The snipping sounds did what fingernails didn’t.
In an instant, Max was face-to-face with a huge black fanged head.
He froze, still crouched in place. Opened a bare hand and hoped the scent would waft into the massive black nostrils only inches from his own masked nostrils.
The panther snuffled noisily at his hand, at his hidden face. Max stood as slowly as he could, inch by inch.
The panther rubbed absently on one stiffening leg. Max stroked his head. He unfastened the huge leather collar and leash he carried coiled around his neck—his cat burglar garb didn’t have the secret pockets that the Cloaked Conjuror’s did. He slipped it as softly as a wish around the beast’s neck, took a deep breath, and was rewarded with a short purr.
He began walking, and the panther, reacting to previous training, walked with him.
The sixty yards to the paloverde thicket that concealed the black van seemed the longest of his life. There was not only the panther stalking beside him, who might balk at any moment, but the open desert where he and it made such obvious targets.
The guard would be coming by here soon, but Max didn’t dare run, or look back.
They passed as if on parade, man and cat, until the stunted trees, gathered like an inkblot, were close enough to absorb them into their safety and shadow.
CC stood at the gaping van doors, patting the carpeted floor of a cage. “Up,” his mechanical voice rasped.
As the panther leaped into the cage, CC swung the door shut and Max closed the van doors as softly as he could.
It was not softly enough.
“Hey!” a distant voice objected.
They scrambled for the front of the van, CC’s cape flying around his figure.
A powerful flashlight beam caught Max’s mask full on, just before he leaped into the van’s driver’s seat where the keys were still in the ignition.
The engine growled into life, generating an echo of growls from the enclosures behind them.
“Stop!” the guard was shouting, his voice vibrating from his sand-pounding pursuit.
Max gunned the motor, spraying gravel, and drove back into the desert, soon leaving everything behind him but sagebrush.
Behind his ever-present mask, CC laughed. “This was a kick. I don’t get out much. I’m glad you forced me to come along. But why did you want to take the panther as well? It complicated everything.”
“It was a performing animal too. It craves more of a life than retirement, no matter how cushy. I figure you can always use a good cat.”
“But did you ever figure out who took Osiris and why?”
Max stared into the desert vistas passing through the stabbing spotlights of the van’s headlamps. “The Synth was sending you a message all right. It was a spite crime. You would never have seen Osiris again. They sold the animal to Van Burkleo for a few hundred, no questions asked, expecting it to be dead meat in days.”
CC growled through his mask, a sound of disgust that was echoed by one of the big cats. “Why wasn’t he?”
“The Synth didn’t reckon on Van Burkleo’s vanity. I checked up on him and his widow. Van Burkleo was born in July. He was a Leo, astrologically. His wife’s birth name was Linda. She reinvented herself as Leonora after she married him. Like a lot of hunters, Cyrus Van Burkleo identified with his prey; even the women of big-game hunters drip with pricey gold charms of lions and tigers and bears. Then along comes a leopard named Osiris, an unintentional tribute to the mighty hunter’s first name. He probably intended to keep it as a mascot.”
“That didn’t suit the purpose of the Synth.”
“No, and I suspect they had an agent here at the ranch to see to that, but Granger charged in and changed everything.”
“If the big-game people identify with their prey, why kill it?”
“Some people need to conquer any creatures big enough to kill them. I’ve always thought they’re out to find, track, and silence the fear inside themselves. Or maybe it’s the eternal independence of the Other they’re out to kill. They’re like the worm Ouroboros, swallowing their own mortality.”
“Whew. That’s way too philosophical for me. I’m just glad to get Osiris back.”
CC looked over his shoulder. “Those two are nosing each other through the bars like a couple of small-town gossips over a fence. They make a handsome pair. I wonder what they’re communicating.”
“At least they get along. I’m wondering something else: what the guard will make of his glimpse of my face wearing your mask.”
“Shoot! Do you think I’ll be fingered for this kidnapping?”
“I doubt he got a good enough look to be sure what he saw, but maybe we’ll start some leopardmen rumors. I’d like to shake up the Synth.”
“Fine. You do that. I’ll get back to business as usual. Osiris will be happy to get back to his usual digs. We’ll have to rig a separate setup for, for…what should I call the black one?”
Pulling off the mask, Max smiled and thought of Midnight Louie.
“Call him Lucky.”
Tailpiece Midnight Louie Enjoys Being a Pussycat
There was a time when I dreamed of being a Lord of the Jungle. Or the Plain. Or whatever.
I pictured myself away from the Big V, this urban Neon Jungle in the desert, and out where the Wildlife commences, where the lion and the wildebeest play. (In the lion’s case, it is probably playing with its food, which is a wildebeest.)
I contemplated lolling about the veldt under a spreading baobab tree while Midnight Louise prowled docilely off to round up some food on the hoof for my royal appetite.
My claws, the size of jumbo shrimp, would pulse in and out of their gigantic sheaths.
A few worshipful cubs would gambol about the edges of my magnificent eight-hundred-pound frame stretched out to its full twelve or thirteen feet. A flick of my powerful aft appendage would drive clouds of flies into retreat, too insignificant and frightened to come to rest upon my handsome hide.
Oops. My handsome hide.
Maybe a handsome hide is not a biological advantage in this modern world.
Now that I have seen the lives of Jungle Lords up close and personal, I understand why they are such an endangered species and why my subcompact version of lordliness is mostly endangered by overbreeding. From what I have seen, Beauty and the Beast are a combination that results in imprisonment and premature death.
Even those lordly ones with glamor jobs in the show ring or onstage are in danger of being downsized in their old age and thrown into the brutal arena for the amusement of a bunch of feeble humans whose IQ is about the caliber of the firearms they carry.
Although we pocket-size domestic varieties also suffer neglect and abuse, at least we are too small to make into rugs! And our mugs would look pretty ridiculous on some Great White Hunter’s wall.
Thank Bast for small favors, of which I guess I am one.
I will never wish to be King of the Beasts again.
I have just come to this momentous resolve when my Miss Temple wanders into our bedroom and finds me sprawled catty-corner across the comforter. (Little does she know that I have barely beaten her back to domicile, sweet domicile. Thanks to the hysterical Miss Leonora leaving the Storm door wide open for any footsore souls in need of a discreet ride, Louise and I slipped into the backseat and hid on the floor.)
I expect to be gently moved aside, but instead she sits on the end of the bed and regards me with what I can only describe as wistful fondness.
“Oh, Louie.” She sighs. (The dames are always sighing around me, and do not doubt that I take full credit for it.)
“Apparently,” she begins in a confessional tone—you would think that I was Matt Devine—“apparently I have not been a responsible pet owner.” (She has a pet? News to me. This I must look into. I do not like interlopers.)