"I don't understand what you're saying."

Harper looked hard at Clyde. "I'm saying that the brake line could have been switched after the wreck. That there's evidence it may have been switched. Why are you so defensive?"

"Why would I be defensive?"

Harper shrugged and sipped his beer. "Maybe those two pups belonged to the dead man. That would explain why they were roaming around Hellhag Hill where you said you found them. Or maybe they belonged to the guy in the jogging shoes, maybe they followed him down the hill, were milling around while he switched the brake line."

"That's a lot of conjecture. I've never heard you-"

"All conjecture, so far. All bits and pieces. I'm simply playing with the possibilities. Say the pups wouldn't follow him back up the canyon, say they got silly and ran off the way pups will, and later wandered up Hellhag Hill, where you found them."

"So what does that prove? What does that have to do with the brake line?" Clyde looked hard at Harper. "For that matter, what about the dead man? What have you got on him?"

"I thought I told you. Raul Torres was a PI working out of Seattle."

"That's all you told me."

"Hotshot PI. Irritated the hell out of Seattle PD."

"Hotshot in what way?" Clyde asked, popping another beer.

"In the way he ran his investigations. Always mouthing off, Seattle tells me. Making people mad."

Clyde shrugged.

"Seattle's interested in what Torres might have been working on, down here. Torres's secretary said he was meeting a girlfriend, but Seattle thinks he was on a case."

"You have a line on the girlfriend?"

"A Seattle girl, living in San Francisco. Had a connection in Molena Point, a friend down here."

Joe watched Harper, puzzled. Was Harper not telling Clyde everything? And what, exactly, did that mean?

"Seattle says she's something of a high roller. Particularly likes yacht cruises."

"Cara Ray Crisp?" Clyde asked.

Joe relaxed. Harper was just stringing it out.

Harper nodded, and busied himself arranging sliced onions on his burger.

Clyde rose, fetched a jar of horseradish from the refrigerator, and behind Harper's back cast a scowl at Joe that was deep with meaning, that said, Get out of here. Now. Go out to the backyard, Joe, and catch a mouse.

Joe leaped to the counter and settled down, glaring.

Clyde looked as if he might wring a little cat throat. But he turned back to Harper. "Do you suppose Cara Ray was seeing Torres while Shamas was alive? What kind of case was Torres working?"

"We think it's possible he was running an investigation on Shamas."

Clyde couldn't help but glance at Joe. "What kind of investigation? Women? You mean Lucinda actually-"

"No, Lucinda didn't hire him. He had apparently been checking into a Seattle machine-tool manufacturer, for some company that got stung on their products. It's possible Shamas was involved. The secretary wasn't too sure what it was all about, she said she only does a few letters and the billing. She thought it was some kind of lawsuit." Harper busied himself with his second burger.

Clyde was quiet.

Joe Grey sat very still, pretending to look out the window into the dark backyard. But beneath his sleek silver fur, every muscle twitched. Max Harper's words had fired every predatory cell; he was as wired as if Harper had waved a flapping pigeon in his face.

12

THE NIGHT was fading. A thin moon hung low over the sea, and a sharp wind whipped across Hellhag Hill, pushing at the scrawny, half-grown kitten, flattening the grass around her where she crouched sucking up a meager meal, licking up bits of kibble mixed with dirt, a thin scattering left from the previous day after the bigger cats had fed. A woman had brought the food.

Always she wanted to approach the woman, but the other cats would never let her; they hazed her away, wanting nothing to do with humans except to take their food-and they took it all. Hunkering down, belly to the earth, she gulped the last crumbs, shivering.

The kit was fierce enough when she was alone; certainly she had no fear of dogs. Many days earlier, when the two huge puppies had jumped and barked at her, she had attacked one of them as wildly as a bobcat- had been greatly amused to ride it right among the village streets. Oh, that had been a wild race, all her claws digging in.

But she feared her feline peers; she feared the vehemence of the clowder leaders, their fierce circling and hissing and striking out. She wouldn't challenge that hierarchy of big, mean cats. Not many cats ran in a clowder like a pack of dogs, but feral cats often lived together in such a clan-the pack leader had told her that-for strength within their own territory and for protection. He said her own group ran in a clowder because of who they were, because they were not like other ferals.

The dog had found that out. Found out that she was not simply another frightened kitty.

The woman had been on the hill when she rode that dog; the woman must have laughed. The clowder cats didn't like the woman, but the kit liked to slip close to her, unseen. She liked to see the woman take pleasure in the fog and in the dawn. The woman loved the hill and loved the sky and the sea, and so did the kit love those things. Nor did she think it strange to have such thoughts, any more than it was strange to be always hungry. Her thoughts were part of her, her hunger was part of her-hunger was a beast's natural condition. What else was there but this wary and hungry existence-and then her private thoughts to warm her?

Yet there was something else. There was more in life than hunger and fear and cold-more, even, than her own excited musings. But what that something was, she hadn't worked out. She knew only that somewhere food was plentiful and delicious and that one could be warm and there were soft beds to sleep on-the kind of sleep where a cat needn't doze with one eye open, jerked awake by the slightest sound.

Finishing the crumbs, and finding no homely wisdom scattered among them through the dirt, she crept out of the grass into the gusting wind and leaped atop a boulder, stood up bold in the blow, surveying the hill that tossed and rippled around her. Grass lashed and ran in silver waves, and beyond it the sea crashed and surged like a gigantic and sensuous animal spitting its foam white against the sky.

With her mottled black-and-brown coloring, her blazing yellow eyes, and the long hair sticking out of her ears in two amazing tufts, the young cat resembled a small bobcat more than a domestic feline. Her thin body seemed too long for a normal cat, and she was far more swift and agile.

She hadn't a bobcat's tail, though, but a long, fluffy plume, an appendage of amazing length lashing as importantly as a flag of national significance; and though her coat was dense and short, she had longhaired pantaloons like furry chaps, her fluffy parts so bushy that one had to wonder if God, in some temporary absentmindedness, had fashioned this cat from leftover and mismatched parts.

Perhaps God had been in a joking mood when he made her? He seemed, as well, to have filled her with more imaginings than any proper cat could contain. The very look in her round yellow eyes and the set of her little thin face implied teeming and impatient dreams, wild and untamable visions.

This cat had no name. She had made for herself a dozen names as ephemeral as the wildflowers that came and went across the hillside. But if she had a real, forever, and secret name that belonged to her like her own paws and tail, she didn't know what it was.

Standing in the wind atop the boulder, she speculated about the mice that burrowed beneath the stone, that she could never catch, and about the songs the wind whispered and the habits of the cottontail rabbits she had scented in the grass (I'm faster than any rabbit. Why can't I catch them?), and about the nature of the gulls that wheeled and screamed above her. And, filled to bursting with questions, in her fierce small presence shone a power far bigger than she, a power that glowed from her yellow eyes, and of which she had little understanding.