hollows, so that the vehicle seemed to be simultaneously approaching and racing away. With this storm of sound, indecision flooded me, and for a moment I floundered in it.
Then I decided to go the way of the cat.
As I turned from the left-hand trail, the Hummer roared over the hilltop on the eastern flank of the hollow into which I had almost proceeded. For an instant it hung, suspended, as though weightless in a clock-stopped gap in time, headlights like twin wires leading a circus tightrope walker into midair, one searchlight stabbing straight up at the black tent of the sky. Time snapped across that empty synapse and flowed again: The Hummer tipped forward, and the front wheels crashed onto the hillside, and the rear wheels crossed the crest, and gouts of earth and grass spewed out from under its tires as it charged downhill.
A man whooped with delight, and another laughed. They were reveling in the hunt.
As the big wagon descended only fifty yards ahead of me, the hand-held searchlight swept the hollow.
I threw myself to the ground and rolled for cover. The rocky swale was hell on bones, and I felt my sunglasses crack apart in my shirt pocket.
As I scrambled to my feet, a beam as bright as an oak-cleaving thunderbolt sizzled across the ground on which I had been standing. Wincing at the glare, squinting, I saw the searchlight quiver and then sweep away to the south. The Hummer was not coming up the hollow toward me.
I might have stayed where I was, at the intersection of the trails, with the narrower point of the hill at my back, until the Hummer moved out of the vicinity, rather than risk encountering it in the next hollow. When four flashlights winked far back on the trail that I had followed to this point, however, I ceased to have the luxury of hesitation. I was beyond the reach of these men’s lights, but they were approaching at a trot, and I was in imminent danger of discovery.
When I rounded the point of the hill and entered the hollow to the west of it, the cat was still there, as though waiting for me. Presenting its tail to me, it scampered away, though not so fast that I lost sight of it.
I was grateful for the stone under me, in which I could not leave betraying footprints — and then I realized that only fragments of my broken sunglasses remained in my shirt pocket. As I ran, I fingered my pocket and felt one bent stem and a jagged piece of one lens. The rest must have scattered on the ground where I had fallen, at the fork in the trail.
The four searchers were sure to spot the broken frames. They would divide their forces, two men to each hollow, and they would come after me harder and faster than ever, energized by this evidence that they were closing on their quarry.
On the far side of this hill, out of the vale where I had barely escaped the searchlight, the Hummer began to climb again. The shriek of its engine rose in pitch, swelled in volume.
If the driver paused on this grassy hilltop to survey the night once more, I would run undetected beneath him and away. If instead he raced across the hill and into this new hollow, I might be caught in his headlights or pinned by a searchlight beam.
The cat ran, and I ran.
As it sloped down between dark hills, the hollow grew wider than any that I had traveled previously, and the rocky swale in the center widened, too. Along the verge of the stone path, the tall cordgrass and the other brush bristled thicker than elsewhere, evidently watered by a greater volume of storm runoff, but the vegetation was too far to either side to cast even a faint dappling of moonshadows over me, and I felt dangerously exposed. Furthermore, this broad declivity, unlike those before it, ran as straight as a city street, with no bends to shield me from those who might enter it in my wake.
On the highlands, the Hummer seemed to have come to a halt once more. Its grumble drained away in the sluicing breeze, and the only engine sounds were mine: the rasp and wheeze of breathing, heartbeat like a pounding piston.
The cat was potentially fleeter than I — wind on four feet; it could have vanished in seconds. For a couple of minutes, however, it paced me, staying a constant fifteen feet ahead, pale gray or pale beige, a mere ghost of a cat in the moonglow, occasionally glancing back with eyes as eerie as seance candles.
Just when I began to think that this creature was purposefully leading me out of harm’s way, just as I began to indulge in one of those orgies of anthropomorphizing that make Bobby Halloway’s brain itch, the cat sped away from me. If that dry rocky wash had been filled with a storm gush, the tumbling water could not have outrun this feline, and in two seconds, three at most, it disappeared into the night ahead.
A minute later, I found the cat at the terminus of the channel. We were in the dead end of a blind hollow, with exposed grassy hills rising steeply on three sides. They were so steep, in fact, that I could not scale them quickly enough to elude the two searchers who were surely pursuing on foot. Boxed in. Trapped.
Driftwood, tangled balls of dead weeds and grass, and silt were mounded at the end of the wash. I half expected the cat to give me an evil Cheshire grin, white teeth gleaming in the gloom. Instead, it scampered to the pile of debris and slinked-wriggled into one of many small gaps, disappearing again.
This
Hastily I climbed the nine-foot-long, three-foot-high slope of packed debris, which sagged and rattled and crunched but held beneath me. It was all drifted against a grid of steel bars, which served as a vertical grate across the mouth of a culvert set into the side of the hill.
Beyond the grate was a six-foot-diameter concrete drain between anchoring concrete buttresses. It was apparently part of a flood-control project that carried storm water out of the hills, under the Pacific Coast Highway, into drains beneath the streets of Moonlight Bay, and finally to the sea.
A couple of times each winter, maintenance crews would clear the trash away from the grate to prevent water flow from being completely impeded. Clearly, they had not been here recently.
Inside the culvert, the cat meowed. Magnified, its voice echoed with a new sepulchral tone along the concrete tunnel.
The openings in the steel-bar grid were four-inch squares, wide enough to admit the supple cat but not wide enough for me. The grate extended the width of the opening, from buttress to buttress, but it didn’t reach all the way to the top.
I swung legs-first and backward through the two-foot-high gap between the top of the grate and the curved ceiling of the drain. I was grateful that the grid had a headrail, for otherwise I would have been poked and gouged painfully by the exposed tops of the vertical bars.
Leaving the stars and the moon behind, I stood with my back to the grate, peering into absolute blackness. I had to hunch only slightly to keep from bumping my head against the ceiling.
The smell of damp concrete and moldering grass, not entirely unpleasant, wafted from below.
I eased forward, sliding my feet. The smooth floor of the culvert had only a slight pitch. After just a few yards, I stopped, afraid I would blunder into a sudden drop-off and wind up dead or broken-backed at the bottom.
I withdrew the butane lighter from a pocket of my jeans, but I was reluctant to strike a flame. The light flickering along the curved walls of the culvert would be visible from outside.
The cat called again, and its radiant eyes were all that I could see ahead. Guessing at the distance between us, judging by the angle at which I looked down upon the animal, I deduced that the floor of the huge culvert continued at an increased — but not drastic — slope.
I proceeded cautiously toward the lambent eyes. When I drew close to the creature, it turned away, and I halted at the loss of its twin beacons.
Seconds later it spoke again. Its green gaze reappeared and fixed unblinking on me.
Edging forward once more, I marveled at this odd experience. All that I had witnessed since sundown — the theft of my father’s body, the battered and eyeless corpse in the crematorium, the pursuit from the mortuary — was incredible, to say the least, but for sheer strangeness, nothing equaled the behavior of this small descendant of tigers.
Or maybe I was making a lot more of the moment than it deserved, attributing to this simple house cat an awareness of my plight that it didn’t actually possess.
Maybe.
Blindly, I came to another mound of debris smaller than the first. Unlike the previous heap, this one was damp. The flotsam squished beneath my shoes, and a sharper stench rose from it.
