Game of Cages

quickness that comes from having a huge, hostile animal at my back, but I still had plenty of fear.

And I could hear the horse backing out. It didn’t have room to turn around quickly, but I still didn’t have a lot of time.

I dropped down on the other side of the wall, my weight pitching forward and my hands landing on something huge, soft, and cool right in front of me. It was another horse, this one dead and lying almost against the wall.

One of the front doors had been closed, and the other was scraping shut, cutting off my light and means of escape. I stumbled over the dead horse, half running, half falling toward the exit. I didn’t look back. If those hooves were coming toward me, I didn’t want to see it. I slipped through the doorway and sprawled in the mud just as Catherine slammed it shut.

The doors banged and jolted as the horse tried to kick them open. Catherine was knocked several inches away from them, then threw her shoulder against them again.

“Get something!” she yelled at me, and I jumped to my feet.

There was no way I could see to lock both doors—no bolt, no bar, no padlock. There was only a wooden catch, which I closed, but it was worn and fragile. It might not have held up in a strong windstorm, let alone a couple more kicks.

I turned, scanning the yard. What I needed was a truck or tractor I could drive up to the doors and block them with, but there wasn’t one nearby, and I couldn’t have gotten any of the cars in the lot through the fence.

Instead, I ran to the aluminum pen and cut off two lengths of pipe. As I ran back to Catherine, I shaved one end of each into a point, then staked them into the ground at the base of the doors.

Catherine stepped back carefully, ready to throw her body against the doors again if the stakes didn’t hold. I stood next to her with the same thought.

The stakes held, but the doors still wobbled with every kick. And damn, it was loud.

“That’s not secure enough,” Catherine said, and I agreed.

I cut and shaved two more stakes from the aluminum fence. I had a twinge of guilt at destroying someone else’s property, but I figured it was minor compared with what had happened to their two horses. I tossed them both to Catherine.

The doorway across the yard was built the same way, with two doors on two hinges each. With my ghost knife, I cut through the hinges on one of them and let it fall across my shoulders. I carried it across the mud, dropped it on its side, and tipped it against the staked door. Catherine drove the two stakes into the mud at its base, bracing it in place.

The thump of the doors slamming together must have startled the horse inside, because the steady bang bang bang of its kicks halted. We stepped back and surveyed our work again. Catherine turned to me. “Better,” she said. She lifted her forearm and tenderly laid her hand against it. Was she injured?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had a pitchfork in my hand, and maybe I could have stopped that horse without—”

“Ray, forget that shit. If you think I wanted you to kill that animal, you haven’t been paying attention.”

“No, I know that,” I said. “We would have been safer, though, if I’d been willing to go all out. If I hadn’t held back.”

“I’d rather be good than safe.”

With that, the conversation was over.

I crossed the yard and went into the stable the horse had come from. There was a trough filled with hay and two more dead animals. Both had their skulls crushed.

“A horse wouldn’t …” Catherine’s voice sounded tiny.

“Both of these have white marks, too.”

So, the sapphire dog fed on animals as well as people. Hopefully, no one kept any lions around.

We searched the other stables. We found three more dead horses and a dead woman. She was dressed in dirty coveralls, but she’d applied her makeup with extraordinary care. She’d even plucked her eyebrows and drawn them back on. Her neck was crooked—broken by a horse’s kick, maybe. And she had a white streak over her left ear.

Catherine searched her and produced a driver’s license. She was Lois Conner, just like the name above the entrance. She was forty-nine, and like me, she carried a single credit card. I stood watch in the doorway while Catherine finished. I didn’t have the stomach for another corpse. Instead, I stared at the braced stable door, watching it shudder under the trapped animal’s kicks. They were slowing and growing weaker as it tired.

“She’s been dead for hours,” Catherine said. Apparently, there was nothing else about her that mattered to us.

Beyond the last stable was a bungalow with an OFFICE sign over the door. Behind that was a house that looked like an uneven stack of wooden boxes. The office was locked up and dark. A single light shone in the house.

We searched the office first, just in case. I held my ghost knife ready, but we didn’t find anything.

The front door to the house was standing open. I entered first. We walked through the living room into a quiet little den with a sunken floor. The rooms were nicely furnished but filled with clutter: stacks of papers, pretty seashells, two dozen books all lying open and facedown on counters and coffee tables. Everything looked like it had been set in a random but convenient place and then forgotten.

Catherine got ahead of me and peeked into the hall. A light shone from a room at the far end, illuminating a body lying curled in the corner of the corridor floor. I caught her elbow and pulled her back. I was the one who was a little bit bulletproof. For once, she didn’t cringe at my touch.

I turned the body over. He had long, graying hair like a hippie cowboy. He’d been shot in the chest and had fallen with his face to the wall and died. If he had a white mark, I couldn’t see it.