Stuffed (16 page)

All sorts of leads were pointing—shoving—me toward Maine. I’ve since learned that such compulsions are like being worked over by a pushy car salesman. He makes you want to buy the clunker with the
CHERRY!
sign on the windshield, when all the while there’s a strangled voice deep inside telling you to kick him in the shin and make for the hills. I should have told her to get the hell out of there.

“An Escort? Why?”

“Look, Angie, a lot happened here today, too much to go into. But that may be Slim’s car. If he saw you or knows you’re there—look, it could be they’re back there at Mallard Island right now with the crow, selling it to the guy in the ad.”

“Here?”

“And I’m on my way,” I gulped, “leaving now. Listen, Angie: Stay in your room, lock the door, and don’t open it for anybody. They may know you’re around. I’ll be there in a couple hours.”

“Should I do anything? Call anybody?”

“Just sit tight.”

I hung up and looked over at Walker lying on the other bed. He had one bloodshot eye and his smirk trained on me.

“Just where do you think you’re going, Carson?”

“I gotta go meet Angie.” I sat up. “I think she may be in over her head.”

“Where’s she at, Carson?”

“Maine, somewhere.”

Walker got up casually and stretched. “Maine, huhn?” I heard a click and felt something hard and cold hit my wrist, namely a handcuff. “That’s a long ways from here. What would happen if our friend the cowboy showed up and we weren’t here?”

“Take this thing off, Walker!”

He snapped the other end to the bed before I could jerk it away. “You’re the bait, and you’re staying right here.”

“Look, Walker, wanna get your sergeant’s stripes? Want to solve this case single-handedly? Come with me to Maine. Angie called, and she’s found something that leads me to believe what these characters are after is in Maine. See this note, this ad? Somebody there is looking for the crow.”

“We’re after a monkey, Carson.”

“But the crow . . .”

Walker sauntered off to the bathroom with a
Sports Illustrious,
turned on the fan, and closed the door. I was furious but knew that splitting a gut would only give him perverse satisfaction. So while Walker caught up on a little light reading, I started fumbling around in my pockets, then my bag, then the desk drawer looking for something—anything—that might work as a lock pick.

The only thing handy was a red ballpoint pen, which I promptly jammed into the lock and deftly got it stuck in there. So I grabbed the pen with my teeth and yanked it free, only to find the front part was still in the lock. I also discovered a sour taste in my mouth: ink. A handy pillow became smeared in red ink as I used it like a salt lick to hastily wipe my tongue.

My frantic tongue-scraping came to an abrupt, chilling halt: The front doorknob was turning, the door pushing slowly open.

I was trying to formulate some intelligible yell to my protector on the throne when Otto popped his grinning, satyrlike face around the door frame. He was dressed in what I guess he considered vacation-wear: a garish, wide-striped sport coat, white slacks, two-tone shoes, and a white dress shirt with stiff collar points that reached halfway to his navel. Must be what Russians wear when making the swinging beach scene on the Baltic.

He threw the door open and splayed his arms apart, a robust greeting welling up from inside. A finger to my lips managed to shut him up. Or maybe it was the handcuffs. He dropped his bag and tiptoed up next to me, his stinky tobacco breath never so welcome.

“What are you doing here?” I rasped.

“Garv say to Otto: Please, come to me! Vac-ate-ton! I see you soon.”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t mean for you to come on vacation. . . . Okay, look, KGB on toilet,” I whispered, nodding toward the bathroom. “Angie, she’s in trouble. Angie not looking, Otto. We must go help Angie.”

Otto studied me a moment. “Garv, I dunno.” He studied me for another moment. “Lookink like circus.”

“What?”

He pointed at my face. “Circus man, lips to red, poke a darts, pants much big . . . amusink very much.”

I paused.
Circus man, red lips, polka dots, big pants . . .

I glanced at my visage in the mirror over the dresser. Red ink was smeared all around my lips, and there was a smudge of it on the end of my nose. My frantic tussle with the pillow had broken the shackles of my styling gel—my hair was standing straight up. And I was wearing baggy red sweats. Sure enough, I looked like a clown. And felt like a bozo.

“There was a pen, with red ink—oh, never mind. Otto, get me out of this!”

I’ll never say another deprecating thing about the little imp. Well, I will, but I’ll feel an eentsy weentsy bit guilty every time.

Otto went into action. Cutting off the curtain pull strings, he made several big loops out of them. Tying one end carefully to the bathroom doorknob, he tied the other end to the closet doorknob opposite. He put a coat hanger between the multiple strands and turned the hanger until the cords doubled up on themselves and twanged to the touch. Then he used a handkerchief to tie the hanger to the back of a chair so the cord wouldn’t unwind.

Next Otto tiptoed back over to examine my handcuffs. Stroking his pointy beard, he considered the problem from all angles: my wrist, the chain, the locks, the bedstead.

“Hurry!”

“Eetz interesting, eh?” He tapped the cuff on my wrist. “Much very Moscova Police. Same. Gear, shackle, spring. Key, eet push on spring, gear turn, shackle—”

“Hurry!”

“Yes, of course.” Otto took out his penknife, opened a blade, but decided it was too thick. He thought a moment, then sliced the collar off his shirt.
“Ahoyatilne!”

The toilet flushed.

Otto pulled the white plastic insert out of his shirt collar and fed it gently into the cuff where the male part joined the female part. His tongue peeked out between stained teeth.

Water began to run in the bathroom sink.

Then the water in the bathroom shut off, the vent fan stopped, and a hand landed heavily on the bathroom doorknob. “What the—”

“Eh?” The cuff slipped open. “Eetz looking!”

“Carson!” Walker yelled, the bathroom door convulsing. “Carson!”

I slapped Otto on the back. “Ve go!”

When my bare feet hit the gravel, I turned back to the room for shoes but saw the bathroom door about to burst open. I stepped into the shoes nearest the door—Walker’s. They were about a size fourteen, and I had to clench my toes to keep them from falling off my feet.

Otto stared, giggling. “Garv . . . Bozo shoes amusink.”

“Hurry, you idiot!”

We gathered up the plastic bags full of my valuable skins and shut the door on the growing racket in my room. Otto had a van out front.

“We’ll take the Lincoln,” I said, opening the back door and shoving my bags in. “It’s faster than the van.” Otto shoved his bags in the opposite side and went toward the van.

“Otto! This car!”

“Yes, of course.” From the van, he heaved a large cooler toward the Lincoln.

“Otto, what the hell is that? Come on, hurry!” I could hear banging in the room. Those bathroom doors aren’t exactly solid oak.

He approached the trunk and I quickly popped open the dented lid.

“I dunno.” Otto dropped it in the trunk, smiling. “You tell to Otto bring chest freezer.”

I flipped the top of the cooler, and my jaw dropped.

Dry-ice vapor cleared, and by the motel porch light I saw a fat beak.

“Eetz good, eh?” Otto folded his arms. “Sneezy
pizdyets.”

Chapter 18

T
he cops in the unmarked car across from the motel
were
sleeping. Can you believe it? Making small-town cops everywhere look bad. Of course, even if they had been awake, I think my ad hoc Clarabell disguise would have fooled them.

Blasting east on Route 9, we made the New Hampshire border in six minutes ten seconds. But who’s counting?

Beside me, I had an erratic Russian gnome. In the backseat, $50,000 worth of protected species’ pelts. The day wasn’t over yet, and I’d been shot at, had a boulder dropped on my car, been used by the police as bait, handcuffed to a bed, and effected an escape. My girlfriend was likely in mortal danger. Carnies had stolen my white crow, and there was probably a missing gorilla corpse out there somewhere. A mysterious guy named Jim Kim claimed he was trying to help me but wasn’t. The police and the NYSDEC claimed to be trying to help me but weren’t. My destiny was perched on the sharp edge of a job offer I was deathly afraid of accepting and deathly afraid of not accepting.

And as if that weren’t enough, I had a frozen penguin in the trunk. His name was Reggie. RIP.

Rural New Hampshire ghosted by in the periphery of my headlights, my eyes trained on the white line that would lead me to Angie.

There was no sense asking Otto how he could possibly have misunderstood my instructions, if for no other reason than I was so happy he had.

“Otto, where did you learn to open handcuffs?”

Otto sighed heavily and flashed steel dental work. “Garv, many things Russia men must know. To live life, men must make smart.”

“Thank you, Otto.”

“Yes, of course. But tell to me, Garv. Where Yangie? Why we go?”

“She went to Maine, to a place called Mallard Island. The men who stole from us, who attacked Angie and me? We followed them to Brattleboro. They tried to kill me today.”

“Yob tvoyu mat!”

“Now I think they’ve gone to Maine. To Mallard Island.”

“Poshol v pizdu!
Garv, men, ve maybe must killed. Eh?”

“I’m hoping nothing bad has happened, Otto.”

“But if men—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Hmm.”

I looked over at him and saw a metallic glint, which I thought was from his steel-capped teeth. But in his hand was a large, nickel-plated revolver. “Garv, men, ve maybe must killed.”

I practically ran off the road.

“Poshol ty na khuy!”
Now he had me doing it. “What the hell is that?”

“Eetz important. Otto travel, he takes beeg gun. Mother tell to me:
Otto, you to take beeg gun, to you always make safe.”

“Eetz
dangerous, and probably very illegal.”

He gave me a withering look. “Vhat illegal when bad men to Yangie!”

“I told you, don’t go there. . . .”

He made the gun disappear. “Make to Yangie destination very fast.”

I seem to remember promising myself just the night before that I was going to get myself a big Dirty Harry gun. Yet the sight of that revolver brought me anything but peace of mind. If anything had happened to Angie, I
would
kill them, given the chance. And Otto’s mother’s gun suddenly made that possible. I’d fired a gun once or twice, knew how to work one, but didn’t own one and didn’t much care for them. Chalk that up to being a New Yorker. The less you see of guns in Manhattan, the better.

My vision swam. I felt sick. The pedal went closer to the floor.

I felt better once I saw a sign for Concord. I knew this route. I’d driven it a number of times on my taxidermy safaris. At Concord, I could pick up I-93, to I-393, cross the Merrimack, and beeline on Route 4 to Portsmouth and I-95. I looked down at the speedometer and edged the needle up past eighty-five. I figured I might make it in three hours.

I didn’t feel like talking, not even to ask Otto to quit smoking, which he did continuously across New Hampshire. I fumbled around through my 8-tracks. There’s a guy at the 26th Street flea markets who still sells the cartridges. Of course, I don’t exactly have my choice of any music post-1982, but there was no shortage of good music up to that point in man’s evolution—Supertramp and Foreigner notwithstanding. Hank Williams started twanging and moaning through my dash speaker—perfect.

My thoughts were focused on Angie, and it was all I could do to keep from slipping into a stupor of dread. Was I letting my imagination go a little wild, picturing Tex and MacTeague closing in on Angie after seeing her poking around town? Could I even be sure they were in Mallard Island to take delivery of the crow? The thought of Angie being victimized kept surging to the fore. I’d already had my fill of that, and in person. I was determined not to let it happen again.

I could picture Tex winking.
Be a shame to see that purdy woman of yours get hurt.

Can’t think about that. Better think about something else.

Gee, what about that job offer? There was a subject I really didn’t want to think about, yet it was consuming enough to force the other from my mind, at least for a little while.

So why was I
deathly afraid
of this thing? Why not take the job, and if I didn’t like it, go back to brokering taxidermy?

Well, for one thing, after traveling around ratting out antiques dealers up and down the East Coast, my name would be mud. It’s not like I saw that many protected and endangered species around. But there were some. I saw songbirds, for example, but not whole slews of them. Most were probably killed by cars, ran into plate glass, or died from parasites. I doubt that people are shooting them for trophies in numbers even mildly comparable to the damage that domestic and feral cats do. Songbirds are exquisite creatures, and I can’t fault someone who—like me—sees a dead blue jay as art too beautiful to discard. I see ducks, which can be mounted for the hunter who shoots them but cannot be resold, and the heads from old rugs, like lion and cheetah and leopard and polar bear. They’re pre-CITES, obtained legally, but without permits it is illegal to sell them.

This is at Mom n’ Pop stores, largely. Sure, they’re technically breaking the law, and maybe some of them even know it, but from my perspective, Mom n’ Pop antiques dealers are not the enemy. It’s people like Smiler, the chop-shop gangs, that need to be taken down. And that’s the job of someone like Pete Durban, who thrives on danger.

So that’s that: I’m turning down the job.

Then again, what about Angie? Didn’t she deserve someone better than a dealer, a taxidermy bum, for a consort? Someone who could provide better insurance, some financial security for retirement, maybe even vacations, a trip to Europe? One of these days, she might just meet a guy who could rescue her from contract jewelry work, a man who would afford her the ability to spend time making her own art jewelry. I’d always harbored some guilt about holding Angie back from making it in the art world. There had been times when we first joined forces when things were slow for me, and she footed the bills. It had never been the other way around. With a steady job, and raises, and if I made some money on the side brokering taxidermy, I could fulfill my obligations as partner. I might not amount to much, but at least she could reach her potential.

That settles it. I’m taking the job.

A gas station loomed, and signs announced the I-89 interchange just ahead. I roared into the station, showed the attendant where the gas cap was, and asked him to fill it with premium. Otto went into the QwixMart. I went to the phone booth, whipped out my calling card, and tried Angie. I wanted to make sure she was still snug in her motel. And I was going to tell her about the job and that I was going to take it.

No answer.

No answer again.

No answer again.

“Otto! Let’s go!”

He came trotting out of the market with two coffees and a small shopping bag of jerky. “Yes, of course, Garv. How Yangie?”

“She didn’t answer.”

His face darkened. But he didn’t say anything. For a change.