’We fly meat all over the country. This is a working ranch. Cattle.”
“Cattle.” That made as much sense as raising llamas. The only head that did not gaze back at her from the crowded walls was that of the humble steer or cow. Too common. Too domesticated. Too doe-eyed. Too easy.
“Cattle,” he repeated, pleased that she had so quickly learned their code. Their hypocrisies. “And what kind of ‘stock’ can I interest you in?”
“Nothing too exotic,” she said apologetically. “A big cat or two.
I suppose white tigers are—”
“Very difficult. Not impossible, but very difficult. Luckily, we have some excellent breeders locally.”
Temple sat still, shocked to her core. Was he implying that he could raid the breeding stock of the most public and protected big-cat programs in the country?
Such power—or nerve—was truly chilling.
“We really don’t care to compete on that level,” Temple said. “Something smaller would be fine. A panther. Or a leopard. Maybe both.”
He nodded. “Excellent choice. You do understand that obtaining a prime specimen may be expensive?”
“What attraction in Las Vegas is not?”
At that moment the broad coffered door leading into this den of iniquity opened again.
“A guest, Cyrus?” asked the woman framed by the doorway.
Temple had expected the aloof Courtney. Instead, she found herself riveted by the most exotic-looking woman she had ever seen. In fact, she blinked hard a couple of times to make sure she hadn’t been transported to the Island of Dr. Moreau.
The woman seemed to expect the unabashed wonderment of strangers. She slunk into the room, one leg crossing so markedly in front of the other that the gait underlined her resemblance to a jungle cat.
A tawny mane of painstakingly streaked hair haloed her face…or what was left of it.
Temple had seen TV reports on extreme plastic surgery: young adults having themselves tattooed, pierced, and cut-and-pasted into hybrid human/animals. The extremest example she recalled was a guy who was morphing into a lizard-man, surgically split tongue and all.
This woman’s case wasn’t as obvious, but it came close. Eyebrows plucked to a thin blond line were barely there. Her supplemented cheekbones jutted out so far they made her eyes look smaller and forced them into an unnatural tilt. Collagen-thickened lips went beyond starlet-swollen to misshapen, blending with her snubbed nose until together they made a…muzzle.
Worst of all, when she reached the desk, Temple saw she was wearing those patterned contact lenses. This amber-colored pair gave her pupils vertical slits, like a cat’s eyes.
Add all that to the fact that everything she wore was bronze or hide patterned, and that costly gold charms shaped into the heads and bodies of big cats dangled from her neck, ears, and wrists, all winking with tasteless constellations of diamonds…Temple was speechless.
“Leonora,” the woman said in a husky purr, extending a hand with nails so long they curved into claws. They were enameled a pale ocher color, which made them even creepier than if they’d been lacquered an obvious Carnivore Red. It was as if they were lying in wait for the real thing, like blood.
Temple had stood without thinking why. Maybe to be polite and shake hands. Maybe to be readier to run.
Leonora kept coming closer. She was wearing chamois suede capri pants, a tiger-striped silk-and-spandex top, cork-soled espadrilles.
One clawed hand, tanned pale mocha, reached for Temple.
Temple wasn’t sure if her hand lifted to meet it, or to paw it aside.
Smooth, cool flesh grasped hers. The curved nails brushed the thin skin on the top of Temple’s hand.
“Leonora Van Burkleo,” the woman emphasized.
Temple glanced at Cyrus in dazed comprehension. This was his wife. From the marked age difference, his trophy wife. From Leonora’s bizarre and deliberate resemblance to a beast, his literal trophy wife.
Leonora’s smile revealed Hollywood-white teeth, quite emphatically pointed. Temple had met people with markedly pointed teeth before. But these were unnatural. They had been filed, just as Leonora’s face had been reshaped.
Temple realized then that she had quite literally walked into the lion’s den.
Max wasn’t aware of being stalked until he was almost back to the drop-off point where he was to meet Temple.
He had sighted some of the ranch’s security forces early during his ramble. These were camouflage-attired men with rifles, the kind of professionals that turned his blood cold: hirelings, not true believers. Hard men who were used to doing unspeakable things. It was kill or be killed with their sort, and Max had always tried to stay well away from either role.
He flattened himself among some scattered rocks, a shadow among shadows, and waited until they were utterly gone before moving on.
And then he came on the trail.
He was an urban animal. Wilderness tracking wasn’t his particular skill, but even a city slicker could see the random impress of a sneaker tread on the softer areas of sand.
Several sneaker treads.
The security forces wore desert boots. His own shoes always had smooth-soled leather. He had never left easily traceable tracks, like a tire, on carpeting or anywhere else.
Sagebrush was the only cover out here, but the three-foot-high growths pockmarked the flat desert floor as regularly as dotted Swiss. Max moved from bush to bush like a cartoon character, trying to figure out whether the sneaker set had been coming or going.
He had gotten close enough to the compound to not like what he’d found. Close enough to worry about Temple still inside. Now other trespassers were adding to the likelihood that either Temple or he might get into trouble.
Max checked his watch. Only an hour and forty minutes since he’d left Temple. Knowing her fondness for thorough jobs and her gift for talking her way into, and often out of, anything, she was probably still happily poking her nose into her host’s business.
He glimpsed movement to his right, sensed a buzz on the air, possibly a distant Jeep.
He dove for the best cover, a small outcropping of rock thirty feet away, hitting the sand and rolling the last few feet. Before he could roll upright, a heavy weight jumped him from above.
Lord, one of the lions is loose, was his first thought. The weight squeezed the wind out of him, flailing buff-colored limbs blurred his vision.
A blow to the head reassured him. It was hard, but not clawed. A human pride had him in their grip.
Max promptly feigned unconsciousness to avoid any more cracks in the skull. No one could go as convincingly limp as a magician.
“Not a guard,” someone whispered harshly.
“Then what?” demanded another whisperer.
“Shhh! The Jeep’s coming this way.”
The grips on Max tightened as the vehicle’s motor and wheels ground, coughed, and spit sand through the sere desert air. It sounded like an eggbeater on the run.
The noise grew, hovered like a swarm of huge bees, then faded into a distant drone.
“Thank God.” This whisper was raspy, but it was a woman’s voice. “I hope we didn’t kill him.”
Max found that hope encouraging. Ranch security would have had no such scruples.
He played possum while they turned him over and poked at him like curious chimps.
“Black?”
Max, sweating, agreed. It was crazy to have gone a-hunting in city black out here, but he hadn’t become really suspicious until he and Temple had arrived, and by then it was too late to send out for a safari suit.
Hands pawed at him. “He’s not armed.”
Not with obvious weapons anyway.
“What’s a Joe Blow doing out here?”
Max stirred slightly, not wanting to start a ruckus. There were at least three of them, and while the odds didn’t concern him, keeping the peace did. Guards with powerful binoculars would catch any dust-up in this terrain.
He blinked the sand out of his eyes, finally focusing on tanned, seamed faces. Two men and a woman. She was the party’s senior member, a lean sixty-something with wiry strands of silver hair escaping a beige bandanna.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
The men, a twenty-something and a forty-something with outdoor faces, kept what they thought was a good grip on him.
“Exploring,” he answered.
“Alone? On foot? Dressed like that?”
“A friend dropped me off by car. I’d heard about this place. Wanted to look it over.”
“Didn’t you see the guards?” one of the guys asked.
“Yes. But they didn’t see me.” Max risked a grin. You don’t want to be seen by guards, he implied. I don’t either. Maybe we’re allies.
The woman snorted contemptuously. “In that outfit, and they missed you?”
“I headed for shadow when I saw or heard them. Unfortunately, you were part of the shadow I was heading for here.”
The woman’s burnt sienna fingers curled into the fabric of Max’s black turtleneck sweater. “Silk blend.” Her eyes, so light a gray they seemed as silver as her hair, hardened. “What the hell is someone like you doing out here on foot?”
“I’m looking for a big cat.”
“Going to take it down with your teeth, right?” asked one of the youngsters.
“Not going to take it down at all. Going to get it out of here.”
That made them sit up and take notice. Literally. The hands loosened on his limbs.
“What is your scam?” asked a thin-faced man with a sand-grayed ponytail down his back.
“No scam. What I said. I’m looking for a stolen leopard.”
The woman was unimpressed. “Alone. On foot. Out here. Unarmed. Dressed like that.”
“My partner is inside, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d quit playing twenty questions and let me start worrying about when she’s coming out, or if she’s coming out.”
Their custody eased even more. Max went on. “And you might mention who you are, and why you’re out here. Together. On foot. On feet that leave quite visible tracks, by the way.”
He looked around. Except for the walking stick that had beaned him, they carried nothing more obviously dangerous than water canteens and backpacks.
“She?” the woman asked.
Max nodded. “It was an impromptu mission, I admit. Not advisable in light of what I’ve found out here, including you.”
“Mission?” The thin-faced guy still looked suspicious. “You some kind of…cop? Paramilitary?”
Max smiled. “No. Just trying to help out a friend.”
“A friend who keeps leopards?” The man who asked this had freckles, a snub nose, earnest blue eyes. Must have been a cute kid, but his face and tone now were harder than the red rock in the Valley of Fire.
“A friend who works with a leopard. A magician.”
“They’d steal a performing leopard?” Ponytail’s voice shook with rage and surprise.
“Hard to come by unmarked heads.” Blue Eyes flashed a meaningful look at the others.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” the woman said to Max, having made up her mind about him. “We’ll get you back to where you need to meet your partner, if we can, but we won’t get caught to do it.”
Max allowed himself to move into a crouching position that was still nonthreatening. “I know what I’m doing out here, and now I know what’s going on out here, but why are you here?”
“What’s going on out here?” Blue Eyes taunted him.
“Canned hunts. Trophies for rich men, culled from zoos, stocks of abandoned exotic felines, the old, the weak, and the domesticated, available to dress your mantel for the sum of several thousand dollars. Pretty ugly racket.”
The woman let out an explosive breath, part relief, part unspoken expletive. “You got it. And that’s why the security. They don’t want anyone to know what’s going on, and I’m not so sure they wouldn’t shoot anyone who found out about it, especially someone out here on their own without witnesses.”
“So. You’re not government investigators?” Max eyed them all again. “You look like a college archeological expedition—sorry, no offense meant. And you don’t have a handgun between you, much less a rifle…. So what are you?”
“Hunt breakers.”
“And you think I’m a fool. You’ve seen the patrols, the weapons. Those men will kill you, whether you’re alone or in a pack, if you interfere with their operation. That’s what they’re paid to do.”
“But not in front of the hunters.” The woman smiled grimly. “That’s why we won’t show ourselves until they’ve got a customer with a gun in his hand and some poor declawed retired circus lion cornered against an outbuilding so the coward can be a big-game hunter when he goes home with a dead head for the wall.”
Max shook his own head, thankfully not yet dead, just aching. “You won’t believe me, because I look like an amateur, but I’m not. If they’ll steal a performing leopard from a Strip show just to get stock, they’ll kill to protect their setup….”
He let the sentence trail off because it didn’t make sense, even as he said it, not even to him. He believed that these hunt breakers were in mortal danger, all right, but why would this illegal canned hunt operation risk drawing attention to itself by abducting a prized animal from a man as powerful as a multimillion-dollar-salaried magician?
Not just for kicks, but he couldn’t see any other reason for the leopard’s abduction. Maybe that walking stick had shaken up his brains more than he liked to think.
“Would you like to the see the operation up close and personal?” Van Burkleo asked, smiling genially at Temple.
“Of course,” she said. “I’m already impressed. I had no idea such a sumptuous accommodation was out here.”
“We like it that way,” Leonora said. “But don’t drag our guest—Cyrus, you haven’t introduced her to me—”
“Temple Barr of the Crystal Phoenix.”
“The Phoenix!” Leonora’s virtually invisible brows rose with surprise. “We haven’t had any clients from there yet. Of course we are pleased to accommodate a Fontana family enterprise. What is your position at the Phoenix?”
“Informal,” Temple said, watching both Van Burkleos’s eyes narrow suspiciously. She was by no means in like Flynn, which meant getting out might be dicey. Very dicey.
“I’m a humble publicist, but Nicky and Van have entrusted me with the concept and execution of their new virtual-reality Action Jackson ride and holographic experience, and also for a small animal area, with all the close-up and personal effect of a Vegas show, but strictly appropriate protection for the animals on display, of course.”
“Of course.” Leonora’s frighteningly inhuman eyes regarded Temple with the same expressionless intensity she sometimes encountered in Midnight Louie’s gaze. “We will have a drink while I explain our setup and rules. I’m sure Cyrus neglected the details. Would you like a golden lion?”
“Actually, I’m interested in something smaller. A panther or a leopard, possibly both.”
Leonora’s laugh was half a growl. “Silly. I meant a drink. A golden lion is my own invention. Lochan Ora with rum and Kahlúa.”
“Sounds…delish,” said Temple, who couldn’t imagine combining coffee and scotch liqueurs with rum, but sensed that you didn’t argue with a lioness.
Leonora opened a tall cabinet lined with mirrors and cut glass, quickly mixing the contents of two Waterford decanters in a pitcher. The amber-black concoction was poured into delicate liqueur glasses. Temple sipped at hers after Leonora brought it over. Maybe lion fangs weren’t venom bearing, but Leonora’s filed teeth looked fairly aspish.
During the social lull, Temple asked innocuous questions, which got innocuous answers.
“How long have you been here?” sh
e tried.
“Long enough to develop the property, and our very quiet but solid reputation, as we wanted to,” said Leonora.
“It’s wonderful to have a nearby resource for the occasional animal,” Temple soldiered on. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t heard of you.”
“And how did you hear of us?” Van Burkleo asked, his voice as smooth as a rum sundae.
“Oh. A friend of Macho Mario’s, of course. I mean, Mr. Fontana.”
Leonora’s eyes glittered as she looked significantly at her spouse.
Temple realized that her clumsy attempt to name-drop had gotten her pegged as the old man’s girl Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.
These people thought like National Enquirer reporters!
But the instant that false impression had been made, it was as if Temple had joined some secret sorority. Leonora came to take away the triple-power liqueur, favoring Temple with what passed for a wink from one of her beastly eyes.
“We better not keep you away from the Phoenix too long. Come along. I’ll show you what we have available. Something, I’m sure, will suit.”
Temple thanked Mr. Van Burkleo profusely, more from relief at leaving his presence and that of the surrounding animal heads than from gratitude, and trotted out after Leonora.
As she recalled, lionesses were the huntresses of the pride while the extravagantly maned males lay and sunned themselves like romance-novel cover models. So she had been handed over to the more dangerous of her hosts.
They left the house by the rear, after passing palatial rooms filled with animal memorabilia, that is to say, taxidermied body parts.
Temple began to imagine a wonderland filled with Van Burkleo parts to infinity….
Behind the living quarters was a pathway and a deep moat, beyond which unnatural natural habitats for big cats and other exotic animals were established at the base of the mountain.
Temple was sure it was all impressive, but she was taken only to the big-cat area. She couldn’t help thinking that the animals were on display like department store mannequins, only these were living. A lion roared from behind the scenes, causing her to jump and then come to a dead halt.
Cat in a Leopard Spot Page 9