me harder and faster than ever, energized by this evidence that they
were closing on their quarry.
On the far side of this hill, out of the vale where I had barely
escaped the searchlight, the Hummer be an to climb again. The shriek
of its engine rose in pitch, swelled in volume.
If the driver paused on this grassy hilltop to survey the night once
more, I would run undetected beneath him and away. If instead he raced
across the hill and into this new hollow, I might be caught in his
headlights or pinned by a searchlight beam.
The cat ran, and I ran.
As it sloped down between dark hills, the hollow grew wider than any
that I had traveled previously, and the rocky swale in the center
widened, too. Along the verge of the stone path, the tall cordgrass
and the other brush bristled thicker than elsewhere, evidently watered
by a greater volume of storm runoff, but the vegetation was too far to
either side to cast even a faint dappling of moonshadows over me, and I
felt dangerously exposed. Furthermore, this broad declivity, unlike
those before it, ran as straight as a city street, with no bends to
shield me from those who might enter it in my wake.
On the highlands, the Hummer seemed to have come to a halt once more.
Its grumble drained away in the sluicing breeze, and the only engine
sounds were mine: the rasp and wheeze of breathing, heartbeat like a
pounding piston.
The cat was potentially fleeter than I-wind on four feet; it could have
vanished in seconds. For a couple of minutes, however, it paced me,
staying a constant fifteen feet ahead, pale gray or pale beige, a mere
ghost of a cat in the moonglow, occasionally glancin back with eyes as
eerie as seance candles.
Just when I began to think that this creature was purposefully leading
me out of harm’s way, just as I began to indulge in one of those orgies
of anthropoinorphizing that make Bobby Halloway’s brain itch, the cat
sped away from me. If that dry rocky wash had been filled with a storm
gush, the tumbling water could not have outrun this feline, and in two
seconds, three at most, it disappeared into the night ahead.
A minute later, I found the cat at the terminus of the channel.
We were in the dead end of a blind hollow, with exposed grassy hills
rising steeply on three sides. They were so steep, in fact, that I
could not scale them quickly enough to elude the two searchers who were
surely pursuing on foot. Boxed in. Trapped.
Driftwood, tangled balls of dead weeds and grass, and silt were mounded
at the end of the wash. I half expected the cat to give me an evil
Cheshire grin, white teeth gleaming in the gloom. Instead, it
scampered to the pile of debris and slinked-wriggled into one of many
small gaps, disappearing again.
This was a wash. Therefore the runoff had to go somewhere when it
reached this point.
Hastily I climbed the nine-foot-long, three-foot-high slope of packed
debris, which sagged and rattled and crunched but held beneath me. It
was all drifted against a grid of steel bars, which served as a
vertical grate across the mouth of a culvert set into the side of the
hill.
Beyond the grate was a six-foot-diameter concrete drain between
anchoring concrete buttresses. It was apparently part of a
flood-control project that carried storm water out of the hills, under
the Pacific Coast Highway, into drains beneath the streets of Moonlight
Bay, and finally to the sea.
A couple of times each winter, maintenance crews would clear the trash
away from the grate to prevent water flow from being completely
impeded.
Clearly, they had not been here recently.
Inside the culvert, the cat meowed. Magnified, its voice echoed with a
new sepulchral tone along the concrete tunnel.
The openings in the steel-bar grid were four-inch squares, wide enough
to admit the supple cat but not wide enough for me. The grate extended
the width of the opening, from buttress to buttress, but it didn’t
reach all the way to the top.