Death, Taxes, and Cheap Sunglasses (A Tara Holloway Novel Book 8) (8 page)

“How’d your donors get the cash to you?” I asked.

More beard twirling. The thing looked like an F-5 hair tornado now. “Some of them mailed it to us. Others stopped by and dropped it off.”

More bullshit.
Nobody in their right mind put cash in the mail. “You didn’t get their names and contact information so you could hit them up later for more money?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and stared at my chin. “That’s a good idea, though. Wished we’d of thought of it.”

“You two should hire a professional bookkeeper,” I suggested.

“You’re tellin’ me!”

chapter eight

L
et’s Call It a Day

Kevin barked with laughter, raising the hackles on the dogs, who had settled on the floor at our feet. “Look,” he said, leaning toward us. “Quent and me ain’t the most s’phisticated guys you’ll ever meet.”

Eddie snorted next to me, doing his best to disguise it as a sneeze. “Excuse me.”

“Bless you,” I said, cutting him a look.

Kevin continued. “We may not be doing things ’xactly the right way when it comes to all that record-keeping and making Uncle Sam happy. But cut us some slack, here. We’re saving animals. We’re good guys!” He threw his hands in the air for emphasis before leaning back toward us and shifting his focus to my nose. “That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?”

If I’d had a beard, I would’ve stroked it at that point as I pondered my next move.
Hmm …

“You know, you’re right,” I said, once I’d come up with a fresh tactic. “We really don’t mean to hassle you. I’m an animal lover, too, and I think you’re doing a great service here. I don’t want to cause any problems for the auditor, either. She’s got five kids and she really needs to keep her job.” I leaned toward him, as if he and I were in cahoots. “How about this. You two promise to start keeping better records from here on out, take me and Eddie on a tour of the place and show us your critters, and we’ll call it a day.”
As if.
“Deal?” I stuck out my hand.

Kevin reached out and took it. “Deal.” He then turned to Eddie and shook his hand, too. He stood from the table and motioned for us to follow him. “Come on. We’ll take my truck.”

Eddie and I followed the two men and the dogs outside. While Eddie and I climbed into the cab with Kevin, Quent stepped up onto the back bumper and swung himself over the tailgate to take a seat in the bed. The dogs settled down in the shade of a nearby tree to take a nap.

The truck smelled like a blend of beer and urine, and had stained seat covers, no floor mats, and a cracked, dusty dashboard. The small black turds on the floorboard told me a raccoon or two had probably lived in the cab at some point. I could only hope one wasn’t hiding under the seat, waiting to take a bite out of my ankle.

Kevin started the truck and headed farther down the dirt road, which rapidly devolved into nothing more than a couple of tire tracks separated by a strip of grass and weeds. Eddie slid a nervous glance at Kevin, then shared it with me. I patted my hip to let him know my Glock was within easy reach should a
Deliverance
-type situation arise.

Since playing along with their farce seemed to be working, I decided to build on our newfound camaraderie by asking about his fishing-guide business. “What do most of your clients like to catch?”

“Largemouth bass,” he said, “or catfish.”

“Channel cats? Blue? Flatheads?”

He cut me a surprised look, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. “You know fish?”

“Heck, yeah,” I said. “I worked at a bait shop all through high school.”

Thanks to three summers at Big Bob’s Bait Bucket, I knew more about worms than Donatella Versace knew about fabrics. Nightcrawlers. Wax worms. Mealworms. Which ones worked best for catching which fish. The only thing I didn’t know about worms was how they tasted. Despite my idiot male coworkers offering me a hundred dollars to eat one, I’d never taken them up on their offer. That was definitely one deal I was not willing to make.

Kicking up a trail of dust, the truck approached a chain-link enclosure no bigger than a dog run. A large makeshift shelter formed from scrap plywood sat at one end. Inside the cage, a lion paced back and forth on a well-worn strip of dirt. What else could he do in the tiny space? It took him only five steps in each direction to reach the limits of his cage. Some sanctuary. Keeping a big cat in such a confined space should be illegal. This king of the jungle had definitely been dethroned.

“’Fess up,” I said to Eddie. “That song from
The Lion King
is running through your head.”

“Actually,” he said, “I was thinking of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’”

“Even better,” I said. “I actually know the lyrics to that one.” Much to his chagrin, I began to sing the nonsensical part of the chorus. “Wee-ee-EE-ee, ee-ee-ee-EE-ee, wee-ah-bomba-way!”

At the sound of the truck pulling up, the lion stopped and looked our way, probably hoping we were bringing him something for lunch. He began to pant, his mouth falling slightly open, revealing what appeared to be a full set of secondary teeth but only three large fangs. His lower left fang was missing.

As Kevin stopped the truck, I gestured at the lion. “What happened to his tooth?”

“Got no idea,” Kevin said. “Simba’s like that when we got him.”

With the information gleaned from the bank records, I’d been able to do some snooping on the Internet and determined that Kevin and Quent had acquired the lion from a roadside zoo outside Tupelo, Mississippi. The zoo had closed down after its black bear had taken a swipe at a child through the bars of its cage and come away with enough flesh that it took doctors thirty-eight stitches to piece the kid’s face back together. The kid’s parents sued, of course. According to an online news report, the zoo operator carried no insurance and was forced to sell off the animals to pay the $300,000 damage award. Too bad Simba hadn’t ended up in a better place.

I nudged Eddie and motioned for him to let me out of the truck. When he did, I eased slowly toward the cage.

“Careful now,” Quent called from his place in the bed of the pickup. “That ol’ cat can be a little moody.”

I would be, too, if I were stuck in a shoe box. I snapped a quick photo of the lion with my cell phone and turned to return to the truck, when—“Aaaaah! Rattlesnake!”

I leaped backward instinctively as a long, thick, brown snake slithered by in front of me. My new aviator sunglasses flew off my face and landed somewhere in the thick grass. I wasn’t about to search for the damn things and risk my hand being bitten by a rattler. I bolted back to the truck and hopped in.

Kevin sniggered. “Forgot to mention there’s quite a few diamondbacks and other snakes out here. Gotta be careful.”

Now
he tells me.

Ass.

Kevin started off again, driving to a similar set of enclosures where the bears were kept. The bears, too, appeared frustrated, bored, and miserable, their eyes dull and hopeless as they lay curled up on their sides on the bare dirt of their pens. It was sad and cruel. These bears should be running free in the Canadian wilderness or stealing pic-a-nic baskets in Jellystone Park.

Our final stop was at a pair of four to five-acre pastures enclosed on the sides with twelve-foot chain-link fencing. Chicken wire spanned the top. Wild vines had grown up the sides of the fence and across the chicken wire, providing shade across much of the space. Water troughs and feeders filled with deer corn were spaced throughout the pastures.

Inside the first corral milled two dozen or so hoofed beasts with expansive antlers, some kind of antelope or deer, though their legs and bodies seemed much longer than the typical white-tailed deer common in Texas. The animals ranged in size from small babies no bigger than the average dog to enormous stags nearly six feet in length and topping the scales at over five hundred pounds by my best estimate.

“What are those?” I asked, gesturing to the beasts.

“Barasingha deer,” Kevin replied.

I pointed into the second corral, which contained another long-legged, hoofed species, though these were primarily white instead of brown. Rather than antlers, however, these animals bore two long, relatively thin, backward-angled horns on their heads. Like the deer in the first corral, these animals ranged greatly in size. “What about those?”

“Scimitar-horned oryx,” he said. “Beauties, ain’t they?”

“You can say that again.”
You can also go jump off a cliff for all I care.

“Oryx are extinct in the wild,” he said. “If it warn’t for Quent and me rescuing a small herd and letting them reproduce, the species woulda gone the way of the dinosaurs.”

Eddie and I exchanged looks again. Perhaps his Jurassic Park comment earlier hadn’t been too far off. Though this place was more like Jur
asshole
Park.

Kevin turned the truck around and headed back in the direction of the trailer. But we couldn’t be done yet, could we?

“Is that all of the animals?” I asked.

“Yuh-huh,” Kevin said. “That’s all of ’em.”

The small number of animals he’d shown us was far less than the number that should be here. That explained how they could spend such a paltry sum on food and supplies.

“Where are the panthers?” I asked. “And the cheetah? And the elephant?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, lifting one shoulder. “They got old and died and whatnot.”

“
Whatnot?
What do you mean by ‘whatnot’?”

“You know,” he repeated, though obviously I did not know or I would not have asked. “Diseases and stuff.”

“So they all passed away? You didn’t sell any of them or give them to another sanctuary?”

He hesitated again before answering, as if once more he was trying to decide what answer would pose the least chance of me catching him in a lie. “No. They all died. Some of ’em was old or in pretty bad shape when we got ’em.”

I didn’t doubt that. An inordinate number of wild animals were in the hands of people who had no business keeping them. Heck, there’d been multiple instances of wild animals escaping and mauling or even killing innocent victims, including children. Unfortunately, the more extreme members of the hunting lobby, which often sided with and supported the keeping of undomesticated animals, had a strong presence in Texas and many other states, and legislators often bowed to their will, relying on their contributions for reelection.

“What did you do with their bodies after the animals passed?” I asked. “Did you bury them here on the property somewhere?”

“We … uh…” His left hand tightened on the steering wheel while his right hand resumed stroking his beard. “We had them … what do you call it?
Cremated,
right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s it. That’s what we do. We cremate them.”

I nodded as if in understanding, when in reality I wanted nothing more than to pistol-whip some truthful answers out of the guy. I didn’t think he’d given me a single honest answer yet. Well, maybe about the largemouth bass, but that was it.

“Must be hard to cremate such large animals,” I said. “Who handled that for you?”

Kevin shifted in his seat, leaning slightly farther away from me. He was twisting the beard again now, as if it were a crank that ran his brain. “Quent and I do it ourselves. No sense spending money to have someone else do it when all it takes is a little gasoline and a match to get the job done.”

Sheesh.
No true animal lover would have ever phrased things like that. Still, I had to keep my disgust and dismay in check. If the Kuykendahls realized how upset I was, they might figure out that I planned to do whatever it took to shut down this sham rescue operation.

When we returned to the trailer, Eddie, Quent, and I climbed out of the truck, but Kevin remained in the cab, probably to head back down to the “crick.” I thanked the two men for their time.

“So you’ll be closing our file?” Kevin asked. “Like we agreed?”

“We’ll call it a day,” I said with a smile, repeating the same intentionally vague phrase I’d used earlier.

“We ’preciate that.” With a nod, Kevin motored back down the path.

I turned to Quent, who had called his dogs and was heading back up the steps to the trailer.

“Kevin showed us where you buried the animals that died,” I said, knowing he hadn’t been able to hear the conversation taking place in the cab of the truck from his seat in the bed. “It was nice of you two to lay them to rest in peace. It must’ve taken y’all hours to dig a hole big enough to bury the elephant.”

Quent’s crazy eyes looked up and down a few times, rolling like a slot machine. I half expected lemons or cherries to appear in them and quarters to pour out of his mouth. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Hours and hours.”

Hours and hours, my ass.

“Bye, now.” I lifted a hand as my partner and I returned to my car.

Once inside, Eddie let out a derisive snort, not bothering to mask it as a sneeze this time. “Lying sacks of shit.”

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I vowed. Not only because it was my job, but because Simba and those other animals deserved so much better.

*   *   *

As Eddie and I headed back down the highway, we again passed the property with the high fence. I braked abruptly, nearly giving us both whiplash, and turned onto the smaller country road that ran alongside it.

Eddie rubbed the back of his neck and cut me an irate look. “Give a guy some warning next time. You nearly snapped my spine.”

“Sorry, partner,” I said. “I just had an aha moment. I think I know where the missing animals might have gone.”

I’d learned to follow my hunches. Sometimes our subconscious mind is a step ahead of our conscious one. Then again, other times it is only punking our brain.

We continued on for three quarters of a mile until I spotted a sign. I pulled over to the side of the road and pointed at it. The sign featured a cartoonish picture of a stalking tiger with his sharp teeth exposed and a roaring bear standing on his hind legs, claws extended. The sign read: