Authors: Shirley Rousseau Murphy
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 carâto say nothing of starving them bone-thinâdeserved 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 handsomeâas 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 muttsârealized 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 tailâmore than just a two-inch stubâthe 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 wallâthey 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.
I
T'S GOING
to be hard to dump these mutts,
Joe Grey thought. They clung to him like road tar. When he tried to drive them back into the ravine they nearly smothered him with slurping kisses. Even his lancing claws no longer deterred them. They licked their noses where he'd slapped them and bounced around him like a pair of wind-up toys, fawning and trampling him, grinning with the delighted assumption that he was their dearest friend; they were so stupid and innocent that even if he could have ditched them and made his escape, something within Joe rebelled. He knew he couldn't abandon them; puppies and young dogs have no more notion of how to find food for themselves than does a human baby.
Well, he'd take them home to Clyde. Let Clyde deal with the problem. Clyde would love the stupid mutts. And maybe they'd cheer up old Rube. Rube had been mourning the death of Barney, their golden retriever who had succumbed to cancer, for far too long.
So, okay, he'd take them home. But did they have to make such a scene? By the time he reached the road above Hellhag Canyon his fur was sopping from their affection.
Atop the cliff, the sea breeze came stronger, lifting and thinning the mist. The narrow two-lane, clearing of fog, glistened wet and black. In the watery sunshine, the pups looked even more skeletal, every rib casting a curved shadow, their cheeks so deeply sunken that he could see each indentation of their canine skulls. Turning his back on them, he studied the slick black road.
Where the car had gone over the edge, the earthen shoulder was scarred raw, rocks tumbled, bushes broken and uprooted. Trotting along the verge watching for the man they had scented below, for a stranger to suddenly appear climbing out of the canyon, Joe could find no skid marks on the dark macadam. It looked, just as Joe had guessed, as if the driver, when his car hit the second curve, had no brakes at all.
Examining the wet paving, he found several splatters of brake fluid pooled like oil. He had to drive the pups away, cuffing and slapping them to keep them from licking the spills. He didn't know if brake fluid was poisonous like radiator coolant, but he didn't care to find out. It was not until he trotted around the second bend that he smelled burnt rubber.
Before him, S-shaped trails snaked across the asphalt, and a larger puddle of brake fluid gleamed. Joe imagined the driver stamping repeatedly on the pedal, trying to slow, the fluid spurting out until it was gone.
Pumping the pedal, jerking the wheel, he'd have hit that second curve like a missile, the car swerving back and forth, gaining speed on the downhill, hitting the shoulder to plow up half a ton of dirt and flip a double gainer straight into Hellhag Canyon.
He could find no sign of the second car, no trace of a second set of skid marks.
He wondered if the driver had braked suddenly to avoid not an oncoming car but the pups themselves looming in the fog.
Except, the horn had honked
before
the skid, not at the same moment, as one would expect if the driver were startled by the sudden appearance of animals in his headlights.
Crossing the road, Joe headed up Hellhag Hill through the tall, wet grass. He was halfway to the crest when he realized the pups had left him.
Rearing above the wild oats and barley, he saw them far below, creeping along the edge of the highway, staring up the hill white-eyed and quivering.
Joe didn't know what was wrong with them; something on the hill terrified them. He stood tall on his hind paws, observing them, smiling a sly cat grin.
Now would be the perfect time to ditch them. Take off across Hellhag Hill and leave them cowering down there.
A practical voice told him,
Lose them, Joe. Lose the silly mutts now, while they're distracted. You'd be stupid to take them home, they're sure to have mange, fleas, ringworm. They'll give it to the household cats and to poor Rube, and he's too old to fight a case of mange. Dump them. Dump them here. Now. Do it now.
But a kinder voice whispered,
Come on, Joe. Have a heart. Clyde can take them to the pound, where they'll be fed and safe, not running along the highway. Even a dog deserves a little compassion.
Ditch them. They'll learn to fend for themselves, live out of garbage cans. There's that trailer park up Hellhag Hill; some dumb human will feed them.
And above this internal argument, he kept wondering about the dead man, and about the unseen stranger in the canyon, wondering where he had come from, and why he didn't hike on into the village and report the wreck. Joe hadn't seen the guy come up out of the canyon.
He wondered how long before someone else would come along the road, notice the torn-up shoulder, take a look down into the canyon, and call 911. Get the cops and a wrecker down there. Meanwhile, below him on the road, the pups crept along shivering with fear. Poor dumb beasts.
Well, he'd take them home. Clyde would love them. They'd give him something to do: he'd feed them, get them in shape, have
them vetted, walk them and bathe them, worm them, fawn over them. Find homes for them. He'd be so proud when they were sleek and had collars and homes of their own.
Right. And when did Clyde ever give away an animal? He won't find homes for them. He'll keep the beasts. You and Rube and the household cats will be sharing your nice peaceful pad with a pair of wild-mannered elephants. Think of poor Rube, heâ¦
Sirens screamed from the village, and a rescue unit appeared around the farthest curve, moving fast and followed by a black-and-white. The pups stared around wildly and fled into the drainage ditch, but when a second police unit came scorching toward them, the pups chose the lesser of two evils and bolted up the hill to cower whimpering against Joe.
Joe couldn't see much with the pups milling around. He glimpsed four officers disappearing down the hill: he thought it was Wendell, Brennan, Davis, and Hendricks, following two paramedics with their stretchers and black bags. He could hear the officers' muffled voices mixed with the crackle of the police radio. The fog had broken into wispy scarves; now, beyond the cliff, the vast sweep of the Pacific Ocean gleamed up at him in the sun's first rays, the white surf crashing against the rocks. Off to the north, the red rooftops of the village caught the sun's light, too, and he could hear the distant, thin chime of the courthouse clock striking seven. The morning smelled of sea and iodine, and of coffee and frying sausages mixed, nearer at hand, with the pungent stink of wet dog. When, somewhere on the village streets, a little boy shouted, the pups cocked their floppy ears, whining and panting. Their eager innocence touched something tender in Joe Grey. “You poor, dumb puppies. So damn lonely.”
They slobbered and drooled on him, so starved for affection that they made a cat barf. Gently he stroked their wet black noses with his velveted paw.
If Clyde takes them to the pound, they'll be locked in a cage.
They'll be fine in a cage; dogs have nothing like a cat's burning need
for freedom, they'll thrive in a nice warm kennel. Dogs love structure. Look at police trackers, always on leash or on command.
But his other voice said,
Pound dogs are gassed, Joe. Euthanized. Sent west.
Ignoring both voices, he moved swiftly toward home, the pups pressing so close that their legs were like a moving forest through which he had to navigate. He wondered, would the cops examine the wreck carefully enough to find the leaky brake line? Lieutenants Brennan and Wendell might very well miss that damning bit of evidence; Wendell had just recently made lieutenant, but he was better with street crime than with the subtleties of a possible murder scene.
But the new female officer, Davis, was thorough. Joe had watched these uniforms work a crime scene so often that he felt like part of the force.
The trouble was, they didn't know this was a crime scene. It looked like an accident that could too easily have happened in this early, foggy dawn.
Now, with the road quiet again, the pups left him, racing down the hill and glancing worriedly behind them.
“Get back up here, get off the road. The ambulance will be coming back. What's with you two? What are you afraid of?”
They stared up at him, whining.
“Come on, dummies. Get up here. There's nothing here to scare you, nothing but maybe a stray cat in the grass.” Nothing but a few rats and ground squirrels, and the half dozen stray cats that had taken up residence some days before, following the quakes, appearing suddenly, a clowder of thin, wild beasts so fearful they would run from a bird shadow swooping overhead. No pup could be afraid of them. Dulcie said humans who abandoned cats ought to be stripped naked and dropped without foodâwithout money and credit cardsâin the icy wilds of Tierra del Fuego, and see how they liked being abandoned.
Joe thought those cats had probably come from the trailer
park, a transient human community of the less-affluent snowbirds who trekked out to California in the winter to escape the blizzards of the Midwest. Usually those people, if they brought pets along, took care of their animals, but once in a while you got some lowlifes.
But Dulcie said these cats were too terrified of humans to have ever lived with people. She thought they were feral cats, the products of several generations of strays, gone as wild as foxes.
He wondered what Dulcie would say about his dragging home the pups.
He could just see her green eyes blazing with amazement.
Puppies, Joe? These aren't puppies, they're monsters.
Dulcie was not afraid of dogsâshe could intimidate any dog in Molena Point and often didâbut after their recent encounter with the black voodoo cat, she'd had enough of involvement with any fellow creature. And just then, having appropriated Clyde's backyard for her own purposes, she'd take a dim view of two giant puppies plunging around barking and whining and getting in her way.
For two weeks she had spent every daylight hourâit seemed to Joeâand most of her evenings, crouched atop Clyde's back fence within a mass of concealing maple leaves, peering into the windows of the Greenlaw mansion, which stood on the big double lot behind Clyde's cottage. Clyde called Dulcie's preoccupation,
eavesdropping
; he told her she'd grown unspeakably nosy even for a cat. But Dulcie, staring in through Lucinda Greenlaw's lace curtains, was convinced that something in the old Victorian house wasn't right.
“Of course something isn't right,” Clyde had snapped at her. “Lucinda's husband just died. Lucinda's suddenly a widow. Of course life isn't rightâdon't you think she's grieving! Cats can be so unfeeling!”
“Why would she grieve?” Dulcie had hissed, her ears tight to her head, her green eyes fiery. “Shamas Greenlaw was nothing but
a womanizer. Going off for weeks, leaving Lucinda with practically no money while he took his expensive trips, and every time with a different bimbo. Why would she grieve! She's lucky to be rid of him.”
Dulcie didn't hold with the shades-of-gray school of moral behavior. Shamas Greenlaw had been sampling the herd, and Dulcie called it like it was.
Shamas had been dead for two weeks, drowned in a boating accident off Seattleâleaving his current squeeze on the boat with Shamas's nephew, Newlon Greenlaw; Shamas's cousin, Samuel Fulman; and Winnie and George Chambers, an older Molena Point couple. Probably, Dulcie said, leaving the girlfriend deeply grieving as she contemplated an end to the money Shamas had lavished upon her.
“Anyway,” she'd told Clyde, “Lucinda is doing more than grieving. Something else is the matter.”
“And how did you arrive at this very perceptive conclusion?”
“You don't need to be sarcastic,” the little cat had hissed. “And
I
don't need to listen! If you're not interested in my opinion, Clyde Damen, then stuff it. I don't need to come in here and be insulted. I have my own home, which is far nicer and more pleasant than this bachelor horror.” And she had stormed out through Joe's cat door and up the street, her striped tail lashing.
Joe had looked after her, grinning. But Clyde had sat at the kitchen table cradling his cold coffee, scowling and hurt; looking, that early morning, like a particularly unfortunate example of homelessness, a soul in need of extensive assistance, his short, dark hair sticking up every which way, his ancient jogging shorts threadbare and wrinkled, his sweatshirt sporting three holes where it had gotten caught in the washer. His expression, as he stared after Dulcie, was one of deep puzzlement.
Clyde could mouth off at Joe, and get just what he gave, and that was okay. But he didn't know how to respond when sweet little Dulcie snapped back at him.
It had taken Dulcie a long time, after she and Joe found they could speak, before she would talk to Clyde. Then, there had been a far longer interval of mutual good manners between cat and human, before Dulcie had the chutzpah to return Clyde's smart-mouthed remarks in kind.
Now, leaving the jungle-tall grass of Hellhag Hill, Joe called the pups to him for the last time as he crossed a narrow residential street, heading back among humans. He would not raise his voice again to give them a command until he was sheltered within his own walls. The pups bolted up to him, wagging and panting, happy to leave the wild slope.
“Idiots,” he muttered. But maybe he understood their fear; sometimes when he crossed Hellhag Hill, the fur along his own back stood up as rigid as a punk haircut.
Joe didn't know what caused his unease, but once when he was hunting high atop Hellhag Hill, he'd imagined he heard voices beneath the earth, and that same night he'd dreamed that Hellhag Hill vanished from under his paws, the earth falling away suddenly into a black and bottomless cavern.
He had awakened mewling with fear, as frightened as a helpless kitten.
Ahead of him, one of the puppies stopped, sat down on the sidewalk, and began to scratch. The other pup copied him, nibbling at an itchy tailâcausing Joe to itch all over, to imagine himself already flea-ridden, covered with hungry little freeloaders glad to move to fatter environs, parent and grandparent and baby fleas burrowing deep into his clean silver fur.