Squirm

  She explains about the license plate. “The dude was about the same height as you, only older and all leathery, like a legit cowboy.”

  “What about the dogs?” Dad asks. Now he’s tying on his shoes. “Were they black and brown and white? Kinda skinny?”

  “Yeah, with big ears,” I say, “and a thin tail that curves upward.”

  “Walker hounds!” He points at my phone. “Google a picture of a Walker! See if it’s the same breed.”

  Summer and I scroll through the photos online. There’s no question it was the same kind of dog we saw in the Texan’s kennel truck. Dad tucks in his shirt, snatches up his keys.

  “One more thing,” he says. “Those hounds—did they bark? This is important. Did you hear any barking?”

  Summer and I both shake our heads.

  “Damn,” Dad grunts, and practically runs out the door. We’re right on his heels.

  * * *

  —

  Something else I picked up from the internet:

  Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV was born thirty-two years ago in San Francisco. He’s the son of Lincoln Chumley Baxter III, the grandson of Lincoln Chumley Baxter II, and the great-grandson of Lincoln Chumley Baxter I. (If he ever has a boy of his own, Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV will undoubtedly name the poor kid Lincoln Chumley Baxter V.)

  At least on paper, Baxter the poacher has a day job. He is listed as a “vice president” of the Royal Alcatraz Development Corp., which is owned by his father and two uncles. The company builds office towers and high-rise condos in Northern California.

  Dad says Baxter the poacher has no regular contact with the family business. They basically pay him not to show up. The photograph on his LinkHead page is of a tanned man with a smug, wormy smile, a bent nose, and silly blond-tipped hair. He describes himself as a “prominent corporate executive, generous philanthropist, experienced pilot, 6.0 tennis player, and international sportsman.”

  It’s the same profile that he posted on a site called BraveWhiteHunter.com, where Summer found his name next to a different photo: Baxter wearing a bush hat and a leather vest, cradling a rifle while posing on top of a dead Alaskan moose.

  “Macho man,” Summer snorts when she shows me the picture.

  From the driver’s seat Dad says, “Here’s somebody else you need to google: Axel Burnside.”

  “Is that the Texan?” I ask.

  “He spells it A-x-e-l.”

  The name pops up immediately: Axel Burnside of Waco, Texas. It’s the same guy we saw outside the 7-Eleven. Wikipedia says he’s a famous trainer of hunting dogs, and not just any old hunting dogs. He specializes in Walker hounds that track mountain lions and other wild cats. His reputation reaches all the way to Central and South America, where wealthy landowners hire him for jaguar hunts in the rain forests.

  I had no idea they used dog packs. “Not exactly a fair fight, is it?”

  “Duh” is Summer’s response.

  Dad says Walkers are fast, and they can run for miles. “They’ll chase an animal until it’s totally exhausted. All that’s left for the hunter is to walk up, aim his gun, and—bam!—point-blank. That’s the ball game.”

  “What’s so special about Burnside’s dogs?” I ask.

  “He trains ’em not to bark, Billy. They track silently, so the cat doesn’t hear ’em coming till it’s too late. Once it goes up a tree, the dogs start howlin’ like maniacs. That’s how they let the hunter know where they’re at.”

  Summer says, “So you think Baxter hired Burnside to help him find a panther.”

  “There’s no other reason for Baxter and those dogs to be in the same town at the same time.”

  We drove all over searching for Burnside’s truck. Now we’re parked in a steady rain across the street from the Lonesome Rooster Motel, where Baxter is supposedly staying. Dad’s secret informant finally called up with a few details about tomorrow’s hunt.

  I’m reading what’s been posted about Axel Burnside on the internet. It sounds like the man has all the legit business he can handle.

  “Why risk everything for an outlaw job like this?” I say. “He could wind up in prison.”

  Dad thinks it’s no mystery. “Baxter probably offered him so much money, he couldn’t turn it down. Cash talks, and big cash talks even louder.”

  An hour passes with no sign of the poacher or the dog trainer. Dad’s got the air-conditioning blasting and the radio tuned to a “deep rock” station. The music is fine with me, but Summer acts like she’s being tortured. Finally she plugs in her earbuds and retreats to her own private playlist, disappearing behind those tacky three-dollar sunglasses.

  Dad says Baxter doesn’t use hounds when he’s hunting grizzlies in Montana.

  “He tried once. The dogs never came back, and he had to pay their owner twelve grand. So now he just leaves a dead deer in the meadows where the bears like to feed.”

  “Is that what happened at Tom Miner?”

  “Yeah, and it almost worked,” Dad says. “But some concerned citizen buzzed the bear with a drone, and it ran away before Baxter could take a shot. Turns out grizzlies aren’t fond of low-flying objects.”

  Picturing that scene makes me grin. “I bet Baxter was mad.”

  “Extremely.”

  “So mad,” Summer says, “he slashed the tires on the drone pilot’s truck?”

  “And put a bullet in the fender,” I add.

  My father smiles ruefully. I ask him if the bear he frightened off was a female with two cubs.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Because I saw her, too. At first I wasn’t sure if she was real, but I am now.”

  Dad switches on the windshield wipers for a few flaps, to clear our view of the motel across the street. Fat raindrops thump the roof of the truck.

  The song on the radio is called “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I’ve heard it before, on one of Mom’s stations. She likes to sing along with the music, no matter what’s playing. It’s sort of annoying, even though she has an okay voice.

  You want to sing, my sister always tells her, go to a karaoke bar.

  Mom knows all the Taylor Swift songs, so there are times when I’ve got to restrain myself from leaping out of the car window. I don’t complain like Belinda, though, because if singing makes Mom happy, it’s worth putting up with.

  After observing my father all day, I can totally picture him and Mom getting together when they were young. Both of them are free spirits—by that, I mean they sail with no anchor—but they care about the same sorts of things. Mom’s got her eagles, Dad’s got his bears and panthers. Their hearts are on the same page.

  Not that I wish they were still married, because I can also see why it didn’t work. My father was the one who packed up and left, but my mother’s just as restless in her own way. Maybe one day she’ll find someone who can steady her the way Lil steadies Dad.

  I’ve been waiting for a quiet moment to ask what happened to his parents, so I do.

  “Car accident,” he says. His voice is a raw whisper.

  “How come you never talked to Mom about it?”

  “Back then I never talked to anyone about it. I should have, but I didn’t.” He turns to check on Summer in the back seat. She’s got her eyes shut, rocking out to her tunes.

  “There was a turtle in the road,” he says.

  “A what?”

  “The woman driving behind them said they swerved to miss a turtle in the road. This was at, like, seventy miles an hour on the turnpike. My father lost control and the car veered into a canal.”

  The sadness on his face is crushing. All I can say is, “Dad, that’s terrible. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “A turtle! It was even in the police report.”

  He’s not crying, but that’s what I feel like doing.

  “You
r grandpa and grandma—what a pair of characters they were, Billy. I wish you could’ve known ’em.”

  “Me too.” It comes out as a dry squeak. I feel like a monster for bringing up such a painful subject.

  Dad reaches over and pats my arm. “It’s all right, son. I think about them every day. I need to. You understand?”

  A nod is all I’ve got left.

  What saves me from turning into a total bawling mess is the sight of a jet-black Range Rover, screeching into the parking lot of the Lonesome Rooster. Trailing close behind is the gray kennel truck.

  My father straightens in his seat and flicks on the windshield wipers again.

  A bent-nosed man who can only be Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV steps out of the Range Rover wearing full storm-weather camo gear and mouthing a fat brown cigar. Axel Burnside emerges from the kennel truck shielding his cowboy hat with a folded newspaper.

  In the beating rainstorm, the dog trainer and the poacher stand toe to toe. The conversation doesn’t look warm and friendly. My father has a trace of a smile as he studies the unhappy pair. Summer sits forward to watch.

  “What do you think they’re arguing about?” I ask Dad.

  “I’ve got no idea,” he says, “but it’s a glorious way to get this party started.”

  THIRTEEN

  Nobody knows the exact number of panthers that are left in Florida, but biologists say it’s less than three hundred. The surviving cats are skittish and solitary animals that try to stay away from humans, which isn’t easy in a state where more than a thousand new humans arrive every single day.

  A few years ago, scientists imported some Texas cougars to mate with the remaining panthers in the hope their kittens would grow up stronger and tougher. The problem is they’ve basically run out of territory to roam. Most of the old scrub woods and prairies are now concrete—subdivisions and strip malls—while the last of the wide-open spaces are crosshatched by highways. Lots of young panthers get killed by cars.

  Yet, despite the constant crush of civilization, the animals are rarely seen. They travel after dark across farms and cattle ranches to hunt wild hogs, deer, or, occasionally, calves. While some landowners don’t mind the big cats hanging around, others feel just the opposite. Dad suspects an unsympathetic rancher complained to somebody about a visiting panther. That person then tipped off Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV, who reached out to Axel Burnside and his legendary barkless hounds.

  The argument between the poacher and the dog man outside the Lonesome Rooster had ended with each man stomping through the puddles to a different room.

  “I bet they were fighting about money,” Summer said as she climbed into bed.

  Dad was doubtful. “Baxter’s so rich he can afford to double or triple whatever Burnside charges for a hunt.”

  “Then what else could it be?” I ask.

  “Let’s get some rest.” He turned off the lights and tugged the blanket up to his chin.

  By midnight he and Summer were snoring like walruses. I was still awake on the floor, trading texts with my mother, who wanted to know why we were “camping” at a roadside motel. I told her it was too rainy to pitch a tent.

  She said Belinda might split up with Dawson, not exactly heartbreaking news. It would save me the trouble of telling my sister that the blockhead she was dating tried to take out the neighbor’s cat with a slingshot. Mom said another boy from school had asked Belinda for a date, and she was deciding whether or not to “like” him. He was an AP student heading for Yale. I said anybody with an IQ higher than a doorknob’s would be an improvement over Dawson.

  Afterward, I dimmed the phone, tucked it under my pillow, and closed my eyes. At three in the morning Dad’s alarm chimed, rousing me from an awful dream: I was trapped inside a car that was sinking in a lake. Turtles with glowing yellow eyes were swimming all around, peering through the windshield.

  Now I’m fumbling around, trying to roll up my sleeping bag. I can’t seem to line up the corners.

  “We’ll stop for coffee,” my father says.

  Summer looks as groggy as I am, but Dad’s totally wired and ready to go. He says we need to be hiding “on location” before Baxter and Burnside arrive with the hounds. Last night at dinner he’d ordered three medium-rare hamburgers to go. His plan is to use the drone to air-drop the meat patties, distracting the dogs from the panther’s scent. The odds of this plan succeeding are about one in a trillion, based on what I’ve read about Walker hounds. Once they catch an animal’s scent, nothing short of an earthquake can break their concentration.

  Dad insists it’s worth a try. The bag of burgers goes in the red pickup with the rest of our gear, including the quadcopter, which I still don’t know how to fly. Because of all the rain, I never got my pilot lesson.

  The damp streets are empty, and the traffic signals are blinking yellow. We’re the only customers at the 7-Eleven. Dad and Summer beeline for the coffee machine while I grab a bottle of tea. It’s so cold inside the store that the front window is fogged. The clerk is actually wearing a ski sweater.

  “How far is the place we’re going?” I ask my father.

  “Nine point four miles. When we get there, we might have a gate issue.”

  “I can pick a lock,” Summer volunteers. When I give her a look, she says, “What—you don’t believe me?”

  Dad buys a box of cinnamon rolls, and we all agree not to peek at the expiration date. That’s how hungry we are.

  The door of the 7-Eleven opens with an electronic cheep, and in walks Axel Burnside. He doesn’t seem to recognize me, probably because today I’m wearing a hoodie. Standing at the register, he asks the clerk for a carton of cigarettes. Dad, Summer, and I slip outside to the parking lot, where we can hear the dogs scrabbling inside the vented aluminum kennels on Burnside’s truck.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Dad says, and we scramble into his pickup.

  Summer buckles up quickly. Not me.

  Sometimes an idea pops into my head, the opposite of common sense, but I just can’t let it be. The moment my father turns the ignition key, I hear myself blurting, “Hold on, I forgot something.”

  “No, Billy, don’t go back in there—”

  Too late. I’m fairly sure Dad won’t follow me, because he can’t afford to let Burnside see his face. He needs to stay undercover.

  Inside the 7-Eleven, the dog man taps a scarred, deformed finger on the counter while the store clerk reloads the coffee machine. I pull down my hoodie and say, “Hey, remember me? How’s Candy, Andy, and Mandy?”

  His response is a granite stare, although he looked meaner yesterday behind those mirrored sunglasses. His eyes are light green and not particularly badass.

  “Why aren’t you home in bed at this hour, boy?” he asks.

  “I’m here to do you a favor.”

  He laughs gruffly, showing a top row of stained teeth. “You gonna do me a favor? Such as what?”

  “Such as keeping your butt out of jail,” I say.

  The clerk glances up from the coffee machine. Burnside grabs my arm and steers me to the rear of the store, the aisle with all the chips and dips.

  “Take it easy,” I say. “They’ve got security cameras everywhere.”

  He releases my arm. “Talk, boy.”

  My hands are a little shaky, so I shove them in my pockets.

  “I know who you are and why you’re here,” I tell him. “This isn’t Texas, okay? And you’re not hunting regular mountain lions. Did you even bother to look up the law on endangered species? ’Cause if you get caught with a dead Florida panther, they’ll put you in handcuffs—and confiscate those expensive hounds for evidence.”

  I’m not certain if that last part is true, but I’m definitely making Axel Burnside uncomfortable, which is the whole point.

  “Just who are you, boy?”

  ??
?I’m nobody.”

  The clerk calls out: “Dude, your coffee’s gettin’ cold.”

  “Let’s you and me go out front,” says the dog man.

  “They got cameras there, too.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  I go outside to wait while Axel Burnside pays for his coffee. My father looks like he’s ready to vault out of the pickup and charge across the parking lot, but I give him a low wave that says: Relax, I got this. He and Summer slide low in their seats so they won’t be seen.

  The first thing Burnside does when he leaves the store is fire up a cigarette. He blows the smoke over one shoulder, props an elbow on the kennel truck, and orders the excited dogs inside to settle down.

  “Personally, I don’t see much sport in what you do,” I say, “but you’ve got a reputation in the big-game world as a straight operator.”

  “And you know that how?”

  I hold up my cell phone. “By reading everything I could find about you. Blogs, newspaper stories, magazine articles. They say you’re such a big deal, there’s a waiting list of people who want to go hunting with you and those dogs. But, see, I wonder what would happen to your business if you went out and killed an animal on the endangered list.”

  The dog man studies his coffee. “You mean, what would happen if word got out?”

  “Oh, word would get out,” I say. “Count on that.”

  His pale gaze narrows. “You got some guts, boy.”

  “Mr. Burnside, I’ve never laid eyes on a wild Florida panther but I would like to, someday. So I’ve got a big problem with what you’re doing.”

  He sets the coffee cup on the fender of the truck, pulls a scuffed leather wallet out of his jacket, and hands it to me. “Count the cash in there. Go on.”

  “But I don’t want any money! That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Just count it up, boy.”

  Three twenties, two tens, and a one-dollar bill.

  “Eighty-one bucks,” I say, placing the bills back in the wallet, and the wallet back in his hand.