Foodchain (15 page)

DAY SEVENTEEN

Frank dosed half a pound of ground lamb with Acepromazine and fed it to two more cats and the tiger early in the morning. They loaded the first of the lionesses and hauled her back to the ranch.

This time, it was Fairfax’s turn. He’d managed to squeeze back into his new clothes. By now, everyone knew his boots hurt like hell. Pine stationed himself by the horse trailer, while Chuck was a good twenty yards away at the pickup, and they had some fun calling him back and forth, asking Fairfax to watch the lioness for a moment, then calling him back over to the pickup to ask him what kind of caliber he thought was the best. Fairfax never did figure it out. He just thought they were being nice to him because it was his turn, and so he just kept hobbling around.

Like before, Frank and Pine opened the gate and swung it back around while everyone else waited with their rifles back by the pickups. No one was ready. Everybody expected the lioness to simply sit there, like with Theo. But with a streak of tan fur, the lioness erupted from the trailer and was simply gone, as if the cat was bending the light somehow, slipping through the morning sunlight in a hazy mirage.

It leaped over the barbed wire fence and was halfway to the house before Fairfax had even gotten his eye through a scope. As soon as he caught a glimpse of the animal, he fired, jerking repeatedly on the trigger of the semi-auto like he was scratching a nasty itch. But it was like trying to shoot a bumblebee out of your yard with a slingshot.

Bullets exploded into the back of Sturm’s house, spiraling through wood siding, concrete, glass. Sturm shouted into the gunfire, but Fairfax either wouldn’t stop or couldn’t hear. Finally, Chuck and Sturm jerked up their rifles and fired. The lioness went down in the garden. The gunfire died.

“I got it! I got it!” Fairfax screamed.

“You didn’t shoot shit, dickhead,” Pine said. “Fuck, it’d be halfway to Idaho by now if it was up to you.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Sturm ripped the rifle out of Fairfax’s pudgy hands. “You. Stupid. Goddamn. Asshole. You’re paying for all that damage, so help me God.”

Fairfax stood stock still, mouth open, realization sinking in like concrete in his veins. He licked his lips a few times, but nothing came out.

Sturm glared at him. “You fucking stupid, or do you just not give a shit?”

“I…I…oh good Lord.”

The men tried to hold it in, but snorts of laughter escaped anyway, sounding like they were trying to suck snot from somewhere up near their brain. Sturm growled through his teeth, whirled, and flung the rifle as far as he could into the field. Frank figured Fairfax was lucky Sturm didn’t just shoot him. Without another word, Sturm climbed into the Jeep. Theo started it up and everyone followed it back to the house.

* * * * *

They found Sturm on his knees in the dog pen, a little enclosure wrapped in chicken wire, set off in the back of the yard. Frank hadn’t realized that Sturm even had a dog until he saw Sturm cradling the black lab’s head. Frank immediately saw how a bullet had torn through the dog’s guts lengthwise. Bluish gray intestines had spilled out in a wash of blood on the concrete. The dog was still alive, breathing in low, keening sounds.

Sturm stood up, pinching at the bridge of his nose. He yanked his rifle out of the Jeep, shoved it up into Fairfax’s chest, eyes searing holes in the lawyer’s skull like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. “This is your doing. Now you finish the job, you sonofabitch.”

Fairfax’s fingers clasped the rifle against his will, but he knew better than to protest. He looked like he wanted to throw up. He stumbled over to the dog pen, put the barrel against the dog’s head, just in front of the soft ear, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Afterwards, he couldn’t move, just stood there with his head down, shoulders hitching once in a while. Bob Bronson went inside and pretended he didn’t know him.

Sturm hurled a shovel at the pen as hard as he could. It hit the chicken wire behind Fairfax with a clang and he flinched. “You show my dog some respect and bury her deep out in the corner of the yard, over by the corn. Deep! You hear me, you fucking dumbshit? It best be deep, by God, or so help me, I’ll shoot you myself.” He turned back to the men. They were silent, subdued, respectful.

Sturm said, “Let’s go hunt us a tiger.”

* * * * *

When they got back to the vet hospital, the tiger looked like it was still unconscious. Still, nobody was in a rush to jump into the stall and find out. Instead, Chuck and Pine produced an oil barrel filled with ice and a beer bottles in the back of Chuck’s truck. Frank gladly accepted a beer. It was ice cold and tasted almost sweet. A few minutes later, a few bottles of Jack Daniels got passed around. Frank filled his flask and passed the bottle on.

When the tiger hadn’t moved in over twenty minutes, they picked it up by its paws. Nobody knew if it was male or female, nobody’d gotten brave enough to look close. They carried all six hundred pounds of cat out to the horse trailer.

Sturm had given Bronson the honor of hunting the tiger. But this time, he wanted to make sure that it was more of a real hunt and less like shooting fish in a barrel. So this time they went farther out, out in the foothills at the edge of Sturm’s property, to a dry creek bed cut from the hill by winter storms. Over the last hundred years, the creek had wandered back and forth with impunity across the five miles of level valley floor. Where they had parked the trailer, the creek was nearly twenty yards across, filled with dead creek grass, brittle and draped close over rocks as if the grass remembered when water ran over the gravel underbelly of the creek. Now, in the brutal summer heat, the gravel was covered in a chalky white crust, burnt in the sun.

Farther up, the creek’s banks rose sharply into loose, sandy soil, shrinking to only a fifteen-foot width. Pine backed the trailer up to where the creek narrowed, tires crunching on the white rocks.

Inside the trailer, the tiger didn’t make a sound. Frank got scared that the Ace had done something permanent, and once Pine turned off the engine, he got out and peered through the slats. But the tiger was awake, and watching him back. It growled low, then suddenly sprang, snarling and ripping at the chicken wire.

Everyone except Fairfax, who was back at the house burying the dog, gathered at the back of the trailer. Sturm took a stick and drew a map in a sandy stretch; it looked like a long, S-shaped crude drawing of the esophagus, stomach, and large intestine.

Sturm told Bronson, “We’ll drop you at this end here, up a ways, where the creek widens out.” He jabbed at what would have been the stomach in the drawing with his stick. “That’s where you wait. Then Pine and Frank’ll release the tiger and send it your way. We’ll be spread out up along the edge on top, just in case, but hell, in that narrow stretch, the bank’s at least fifteen, twenty feet high. That tiger, he’ll stick to the shadows in the ravine. He’ll end up right in your lap. You just be ready, right?”

Bronson slapped the butt of his rifle and grinned. “Shit. That tiger won’t know what hit it. Hope you’re hungry boys. That abalone was damn fine, but we got tiger on the menu tonight.” He licked his teeth. “And if it’s a male, then by God, I’m gonna eat the penis. Fella in Chinatown claims it’ll turn you into a goddamn sex machine.”

“Suppose the tiger doesn’t head father into the creek,” Frank said. “Suppose it decides to head the other way. What then?”

Sturm mulled that over. Frank could see he wanted to dismiss that possibility, but after the last two hunts, he’d realized these goddamn big cats were unpredictable, to say the least. “Shit.” He nodded. “Shit.”

“Looks like we need a dog is all,” Bronson said. “Tell you what. Frank here, he’s the expert, why don’t you drive the tiger up in there.”

“What do you suggest I use? Foul language?”

Sturm snapped his fingers. “Rock salt.” He went to the Jeep and started digging around in the tool box. “Get your shotgun.” Frank’s Winchester was resting in the gun rack of the pickup along with Pine’s M-1. Sturm held up a fistful of .12 gauge shells. “Loaded these last year, after I caught a couple of them fucking Gloucks on my property. Just rock salt. Won’t kill anything bigger’n a squirrel, but it’ll sure sting like a sonofabitch.”

“There we go. Problem solved,” Bronson said.

“Yeah,” Frank said, pumping the shotgun, spitting out the lethal shells. He didn’t sound convinced. He put the shells in his shirt pockets, just in case, and reloaded the shotgun with the new loads.

Sturm handed Pine a walkie-talkie. “When we get in place, you let it loose. But not before I tell you, got it?” Everybody piled in the Jeep. Sturm drove this time.

* * * * *

Pine said, “Well. Don’t that suck donkey dick.”

“Yeah.” Frank took a gulp from his flask and passed it to Pine. In this kind of sun, he’d found that an ice cold glass of fresh squeezed orange juice with two fifths of Appleton Estate Jamaican Rum was better than just about anything. But today the raw Jack Daniels worked damn near as well. They crouched in the sliver of shade of the horse trailer and passed the flask back and forth for a while, not saying much.

The walkie-talkie beeped. “Let her rip.”

Pine wouldn’t look at Frank. “Good luck.”

Frank checked for about the hundredth time that the safety was off and there was a fresh shell in the chamber. He backed slowly away, dull black shotgun heavy and slick in his sweaty fingers. Inside the trailer, the tiger was quiet as death.

Pine sidled along the trailer. Once there, he nodded at Frank, then kicked open the bottom gate, ripped the duct tape away from the top hinge, and let the gate fall open. He dropped to his stomach and wriggled backward under the trailer. Frank raised the shotgun.

The tiger exploded from the back of the trailer and went for him.

Frank aimed low, tracking the blur of black, orange, and white, and when the tiger was fifteen feet away, he fired. The blast sent a spray of stinging salt and sand up into the tiger’s face. The cat immediately threw itself sideways, hissing and spitting. Frank felt sorry for the creature as it glared at him for a moment, seemed to consider trying for him again, then ran off, deeper into the creek, towards Bronson.

“That was goddamn close and I ain’t shitting you at all,” Pine hollered from under the trailer.

“Yeah,” Frank said.

The walkie-talkie beeped again. “Tell Frank to make sure that tiger keeps going. Don’t want it laying low in some bushes, got it?”

* * * * *

Frank jacked a new shell into the chamber and started across the white rocks, slowly following the tiger. The cliffs on either side grew taller and closed in. The shadows grew deeper, darker. White chalky crust gave way to damp sand and slippery, slick green algae, down where the sun never hit. Stiff, brittle bushes began to choke the creek bed. Frank clutched the shotgun, trying to look everywhere at once, watching for the tiger and Bronson. He didn’t want to get eaten, but he sure as hell didn’t want to get shot either.

When he reached the spot where the creek widened, he stopped, then crouched low, wedging himself into a tangle of bushes draped with dried moss and dead tree limbs. His eyes flickered back and forth, searching for movement. The wide spot, maybe twenty yards across, had been bisected with a rotting pine tree, a victim of the surging waters. The soil around the roots had washed away, and some years earlier it had toppled over into the creek. Now it was lying at a downward angle across a stretch of flat, smooth stones. Thick bushes dotted the crumbling cliffs. He couldn’t see the tiger anywhere. He glanced up at the top of the cliffs, but couldn’t see Sturm or Chuck or Pine or anybody else.

Thirty yards away, at the far end, Bronson clomped into view, his head just a turnip jammed into the shoulders of a safari jacket. The man couldn’t sneak up on Sturm’s dead Lab. When he reached the log, he straddled it and rested, wiping the sweat from his brow. At first, he held his rifle ready, slowly swiveling his head back and forth, scanning for the tiger. But as the minutes ticked by, Frank watched the man’s patience erode like the dirt under the pine tree. Bronson set the rifle next to him and lit a cigar.

As Bronson exhaled the first plume of blue smoke, Frank saw the tiger. It had somehow materialized out of the bushes under the pine tree, up near the bank, and was now creeping down the rotting log towards Bronson; an undulating orange and black caterpillar, inching through the jutting, jagged branches with infinite patience.

Frank watched, frozen with fascination. Somewhere, way back in the dim shadows of his conscience, he knew he should shoot, shout, something. But he couldn’t bring himself to move, because that voice, the same voice that urged him to put the red-haired woman out of her grief and misery was now whispering, in biting, chopping words, that Bronson deserved whatever happened.

A half second later, it was too late for Frank to do anything anyway. The tiger, fifteen feet from Bronson, launched itself down the log and hit him like a locomotive going off a cliff. The force knocked Bronson flat, slamming him onto the smooth rocks; an instant later, the massive teeth crunched together at the back of Bronson’s neck. His limbs flopped and shuddered, then wilted and lay still in an awkward pose that could never be achieved in life.

The tiger lifted its head and stared through the underbrush, locking eyes with Frank. It knew he had been there the entire time. It bent back to Bronson’s body, clamped down on his left shoulder, and dragged him under the log, shaking the man’s body like a German Shepard breaking a rabbit’s neck.