One morning I checked my YouTube feed for something notable and interesting. YouTube knows my tastes run to nature and ocean videos – Montana bears, Florida alligators and pythons, Central American birds, enormous waves in Portugal or Tahiti or Hawaii, ridden by miniature surfers.
I was in luck.
And a little awestruck to find a recent video of a large male mountain lion (puma concolor) walking up Pacific Coast Highway in artsy Laguna Beach, California in the early morning darkness.
He was northbound, looking through the shop windows. Galleries. A surf shop. Boutiques and hair salons, restaurants and bars long closed for the night.
He’s got big shoulder muscles shifting under his pale tan coat, and a casual but interested air about him as if he’s, well, window shopping.
Big male mountain lions can run up to 160 pounds, according to who you ask Google claims 220 pounds in northern climes, so let’s put this guy at a conservative 150 pounds. So, he must be interested in an XL.
I watched the brief video several times, then followed various news feeds over the next few days, where he’s found again in a Laguna Beach parking garage, a city of Irvine park, and in Newport Beach. He’s got a tag and a name by now: Newport. He was spotted and photographed some weeks ago near Casper’s Wilderness Park, adjacent to Cleveland National Forest, inland of San Juan Capistrano.
From Caspers Wilderness Park – with a little luck and the great roaming range for which mountain lions are known – Newport would have had fairly easy access to Laguna and beyond.
I imagined him just a few days ago, sneaking through the last half mile of Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, stepping stealthily from the dense brush onto the broad cement sidewalk of south Coast Highway for his first look at these loud, shiny monsters speeding this way and that, a golden-sanded beach just beyond those cars, and a shimmering, gray-blue Pacific Ocean stretching to the distant horizon.
My kind of place. I grew up here.
I just love this cat.
So, I put him in my new novel, Wild Instinct.
Where he’s first seen eating a wealthy young real estate developer trying to build a beautiful, exclusive small town – Wildcoast – in the rough, wild country near Casper’s Park, just miles from Laguna.
It’s a gruesome scene.
And the Orange County Sheriff’s Department sends out a tracker to find and “euthanize” the cat. This is the second time a person has been killed and eaten by a mountain lion in Casper’s Wilderness Park; a young girl was mauled terribly, some years back.
But it soon turns out that this celebrity developer – Bennet Tarlow III – was dead before the lion started his human meal.
Two .22 bullets hidden in his skull.
The Killer Cat – as the media name him – just happened upon his body, dragged him to a stand of sycamores, and started doing what mountain lions do.
Whodunnit and why are, of course, the puzzle of Wild Instinct.
But its heart is Lew Gale, the tracker dispatched to end the life of the so-called Killer Cat. He’s the right man for the job.
Gale is half Acjacheme tribesman, a sheriff’s detective. He’s a former Marine sniper who served in the bloody and infamous siege of Sangin Valley, Afghanistan, when he was nineteen years old.
As a boy he used to hunt small game and birds here in the Cleveland National Forest.
All of that, a long time ago.
Now he serves on the sheriff’s Predator Tracking Unit for the “special assignment enhancement” of $175.57 a month.
Lives with his mom in the old Rios District of San Juan Capistrano.
Wounded badly in Sangin Valley.
Big-hearted, almost sober, closed down.
But he’s a kick-ass detective and he and his new partner, Daniela Mendez throw themselves into the murder of Bennet Tarlow III.
Mendez has ghosts of her own – active, full-blown ghosts.
She’s a widow with a teenaged son who never knew his father, a son pursued by a scheming girlfriend and the Barrio Dogtown gang in rough Santa Ana, looking to jump him in.
A secret lover Daniela will never reveal.
They find intriguing evidence at the “real” kill site, which turns out to be just a few hundred feet away from where the Killer Cat was eating young Tarlow.
These aren’t spoilers: Wild Instinct is only getting started.
What happens to the Killer Cat?
Early in the story, Gale has a chance at a shot to kill the lion, but the distant, instinctive animal vanishes into the boulders of the Santa Ana Mountains.
Later, after the Killer Cat has been cleared of the murder of Bennet Tarlow III, Gale wakes from a dream in his boyhood home near Mission San Juan Capistrano, in which the Killer Cat is standing in the doorway, tail twitching, looking at him in bed.
Not long after that, a half-drunk Lew Gale walks the late-night streets of San Juan Capistrano from a would-be lover’s house toward home, and sees a big mountain lion walking down a deserted downtown street with a limp coyote in his mouth.
Killer Cat or the bourbon talking?
Late in Wild Instinct, Lew Gale and the Killer Cat meet again.
But the big question here isn’t the Killer Cat’s innocence or his fate, it’s the mystery who killed Bennet Tarlow III and why?
The only thing we know for certain is that the Killer Cat didn’t.
He just stumbled onto easy pickings.
***
