Claws (10 page)

Eighteen

Dan Tapper knew the governor would give him hell for borrowing the Black Hawk from the Idaho National Guard. He also knew that stepping out of a military chopper dressed in hunting gear made a bolder statement than arriving by car. Besides, as acting-governor, it was Dan’s job to deal with emergencies, and he figured lions and tigers terrorizing Idaho qualified. While Dan waited for the blades to cease their thwap-thwap-thwap, he watched Dell and Iris, heads lowered, come forward to greet him. Iris’ hair whipped around wildly. She wore a black dress and held the bottom of it with one hand while she waved with the other. Her dress still ballooned up, showing Dan a lot of thigh.

A moment later Dan stood in the doorway, waved, and smiled at the reporters his campaign manager had alerted. Then he stepped down and hugged Iris, who said, “Welcome to the Idaho Lion Hunt, Mr. Acting-Governor.”

“Quite an entrance,” Dell said without smiling. Dell had swapped his western suit for a sober blue pinstripe.

“I’ll need to change for the funeral,” Dan said.

“I like your outfit,” Iris told him. “Very bold.”

“And I like your dress,” Dan said with a smile before looking past them. “I see Fox News here so I should say a few words. A good Republican network, they like me.”

When Jackson got to the Methodist church late Tuesday morning, he was wearing his blue uniform, a black armband, and an ankle holster with a .38 revolver. His cell phone was set to vibrate. Half the town was there already and more were arriving as he parked in a spot Brian Patterson was guarding for him. Other drivers weren’t as lucky.

On his way into the church Jackson greeted Dan Tapper, spoke to Iris and Dell, and hugged his daughter, who then split off to be with her friends, including kids from the motel room party. The nature of Ed’s death, coupled with the public hunt, had attracted the media; the media and Dan Tapper’s presence had brought out a number of State Police troopers. All Buckhorn officers were present except for Angie Kuka. After the service Brian would relieve her so that Angie could attend the burial at the cemetery.

Jackson endured the hymns and the sermon, but when Becky Rebo, the psychologist sent to visit the Placett children, and also the best singer in the county,
warbled Merle Haggard’s
Sing Me Back Home
, and sang it as slowly and soulfully as possible, Jackson felt the weight of regret dragging him under and struggled to stay afloat.

Jackson had recovered by the time he served as a pallbearer. Then he drove alone to the cemetery west of town. As soon as the burial ceremony was over, he left like everyone else so that the family could have the final moment alone to say goodbye to Ed. He leaned against his car and except for nodding to people and muttering a few soft hellos, he spent his time thinking about how lucky he was to have known Ed Stevens. He was so lost in thought that he at first did not hear Eileen Stevens say his name.

“Jackson,” she said again. The group that accompanied Eileen, including Tucker and his wife, waited in a tight cluster a short distance away. “Thank you so much. It’d mean a lot to Ed, knowing you and the others are all here.”

Jackson hugged Eileen. “I don’t know what to say, Eileen. If I hadn’t sent Ed out there –”

“He’d have gone anyway,” she said. “Ed did exactly what he thought a good lawman should do. He always told me you’re just like him.”

Oh damn, thought Jackson.

“Ed left a letter. He said I was to give it to you once …” Her voice finally cracked. “I meant to bring it
today, but I plumb forgot. Maybe you can stop by and get it. Ed told me not to read the letter, ever.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll stop by.”

“Ed, he didn’t think I knew,” Eileen said.

“Knew?”

“That his days were numbered.”

Jackson said, “From the cancer, you mean?”

“Ed liked his little secrets.”

Jackson nodded and kept quiet.

The moment the service ended, Angie hurried away from the cemetery. She had until the big lunch event before she had to be at the Elk’s Club. At least I don’t have to work with Tucker, she thought, then chided herself for having such a thought on the day his uncle was buried. Still, she didn’t like the way Tucker ogled her crotch or the smirk he often wore or how careless he was as a cop. Angie should have gone home and done laundry or bought groceries or done a number of other things. Instead, the moment she left the cemetery, she made a beeline to Divine Jewelry Store.

The jewelry store had changed owners a few times since the Divine family sold it, but the name and location on the town square had remained the same for seventy years. Sean
and Maggie Curly, the current owners, were cleaning and stocking the jewelry cases when Angie entered. She placed a silver necklace on a black mat on top of a long glass case.

“You carry anything like this?” Angie asked.

Angie was wearing a pressed blue uniform, necktie, hat, black armband, and equipment belt. The couple stared at her for a moment before Sean picked up the necklace and examined it. “It’s silver plate, not sterling,” he said. “We can sell you a nicer one. For a good price too.”

“I’m not shopping. I’m investigating a crime.”

“Oh!” Maggie said. She stopped dusting a display of watches and came over to examine the silver cross.

“So did this come from here?” Angie said.

“Not our style.” Maggie returned the necklace to the mat. “I hope some poor girl wasn’t mugged for this?”

Angie shook her head. “Any idea who might sell it?”

“Maybe the Walmart in Rexburg,” said Sean, looking at his wife for confirmation. When she shrugged, her whole body giggled. Both Maggie and Sean hit the buffet lines too often. “It could’ve come from anywhere,” Sean added. “Shopping Network, on-line stores, no way to know.”

It was common for people to share food and drink and memories following a funeral. Jackson had attended these
gatherings a few times before, but he had never been to a funeral that was followed by anything like the welcoming luncheon for Dan Tapper to kick off the Idaho Lion Hunt.

The event was held at the Elk’s Club. At first the atmosphere was subdued, but before long conversations became louder and laughter more common. Though Katy had not attended Ed’s funeral, she had accepted the lunch invitation. Jackson finally spotted her in a corner with Dell. He had started toward them when Major Jessup walked up to him. “I didn’t know you were coming,” Jackson said.

“Didn’t plan to,” Jessup said. “But the LG invited me. In my world that’s the same as a subpoena.”

Jackson chuckled. “Ronnie Greathouse turn up?”

Jessup hesitated a second. “Not yet.”

“So your troopers are still looking for him?”

“No. A detective took it over.” Jessup scoffed. “Anyway, the Roberts boys are too busy strutting around like roosters in a hen house. Big shot lion hunters now.”

Before Jackson could comment, an announcement was made asking everyone to be seated. During lunch Jackson paid little attention to the speeches or chatter. Although Katy and he sat at the head table along with Dan Tapper and his chief of staff, Iris and Dell, members of the town council, Sheriff Midden, and Major Jessup, the first time Jackson
spoke to the lieutenant governor that day was after the meal. Dan approached him while he was talking to Katy and said, “Chief Hobbs, I hear you don’t like the public hunt.”

“The cats have to be found, Mr. Lieutenant Gov –”

“Let’s stick with Dan until after November. It’s easier to say.” Dan Tapper smiled and touched Jackson’s elbow. His smile was practiced, his touch perfected.

“Okay then, Dan,” Jackson said. “Let’s just say I have concerns about the safety of people.”

“And you should,” Dan said. “That’s your job.” He turned to Katy, having met her earlier. “Maybe Chief Hobbs is right, Miss Osborne. I’d certainly feel safer if you go with us. Show us how lion hunting should be done.”

“I doubt if we have the same objective, sir.”

Dan Tapper chuckled. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

“Dan,” Iris said, coming up to him from behind, “we need to go or we’ll be late for the opening assembly.”

The moment Iris was alongside Dan Tapper, he laid his hand on her back. “Your town may need a new mayor soon. I can see Iris over in Boise on my gubernatorial staff next year.” Iris beamed, and Dan did not remove his hand.

“You’re that sure you’ll win?” Jackson asked.

“Of course. Aren’t you?” Not waiting for an answer, Dan turned to Iris. “Chief Hobbs and Miss Osborne tell me I made a mistake in supporting this public lion hunt idea.”

“Well, you’re a politician,” Iris said. “I’m sure you can tell when people are giving you bad advice.”

Dan Tapper laughed and rubbed Iris’s back. “Boise.”

More than three hundred people crowded into the Buckhorn High School gym. While the audience was settling in, Jackson spotted Pamela Yow, told Katy he would catch up with her, and dodged people until he reached the librarian. He drew her away from the crowd and found a private spot.

“Don’t tell me you need more research?” she said.

“Nope, but I do appreciate your help.”

“I bet you do,” Pamela said and looked disapprovingly over at Katy who was talking to reporter Gary Chen.

Jackson laughed softly. “You didn’t mention that you and Dolly Cheney are cousins.”

“Didn’t I? Well, we were never close. Guess she never seemed like a cousin. And certainly not a friend.”

“I get it. I have cousins I wouldn’t even recognize.” He paused, like he was trying to think of something to say. “I was wondering, what’s your former husband’s name?”

Pamela was clearly surprised and without moving seemed to withdraw. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Just official paperwork.”

“I haven’t seen him in ten years.”

Jackson waited.

“King Yow,” she told him.

“King’s his legal name?”

“It’s what everybody calls him.” After a moment Pamela added, “Edward King Yow.”

“Eddie? The same man Dolly married?”

The microphone shrieked, and then Iris appeared at the podium and motioned for people to be seated and silent.

“By the way,” Jackson said, “you going to the hospital to see your cousin?”

“Didn’t you hear? She died this morning.”

Iris welcomed everyone and introduced the city council. Then Dell introduced his brother. After that, Dan Tapper delivered a short, rousing campaign speech in front of a mysterious backdrop, a six-by-eight foot sign covered by a cloth. Nobody had mentioned it yet.

Once Dan finished, Iris explained the details of the Idaho Lion Hunt: it would end when all the animals were accounted for or after ten days. That’s the way she
said it – ‘accounted for’ rather than ‘killed’. She explained the procedure for purchasing a license – $1,000 for each person carrying a hunting rifle, for verifying the kill – an official weight and measurement station was set up in Reynolds’s Auction Barn just outside town, and she laid out the rules for collecting the prize money. “The hunters who bring in the biggest lion AND the biggest tiger will each receive ten thousand dollars,” she announced.

The hunters clapped, cheered, and whistled.

“Wait, wait.” Iris tried to silence the crowd. “There’s a grand prize too.” At that moment Dell and Fred removed the cloth covering the large sign, revealing a painting with two lions, a male and a female, a tiger, and, dwarfing the other animals in size and placement, a giant liger. “We’ve got two monster cats,” Iris said, while presenting the painting with a flourish worthy of a TV host. “We’re offering a twenty thousand dollar grand prize for the first liger killed.”

“What about the second one?” someone yelled.

“Five thousand, and we’ll pay to have it mounted for you. You can take it home and use it for a picnic table.”

The audience jumped up and applauded.

Nineteen

Kali and Shaka watched patiently from behind some antelope bitterbrush two hundred feet below the clearing where the doe was tethered. The ligers had barely twitched a muscle, other than in their tails and ears, since Eagle Cassel, a Fish and Game Department employee, had arrived on a Yamaha Grizzly 700. To the ligers the ATV was simply noisy and inedible. Cassel had removed an injured six-month-old whitetail deer from its carrying rack and staked and trussed the doe with heavy rope before riding away.

The ligers did not know that Wade was waiting in a service station tow truck at a barley field two miles away. They did not know that Dell, Dan, and Stilts Venable had arrived and were spilling out of Dell’s Cadillac SUV and Shane out of his Toyota pickup. A State Police cruiser attached to Dan Tapper’s security detail also pulled in behind them. Kali and Shaka did not know that the armed trooper would remain with the vehicles or that additional troopers were stationed on the county road to keep other hunters out of the area. Neither did they know that the injured doe was bait and that Dan’s hunting party would
soon be trying to use her to kill them. The ligers did not know these things, but they were suspicious of easy prey, so they watched and licked their muzzles and waited.

The ligers waited while the hunters gathered their weapons: Dell carrying his .375 Holland & Holland Magnum; Shane the .270 Weatherby; Dan a powerful short-barreled .500 Jeffrey; Wade his Remington 770 Sporting Rifle; and Stilts, who preferred bow hunting, had a Mossberg pump shotgun loaded with deer slugs. Shane, Wade, and Stilts toted backpacks with water, food, first aid kit, cameras and such. Most of the hunters had binoculars. Everyone except Shane wore hunting knives. Shane had forgotten his.

When the hunters reached the fawn, she was still unable to move or make a sound. After checking the rope and the stake, Stilts untied her legs and muzzle. The doe sprang up and bolted. The rope around her neck jerked her down, and she grunted a frightened contact call. The men walked on another hundred and fifty feet and climbed a ladder to a platform built in a large Douglas fir. Hot, dry weather had dulled the usually vibrant color, but the fir was thick with branches and needles and was good cover.

After the assembly, Katy quickly changed clothes and then followed Jackson home. She waited while he changed.
With her help, Jackson planned to check on his cattle and bring his two quarter-horses to the barn. Deborah had lost another sheep, so Jackson knew the big cats were close.

“What gun are you taking?” Katy asked when he came downstairs. She was examining his gun cabinet. Katy wore the safari outfit she had worn Monday morning, minus the windbreaker, while Jackson had on jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, fishing vest, and well-worn Red Wing boots.

“Thought I’d take the Stoeger shotgun.”

“Deer slugs?”

“Uh-huh. I have my Glock 21 and the M4 tactical rifle.” He unlocked the gun case. “And these, my .22, this old Benelli 12-guage, and my thirty-ought-six.”

“I’d take the thirty-ought-six. And let’s see what ammo you have that’ll stop a big cat.”

As Jackson removed the Remington 700 from the gun cabinet, his cell phone rang. He answered it but barely spoke, mostly saying, “Uh-huh” or “When?” or “Why didn’t you call me earlier?” When he ended the call, he looked at Katy and said, “The ligers are back.”

“Bored?” Dan quietly asked Shane upon seeing his ‘anywhere but here’ expression after an hour of waiting.

Shane shrugged and glanced at his father.

“Well, I could tell you a story,” Dan said.

“Uncle Dan, I’m not a kid anymore.”

“I know. It’s a grown-up story.” Dan flashed his practiced smile. He spoke softly, barely loud enough to be heard. “There are these two guys in Africa, you see. And they’re out walking one day when they realize a lion is stalking them. Now unlike us, they don’t have a gun or anyplace to hide. So the one guy, he kicks off his boots and takes some running shoes out of his backpack and starts lacing them up. ‘What are you doing?’ the other guy says. ‘Man, you can’t outrun a lion.’ ‘But I don’t have to,’ the guy in the Nikes explains. ‘I only have to outrun you.’ ”

Everyone laughed, even Shane. Kali and Shaka heard the noise. They were watching the human prey up in the tree.

“Ssshhh!” Dell hissed, cutting off the laughter. He was scanning the area with his binoculars. “About nine o’clock,” he said. “It’s some goddamn wolves.”

Everyone who had binoculars looked through them. “I see them,” Stilts added. “Six big northern grays.”

“Shit, they’re coming for the doe,” Dan whispered.

“Don’t shoot or we’ll scare off any cats,” Dell said.

Wade moved to the edge of the hunting platform. “I’ll climb down and scatter them.”

“Let Shane do it.”

“Me?” Shane said to his father.

“Sure. Since you’re bored. Nothing like a little excitement to take care of that.”

“You’re sure this was the animal you saw?” Katy asked, showing ten-year-old Josh a color photo of a liger with its front paws high up on an extension ladder. The man beside the liger was half the height of the giant cat.

“Uh-huh.” Josh indicated the liger. “Two of them.”

“Two of them?” Katy looked over at Jackson. “And did you see where they went?”

Josh nodded and said, “Want me to show you?”

“Right, that’s even better.” They got up from the couch, and Josh took her hand. On their way out of the room Katy looked back at Jackson and Mandy and said, “The girls in Buckhorn better watch out in a few years.”

As they left, Mandy said, “Some more coffee?”

“Not me,” Jackson said. “I’m about to float.”

Jackson was seated on a sectional rust-colored couch, while Mandy occupied a rocker, her five-year-old daughter in her lap, just like the last time he was there. Tammy was sucking her thumb, and Mandy removed it from her mouth.

“Oh Tammy, Tammy. What am I going to do with you?” she said and then looked over at Jackson. “I bet they’ll just keep coming back here, won’t they?”

He remembered Katy saying the cats would return to where they found food, but he didn’t want to think of Ed in that way. “Maybe not. Did they get your chickens?”

“Nope. Wade put a wire top on the coop.” Mandy smoothed her daughter’s hair. It was the color of corn silk. “I know you’re scared, honey. And I am too.”

“Nothing’s bad’s going to happen.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“You can,” Jackson said.

“Did you tell Ed Stevens the same thing?”

Jackson left his coffee and stood up.

“I’m sorry,” Mandy said. “That was really mean.”

“Mean or not, you’re right,” he said. “Nobody’s truly safe with these cats running free.”

A second later, Katy and Josh returned. “The ligers went north toward a hunting blind,” she told Jackson.

As the sun hugged the horizon, the doe stopped trying to pull free of the rope and froze. Dan peered through powerful Ricoh binoculars, scanning the area the doe was fixated on, and spotted the liger first.

“Holy shit,” he murmured. His hushed voice still revealed the excitement he felt.
“About seventy-five, eighty yards southwest … in some chokecherry bushes.” Dan softened his voice to a whisper. “The size of that thing. It’s a fucking monster.”

“I see him,” Dell said softly. He watched the liger slink along the ground toward the deer. Come on baby, right to us.” Dell removed his binoculars and peered through the scope atop the .375. He adjusted the range until he could clearly see the liger again. “Got him. About sixty-five yards and still coming.”

Everyone else in the blind except for Stilts, who had a shotgun, dialed in their riflescopes.

“Dell, remember my first time elk hunting?” Dan said, his voice barely audible. “You let me take the shot. A rite of passage you said. Let’s give Shane that chance.”

“But I knew you wouldn’t miss,” Dell said softly.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Besides, that Weatherby won’t stop a cat this big.”

“I said the first shot, not the last,” Dan whispered.

Dell hesitated and then said, “Oh hell! Why not?”

“So what should I do?” Shane said too loudly.

“Ssshhh!” Dell warned. “Don’t piss yourself. Just crawl around and get on your belly. Use this tripod right
behind me. And when you shoot, don’t jerk the trigger. Squeeze it gently like it’s your girlfriend’s nipple.”

Somebody tittered, but not Shane. His heart was beating too fast and loud. He wiggled into place and laid the barrel of the .270 across the tripod. After that, nobody spoke or moved. A couple of times the sweat on Shane’s forehead reached his eyes, and he wiped it away.

“Get ready, Shane,” Dell whispered. “Ready … wait … wait … wait … hold it … hold it … wait–”

Shane twitched and squeezed the trigger. The doe fell over so quickly that the sound of the rifle shot, echoing off the hills, seemed to come afterward.

“Oh shit,” Dan said.

“Shot the fucking deer!” Dell said.

“The liger is running away!” Wade shouted.

“Get down! Hurry!” Dell ordered. “Follow it!”

The men scampered down the rough, homemade ladder nailed to the fir. Shane was the last one to the ground. His ears were ringing from the shot, but he still heard his father say, “Shot the fucking doe; I can’t believe it.”