The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  He paused, a finger in the air. “No, nothing. I thought I heard her call.” He turned an ear. Then shook his head.

  “As I was telling you about Buster, that hard core he presented, it grew softer with his age and his abstinence. He grew a conscience. Having stolen the cubs from their mother’s den and so been an accomplice to their rewilding, he felt responsible for the human kills. It was bad enough when the male had turned to man-eating. When the herder was taken by Zahara, his remorse was compounded. It was Buster himself who had killed Simba, who was her provider. And it was his client who had wounded the tom and turned it man-eater in the first place. He came to the yurt a broken man and told me that he could no longer stay silent. He had blood on his hands that he could not wash away.”

  “Like you could.”

  Blake frowned. “If you wish to put it that way. I couldn’t let him talk, of course. When my role in the buying and training of these animals became known, I would lose my position. Rewilding captive animals is against federal law. I could go to prison. Wrongful-death suits could be brought against me and my foundation by the families of those who’d been killed. Most important, I would no longer be able to raise money, and I would lose my voice as an advocate for the cats. You do understand I could not let this happen. There is a greater good to consider than the collateral sufferings of a few people. And there was another matter, a personal one, concerning Mr. Garrett and myself. Leave it at that.”

  “You saw a way to bury a murder and cast blame on the cat. What did Buster do that you hated him enough to kill him?”

  Sean saw rage boil up in Blake’s face. He had touched a nerve.

  “That is none of your concern.”

  “How did you do it, Drick?”

  A pause. The dark blood flushed from his cheeks, and for the first time Sean noticed that his face was heavily bruised. He had seen the signs of a struggle on the ridge where they found Garrett’s body. He must have fought back before the sedative kicked in.

  Blake collected himself before speaking.

  “I lured him with the one bait he could not resist—Zahara. I told him that I had located her by her calling and that we could find her with the radio receiver. He would buy it. It was in fact the truth.”

  “What did you use to kill him?”

  Blake laughed. “You may find you do not want an answer to that question. It’s time. No more words. We will speak Zahara’s language now.”

  There was a clicking sound as Blake turned the recorder on, a long moment of static, and then a scream, startling in its intensity. And again, one long note rising and falling, pulsing in echoes, as if the canyon itself had taken up the call.

  He switched the recorder off. Silence. That vast stillness of the north. Then, somewhere far away, the faintest response, whispered on the wind.

  Blake tapped his ear.

  Sean worked his bound hands, searching for a weakness in the knot, anything to give him hope. But his hands were almost useless now, the circulation all but cut off.

  Minutes passed.

  “Maybe she won’t come,” Sean said.

  “She has been searching for a mate for days, maybe weeks. She will—you will see. I will tempt her.”

  He played the recording again. Then, from the mountain, the answer. Closer? Sean thought so.

  Blake gave him his smile. “She will come now. She has already started.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Monster by a Different Name

  It was the lynx, finally, that led her to the body. Martha had checked the yurt and the grounds in that order, finding no sign that anyone was near. Sean had told her about the rabbit chase with the lynx, and as she passed the open door of the enclosure, she hesitated. She unsnapped the safety strap on her bear spray and did the same with her holstered revolver, tapped the hammer of the .357 for assurance, took a breath, and entered.

  The enclosure was so large you could walk through the middle of it without knowing you were inside fencing. Martha could feel each of her footfalls, could feel the pulsing of blood in her throat. As she approached the back of the enclosure she saw the lynx. The animal was crouched beside a white cloth or sheet that appeared to be bloodstained. The lynx flattened her ears.

  “Good kitty.” She had forgotten the name that Sean had told her. She took a bold step and the cat, rising to full height, turned and bound away in a fluid motion.

  Martha steeled herself, flashing back to the dogs that had eaten the herder’s body. But then she saw a corner of the cloth flutter with no wind to make it move. The shape shifted and a woman sat up. Her face was filthy, her hair caked with mud. The entire front of what Martha now recognized as a robe with a sash tie was soaked in blood. Some was crusted over and dark, almost black. Other patches were crimson.

  The woman spoke. Her voice was unexpectedly calm. “I’ve lost blood, but the bleeding has stopped now. Tatiana has been cleaning me with her tongue. Please do not hurt her.”

  Martha squatted down. She saw that the woman—she knew it was Scarlett Blake, though she had never met her—had a shackle on one ankle, and that she was chained to a small tree.

  “Let me see how badly you’re hurt.”

  Martha tugged the sash open. The right half of the woman’s torso had swirls of raised white scar tissue that resembled scrollwork. The left side, what she could see, for the skin was sticking to the cloth, had the same pattern of deep lacerations, but they were fresh and raw, raking from the collarbone to the woman’s abdomen. Sean had told Martha about the scars. Still, she was not prepared for the oddly beautiful horror, and gasped involuntarily.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “He did.” A pause. “As he has before.” Her eyes never quite settled, but roamed, seeking one cloud, then another.

  “Your brother, you mean?”

  Scarlett brought her head down. She seemed to see Martha for the first time. “If you wish to call him that.”

  “Sean Stranahan, is he with him? Are they together?”

  A hesitation.

  “I know he was here. His rig is parked at the gate. His dog is inside.”

  “He was here. When we met in the winter, I found him . . . attractive. Someone who knows where his feet are planted on the Earth. He had kind eyes.”

  “Where are they, Scarlett?”

  “I tried to warn him. I told him, ‘Never turn your back.’”

  “Where have they gone?”

  “Earlier, I could hear her calling.”

  “The lion?”

  “Zahara, yes.”

  “Where? Can you direct me?”

  Again, a hesitation.

  “You do understand that if you withhold information and anything happens to him, then you could be implicated. You could be abetting a crime. You could go away.”

  The eyes that had been roaming again relinquished the sky. Her gaze fell on Martha.

  “Go where?” she said. “I’m already gone.”

  “Go to prison.”

  “Where do you think I’ve been?” She stood, her body shaking, and tugged on the shackle. “Where do you think I am now?”

  * * *

  • • •

  SEAN FELT CAUGHT IN that nightmare where feet turn to cement as a demon in diabolical form draws closer and closer. He heard a scraping noise and turned his head. Blake, who had not spoken since the second call of the cat, was climbing into a tree some twenty feet away. His boots showered down the rough, scale-like bark. The tranquilizer gun he had drawn from his pack was slung over his shoulder. He reached a crotch in the trunk and sat down on one of the heavy lower branches.

  Sean’s eyes searched the forest. Shadows upon shadows. The cat’s last call had sounded close, closer than any before. He strained his eyes. He saw a smear of tan in the trees. One glimpse and it was gone. Was it the lion? Or maybe an elk? Their
coats were similar in color. But wouldn’t an elk have run off upon hearing the lion’s scream?

  Sean had that wincing feeling of waiting for a big gun to go off. But there was no sound except for the whispering of a Canada jay in the forest canopy. Then Sean heard the caterwaul of the cat. It seemed to come from all around him at once.

  * * *

  • • •

  “IS THERE A KEY to this damned thing?” Martha said.

  Receiving no response, she opened the saw blade of her Swiss Army knife and got to work on the sapling. Five minutes later she had accomplished little beyond rubbing the skin off her hand where it gripped the handle. She knew there would be an ax somewhere on the property, probably a chain saw as well, but the work acted as a stimulus and seemed to loosen the woman’s tongue. Martha kept sawing, and as the sawdust began to accumulate, she coaxed the story of the affair out of Scarlett Blake.

  Scarlett initially feigned ignorance, but when Martha told her about the matchbox, the woman’s face had collapsed.

  Buster, she told Martha, had not been physically attractive to her, not the persona he presented the world. The five o’clock shadow. The scar. The machismo. But she had admired his struggle, the fact that he had struggled when so many of his nature would succumb to their baser instincts. Buster changed, and change, real change, was as rarely found in the human animal as it was among the cats. But what he could not change were the sins of his past, and he suffered for them. When he was thrown together with Scarlett, they had circled each other warily before becoming each other’s port in the storm that was Scarlett’s brother.

  The sapling was cut halfway through.

  “Did he know about it?” Martha asked.

  No, she said. Drick was too arrogant, too vain to consider that she might find comfort elsewhere. In the end, she had confessed to the affair, though not to the name. The name had come out after the claws dug in.

  “Did Drick kill him?”

  The green eyes had begun to wander again and Martha held up two spread fingers. “Look at me. I need to know what happened.”

  Drick, she said, told her he’d arranged to meet Buster in the Pioneers, near the drainage where Zahara had first been introduced into the wild and where she had returned before to find a mate. Said that he had located Zahara by the radio transmitter built into her collar. When Drick came back the following day, he told her that they had found no trace of Zahara and he assumed that Buster had gone home. Scarlett hadn’t believed a word, starting with the location where he said they had met. His explanations seemed pat and overly rehearsed. Drick didn’t have to tell her that he’d killed Buster. She’d seen the murder in his eyes. She’d seen the signs of a struggle on his face, too, the bruising and cuts that he explained away by saying that his horse had ducked under a branch and scraped him off. She’d seen the blood on his clothes. Blood persists. Having been ritually cut by her brother as a sign of his ownership, she knew a thing or two about that.

  “I saw his body,” Martha said. “Buster was killed by a cat. I saw the teeth marks in his throat.”

  “That is only what you think you saw. He makes . . . contraptions.”

  Martha was almost through the sapling. She made a cut on the other side of the tree, an inch underneath the facing cut, so she could control the direction that it fell in. She pushed against the trunk. “Timber,” she said.

  Scarlett was wobbly, but strong enough to walk with Martha’s assist, the chain dragging in her wake. At the yurt, she hobbled over to the shelf with the skulls and opened the jaws of one of the smaller ones. She turned with a key in her hand and unlocked the shackle.

  Martha looked at her.

  “I just remembered,” Scarlett said. “I was a little woozy, but I’m all right now. If you want, I can take you to my brother.”

  The drive was no more than half a mile, but a long grind in second gear up switchbacks to the open country of the snow line. Scarlett had brought a radio receiver from the yurt and said the range would be extended in the high country.

  At the end of the trace road, Martha parked and wedged stones under the tires, an old habit in steep country. Martha asked Scarlett again if she was okay to wait in the rig. Scarlett said she was fine, that the blood made the wounds on her torso look worse than they were. Just follow the contour, Scarlett told her. And keep your ears open.

  She drew her fingers down the scars on her face. “Remember,” she said, “it is not Zahara you need to be afraid of. The monster goes by a different name.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Zahara

  Sean heard the light padding of the footfalls. They seemed to be coming up from behind him. He craned his head to his right as far as he could.

  Zahara.

  The cat had managed to approach without his seeing so much as a hair. She was fifteen feet away, her stomach pressed against the forest floor, her rear legs tucked under her belly. Sean felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir against his jacket collar. The cat pinned her ears back and growled deep in her throat.

  “Hello, Zahara.” He tried to strike a conversational tone, but the words sounded strangled.

  Again the cat growled.

  “Let me have a look at you, Zahara.”

  As if on cue, the cat stood. Low, her belly brushing the dead grass that poked above the thin snow cover, she circled the tree trunk. Sean’s eyes never left her. Never turn your back.

  Zahara opened her mouth in a silent hiss. Her muzzle was wrinkled back. Sean could see the long canines.

  “My, what sharp teeth you have.” His voice was not his own.

  What did he know about the proper response to lion aggression? Hold their eyes. Make yourself appear larger. Pick up a stick, any weapon at hand. Don’t run. A lot of good that did. The rope that tied his hands behind the tree trunk prevented him from standing, and even had his hands been free, the only debris within reach was leaf litter and pinecones.

  She was facing him now, no more than ten feet away. Sean could smell a faint odor. Something like sawdust and sage, but darker. She circled back behind him.

  In the next few minutes she circled him three more times, her posture aggressive, but each time the circle was larger, the cat a few feet farther away. Then she inexplicably turned her back to the tree, glanced once at him over her shoulder, and, her ears no longer folded flat, began to walk away. It was only then that Sean noticed the pronounced limp in her right foreleg and heard the moaning she made with every other step.

  He heard a sharp cracking sound from somewhere above. A bloom of pink appeared on Zahara’s left haunch. She whipped around and tugged at the dart with her teeth. She caught Sean’s eyes and spat at him. She took a step toward him, then, seeming to lose focus, stopped and looked around curiously. She glanced skyward, as if looking for a singing bird. Her eyes fixed on the man in the pine tree. A low growl came from her throat. She walked over to the trunk and stood against it, reaching high with her front paws and clawing at the bark. Twice she leapt up into the lowest branches, but well short of Blake, whose hands gripped the tranquilizing rifle. The third time the cat leapt up, she fell back onto the ground. Her legs quivering, she began to walk away. Her path took her directly in front of Sean, so close that he might have touched her with a stick, but she did not appear to even see him. A few yards away, she sat down. The muscles in her forelegs fluttered. Then she lay down. Her head drooped and she rolled over onto her side.

  “That was intense. I was afraid I might have to give her a second dart.”

  “What?” Sean’s eyes were on the cat.

  “It would have been dangerous for her, one dose on top of another.” Blake set down the rifle on a stump. He began to dig through his backpack. He spread a space blanket over the ground. Standing on one end of it, he half lifted, half dragged the drugged cat onto the reflective fabric. He draped a cloth game bag over her head. Then, with a b
usinesslike approach, he arranged tools from the backpack onto the blanket—fisherman’s hemostats, a Vise-Grip with pointed jaws, several sheathed scalpels, a bottle of some solution, and a tube of ointment.

  “She didn’t attack me,” Sean said.

  “No. She came here to find a mate, not a meal.”

  “What’s wrong with her leg?” The right foreleg was scarcely more than half as big around as the left.

  “Porcupine quills, as I suspected from her tracks. Actually, as I’ve expected for some time. Had she been taught to properly kill by her mother, she would have known better than to get stuck. It is hard to say how long she has been in this condition. If she was unable to rely on her brother for meat, I’m sure she would have died years ago. We’ll see how many we can extract. She’s bitten them off short, so they’re not going to be easy to grip. Each quill is barbed like a fish hook, which makes it work deeper into the flesh. I’ve known quills to migrate a foot or more, pierce the heart. The good news is she doesn’t have them in the pad of her paw and I don’t see obvious signs of infection.”

  “You plan to release her.”

  “If you mean to give her a chance to survive on her own, then yes. Of course. That has been my mission since she was a cub.”

  “She’ll kill again.”

  Blake shook his head. “That is the common wisdom, but where is the data? If she recovers, she can just as easily turn back to killing her natural prey. You’ve seen how reluctant she is to attack people. She may be guilty of eating the bodies that her brother provided her, but to my knowledge she has only killed one person, the sheepherder. And on that occasion she was driven away by the dogs, which must have left a bad taste. Those scars you see are from fighting dogs, not other cats.”