The Cat Dancers cr-1

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Knock yourself out,” he said. “It’s not like I’m looking for a feature story in the Enquirer. You’ve basically answered my questions.”

  She nodded at him with a faintly triumphant smile. Shit, he thought. She just mouse-trapped me. Dr. Smiley. He grinned at her. “Okay. Nicely done.”

  “Thank you. And the real story is?”

  It was his turn to surprise her. “I can’t tell you anything else about this investigation,” he said. “It’s that sensitive, okay?”

  She blinked. He stared at her until she got it. “Oh,” she said. “Internal problem.”

  “I never said that, and that’s where we need to leave it,” he replied. “No offense intended.”

  “None taken. How can we help?”

  “Cat dancers,” he said. “Anything you can tease out of the local woodwork about that term might help. I’ll take rumors, hearsay, gossip, all the way to names and addresses. Anything.”

  “You really are nowhere on this, aren’t you,” she said. “Okay, I’ll get the guys to ask around.” She thought for a moment. “At least now we seem to have the requisite cat.”

  41

  Cam waited around for another hour while the ranger tried to surface more prints, and then, after putting both dogs in the truck, he went back to the headquarters of the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office and met with a Lieutenant Grayson, who headed up their Criminal Investigations department. He directly asked for their help in running down any information they could develop on the cat dancers story and any possible connections to White Eye Mitchell. He described the electric chair executions case, the bombing incident, and the fact that their prime suspect had committed suicide, but he did not allude to suspicions that police might be involved. Grayson, a tall, rangy individual in his fifties, took it all aboard and said they’d look into it, then asked whether Cam would mind if they checked back with Manceford County. Cam, “No problem,” and gave the lieutenant the appropriate phone numbers to get in touch with Bobby Lee.

  “We heard some talk about a mountain lion this morning,” Grayson said.

  Cam nodded. He’d forgotten how fast news could travel in a small county. He described the tracks and what the park ranger thought about them. He also mentioned Mary Ellen’s comment about the possibility that Cam had faked the tracks.

  “Mary Ellen’s good people,” Grayson said. “They get to listen to a lot of BS at that station. Tourists see the damnedest things: panthers, wolves, king cobras, grizzlies, and I don’t know what all.”

  “She gave me the official Park Service line in the office: Ain’t no panthers. Then later, she sort of hinted that that might not be true. Struck me as odd. She seems to be… nice.

  “She tell you what happened to her fiance, Joel Hatch?”

  “Knocking on the wrong door at the wrong time?”

  Grayson tapped a pen on the desk for a moment. “Brother Joel was a bit of a cowboy, especially for the Park Service. Really got into the sworn officer bit. TV cop wanna-be, in our opinion.”

  “Is that what got him shot?”

  “What got him shot was that he called in the meth lab, was told to wait for backup from us, and then talked his partner into doing a John Wayne. No surprise to any of us, but we all felt bad for Mary Ellen. And his partner.” He gave Cam a significant look. “Mary Ellen’s a special lady in this community, if you follow me?” he said.

  Caution received, Cam thought as he nodded.

  “They get any hairs from those prints?” Grayson asked.

  “I believe they did,” Cam said. He remembered the ranger going out to the SUV to get some evidence bags.

  “Good,” Grayson said. “We have some mounted specimens from the early nineteen hundreds here in town, in private hands. They can do a DNA comparison, see if we’re talking eastern or western panther. Or rabbit fur stretched over a dinner plate with bear claws glued to it. What’s the connection with White Eye in all this?”

  Cam hesitated. He was pretty sure that Grayson’s sudden shift in topic had been calculated, so he decided to take refuge behind the same line he’d given Mary Ellen Goode.

  “There’s more to this case than I’m allowed to talk about,” he told the lieutenant.

  “No shit,” Grayson said with an amused look on his face.

  Cam smiled sheepishly. “Best thing is probably for your boss to talk to my boss. That way, I’m not going to wander too far off the reservation with what I say or don’t say. Personally, I think Mitchell might know something about this cat dancer story, although he says he’s never heard of such a thing.”

  “Nor have I,” Grayson said. “Not to mention that that would be a damn fool thing for any man to try with a panther.”

  “Exactly. This whole thing is probably a dead lead.”

  “Except for the fact that we have you coming all the way out here from Manceford County, asking around about mountain lions, and suddenly we have what looks like the first confirmed evidence of a panther in many years. Quite a coincidence there, and I assume you feel the same way we all do about coincidences.”

  “I do,” Cam said. “There is one thing, though.” He described his casual conversation with the two deputies in the Waffle House, and his suspicion that they actually might know something, too. Grayson made a note, said he knew who they were and that he’d pull that string.

  Cam thanked him. “Like I said, we’re more than a little bit behind the power curve on this one. And we have feds in our hair just for grins.”

  “Is there just possibly an IA angle on this deal?” Grayson asked.

  Cam looked at him with as innocent a face as he could muster. “Why ever do you ask that, Lieutenant?”

  Grayson smiled and said they’d poke around and get back to him. Cam thanked him again and left.

  He got back to the cabin park a little after sunset. The skies were filled with ragged white clouds drifting down off the Smokies and the temperature was dropping quickly. As he turned in, he was surprised to see that the security light on the front of the office was out, leaving the line of cabins in even darker shadows than usual. The gloom was relieved by an occasional burst of moonlight on the hard-packed snow. He pulled into the parking notch by his cabin and let the dogs go. After a day of being cooped up in the truck with only occasional tree breaks, they happily took off into the snowy woods. Cam hoped there weren’t any hungry things out there.

  He’d spent the afternoon hitting more of the guide shops and asking around about Mitchell and the wild tale about men tracking mountain lions just for fun. He’d learned exactly nothing. He’d then stopped by the Park Service rangers’ office, ostensibly to see what they’d come up with on the prints, but mostly to see Mary Ellen smile again. The prints had been cast into plaster of paris and were going to UNC for evaluation. Mary Ellen was getting ready to go to a one-day conference in Asheville and, while polite and even friendly, she’d made it clear she was busy. Disappointed, Cam had backed out and returned to his cabin.

  He could hear the dogs barking at something up on the slopes behind the cabin as he let himself in, but they didn’t sound frantic about it. They were just making shepherd noise for the sake of making noise. He closed the door and flipped the light switch up. Nothing happened. So now he knew why the security light wasn’t on up front: The power had to be out for the whole complex. The interior of the cabin was almost totally dark, illuminated only by the brief glimpses of moonlight coming through the windows. His breath was visible in the cold air. At least the woodstove ran on wood alone, so while it might be dark, there would be heat. He shucked his coat, hung it up by the front door, and went to reload the woodstove. He was bent over the front of the stove, trying to get a match to stay lit despite a back draft coming from the stove, when he saw something in the corner of the main room that made him become very still. The match began to burn the tips of his fingers, so he dropped it, missing the paper crumpled under the logs completely.

  His eyes told him that what he was looking at was a
pair of green eyes that were locked onto his own eyes like tracking beams. The eyes disappeared when the clouds covered up the moon, but they reappeared each time the moonlight did. His first thought was, Where are the damned dogs when I need them? They were still outside and still barking, but farther away now. He stared back into the corner, and, sure enough, there was a large feline face surrounding those yellow-green eyes: tawny fur marked with a darker mask and two rounded ears with tufts of white inside. It was a big face, much bigger than he had imagined.

  He remained motionless for a long thirty seconds, and then slowly, very slowly, while still down on one knee in front of the woodstove, he fished out another match and struck it up, illuminating the room this time. The flare of light confirmed his worst suspicion: There was a mountain lion in his cabin.

  42

  Swallowing hard, he shoved the match into the paper, and it caught this time, sending a yellowish cone of light out onto the floor and into Cam’s face. He kept watching the cat, which kept watching him. His coat with the. 45 was ten feet away, so that was not an option. He’d seen the big cat, and the big cat had definitely seen him. He didn’t have to know much about mountain lions to know that at this juncture, after they’d been staring at each other, any sudden move on his part was going to provoke a similar move from the huge cat, with negative consequences likely. His heart had begun to pound and his face was probably a little whiter than it had been a moment ago.

  The fire grew as the stove began to draw, and he had to back his face away from the sudden heat. Just that tiny movement, an adjustment more than a movement, summoned a deep, sustained growl from the corner of the room. He could see the cat’s face clearly, but not its body. Was it crouching, preparing to pounce? Or just lying there, watching to see what he’d do next?

  Okay, he thought, have to do something here. He glanced down into the firebox and saw one thin log that was burning brightly on one end. He’d have to reach through the flames to grab it, but if he grabbed it, threw it at the cat, distracted the damned thing long enough to get to the. 45, he might have a chance. The cat growled again, a deep-throated warning rumble, as if it were reading his mind. Those yellow-green eyes never wavered, never blinked. He knew it wouldn’t work. He might be subtle about reaching into the firebox, but then his reflexes would take over as soon as his flesh sensed the flames and he’d jerk that hand out of there, and then that big bastard would be on him in one shrieking leap.

  Slap, slap, chow time.

  He could no longer hear the dogs, and his legs were starting to tremble. He saw the cat’s shape change slightly in the deep shadows of the corner, as if it was gathering itself. Hell with it, he thought, and began to edge his hand back toward the door of the firebox.

  He never saw it coming. One moment, he was trying to watch the cat while positioning his hand to grab for the burning log. The next instant, he was skidding backward, flat on his back, his head bouncing along the wooden floorboards, with two hundred pounds of wet fur and fangs shrieking into his face. The cat’s breath was foul, and two dinner plate-size clawed paws were clamping onto his head on either side. He screamed back, shouting from all the way down in his gut, vaguely aware that he had pissed his pants, his mouth only inches from those long, yellow curved fangs, and then the cat was gone and he was staring up into the rafters, still paralyzed with fear, trying to focus his eyes on something up there. Oh God, not another one. And then he realized he was looking into the grinning face of White Eye Mitchell.

  “Ain’t she somethin’?” Mitchell said quietly, his eyes appearing to flicker in the firelight from the stove’s open door. “You oughta see her brothers.”

  Cam was speechless after the cat’s pounce. White Eye seemed to levitate out of the rafters, dropping noiselessly into a momentary crouch onto the floor. He straightened up and offered Cam a hand up.

  “What the fuck?!” Cam asked, trying to make his voice work properly.

  Mitchell pulled out two chairs, pushed one over for Cam, and then sat down in the other. Cam looked around for the panther and found it sitting like any house cat by the door, but it was still watching him. He sat down gingerly, wondering if he could get to his gun, which was still in his jacket pocket, which, in turn, was hanging about eight inches away from the cat. No way, and besides, White Eye saw him looking.

  “You don’t need no gun,” he said. “You need to be listenin’ to me now.”

  “I say again-what the hell is going on here?” asked Cam.

  “You train dogs, right? Well, I train cats. How ’bout them apples, huh?”

  Cam just stared at him.

  “You wantin’ to know about cat dancin’, ain’t you?”

  Cam nodded, still vitally interested in getting his hands on the. 45. He’d shoot the cat first, and then Mitchell. That’s exactly what he was going to do. And where the hell were the dogs? He could still smell that cat’s foul breath on his shirt. He realized he was still shaking. Mitchell got up, went over to the front door, and retrieved Cam’s revolver. He came back and sat down, holding the. 45 casually in his lap.

  “You go in there,” he said, indicating the bedroom with his head, “and git yourself dressed for some snow walkin’. Warmest shit you got. Extra everythin’.” He glanced down at Cam’s trousers. “Dry, too. Night-Night’s gonna come along’n watch.”

  “‘Night-Night’?”

  “Go on, now,” Mitchell said, waving the gun. “I ain’t got all damn night. And leave that door open.”

  Cam got up unsteadily and headed for the bedroom, where his clothes were stacked on a chair. On some signal from Mitchell that Cam couldn’t see, the cat got up and followed him into the room, where it sat down in the doorway and began licking one of its enormous paws, watching him. He heard Mitchell get up and go into the kitchen.

  He changed his clothes in the dark and started putting on layers. Night-Night, he thought. He eyed the cat while he dressed. It was a beautiful thing, he had to admit, until it stopped licking and stared at him, one massive paw held motionless right by its mouth. Its eyes glowed as if lit from within, and they were not friendly. It’s tame, Cam told himself.

  When he was ready, he started for the door, but the cat changed its position in such a way as to stop Cam in his tracks. White Eye made a sound in his throat and the cat turned away out of the door. Cam smelled coffee when he came out of the bedroom. The fire in the woodstove was roaring now, and there was much more light in the cabin.

  “Set ye down,” Mitchell said. Cam sat, moving awkwardly in all his layers of clothing. Mitchell brought over two mugs of coffee, pushed one across the table toward Cam, and sat down. “I reckon everybody’s tellin’ you that cat dancin’ is bool-shit,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Cam replied. There were coffee grounds twirling in his mug. “The rangers said that mountain lions were extinct in these parts.”

  Mitchell snorted. “Seemed real enough sittin’ on your chest, didn’t she?”

  “They were talking about wild mountain lions, I think,” Cam said. “Not tame ones.”

  “They’s wrong about that, too,” Mitchell said. “Jist ’cause they ain’t seen ’em don’t mean they ain’t up there. Them rangers like that warm office. Only one of ’em goes deep back country.”

  “And cat dancing? How about that?”

  Mitchell looked him over. “You git around in the mountains any?” he asked.

  “Some. But not normally in winter.”

  “This ain’t winter,” Mitchell scoffed. “Not yet. I can show you what it is you’re askin’ about, but you gotta come with me right now.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Right now. It ain’t winter yet, but it’s fixin’ to be.”

  “Do I have choice?”

  “You want to know about this stuff, or what? ’Cause if you do, I’m the man to see. That part you got right.”

  “I want that gun back.”

  White Eye shrugged, pulled the. 45 out of his coat pocket, opened the cylinder and
thumbed the rounds out of it, and then handed the gun back to Cam. He dropped the rounds into his own coat pocket. “Leave it unloaded till you see what I got to show you,” he said. “Remember, you the one started this shit.”

  “What’s James Marlor’s connection to all this?”

  “Don’t know,” Mitchell said. He got up and kicked the door shut on the wood stove. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are my dogs?” Cam asked.

  “They run off when they got a whiff of Night-Night. They’s smart dogs. They’ll be back. Leave ’em some chow out front. And bring that coffeepot.”

  43

  Two hours later, they were grinding their way up a narrow mountain road in White Eye’s ancient Bronco, and Cam was thinking that road was probably not the right word. Track, maybe. Mountain-goat trail. Trace? The vehicle’s four-wheel drive worked just fine, but even with that, they were making no more than five miles an hour, if that, and often much less. White Eye had produced the vehicle from behind the cabin park’s office, where he’d also restored the electricity. Night-Night loped along behind the Bronco with seemingly endless ease, and Cam was grateful that she was outside and not riding in the backseat, two feet from his neck.

  He had no idea of where they were. Mitchell had driven about a hundred feet down the county road toward town, abruptly turned right into what had looked to Cam like an empty meadow, and then pointed the Bronco toward higher ground. The snow wasn’t that deep, but it was crusted with ice, which made a crunching sound as they plowed through it, the nose of the Bronco permanently tilted up as they climbed.

  About a half hour into the trip, White Eye had taken off his jacket and draped it over the center console as the heater began to kick in. Cam had done the same, piling his outer coat on top of White Eye’s. And then surreptitiously, using his left hand, he had picked Mitchell’s jacket pocket to retrieve three rounds. He’d quietly slipped these into his pants pocket. He’d have to figure out how to get the rounds back into the. 45 once he got his coat back on. He was pretty sure that White Eye meant him no harm.