Page 3 of Escape Clause


  “What? What?”

  “You shot me, you asshole,” Peck said. He was holding his hand flat on his head, and when he took it away, there was a splash of blood in his palm. His baseball cap, which had been given to him by a crew member of the movie The Revenant, lay on the floor. Peck told people it was a gift from Leonardo DiCaprio himself, though he was lying about that.

  “Let me look, let me look,” Simonian said. Behind him, Katya threw herself at the cage again, a rattling impact that bent the chain-link fence.

  “Hurts, hurts, hurts,” Peck cried, still wandering in circles.

  Simonian nervously watched the agitated cat as he and Peck moved to one of the work lights, and Peck tilted his head down. Through his thinning hair, Simonian could see a knife-like cut that was bleeding, but seemed superficial. “It’s not bad,” he reported. “Must have been a ricochet, a little scrap of metal or something. You could press some toilet paper against it and the bleeding would stop.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. It looks like a paper cut,” Simonian said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Hurts like a motherfucker. I’m lucky I’m not dead,” Peck said. “I’m going to go find some toilet paper. You drag the cat out of there.”

  “Drag the cat? Man, he weighs six hundred pounds or something . . .”

  “Use the dolly. I didn’t expect you to throw it over your shoulder, dumbass,” Peck said. “I’m gonna go get some toilet paper. I’m bleeding like a sieve here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Speaking of dumbasses, where is your dumbass brother? He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

  “He had to get a knife, a special knife for removing the skin,” Simonian said. He dropped the rifle, which hit the floor with a noisy clank, and Peck flinched away. Simonian picked it up and said, “No bullet in the thing.” He tapped the bolt.

  “No bullet in the thing,” Peck repeated, shaking his head. “You’re a real fuckin’ gunman, you know that, dumbass?”

  “If I’m such a dumbass, how come I shoot the tiger and it drops dead? One shot?” Simonian asked.

  “Blind luck,” Peck said. He added, “I gotta get some toilet paper.” He picked his hat up off the floor, looked at it, said, “You shot a hole in it. This was my best hat and it’s ruined. I’m amazed that you didn’t shoot me between the eyes.” He tramped off toward the door and out onto the slice of green lawn that Simonian could see from where he was standing. A second later, Peck stepped back and said, “I’m sorry about that dumbass thing. I’m a little tense, you know? That was a good shot. I’m proud of you, Hamlet. I mean, except for the part where the shrapnel hit me. You’re sure the tiger’s dead?”

  “He better be,” Simonian said, “or Hayk gonna get one big surprise when he tries to skin that bad boy.”

  “Yeah,” said Peck. “I’m going to get toilet paper.”

  He disappeared into the sunshine, headed for his truck, where he kept a first aid kit. He wasn’t really sorry about calling Simonian a dumbass, because Simonian was a dumbass. He had to pretend, though, because he still needed the brothers. For a while, anyway. That was simple good management.

  Back in the barn, Hamlet Simonian turned back to the cages, where Katya was making desperate purring sounds at her mate, as though trying to rouse him from a deep sleep.

  She knew he was dead, Simonian thought. He could see it in her eyes when she turned to look at him.

  Another thought occurred to him: he should shoot her now. He shouldn’t wait, despite Peck. If he didn’t shoot her now, something bad would happen. Like, really bad.

  He thought about it, then started rolling a dolly over to the dead tiger’s cage. He didn’t have the guts to shoot another tiger, at least, not on the same day that he’d shot the first one.

  But not shooting the girl, he thought, was a mistake.

  They were going to make it anyway.

  4

  Virgil made a hurried trip from Frankie’s farm back to Mankato, where he lived. He left Honus at the farm, and as he left, the dog stood in the driveway and barked once.

  The bark was a familiar one and translated as “asshole!”

  Honus stayed with Frankie and her kids when Virgil was out of town, but preferred to hang with Virgil, because Virgil had the best arm and also took him for long lazy walks, and because out in the woods, Virgil would occasionally pee on a tree, like a good dog. Honus was named after Honus Wagner, the shortstop. No grounder ever got past him, although he was occasionally fooled by pop flies.

  Since he would be working in the metro area, where BCA officials might see him, Virgil traded his Creaky Boards band T-shirt for a plain black golf shirt, added a sport coat, kept his jeans, and put a quick polish on his cowboy boots. Heeding advice from his departed boss, Lucas Davenport, he got his pistol out of the gun safe in the truck and wore it, though it was uncomfortably heavy.

  “Bureaucrats are afraid of guns,” Davenport had told him. “If you wear one, it gives you an edge.”

  The zoo was on the south side of the metro area, seventy-five miles away. He made the trip in a comfortable hour: Jon Duncan, his new boss, said it was an emergency, so he went up with flashers and an occasional siren to move the lagging left-lane drivers, because it was not only faster, but also because it was fun.

  —

  Frankie called as he was headed north: “I got Sparkle and Bill settled in. Bill worries me. He’s too nice and normal for my household. He’s even made friends with Sam.”

  “What’d he do, show him how to make dynamite?” Sam was Frankie’s youngest, a fourth grader, the kind of kid who’d eventually jump off the barn roof with a homemade parachute.

  “Almost as bad. He showed him how to drive Sparkle’s Mini. Sam was driving it around the yard when Sparkle and I went to see what was going on. Anyway, they’re going to stay. I might spend more than a few nights at your place. Sparkle’s already gotten on my nerves.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, for one thing, you spent an unusual amount of time checking her out in the swimming hole,” Frankie said.

  “Hey. A good-looking naked woman jumps in a swimming hole with you, you’re gonna check her out,” Virgil said. “That’s normal, been going on for a million years, and there’s nothing in it.”

  “That’s good, because you mess around with Sparkle, you could get yourself stabbed,” Frankie said.

  “She carries a knife?”

  “No, but I do.”

  —

  The Minnesota Zoo was in the town of Apple Valley, a bedroom suburb south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Virgil left his 4Runner in a no-parking spot, flipped his “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—Official Business” card onto the dashboard, and walked down to the main entrance. A pack of kids was playing on a couple of full-sized bronze buffalos at the end of the parking lot and Virgil nodded at a pretty mother, and down the sidewalk, more kids were playing on some bronze wolves and Virgil gave another young mother a nod.

  —

  Duncan was waiting for him by the admission counter. “Man, am I happy to see you,” he said. Duncan was on the tall side, with neat brown hair, thickly lashed brown eyes, and big teeth. TV cameras liked him and he liked them back. “You even got dressed up. You even got your gun. All right. They’re waiting inside.”

  “Who’s they?” Virgil asked.

  “Virginia Landseer, the zoo director, she’s the one with gray hair; Robert McCall, the chairman of the board, he’s got the black-rimmed arty glasses; and a couple of other rich people, a maintenance guy, and an Apple Valley investigator,” Duncan said. Duncan had been a fair street cop, but he was happier as a manager. “They were talking about wolf fetuses when I came out to look for you.”

  “Will I get any help on this?” Virgil asked.

  “I gotta tell you, man, after what happened in Iowa . . . proba
bly not,” Duncan said, as he led Virgil through an unmarked door to the director’s office. “We’ve about moved everybody in the building over to the fairgrounds. Losing the tigers is bad, losing a presidential candidate would really bum everybody out. Especially if it was one of the liberal ones.”

  “Great,” Virgil said. Two hours earlier, he’d been floating in a swimming hole with two good-looking naked blondes and a guy who resembled a bear. Now he was walking through what looked and felt like a bunker. “One administrative question. Why am I doing this, if Apple Valley already has a guy on it? It’s their jurisdiction.”

  “Because we think it’s unlikely that this was done by Apple Valley residents or that the tigers are still around here. It’s not really an Apple Valley crime, the way we see it,” Duncan said. “The other thing is, there’s a druggie going around town kicking in back doors. He’s hitting two or three houses a day and he seems to know what he’s doing, because the cops don’t have a clue who it is. People are getting pissed, and the Apple Valley cops are getting a lot of pressure to stop him. They don’t have time for the tigers, if somebody else can do it. And it really is our problem.”

  “Okay,” Virgil said. And, “Listen, Jon, I’ll do this for you, but after that thing with the dogs—I don’t want to become the BCA’s designated dogcatcher.”

  “These are cats.”

  “You know what I mean,” Virgil said.

  “I do. And don’t worry about it, we’re not headed in that direction,” Duncan said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You get these cats back and I’ll see that you never do another animal job in your life.”

  —

  They were walking down a concrete hallway to the director’s office, and Virgil asked, “Anybody got any ideas about how this happened?”

  “Lot of ideas, not so much evidence,” Duncan said. “They’ll tell you the details. Their head maintenance guy is in there; he seems to know the most. They found a cleanup guy, a janitor, I guess, though he works outside shoveling shit or something, who heard what might have been a couple shots from a tranquilizer gun in the middle of the night.”

  —

  They got to the director’s office and Duncan held the door. Virgil stepped inside to find a half-dozen people crowded into an inner office who stopped talking to look at him. Duncan bumped past him and said, “Everybody, this is Virgil Flowers, one of our very best investigators. He’ll want to hear what you-all have to say, and then, well, I’ll let Virgil take it from there.”

  —

  A gray-haired woman who otherwise looked like she might be in her middle thirties and who had to be Landseer, the director, said, “Welcome,” as she stood to shake hands. She introduced McCall, the board chairman, with the arty black-rimmed glasses, and two other board members, Nancy Farelly and Gina Larimore, and Dan Best, the head of maintenance, and Andy White, the Apple Valley cop.

  Larimore said to Virgil, “You’re the man who broke that illegal dognapping ring down on the Mississippi.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.

  “That’s a worthwhile credential,” she said. “We are desperate to get our tigers back. How long do you think it’ll take?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Anything between this afternoon and never, depending on what the thieves have done with them. If they put them in the back of a truck and are halfway to California . . . it could be tough.”

  “Don’t say never, don’t say that,” McCall said. He was a red-faced man in a suit and dress shirt, with a two-tone blue and white collar. “We’ve got to find them, and we have to be quick about it. I know that puts pressure on you, but we can only think of three reasons for somebody to steal them.”

  “Which are?” Duncan had pulled a plastic chair into the office from the outer room, and Virgil took it and sat down.

  “One, it’s an anti-zoo nut,” McCall said. “Those people are mostly talk, as unpleasant as they can be. Two, it could be somebody who deals in live exotic animals—there’s a lot of that down in Texas and owning tigers is more common than you’d think. There might be five thousand privately owned tigers in the U.S. And three, and this is the worst possibility, it’s somebody who wants to sell the tiger . . . parts . . . to be used in traditional Asian medicine. Almost all the parts are used in one form or another. That would involve killing the tigers, of course.”

  “Don’t say that, Bob,” said Farelly. Tears rolled down her face and she wiped them away with a tissue. “I can’t stand even to hear that.”

  “We all know it’s true enough,” McCall said, scanning the other faces in the room. To Virgil: “Here’s the thing: of the three possibilities, I’m afraid the medicine thing is the most likely. If it was exotic animal dealers, well, you can get tigers relatively cheap. You don’t need to steal them and take a chance on going to prison. Anti-zoo people probably wouldn’t go after tigers; they’d take something easier.”

  “Not if they wanted to make a spectacular point,” Larimore said.

  “If that’s what it is, they’ll have to go public, and we’ll get them back—and we haven’t heard a word from those people,” McCall said. “The tiger’s real value—they’re Amur tigers, and they’re rare in the wild—would be as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. They’re DNA certified as real Amurs, of course, since they were here in the zoo. If you wanted that kind of medicine, they’d be all you could ask for. As medicine, they’d be worth a lot.”

  “How much?” Virgil asked.

  McCall said, “All I know about that market is what I looked up on the Internet, and I have no idea of the accuracy of the estimate. The Amurs are highly valued in China and they’re on the endangered species list. Depends on your connections with the market, but two healthy certified Amurs could bring, as parts, maybe . . . a quarter million. That’s what I get from the Internet, anyway.”

  “There’s a motive,” Duncan said.

  “If that’s who’s got them, then they’re already dead or will be soon,” McCall said, turning his eyes to Virgil. “That’s why you’ve got to find them fast.”

  —

  Has the media been here?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Landseer said. “We did a press conference at one o’clock, but I have several requests for further interviews at four this afternoon. We’ll have to do it. They’re really the taxpayers’ animals.”

  Virgil looked over at Duncan and asked, “Jon, do you know Dave the Rotten Bastard up in the attorney general’s office?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Why don’t you call him and find out the highest possible level of criminal offense he could charge with this case, and the longest possible prison term.” Virgil asked. “Then when Miz Landseer has her press conference, maybe you could step up and talk about all that.”

  “What good will that do?” asked Best, the maintenance man.

  “I’m hoping that it’ll scare the heck out of the thieves,” Virgil said. “Dave is a smart guy and he’ll know exactly what we want. He’ll come up with a list of crimes you won’t believe. Something like thirty years in prison, if they’re convicted. With any luck, the perpetrators will give the cats up or tell us where they’re at. If they’re planning to kill them, maybe they won’t do that.”

  “That’s good—that’s very good,” McCall said. “First good thing I’ve heard. Can we get that set up in time for the press conference?”

  “I can set it up in ten minutes,” Duncan said. He would not be unhappy to be on TV.

  Best asked Virgil, “Why’s the guy called the Rotten Bastard?”

  Virgil said, “When he was a prosecutor in St. Paul, he had a ten-year-old crack runner shoot and kill a twelve-year-old. Dave tried to get the ten-year-old certified for trial as an adult.”

  “Gosh, that is a rotten bastard,” Farelly said.

  Duncan asked Virgil, “What else do you need,
right now?”

  Virgil looked around at the group and said, “I need to know what you think. You’re all familiar with this place. How’d they do this? Did they need special equipment to get in? Did they need night vision gear, for instance? Did they have to saw through any steel bars that would require special equipment? Somebody mentioned a tranquilizer gun . . . Where would they get one of those? Do you have any video cameras?”

  Best, the maintenance supervisor, said, “I can answer most of that.”

  “Good,” Virgil said. “Let’s talk.”

  —

  A maintenance worker had noticed that the tigers were missing at eight-thirty that morning, shortly before the zoo was due to open. The tigers hadn’t been missed before that because they’d spent the night in their outdoor containment—an area roomy enough that not all of it could be seen from any one place—rather than the usual indoor night containment. “I guess everybody who might have seen them thought they were on the other side,” said Best.

  The maintenance worker had been dragging a broken food pallet around to a Dumpster when he noticed what seemed to be a fault in a chain-link fence. When he looked closer, he found that it had been cut through. He investigated further and found another hole cut in the fence around the tiger compound.

  The man told one of the animal handlers, who checked the tiger compound and found that the animals were missing. “He was like, ‘Shit! Where are the tigers?’ He was totally freaked out, he was worried somebody had freed them, and they were running around loose.”

  They called the Apple Valley cops, who’d called the local schools and had them locked down, and then had run a sweep through the area, looking for the cats. When they didn’t find them, they’d called the BCA.

  —

  White, the Apple Valley cop, said, “When we decided they’d been stolen, been taken, we figured the thieves had to come in from the parking lot. There’s a surveillance camera out there, but nobody monitoring it overnight. The camera spools to a hard drive, with a monthlong cache. We took a look at last night’s recording, and whoever did it knew where the camera was—it’s mounted on a light pole—and they climbed the pole from behind the camera and sprayed some paint onto the lens.”