Forever Odd

trapdoor and ladder were gone, reduced to ashes. Relieved, I dropped into the space below, landed on my feet, stumbled, but kept my balance.
        I stepped between the twisted steel studs of a missing wall, into the main corridor. Only one floor above ground level, I should be able to escape the hotel without resorting to the guarded stairs.
        The first thing my flashlight fell upon were tracks that looked like those I had seen when I first entered the Panamint. They had made me think saber-tooth .
        The second thing the light revealed were human footprints, which led within a few steps to Datura, who switched on her flashlight the moment that mine found her.

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    FIFTY-ONE
        
        WHAT A BITCH. AND I MEAN THAT IN EVERY SENSE OF the phrase.
        “Hey, boyfriend,” Datura said.
        In addition to a flashlight, she held a pistol.
        She said, “I was at the bottom of the north stairs, having some wine, staying loose, waiting to feel the power, you know, your power, drawing me, the way Danny the Geek said it could.”
        “Don’t talk,” I pleaded. “Just shoot me.”
        Ignoring my interruption, she continued: “I got bored. I get bored easy. Earlier, I noticed these big cat prints in the ashes at the foot of the stairs. They’re on the stairs, too. So I decided to follow them.”
        The fire had raged with special ferocity in this part of the hotel. Most of the inner walls had burned away, leaving a vast and gloomy space, the ceiling supported by red-steel columns encased in concrete. Over the years, ashes and dust had continued to settle, laying a smooth, lush carpet, over which my saber-toothed tiger had recently been wandering this way and that.
        “The beast has been all over this place,” she said. “I got so interested in the way it went in circles and meandered back on itself, I completely forgot about you. Completely forgot. And that’s just when I heard you coming and switched off my flashlight. Mondo cool, boyfriend. I thought I was following the cat, but I was being drawn to you when I least expected. You are one strange dude, you know that?”
        “I know that,” I admitted.
        “Is there really a cat, or were the prints made by a phantom you conjured up to lead me here?”
        “There’s really a cat,” I assured her.
        I was very tired. And dirty. I wanted to be done with this, go home, and take a bath.
        Approximately twelve feet separated us. If we had been a few feet closer, I might have tried to rush her, duck in under her arm and take the gun away from her.
        If I could keep her talking, an opportunity to turn the tables might arise. Fortunately, keeping her talking would require no more effort on my part than would breathing.
        “I knew this prince from Nigeria,” Datura said, “he claimed to be an isangoma , said he could change into a panther after midnight.”
        “Why not at ten o’clock?”
        “I don’t think he really could. I think he was lying because he wanted to screw me.”
        “You don’t have to worry about that with me,” I said.
        “This must be a phantom cat, some sort of eidolon. Why would a real cat be prowling around in this smelly dump?”
        I said, “Close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro, around nineteen thousand feet, there’s the dried, frozen carcass of a leopard.”
        “The mountain in Africa?”
        I quoted, ‘“No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.’”
        She frowned. “I don’t get it. What’s the mystery? He’s a mean damn leopard, he can go anywhere he wants.”
        “It’s a line from ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’”
        Gesturing with the gun, she expressed her impatience.
        I explained: “That’s a short story by Ernest Hemingway.”
        “The guy with the line of furniture? What’s Hemingway got to do with this?”
        I shrugged. “I have a friend who’s always thrilled when I make a literary allusion. He thinks I could be a writer.”
        “Are the two of you gay or something?” she asked.
        “No. He’s hugely fat, and I’m supernaturally gifted, that’s all.”
        “Boyfriend, sometimes you don’t make a lot of sense. Did you kill Robert?”
        Except for our two swords of light, shining past each other, the second floor receded into unrelieved darkness. While I had been in the crawlspaces and the vertical chase, the last light