Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

spotted the faded sign for Paint Horse Road, a narrow black-top that took off to the right. It slanted diagonally up a steep, wooded rise, then leveled off across the shoulder of a narrow ridge, giving me a beautiful view of folded green hills, limestone bluffs, and steep-banked canyons cut into the limestone of the Edwards Plateau by eons of rushingcreeks and rivers. The sky to the west and north—a bright, sharp blue—had already cleared. The low pressure area that had brought last night’s rain was giving way to a high pressure system pushing down from the north that would keep us sunny and dry for the next couple of days, until a new storm system was forecast to come in from the north.
    This area was far enough away from the road so that there wasn’t a house in sight, not even a utility pole or a cell phone tower. When the road slanted down again, I saw a small flock of Angora goats behind a rusty barbed-wire fence that zigzagged up the hill. Angoras produce mohair, a valuable luxury fiber with the sheen of silk and more durable and lightweight than wool. They are more valuable than your everyday, garden-variety goats, which are usually left to fend for themselves while Angoras are sent out to graze with a guard animal. This flock was under the protection of an attentive burro, who was keeping a close eye on his charges. Burros are fast on their feet and can kick like the devil, and they’re aggressively territorial when it comes to protecting their flocks. They might not be much good against a mountain lion, like the one I had seen the night before. But they’re diligent about keeping coyotes and marauding dogs at bay, and predators have learned to respect them.
    That mountain lion. I thought of her—silvery in the rain, in the glint of my headlights—and shivered. She had been so beautiful, so mysterious, so seductively, dangerously powerful. For a fleeting moment, I wished that I could see her again, witness her litheness, her gracefulness, her strength. But only for a moment. I had other things to do. And one glimpse of that kind of danger can go a very long way.
    Another hundred yards on the left, I saw the pair of mailboxes that McQuaid had mentioned. But something caught my attention that he (not being a plant person) probably hadn’t noticed. The boxes were half-smothered under a luxuriant blanket of vine. I wasn’t in a hurry, so Istopped the car and got out to have a closer look. I knew immediately what it was: cat’s claw vine, a long-lived, aggressive plant—a valuable medicinal in its tropical homeland—that can smother trees, structures, and native plants. The vine produces small three-pronged hooks that can cling to almost anything, and showy yellow, trumpet-shaped blossoms in late spring and summer. In fact, you may see the plant sold in nurseries as the yellow trumpet vine and advertised as useful for masking unattractive structures. But in southern states, the cat’s claw vine is considered a dangerous nuisance.
    I got back in the car and turned onto the narrow caliche-topped road, following it through an open landscape of rangeland and bony mesquite trees, leafless now in the November morning. But there hadn’t been a hard freeze yet. The grass was still green, the live oaks still bore their shiny green leaves, and the morning sun was splendid. I saw a Cooper’s hawk, a flirtatious mockingbird, a pair of kestrels, and several jaunty red cardinals, as bright as flame.
    And then I saw the sign I was looking for, weathered but just legible: paint horse ranch. The road, rutted now, dipped steeply downhill, and I guessed that I was headed toward Paint Horse Creek and George Timms’ cabin—his bachelor pad, as McQuaid had called it, where he could party as much as he wanted without disturbing the neighbors.
    Why was I doing this? Curiosity, was it? Wanting to see what kind of party place a guy like George Timms had built? Or maybe a suspicion that Timms might be using the cabin to escape from the nastiness of his surrender and arrest. Charlie said that he had repeatedly called Timms’ cell phone, but Paint Horse Ranch was out in the boonies. It was entirely possible that there wasn’t a signal here, so Timms hadn’t gotten the calls. It was also possible that Timms wasn’t actually hiding—that he had fully intended to come back to town to keep his date with the police but hadrun into some kind of trouble. That he was sick or maybe injured, with no way to call for help. The