Double

I laughed weakly and swung the flash back to where the yellow eyes had been. They belonged to a cat — but one that hardly resembled the fat, docile housecat named Watney that graced my home. This one was sinewy and sleek and, from what I’d seen in zoos, probably full grown. Its cage — like the one that housed the thing that resembled a raccoon — looked sturdy.

The cat flattened in a crouch as I held the light on him, and kept growling. The rattling and flapping sounds increased. Wondering what else was here, I turned the light toward the source of the flapping sounds and found a cage of exotic-looking birds. I shook my head in amazement. Apparently I’d stumbled onto a miniaturized version of the San Diego Zoo.

Curious to see what other kinds of animals Woodall was harboring, I swept the light around the yard. There were a number of other cages, one containing more of the raccoonlike animals, another holding two more big cats. There were some lynxes — I recognized them by their lack of tails — and a bunch of foxes, white ones that looked as if they’d been bleached. Another cage held large snakes that I didn’t recognize. I shuddered, staring at their sleek, patterned coils.

Yes, I thought, it was a zoo, and not such a small one at that. But what was Woodall doing, keeping it here in his backyard? Weren’t there laws about what kinds of animals you could have in your backyard? As I recalled, even the ducks my parents had had — the ones the coyotes had eaten — had been illegal.

And why, for heaven’s sake, hadn’t the gate been locked? Big cats were dangerous beasts, and if these got loose there was no telling what kind of damage they might do.

I went over to the gate, fumbled around for the latch, and found a chain with a padlock attached to it. Shining the light on it, I saw that the chain had been broken forcibly. There were marks, as if someone had used a hacksaw on it.

Lights flashed suddenly in the driveway, illuminating the garage door. A motor purred, and a small car came into view. Before I could step back, the lights swept over me.

The car jerked to a stop, and a man sprang from the driver’s seat. Then he was running toward me, yelling, “Hey! What the hell are you doing there?”

16: “Wolf”

I ate supper in the hotel coffee shop and then went up to my room and tried to call Kerry. No answer. So then I tried to call Eberhardt. No answer. So then I tried to call Charley Valdene, and he wasn’t home either. Feeling lonely and unwanted, I switched on the television and found something to watch — a 1943 film labeled an “Inner Sanctum Mystery” and carrying the sedate title of Calling Dr. Death.

The movie was pretty awful, but I managed to stick with it for close to an hour. Until J. Carroll Naish, playing a cop, said to Lon Chaney, Jr., playing a neurologist in one of the all-time great pieces of miscasting, “You’ve gone beyond life, doctor — into the brain!” At which point I got up and shut the thing off.

Time to go beyond the brain, I thought, into something even greater and more desirable: the realm of sleep.

I went to bed.

17: McCone

The glare of the headlights illuminated the man who was running up the driveway toward me. He had wavy brown hair like the man Wolf had described, and his handsome face was contorted in anger. He reached out to grab me, but I stepped back, deciding to take the offensive.

“What do you mean, going off and leaving this gate unlocked?” I said. “Don’t you know that’s dangerous?”

He stopped, momentarily taken aback.

“What if kids or somebody got in and let those big cats out? What would happen then?” I shined my flashlight on him.

He stood there, arms hanging at his sides, anger turning to wariness. I looked into his eyes, and confirmed that this was the man who had accosted Elaine in the Cantina Sin Nombre. Wolf had been right about those eyes: they were very, very odd. Something burned deep down in them, something changeable that I couldn’t quite make out.

Finally he said, “Are you a cop?”

“No, but I’ve conducted plenty of investigations in cooperation with them. And I know enough to realize that this menagerie is in violation of a whole bunch of ordinances. For one thing, it’s an attractive nuisance—”

Recognition had started up in his eyes when I’d mentioned investigations. Now he said, “Wait a minute — you’re from that convention at the Casa del Rey. I saw you in the bar with Elaine Picard.”

“Right”

“What are you doing in my backyard?”

“Originally I came looking for you. But then those birds started up, and I found myself in the middle of a zoo. Why wasn’t the gate padlocked?”

Woodall glanced at it, troubled. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

“What does that mean?”

“I came home an hour ago and found that somebody had sawed through the chain. None of the animals had been disturbed, as far as I could tell. I went right out to get a new chain, but you can imagine how hard it is to find a hardware store open on a Saturday night.”