Then, nothing.

  Danny dressed himself in black jeans, black T-shirt, black sweater, black socks, black Converse sneakers, and got his black leather jacket ready. He killed the bedroom lights and put black tape over the reflectors on his shoes.

  He opened the bedroom window.

  Of course what he’d told Bob was a lie; he couldn’t actually see the back of Tony’s house from his bedroom. If this was going to work, he’d have to go outside.

  He waited for Walt, and finally at a quarter to ten he heard Walt come up to bed.

  Walt did a lot more fussing than Juanita, but by 10:05 the house was silent.

  Now the hard part.

  Explaining his plan to Jeffrey.

  He took Jeff’s furry orange face in his hands and stroked his head.

  “I’m sorry, pal, but I’m going to try and get this guy, and you’re going to have to help,” he whispered.

  Jeffrey didn’t understand.

  “It’s like this, buddy: Snowflake’s a house cat, kind of pathetic … Have you seen him? He’s all white and furry. He’ll go to pieces when the cat ki—the uh, the bad guy grabs him. He’ll probably have a heart attack and die on the spot. But you? You’re a street cat; you can handle yourself in a fight, and anyway it’s only going to be until I get some video evidence and then I’m gonna reveal myself. Maybe do a citizen’s arrest. I got some pepper spray that I can use if things get rough, which they probably won’t, ’cause it’s a kid that’s doing it. A kid from our school, and believe me I can handle any of those jerks. We’re both from Vegas, remember!”

  Jeffrey yawned.

  “OK, I’ve got to do it now. I’m not going to let him hurt you, I promise. I love you,” Danny said. He scooped Jeffrey up and carried him to the cat carrier. Poor Jeffrey still didn’t understand. He began to purr.

  Danny started to have second thoughts.

  “Look, Jeff, Bob said that you have to look within and all that crap, but I can’t really do that. When I look within, it’s just confusing. I gotta act, I gotta do something. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s like this, old buddy, I can’t let anything happen to her cat. You see that, don’t you? And you can stick up for yourself. I know you can. Like when you took on that coyote.”

  Danny placed Jeffrey gently into the cat carrier. Jeffrey, perhaps thinking he was going on a trip somewhere, curled up and closed his eyes.

  Danny grabbed the carrier by the handle and, wiping away a tear, went downstairs on tiptoe. He checked his flashlight and his Handycam and pulled on his coat. He went into the kitchen cabinet, and behind the sink cleaner he found the can of pepper spray that Juanita still kept from the days when she was working the night shift at the Glynn and walking home from the Strip. He got his mini backpack and chucked in some rope and the rest of the gear.

  “Cat, rope, flashlight, camera, pepper spray. Check,” Danny said.

  He zipped up his jacket and walked across the street to Tony’s house.

  He knew he was safe there; if the killer was already watching the house from the woods, he wouldn’t be able to see this little maneuver. He opened the cat carrier, took out Jeffrey, and pushed him through the cat flap. He took Jeffrey’s favorite toy, a squeaky mouse, and threw that inside too.

  The mouse would keep Jeffrey busy downstairs for hours, and if Snowflake played true to type, he’d be snoozing in his basket upstairs; the odds were pretty good that the catnapper would get Jeffrey. Of course, you couldn’t predict it, but it made it more likely.

  Danny went back across Johnson Close and killed the garage light in front of his house.

  The darkness, immediately, was profound.

  “Have to hurry now,” he said to himself. He ran to the back gate, opened it quietly, and slipped into the woods.

  He looked at his watch. The window for a burglary couldn’t be very long. Maybe an hour, but not much more. You couldn’t afford to wait until all the lights were off in all the houses in the cul-de-sac, but now that the powerful garage light was dead, any unseen watchers could seize their chance. I mean, how long did it take to drive to Denver? How long was the musical? You couldn’t be certain, but if you were going to kidnap a cat you’d do it well before midnight just to be on the safe side. You’d go over the fence, squeeze through the cat flap, grab poor Jeffrey playing with his mouse …

  “Jeffrey!” he whispered to himself, fear coursing through him. “Oh my God, Jeffrey. What the hell was I thinking? This is madness. I’ve got to stop this. I’ll make a noise, scare him off …”

  But he didn’t shout, he didn’t turn on the flashlight, he didn’t climb over the Meadowses’ fence, he didn’t retrieve Jeffrey. Instead, he retreated deeper into the forest and turned on the night vision of the Handycam.

  “He’ll be OK … He’s taken on coyotes and snakes in his time,” Danny said to himself.

  He remembered what Dan Flight of Eagles had said.

  Was this the grown-up thing to do? Was this a responsible thing? Or was this an attempt to get glory for himself?

  He didn’t have an answer.

  He waited.

  Snow began to fall.

  He looked at his watch.

  Nothing happened for a long time.

  Minutes went past.

  Perhaps an hour.

  Heavier snow began to fall.

  But then, movement.

  On the fence to the east of Tony’s house.

  Someone was there. Was there someone there?

  Then they were gone. Danny lifted the camera lens to his eye. He scanned the fence. Nothing. Had he seen someone?

  He thought of Jeffrey and his heart sank like a stone. “What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?” he whispered like a mantra.

  A minute passed that felt much longer. Then another and another and then more movement by the fence and then it was over. Whoever had been there was now in the backyard of Tony’s neighbors, the Allens. The catnapper hadn’t come over the fence into the woods; he had seen an easier way through the Allens’ house. Danny wouldn’t be able to track him. He had screwed up!

  “Oh no!” Danny said, and stuffed the camera in the backpack, shouldered it, and began running through the trees. He made it to the Allens’ just in time to see the intruder walking along the side of the Allens’ house and making his way around to Johnson Close.

  The street?

  Danny didn’t understand.

  He was going to walk down the middle of the street? But didn’t he always use the woods to navigate? Had he already gotten Jeffrey? What was going on?

  His whole plan was falling apart.

  He ran out of the forest and alongside the Allens’ house.

  Someone inside was watching Letterman, the blue light from the tube casting weird reflections on the ground in front of him.

  Danny made it to the street just in time to see the burglar ride off on a mountain bike with a large rucksack on his back.

  “Holy crap!” Danny said, and sprinted back across Johnson Close to his house.

  He ran upstairs, burst into his bedroom, grabbed Sunflower, and ran back downstairs again.

  He bomb-dropped on the board and kicked hard but the bicyclist was far ahead of him. It was all downhill, and any bike could generate a much greater speed than even the most powerful skateboarder.

  Danny kicked hard five times goofy-foot.

  The wind licked his face. Light snow flew into his eyes. He kicked every two beats and didn’t allow himself to freewheel at all.

  “Faster,” he said aloud. “Faster!”

  Danny reached the junction at Alameda and there was no one to be seen.

  Raw panic.

  The guy was gone.

  Jeffrey was gone.

  Jeffrey was going to be murdered and it was all his fault.

  Alameda went either left or right. Right took you to Manitou, left toward the prison road.

  Left was more isolated. Had to be left.

  Danny dead-leg kicked along Alameda for ten seconds and then changed his mind and stopped.

  “No. He went right,” he said to himself.

  He slash-curved the board, boneless-jumped, and kicked it toward Manitou, almost getting sideswiped by a car coming down the hill.

  In thirty seconds he knew that his change of mind had paid off.

  There, ahead of him, far in the distance, was a shadowy form on the road. A bike. They were on level ground and Danny pulled back some of the distance between them.

  Yeah, that was him.

  The cat killer.

  Was it a man on the bike or a boy on the bike? Hard to tell, because he was wearing a big coat, a ski mask, gloves. Definitely a male, though?

  No, Danny didn’t even know that for sure.

  This part of Cobalt had few houses, and the woods on either side had been cleared for grass. Across the barbwire he saw haystacks covered with snow that looked like odd brooding monsters out there in the darkness.

  He was shaking with fear—no, with excitement, or maybe both—and at a runoff ramp for trucks he found himself doing an Andrecht invert just for the hell of it.

  Suddenly the bike swerved to the left and went up a lane that Danny had never even noticed before.

  “Where are you going, pal?” Danny said, landing after the invert and wiping the snowflakes from his face with the back of his glove.

  He kicked up the lane and almost fell.

  The wheels spun. There was no traction. He jumped off and touched the ground. It was a dirt road. There was no way Danny could ride it.

  He got off the board, tucked Sunflower under his arm, and ran to keep up with the bicyclist.

  A sign ahead of him said something about a State Park, but he didn’t have time to read it.

  The dirt trail came to a small parking lot, and then gigantic rocks loomed out of the darkness and the landscape appeared to assume a parched, desertlike quality.

  The dirt under his feet became a packed sandstone, and although the trail was wide, it was unnerving to walk between gigantic unseen boulders that he knew were on either side of him. Big sandstone pillars weathered into strange shapes a little like pictures he’d seen of Stonehenge.

  What is this place? Danny wondered as he walked along the sandy canyon floor. Is this the Garden of the Gods? He’d heard about that weird rock formation from Tom, but he thought that was in the Springs.

  Perhaps this was another outcrop of the same formation? A landform from the time when Colorado was an ancient seabed and the Front Range hadn’t yet been born.

  Suddenly he became aware of all the noise he was making.

  His feet were stomping along on the gravel and the echo was reverbing off the canyon walls.

  He stopped and listened.

  Had he given himself away?

  He stood still for a full minute and then began to move.

  He had to go on. Jeffrey or Snowflake or both of them were up there somewhere. In danger.

  Around the next bend he saw the cat killer’s bike leaning against one of the boulders. He tiptoed over to it and examined it. Standard mountain bike—no clues.

  One thing he could do was deflate the guy’s tires.

  Let’s see you try and get away now, Danny thought as he unscrewed the tube cap and released the air from both tubes.

  He went around the next bend.

  The path was still quite wide and his eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to let him see the whole canyon. It reminded him a little of places he’d visited in Arizona—Indian settlements in the desert, pueblos. It was strange to find a little microclimate like this in Colorado. Especially since it was still snowing and cold.

  The gravelly trail took a wide bend and terminated in a large open space—a natural rock amphitheater bounded by sandstone columns.

  It wasn’t a true circle, but it was close and looked even more like Stonehenge, except that all of it had obviously been created by geologic rather than man-made forces.

  The cat killer was twenty yards ahead of him, standing by a large flat stone.

  His back was to Danny, his hood still up.

  Danny thought about the pepper spray. Maybe he should have tested it first. How far would it shoot? Could he aim it at night? His mom had bought it from a guy on Craigslist and just assumed that it was the genuine article. Maybe she’d been scammed.

  Once this doubt began floating in his brain, other doubts formed.

  Perhaps he should have brought a cell phone, or left a note for his parents or told Tony herself.

  No, not Tony.

  But maybe his mom.

  In his mind Danny measured the distance from himself to the killer. About twenty-five feet. Beyond the range of the pepper spray for sure. He would have to get closer.

  He stepped out from the sandstone rock just as the moon finally appeared over the canyon walls.

  The cat killer looked up. He was ecstatic. “The moon, perfect, perfect,” he muttered.

  The cat killer picked up a flashlight and a knife.

  Because of the muttering and the weird acoustics, Danny still had no clue who he was.

  The cat killer opened a bag and lifted out a cat.

  It was Jeff, not Snowball.

  Jeff was hissing and fighting.

  The cat killer had Jeff in one hand, the knife in the other.

  His plan was obvious. He was going to kill Jeffrey here in this place, this place that maybe had some kind of religious significance for him or his deranged cult friends.

  Kill him here and then display him here or transport the body to some other shocking location.

  Danny wondered what this lunatic was thinking.

  Was he thinking at all?

  Maybe he too was on drugs.

  Danny knew that he had to act.

  He reached into his jacket pocket, fumbled for an anxious few seconds, and found the pepper spray.

  As he took it out he noticed that his hands were shaking uncontrollably.

  “Gotta keep it together, Danny. Got to keep it together, bro,” he told himself.

  He looked at the pepper-spray can and tried to read the instructions on the side but it was much too dark for that. The cat killer was talking to himself through his ski mask.

  Danny took the cap off the pepper spray. Probably you just aimed and pushed.

  Danny walked closer.

  Jeff was struggling.

  The cat killer pushed Jeff down onto the stone.

  Lifted his knife.

  “That’s enough!” Danny said.

  The cat killer turned, startled.

  Jeff jumped off the rock and ran straight to Danny.

  Danny pointed the pepper spray at the strange hooded figure in front of him.

  They were fifteen feet apart.

  “The game’s up, you little punk,” Danny said, his voice steady.

  Jeff was rubbing himself against Danny’s legs, seeking his approval. “Yes, you’re very clever, now scoot. Get out of here. Hide yourself in those rocks over there,” he whispered.

  Suddenly the cat killer turned off his flashlight.

  All was darkness.

  For two seconds Danny wondered what to do.

  But then he saw the cat killer moving silently toward him as if on rails.

  Danny didn’t hesitate.

  He fired the pepper spray. His aim was good. The cat killer was caught completely unaware. He yelped as hot pepper scalded his face and stung his eyes.

  “We got him, Jeff!” Danny yelled.

  But then the killer fired his weapon.

  There was a scream.

  Danny’s scream.

  And then his body was on fire.

  Danny convulsed in pain. He threw up. And then the pain came again.

  The air was sucked from his lungs. He couldn’t think. All he could do was feel pain. Pain in every joint and muscle, pain in every nerve ending and synapse.

  A terrible, white molten torment as a thousand volts traveled from the Taser along its wires and into Danny.

  When the full charge was used the cat killer threw the Taser to one side and ran at him. He knocked the can of pepper spray from Danny’s hand and Danny felt fists thumping into his body. Heavy, measured, deliberate blows that clubbed the air out of him. A punch in the face, another in the throat, one in the gut.

  Danny’s leather jacket did little to protect him.

  Another punch in the face.

  White spots before his eyes.

  He went down.

  Blackout.

  More fists. A kick. Kicks.

  Red-out.

  Blood pouring from his nostrils, his mouth.

  Somehow Danny curled himself into the fetal position.

  The cat killer paused to regard him and get his breath. Irritation over the lost cat had transmuted into triumph.

  This was a special day, after all.

  This was graduation day.

  This was the day he made the cross-species jump. Like a virus. Like a deadly virus. From bugs to cats to, finally, people. A fourteen-year-old boy called Danny Lopez.

  Danny tried to wipe the blood from his face but he couldn’t move.

  Everything hurt.

  Tears had cleared the blood from his eyes. He tried to lift his head but it was wedged into one position like the closed-circuit camera directly above a blackjack table.

  He stared along the canyon floor. He saw the killer’s combat boots and, through his legs, the desert terrain and the distant red and blue lights of Colorado Springs blurring into one long smear of color.

  And on the edge of his vision a pair of slant eyes staring at him from the darkness.

  Run, cat, run, he thought wearily.

  But Jeff was caught up in the moment and he crouched there, behind a cactus, transfixed.

  Curiosity will be the death of both of us, Danny thought.

  The cat killer bent down over him.

  Danny felt his breath.

  The cat killer put his hand on Danny’s cheek, turned his face toward him.

  He grabbed Danny’s long brown hair and pulled it back, exposing the jugular vein to the fleeting moon.

  Danny blinked.