the last week; the first instant the skidding car hit the hill and shook the earth he'd shivered as if another jolt were rocking the cliffs, rattling the central California coast.

The original temblor, two days earlier, at 5.2 on the Richter scale, had sent the more timid human residents of Molena Point fleeing from their cottages, to creep back hours later hauling out mattresses and camp stoves and setting up housekeeping in their gardens. All week, as the village of Molena Point experienced aftershocks, people were tense and excited, waiting for the big one, for the earth to crack open, for their homes to topple and giant seas to flood the land.

Well, it was only an earthquake, a natural, Godgiven part of life-a cat might be wary, but a cat didn't lose perspective. Humans, on the other hand, were hopelessly amusing. Facing a natural phenomenon, the poor, gullible bipeds invariably overreacted.

The earthquake had brought two reporters down from San Francisco, searching for anything sensational, seeking out the displaced and injured, running their cameras in a feeding frenzy, their hunger for alarming news as voracious as the hunger of seagulls attacking a handful of fish innards tossed from the Molena Point pier.

But the quake had disturbed the burrowing wild creatures, the mice and wood rats and voles, driving them from their holes, disorienting the little beasts so they were incredibly easy prey. All week, Joe Grey and Dulcie had gorged themselves.

Though Dulcie refused to hunt down Hellhag Canyon. She had lectured him on the dangers of high, rogue waves after an earthquake, and, when he laughed at her fears, she had turned away disgusted, growling and lashing her tabby-striped tail at what she called tomcat stupidity.

Still listening for a cry for help from within the overturned car, Joe could hear only the drip, drip of gasoline, or maybe radiator water; tensely, he circled the vehicle, ears low, body rigid, ready to spring away if the hulking wreck toppled or exploded.

The broken, fallen saplings that lay tangled across the wreck's greasy, exposed underside half covered the drive shaft and one bent wheel. He found the source of the dripping sound. It came from the left front wheel, where a viscous liquid, a substance as duck as maple syrup, dropped steadily into a pool among the crushed ferns. When he sniffed the little puddle, the stuff smelled a bit like syrup: the stink of pancake syrup laced with ether.

Backing away, he approached the upside-down windshield that rose from the bracken, the glass patterned like a spiderweb encased in crystal. And now, over the smell of gas, came the sharp scent of human blood.

Behind the glass he could see the driver, white and still, his contorted body wrapped around the steering wheel and impaled by a twisted strip of metal, his head jammed down into the concavity of the roof. There was no way this guy could be alive, not with his chest pierced through and the amount of blood pooling out. The passenger seat had come loose and lay across him. He hugged it firmly in a rictus of pain and death.

The victim's Levi's-clad backside was jammed against the shattered side window, an edge of broken glass pressed against the billfold that bulged in his hip pocket. The wallet had probably prevented a sharp cut across the buttocks, not that this fellow would have felt it.

There was no passenger. No one else in the car. The young man had died alone. He was maybe thirty, Joe thought. The victim's pale blue eyes stared at some entity that no one among the living would ever see.

His brown hair was neatly trimmed-a better haircut than Joe's housemate, Clyde, would ever spring for. The dead man's bloodstained shirt and torn, camel hair sport coat looked expensive. The scattered items that had fallen onto the inverted headliner included a suede leather cap, a California road map, a Styrofoam coffee cup spilling coffee across the fabric of the headliner, and bits of shattered safety glass decorating the bloody pools and clinging to the dead man's clothes like diamondbright sparkles for some gory costume party.

The car was a '67 Corvette, a collector's car-you saw many antiques around Molena Point. It was pale blue and, until its mishap that morning, looked to have been in mint condition. The sticker on its license plate indicated that it had been purchased from Landrum Antique Cars in L.A. The wrecked windshield was marked by tape residue where a small piece of paper must have been affixed. He could see no tag ripped away or lying on the floor.

Carefully, Joe reached a paw though a hole in the crazed glass. Pushing out some of the rounded jewellike bits, he squeezed his head through, then his muscled gray shoulders, and eased down onto the dead man's bent knee, his weight shifting the body and startling him; but then the victim settled again and was still.

Pressing his nose uneasily to the young man's nose, Joe sought some hint of breathing. But even as he crouched he could feel, through his paws, a faint drop in temperature as the body began to cool.

Grimacing at the smells that accompanied human death-very different from the smell of a dead rat-he backed away and crept out again, panting for gulps of fresh air. This stranger's death unleashed all manner of past associations for Joe Grey: visions of the police working a murder scene as he crouched watching from the roof above; of a dead man bathed in the green light from a computer terminal; of a man struck suddenly with a bright steel wrench, a memory so vivid that Joe heard again the crack of me victim's skull.

But those deaths had been murders. What he was viewing here was an accident, the result of careless driving on a fog-blind mountain road.

Except that something tickled at him, a puzzled unease, some detail of the crash-something he had heard before the car skidded and came thundering down into the ravine.

Frowning, the white strip down his gray face pinched into puzzled worry lines, the big tomcat padded along a fallen sapling between the upturned wheels.

What had he heard?

Dropping down on the far side of the wrecked car, his mind played back the crash in a quick rerun: the squeal of brakes, then the skid just about where Deadman's Curve began. Hellhag Hill was famous for that double twist. If a driver lost control on the first bend, he was hard put, when he hit the second one, to regain command. The too-sharp turn was on him, the canyon dropping straight down away from his front wheels. The locals took that road slowly. The warning signs were numerous and insistent-but in the fog a driver wouldn't see them. Even a local might not realize just where he was on the hairpin road.

Had he heard another sound before the squeal of brakes? Had he heard a horn farther away, muffled in the fog? The faint, quick stutter of a warning horn?

He squinched closed his eyes, trying to remember.

Yes. First a faint triple beep, then the skid and the crash and the car careening down at him-but had that earlier honking come from a second car, or had this driver honked at something looming out of the fog? Had there been one car or two, moving blindly along that narrow road?

He thought he remembered the hush of two sets of tires; but had they been coming from opposite directions? Then the faint stutter of the horn, then the scream of brakes and the heart-jolting thunder as the car came careening over.

The other car must have had gone on. Why hadn't it stopped? Hadn't the other driver heard the wreck?

Padding back across a sapling above the car's greasy innards, Joe studied the right front wheel with its thick discharge. The drip was abating now, only an occasional drop still falling, its viscous pool seeping down into the dead leaves. The same syrupy liquid coated the bent wheel. He crouched to look more closely.

The drip came from a short piece of black hose attached to the wheel and to a metal pipe that ran to the engine. The brake line. Padding back and forth along the sapling, studying each wheel with its corresponding hose, he found it interesting that only this one brake line was broken and leaking.

Living with Clyde Damen, his human housemate and a professional auto mechanic, Joe Grey had grown from kittenhood exposed to the insides of every possible motor-driven vehicle, subjected to endless photographs in automotive magazines and to countless boring articles on the intricacies of car engines; as he drowsed in Clyde's lap, he was treated to interminable, mind-numbing hours of Clyde's detailed dissertations on the subtleties of matters mechanical.

He had a clear picture of this car's master cylinder, empty now where the fluid had drained away.

No brakes when the guy hit that curve. Zilch. Nada.

He found it most interesting that the broken plastic tube was not ragged as if it had worn through naturally, but was separated by a knife-sharp incision, a cut slicing straight through the hose.

He was debating whether to climb the canyon wall and check the skid marks on the road, to try to get a picture of just what had happened up there, when a noise from above made him crouch.

Someone was descending the cliff, moving downward unseen but noisy, crashing through the fog-blurred tangles in a frenzy, rattling bushes and dislodging stones.

Maybe somebody had heard the crash; maybe the other driver was coming to render assistance after all.

Except, this didn't sound like a man descending. Even a man in a great hurry wouldn't break so many bushes; a man hurrying down that steep bank would be more collected so that he, himself, wouldn't fall. This sounded more like a wild creature running and sliding full out, though the sound was so distorted in the fog that he couldn't really be sure what he was hearing. One minute the approach was loud enough to be a bear, the next instant the noise faded to nothing.

A bear. Right, Joe thought, disgusted. There hadn't been bears on the California coast for a century. A bobcat? No bobcat would follow and approach a wrecked car; no wild beast would do that. Warily, he leaped onto a boulder, ready to fight or run like hell, whichever the situation suggested.

Straining to see above him through the disturbed patches of water-sodden air, he wondered if it could be a horse.

But a horse, escaped from one of the small local stables, wouldn't choose, on its own, to descend the rough and fog-bound canyon. A horse, breaking through his paddock fence, would prefer the slopes of Hellhag Hill above, where the grass was rich and nourishing.

He was considering that perhaps a local horseman had heard the wreck and saddled up to come and render help, when the beast charged out of the mist-not one creature, but two.

Two huge dogs plunged straight at him. Panting and baying, they leaped up the boulder, scrabbling to reach him. Joe, hissing and snarling, prepared to bloody them both. Their eyes were wild, their white teeth flashing.

The boulder wasn't large. It protruded out of the cliff in such a way that if the dogs had thought about it, they'd have gone uphill again and jumped straight down on him. But they didn't think; they were all bark and gnashing teeth, fighting to reach him, their big mouths snapping so close that he could taste their doggy breath. He had raised his steel-tipped paw, ready to rake to ribbons those two invading noses, when he did a double take, studying their thin canine faces.

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.