Next I bend down and explore the side of the bike crushed against the ground. The scent of oozing cactus juice is even stronger than spilled gasoline at this level.
I find another saddlebag, a twin to the first, crushed flat under the motorcycle’s metal side. I sniff for blood, but can’t overcome the gasoline reek. It is like trying to smell lilies of the valley when gardenias bloom next door.
There is a sudden scrape behind me and the sand shifts under my feet as I leap two feet into the air, execute a 180-turn like Mr. Max’s car, and face the wilderness.
I make out a silhouette cresting the dry wash.
Oh, Great-grandmother Graymalkin! It is a lone coyote.
Now, eating nightly is a serious matter to this breed, which has been hunted to hoped-for extinction by humans and yet still manages to scrounge a living from the few uncivilized acres of desert left to its kind.
Actually, my money is on the coyote in this primal battle, but in these circumstances I cannot afford to let my finer feelings stand in the way of my survival skills.
And a coyote is at least twice my size with teeth at least six times the size of mine.
I know from many street brawls that it is not size but attitude that determines who comes out on top. However,an opponent who is perpetually starving to death and who can only look on one as fresh meat is an extreme case it would be better to avoid than get physical with.
So I prance sideways, my back up and fur fluffed to porcupine fullness.
The coyote tilts his feral head in the universal canine gesture of puzzlement. I am sure that the hint of quills is not welcome to a desert-living breed who must grow up on regular snoutfuls of cactus spines.
Either cowed or simply shocked by my performance, he edges down into the wash a good ten yards away from me and soon is nosing at the recumbent form of the former Kathleen O’Connor.
Much as I would like to tell Miss Temple (could I tell Miss Temple anything) that I had witnessed Kitty the Cutter being eaten by coyotes for the sin of persecuting Mr. Matt and Mr. Max, I cannot allow the death scene and the corpus delecti to be tampered with before the ambulance comes.
“Ah, Mr. Coyote, that is not prey for you. The body is several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from you. It is always bad policy to eat your betters. They tend to retaliate. Not that I speak from personal experience, mind you.”
He does not even lift his head at my whimpered protests, but paws at Miss Kitty’s dead hand. There is no doubt that it is dead, for if it were not, no way would it sit still for playing patty-cakes with a coyote.
Mr. Coyote snuffles disgustingly at the corpse, then lifts his head to sniff the scents emanating from me.
There is no way to turn off my natural perfume, any more than I could deactivate the hypersensitive nostrils on a canine creature.
So it is time to let this bozo get a big whiff of my attitude.
“You do not want to mix it up with me,” I warn him in a low growl. “I am not your usual lost domestic feline. I am big-time muscle in Las Vegas, and I am out here on a case. Mess with me and you will lose a major sense.”
His hackles bristle in response and there we are facing off.
It is in the silence that holds while we bluff each other with our badness that a thin, watery wail pierces the darkness like a cactus needle.
First I think siren, but this time the dog is ahead of me. Its ears prick, its head lifts and off it goes bounding along the meandering trail of the dry wash.
I bound after. Ouch! The ground is littered with Christmas tree needles if a Christmas tree was ever a saguaro cactus. Some are the length of knitting needles!
I limp after, Mr. Coyote being a speedball who can use years of canny desert experience to avoid the prickliest pear plants.
I arrive to see him rubbing his nose in the sand and pawing at it with both front feet.
There is a puddle of shadow on the ground that the moonbeams do not deign to illuminate and every raised hair on my shoulder blades tells me that it is Miss Midnight Louise and that she is dazed or injured, or else she would be standing upright and spitting like a kettle at 4:00 P.M. high tea.
Chapter 36
… Neo-Neon Nightmare
A high, thin keening ripped through the darkness.
Max had run the car off the road, turned off the lights and the engine, and waited.
The siren grew louder and shriller until it sounded like an alley cat in heat. The flashing red and blue lights of the squad car leading the ambulance slowed at a distant mile marker, then spurted ahead.
Max grew impatient when the squad car stopped, a pale blot gleaming like a beached whale carcass on the desert darkness.
“There, you idiots,” he whispered. Trained by both his apparent and his secret vocations to precise observation, his eye had already detected and pinpointed the darker patterns at the bottom of the wash that were a motorcycle and a body.
Soon, though, the officers and ambulance attendants were stumbling alongside the rim of the dry riverbed, their high-power flashlights illuminating mesquite bushes and prickly pears.
Finally the lights danced over the high-gloss sheen of a motorcycle flank. They converged in a clot, one man going back along the highway to direct the ambulance driver forward … for more efficient pickup of the victim, the body.
Everyone was scrambling down the incline now. One of the cops held them back while a pair of EMTs rushed to the blot that was Kathleen’s body. They bent over her, applying tests and remedies. The gurney was half carried, half rolled over the rugged terrain.
Max grunted soft appraisal. The major activity on the scene would obscure any traces he might have left, and with his unmarked soles they would be few.
The tire tracks his car laid on the asphalt as he had spun around wouldn’t erase. Come daylight, when an accident investigation team hit the scene, they’d implicate a car and driver in the outcome. His Maxima was history. He’d leave it at one of the designated drop sites, and walk away. One call, and it would be picked up minutes after he left it. Within hours, it would be in another part of the country getting crushed in an auto graveyard.
Max ran a hand over the passenger’s seat. He’d had this car longer than any for a long while. Temple had ridden in it several times. He’d miss it. Then his palm stroked several superficial slashes in the leather. On the other hand, the hitchhiking critter … Midnight Louie, maybe? … had scarred the upholstery beyond repair anyway.
Chapter 37
… Death Trip
“Get away!” I howl at the coyote.
He interrupts his pawing at the shadow of Midnight Louise to gaze at me, puzzled. Puzzlement is a canine characteristic we felines never descend to.
“This is not human carrion,” he half whimpers, half growls, “as you warned me away from before. This was a four-foot.”
I do not know if the word “carrion” or the verb “was” irritates me in Big Cat proportions.
Either way, I go screeching sideways at him, bouncing on my toes like Bruce Lee on hot coals, my coat hairs all at attention.
That is enough to back him off two steps. “Take it easy, little guy.”
And that is another incentive. I leap straight up, shivs out, and come down at an angle, extremities thrashing. I nick the nose.
“Hey!” The bozo buries his injured snout in the sand, his forefeet pawing at the sting.
While he is on his knees, I rocket past and kick sand in his eyes.
“No fair!” he whines.
While he is still on his knees and now blind, I leap again and land on his back, taking a good toothy grip on his hackles.
Now he springs straight up.
“Ow-ow-wow-wow-ow,” he cries.
He tries to buck me off like he was a bronco and I was an old cowhand, but this galoot has spurs on every limb and I use ‘em, digging in. I am going for a very big silver belt buckle here.