Cat to the Dogs Read Free

stopped barking, even their doggy smiles were incredibly downtrodden and sad.
    They couldn’t be more than four or five months old, but were so emaciated that even the weight of their floppy ears and floppy feet seemed to drag them down.
    He wondered if they belonged to the dead driver, if somehow they had managed, as the car went over the cliff, to leap free?
    But the crash happened in a split second; they would have had only an instant to escape. These clumsy mutts didn’t look like they could get out of their own way in twenty seconds.
    Maybe they’d been following the car, running along behind. Had the driver been running his dogs the way some country folk did, exercising them down the nearly empty highway? Joe sneezed with disgust. Any man who ran his dogs behind a car—to say nothing of starving them bone-thin—deserved a violent death.
    He gave them a gentle growl to make them move back and dropped down from the boulder. They backed away two steps, fawning at him, bowing on their front legs and grinning in doggy obeisance. They seemed, actually, like rather nice young pups.Though only youngsters, they were already as big as Rube, Joe’s aged, Labrador retriever housemate. And though they were puppy-silly and disgustingly eager, with their stupid baby grins, Joe thought perhaps the expressions in their bright, dark eyes hinted at some possible future intelligence.
    He thought they might be half Great Dane, and maybe half boxer. The smaller of the two had the happy-go-lucky grin of a young boxer. Actually, if they were fed properly and groomed, if their faces filled out a bit, and their ribs ceased to protrude, they might become quite handsome—as far as a dog could be handsome.
    Too late Joe Grey saw where his thoughts had led him. Saw that he had reacted with no more common sense than a mush-hearted human do-gooder, sucker for a pair of starving mutts—realized that he had actually been wondering where to find these beasts a meal.
    Well, he’d been around Clyde too long; Clyde Damen was such a sucker for stray animals.
    Not yours truly, Joe Grey thought. I’m not playing animal rescue for these two bags of bones.
    The fact that he himself had been a rescued stray had no bearing on the present situation. This was entirely different. Turning his back on the gamboling pups, he studied the wrecked Corvette, wondering if anyone at all had heard the crash and called the cops. There were no houses near Hellhag Canyon, only the empty hills and, atop Hellhag Hill, to the north, the Moonwatch Trailer Park.
    The instant he turned to look at the pups again, they were all over him, slobbering and whining, soaking him with dog spit.
    â€œStop it! Get off! Get back. Get off me!”
    They ducked away, staring at him white-eyed with alarm.
    Obviously they had never been spoken to in the English language by one of feline persuasion. Whining and backing, they watched him with such deep suspicion that he had to laugh.
    His laugh frightened them further. The poor beasts looked soconfused that he ended up reaching out a gentle paw, patting the smaller pup on his huge white foot, then lifting his own sleek gray face to sniff noses.
    He knew he was acting stupid, that he was being suckered. Joe Grey, PI, taken in by a pair of flea-bitten, mange-ridden mongrels.
    â€œGet on out of here! Go on back to the highway!”
    They cowered away, crestfallen, and Joe turned his attention to the crash victim, peering in at the dead driver, thinking about the severed brake line.
    The cops were needed here, the sooner the better.
    He studied the twisted dashboard and the dark hole of the sprung-open glove compartment, but could not see a car phone. Where was the driver of the other car? How could he not have heard the crash? Was he clear down the coast by this time?
    Behind Joe, the pups began a cacophony of heartrending whines. Joe ignored them. Whoever had cut the brake line must have known approximately how