"Was it someone from the trailers?" Dulcie glanced up the dark hill. "Someone who came from there?" She looked deeply at the kit, her green eyes kind and without guile. "Can you take us to that man? Can you show us his smell?"

The kit looked at Dulcie a long time. Twice she cut her eyes around at their unseen observers. She hissed at them and glowered as Joe had done.

At last she led Joe and Dulcie uphill, passing through the invisible cats. Passing a low growl, and snarls. Beside her, Joe Grey thundered and rumbled. No cat moved to strike them.

Up through the matted wet grass, their paws sodden, then splashing through the mud under the trailers. All the trailers were dark above them; no human was abroad now. Only the scents lingered, human stinks riding on the damp air. The kit sniffed and prowled, trying to sort them out. But no cat on earth could have sorted those smells.

"Do you know his smell?" asked Dulcie. "If one could sort anything, would you know it?"

"No," the kit said. "When I followed him, I could only smell blood."

They stood in the sopping mud between the grease-coated wheels, their wet fur clinging to their shivering bodies. "Which trailer?" Dulcie said. "Where did he come from?"

"He came out from between them. There." She cocked her ears toward the trailers. "I didn't see where exactly. I heard a door shut, then there he was." Again the kit moved away. They followed her.

"Somewhere here," she said, scenting at the wheels and at shoe prints all filled with water. But she could find no certain trail.

"We'll come back," Dulcie told her, "when this tangle of stinks blows away and when the rain is gone. Maybe then…?"

"Maybe," said the kit. "Maybe I will see him again, and I can learn his smell. I will watch. I will follow him, and I will find his scent. If the others… if they don't chase me away for being with you, for talking to you."

Joe Grey leaped down to the boulders and looked around him. He could feel the clowder watching.

"If any cat," he growled, "any ragged mangy vermin among you touches this kit, if any moldy creature among you does this kit harm, you will all of you wish you had never come to this hill. You will all die, slowly and painfully, by the force of my claws."

His eyes blazed into night. "I have your scents. I will track you wherever you go, and I will leave you bleeding and immobile. I will watch the gulls swoop down, to pick meat from your living bones."

The kit pressed close to Dulcie. "If they try to hurt me, I will go deep in the cave. They won't come there; they fear the cave. They long for it, they want to go where it leads, but they fear it." She looked brightly at Dulcie. "I will find the man who hurt Pedric. I will find him, and I will lead you to him."

18

MAN KILLED, ONE INJURED, IN FALL DOWN HELLHAG HILL

Newlon Greenlaw, nephew of the late Molena Point resident Shamas Greenlaw, was found dead shortly after midnight, his body lying in the rain on Highway One at the base of Hellhag Hill. A California Highway Patrol unit spotted the body as they answered a 911 call to an accident victim higher up the hill, where just below the Moonwatch Trailer Park elderly Pedric Greenlaw lay injured in a fall. The two men may possibly have been victims in a bizarre double accident.

Relatives had no explanation as to why the men were out on the hill during the midnight storm. Newlon and his uncle were staying in their campers at the trailer park with other members of the extended Greenlaw family, gathered here for Shamas Greenlaw's funeral. Shamas died earlier this month in a drowning accident during a cruise off Seattle. His rosary and funeral will not be scheduled until additional family members arrive.

Pedric Greenlaw is under observation at Molena Point Hospital. His condition, doctors told reporters, is stable. He will be hospitalized for several days.

Pawing open the morning paper and glimpsing the headline, Joe saw that the Gazette had been swift and efficient. Last night's death and injury filled the front page above the fold, displacing whatever local news the paper must have already set up. He imagined the last-minute bustle, late into the night, as editors worked to change the front page.

If the paper were printed out of town, as some small papers were, they'd never have made it. Probably the ink was still wet when the truck delivered its stacks of Gazettes to the pickup stations.

As for the Gazette's take that Newlon's death had been an accident, Joe didn't believe it for a minute.

He had arrived home in darkness, long before the newspaper hit the porch. Soaking and cold, he had gone directly through the kitchen to the laundry and snuggled down on the lower bunk against old Rube's stomach, absorbing the doggy warmth.

Rube slept alone or with the cats. Selig slept on the back porch in a huge TV shipping carton that Clyde had lined with old flannel shirts and a blanket-a far cry from the cold wind on Hellhag Hill. There was barely enough room for two, though, when Hestig was there and not with Charlie.

Snuggled against Rube, Joe had dozed until just before seven, when he heard the morning paper hit the front porch. Galloping through the living room and out his cat door, he had dragged the Gazette through the house and onto the breakfast table; ripping off the plastic, rainproof cover, he'd heard Selig pad across the back porch, whining, to paw at the plywood barrier of the dog door. Of course that woke Clyde. Joe heard him stamp across the bedroom, then heard the shower running. He had barely finished reading the article when Clyde schlepped into the kitchen and began to fill the coffeepot in a sleep-drugged morning ritual. A shower alone was not enough to transform Clyde Damen from sleeping zombie to real-live person.

Soon bacon was sizzling in the pan, and the animals were lined up, eating. Clyde had spoken no word. His one glance at Joe was a deep scowl. Before he broke the eggs into the skillet he moved to the table. Standing behind Joe, loudly sipping his coffee, he read the front page. For some time, he said nothing.

Then he breathed a sigh and turned away. Joe glanced up to see a relieved, and puzzling, smile.

So what's with you? Joe wanted to say; but some errant wisdom kept him silent.

Possibly Clyde, knowing nothing about last night's excitement on Hellhag Hill, had been prepared for a humorous front-page story at his expense, a comic piece about the arrest of the village's best-known auto mechanic and his two pups. Not encountering such an expose, he seemed far more pleased with the morning. It was not until Clyde noticed the muddy pawprints leading across the kitchen from the living room that he sat down at the table, giving Joe a long, direct look

"So where were you last night?"

"I was hunting." Joe considered that his trek up Hellhag Hill and the information he had painstakingly gathered was the most difficult kind of hunt. "Why do you always ask me where I was at night? I don't ask where you've been. I'm not some teenage kid you have to keep track of, afraid I'll wreck your car or get arrested. You have absolutely no cause to-"

"You were on Hellhag Hill last night."

"If you don't turn the bacon, it's going to be charcoal."

Clyde rose and flipped the bacon, then picked up the paper, reading the lead article with more care. Joe waited patiently for Clyde's inevitable and long-winded lecture.

"Do you want to tell me why, Joe, that the minute the paper hit the porch, you were into it?"

Joe looked at him blankly.

"You knew about this accident, that's why. And the only way you could have known, is if you were up there yourself last night. Certainly you were not hunting rabbits in the rain."