A muffled sound in the dark corner behind him.
He spun.
It was Katy. She was tied up, arms over her head, suspended from a hook on a rafter. In the flashlight beam her eyes were wide and wild above her duct-taped mouth. Her face was streaked with mud and dried blood.
He went to her and peeled off the tape.
She pulled in a ragged breath. “Keno! He’s outside!”
“Katy, take a breath.”
She was tied with fishing line, looped over the hook. He began to work at the line on her wrists.
“He heard your truck and he tied and gagged me! He took the dart rifle and ran outside. He wants to — ”
Something hard came down on the back of Louis’s neck. He tumbled forward, almost falling into Katy. He dropped the flashlight and started to grope for it but suddenly he heard Keno working a rifle mechanism. The bastard was trying to load another dart.
Louis scrambled to his feet and suddenly a beam of light beam came up behind him — Katy had worked one hand free and was holding the flashlight. It washed Keno in white light. He stood, holding the large sighted rifle. His hands were shaking, his clothes were caked with mud and his face was dripping with sweat.
“Freeze!” Louis shouted, leveling the Glock at him.
“No. No, you don’t understand,” Keno said.
“Drop the damn gun!”
“I need to do this,” Keno said. “I need to save her. I need to save her now.”
“Drop the fucking gun!”
“Louis!” Katy said. “Don’t shoot him. He’s — ”
Keno got the dart chambered.
Damn it! He didn’t want to shoot this guy, not in front of Katy but the bastard wasn’t leaving him any choice.
“Louis, he’s trying to save Aunt Betty!” Katy cried. “He thought the panthers would — ”
Keno started to raise the rifle.
Louis fired.
The bullet caught Keno in the shoulder and spun him around. Keno dropped the rifle and fell, landing half outside the door.
Katy let out a strangled cry. Louis went to Keno and snatched up the rifle. He had aimed only to wound, hitting Keno in the shoulder. It was enough to bring him down but he wasn’t going to die.
A howl. Deep and pained, coming from Grace.
“Louis! Untie me! Quick!” Katy yelled.
He started back to Katy but saw the belt hanging on the wall and grabbed one of the knives. He had barely sliced through the fishing line before Katy yanked away and ran to the cage.
Louis used a piece of the fishing line to tie Keno to the door latch. Keno looked up at him then hung his head.
“Louis!”
He turned to Katy. She was crouched next to the cage, holding the flashlight on Grace. He got his first good look at the panther.
She was sprawled on her side in the small cage, all four legs out, her body heaving with labored breaths. The cage was littered with feces, small bones and uneaten food of some kind. Grace’s coat was matted with brown mud.
He went to Katy’s side.
“How did you find me?” Katy asked.
“I got worried and hunted down Gary,’ Louis said. “We checked all the abandoned camps.”
She looked at him, her face half-lit in the light. “Gary? Where is he?”
“Keno got him with the dart,” Louis said. “He’s outside, twenty, thirty feet from the shack.”
Katy nodded, her face slick with sweat. “Get me Keno’s rifle.”
“What?”
“Just get it!”
Louis got the rifle and brought it to Katy. When she stood up, she wavered. Louis held out a hand but she brushed it away and took the rifle.
Grace let out a bellow filled with pain.
“Take this and hold it so I can see her,” she said. Her hand was shaking as she gave him the flashlight.
Louis took the flashlight and trained it on the panther. Katy took two steps back. Her eyes were filled with tears. She raised the rifle.
“Katy, wait! Don’t! We can take her — ”
“She’s in pain, damn it!”
Grace raised her head, her eyes coming up to Katy.
Katy fired.
A sharp pop!
Grace’s head fell hard and her yellow eyes went blank.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Louis stared at the motionless panther. He didn’t even realize Katy had moved away until he felt something brush his shoulder. She was holding a blanket.
“I need your help,” she said.
“What?”
“There’s a Coleman lantern in here somewhere. Find it and bring it over to the cage.”
“Katy — ”
“Just do it, please!”
She knelt and untied the wire on the cage door. Louis swung the flashlight around the room until he found the lantern and some matches. He lit the lantern and brought it to Katy.
In the hard light of the lantern he got a better look at Grace. What he had thought was brown mud was dried blood, concentrated around her haunches. There was a small pool of fresh pink blood near her tail.
Katy swung the cage door open and ducked inside, grabbing Grace’s front legs.
“Help me get her out onto the blanket,” Katy said. “Take her back legs but be gentle.”
“Katy, what are you doing?”
“We have to get her out of the cage so we have room to work.”
“Work?”
Katy looked up at Louis, her eyes bright with a mixture of fear and — good god — excitement.
“Grace is in labor,” she said.
Louis glanced back at Grace. Now he could see the bulge in her belly. And labor explained the fresh blood.
Katy was examining the panther, pressing on her abdomen. “She’s too weak to do this herself,” she said. “We need to help her. There’s only one kitten.”
Louis’s mind started spinning with options. Move the truck up closer and load Grace in, use the CB to call for a chopper or something.
“Katy, we can get someone here in an hour,” he said.
Her head shot up. “No!” she said. “We can’t wait. I don’t know what the tranquilizer will do to the fetus. Grace and the kitten could be dead in an hour.”
Katy looked back to the panther. “The amniotic sac is visible but Grace can’t push it out.” She shook her head. “Damn, I don’t have gloves or antiseptic, I don’t have any oxytocin. damn it…”
Louis knelt, setting the lantern on the wood floor. “All right,” he said. “What do you need me to do?”
Katy gave him a wavering smile. “Bring me the knife and see if you can find a clean towel or something. And I need a piece of that fishing line.”
Louis rose and used the flashlight to do a quick scan of the shack. The place was decrepit and filthy, with nothing but some fast food wrappers and some jugs of bottled water. He finally found Keno’s knapsack. It held some toiletries and some men’s underwear.
He cut off some fishing line and took it and a pair of blue boxer shorts to Katy. She didn’t even look up as she took them.
“Hang on, Grace,” Katy whispered.
Louis could see a small greenish sac protruding from beneath Grace’s tail. He shut his eyes. A weird memory flashed to his brain, that day back in the police academy when they had breezed through the part in the textbook about delivering babies.
When he opened his eyes, Katy was carefully pulling out the sac. He watched, fascinated, as she wrapped the kitten in the blue shorts and broke the sac. She severed the cord with the knife and used an edge of the shorts to clean the fluid and tissue from the kitten’s mouth and nose.
“You need to tie the cord,” she said, nodding to the piece of fishing line.
“What?”
“Cut off a small piece of the line and tie it, close to the kitten’s belly.”
Louis knelt, sliced off a piece of line and carefully tied the umbilical cord. He sat back on his haunches, watching the kitten.
“It’s not breathing,” he said.
“I know,” Katy said. She began to rub the kitten briskly with the shorts. She rose suddenly, still cradling it. “There’s water somewhere in here. Where it is?”