FIFTY-ONE

WHAT A BITCH. AND I MEAN THAT IN EVERY SENSE OF the phrase.

"Hey, boyfriend," Datura said.

In addition to a flashlight, she held a pistol.

She said, "I was at the bottom of the north stairs, having some wine, staying loose, waiting to feel the power, you know, your power, drawing me, the way Danny the Geek said it could."

"Don't talk," I pleaded. "Just shoot me."

Ignoring my interruption, she continued: "I got bored. I get bored easy. Earlier, I noticed these big cat prints in the ashes at the foot of the stairs. They're on the stairs, too. So I decided to follow them."

The fire had raged with special ferocity in this part of the hotel. Most of the inner walls had burned away, leaving a vast and gloomy space, the ceiling supported by red-steel columns encased in concrete. Over the years, ashes and dust had continued to settle, laying a smooth, lush carpet, over which my saber-toothed tiger had recently been wandering this way and that.

"The beast has been all over this place," she said. "I got so interested in the way it went in circles and meandered back on itself, I completely forgot about you. Completely forgot. And that's just when I heard you coming and switched off my flashlight. Mondo cool, boyfriend. I thought I was following the cat, but I was being drawn to you when I least expected. You are one strange dude, you know that?"

"I know that," I admitted.

"Is there really a cat, or were the prints made by a phantom you conjured up to lead me here?"

"There's really a cat," I assured her.

I was very tired. And dirty. I wanted to be done with this, go home, and take a bath.

Approximately twelve feet separated us. If we had been a few feet closer, I might have tried to rush her, duck in under her arm and take the gun away from her.

If I could keep her talking, an opportunity to turn the tables might arise. Fortunately, keeping her talking would require no more effort on my part than would breathing.

"I knew this prince from Nigeria," Datura said, "he claimed to be an isangoma, said he could change into a panther after midnight."

"Why not at ten o'clock?"

"I don't think he really could. I think he was lying because he wanted to screw me."

"You don't have to worry about that with me," I said.

"This must be a phantom cat, some sort of eidolon. Why would a real cat be prowling around in this smelly dump?"

I said, "Close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro, around nineteen thousand feet, there's the dried, frozen carcass of a leopard."

"The mountain in Africa?"

I quoted, '"No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.'"

She frowned. "I don't get it. What's the mystery? He's a mean damn leopard, he can go anywhere he wants."

"It's a line from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.'"

Gesturing with the gun, she expressed her impatience.

I explained: "That's a short story by Ernest Hemingway."

"The guy with the line of furniture? What's Hemingway got to do with this?"

I shrugged. "I have a friend who's always thrilled when I make a literary allusion. He thinks I could be a writer."

“Are the two of you gay or something?" she asked.

"No. He's hugely fat, and I'm supernaturally gifted, that's all."

"Boyfriend, sometimes you don't make a lot of sense. Did you kill Robert?"

Except for our two swords of light, shining past each other, the second floor receded into unrelieved darkness. While I had been in the crawlspaces and the vertical chase, the last light had washed out of the winter day.

I didn't mind dying, but this cavernous fire-blackened pit was an ugly place to do it.

"Did you kill Robert?" she repeated.

"He fell off a balcony."

"Yeah, after you shot him." She didn't sound upset. In fact she regarded me with the calculation of a black widow spider deciding whether to take a mate. "You play clueless pretty well, but you're for sure a mundunugu."

"Something was wrong with Robert."

She frowned. "I don't know what it is. My needy boys don't always stay with me as long as I'd like."

"They don't?"

"Except Andre. He's a real bull, Andre is."

"I thought he was a horse. Cheval Andre."

"A total stallion," she said. "Where's Danny the Geek? I want him back. He's a funny little monkey."

"I cut his throat and pitched him down a shaft." My claim electrified her. Her nostrils flared, and a hard pulse appeared in her slender throat.

"If he didn't die in the fall," I told her, "he's bled to death by now. Or drowned. The shaft's got twenty or thirty feet of water at the bottom."

"Why would you have done that?"

"He betrayed me. He told you my secrets."

Datura licked her lips as though she had just finished eating a tasty dessert. "You've got as many layers as an onion, boyfriend."

I had decided to play the we're-two-of-a-kind-why-don't-we-join-forces game, but another opportunity arose.

She said, "The Nigerian prince was full of shit, but I might believe you can become a panther after midnight."

"It's not a panther," I said.

"Yeah? So what is it you become?"

"It's not a saber-toothed tiger, either."

"Do you become a leopard, like on Kilimanjaro?" she asked.

"It's a mountain lion."

The California mountain lion, one of the world's most formidable predators, prefers to live in rugged mountains and forests, but it adapts well to rolling hills and low scrub.

Mountain lions thrive in the dense, almost lush scrub in the hills and canyons around Pico Mundo, and often they venture into adjoining territory that would be classified as true desert. A male mountain lion will claim as much as a hundred square miles as his hunting range, and he likes to roam.

In the mountains, he'll feed on mule deer and bighorn sheep. In territory as barren as the Mojave, he will chase down coyotes, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, and rodents, and he will enjoy the variety.

"Males of the species average between one hundred thirty and one hundred fifty pounds," I told her. "They prefer the cover of night for hunting."

That look of wide-eyed girlish wonder-which I had first seen on our way to the casino with Doom and Gloom, and which was the only appealing and guileless expression that she possessed- overcame her again. “Are you gonna show me?"

I said, "Even in the daytime, if a mountain lion is on the move instead of resting, people rarely see it because it's so quiet. It passes without detection."

As excited as ever she had been at a human sacrifice, she said, "These paw prints-they're yours, aren't they?"

"Mountain lions are solitary and secretive."

"Solitary and secretive, but you're going to show me." She had demanded miracles, fabulous impossible things, icy fingers up and down her spine. Now she thought that I would at last deliver. "You didn't conjure these tracks to lead me here. You transformed… and made these tracks yourself."

If Datura's and my positions had been reversed, I would have been standing with my back to the mountain lion, oblivious as it stalked me.

As wrong as nature is-with its poisonous plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods-sometimes it gets things right.