Claws Page 7

  Then the tiger leaped. Jackson’s shot hit mid-body and kicked the cat sideways. It still slammed into Angie, knocking her forward. She screamed. He shot again. The second deer slug took off part of the tiger’s rear leg. The tiger yelped or cried or made whatever sound a tiger makes with a leg shot off and dragged himself or herself through a doorway that – Jackson would learn – led to the kitchen and then to the back porch and then outside.

  Angie rolled over and sat up. Her hair and her face were covered with bits of blood and flesh and tiger skin. When she looked at Jackson through the blown out glass panes of the door, she saw that he was trembling.

  An hour later Angie sat in the back of the same ambulance that had been at the Placett’s farm a day earlier. Cars were scattered everywhere: county sheriff cars and state police cruisers, a crime scene van, every patrol car in Buckhorn, Tucker’s pickup, the coroner’s minivan, plus a few personal vehicles. The area had taken on the appearance of a reservation roadhouse on Saturday night. Some of the vehicles had their emergency lights silently flashing. The ambulance that rushed Dolly to a hospital in Rexburg had left using lights and siren. A flashing and screeching black and white state police car led the way. More troopers were busy keeping the news people out on the county blacktop and away from the scene.

  Once the medical staff cleared her, Angie returned to the house and located Jackson sitting on the front porch staring at a spreadsheet. Inside the house radios crackled and cell phones rang and voices, some loud, gave orders. The county sheriff and the state police were gathering evidence. “Chief,” she said, “you saved my life in there.”

  Jackson looked at Angie like he hadn’t heard her. “This chart is how they keep track of the cats: ten tigers, eleven lions, and two ligers. Twenty-three big cats.”

  “Maybe they sold them all?”

  Jackson shook his head. “This chart was updated on Friday, two days ago. I think Ted’s been dead since then.”

  Angie slowly absorbed his meaning. “So what are you saying, that we’ve got twenty-three wild cats loose?”

  “Twenty-two,” Jackson said. “One tiger is dead. One hurt and maybe dying. But all the rest of them …”

  They both looked out at the fields and woodlands.

  Ten

  A door opened upstairs, and Iris heard the girls whispering. They barely had left Jesse’s room since Missy arrived today after attending church. Today there was none of the jarring music and teenage giggling that she often found annoying. In a few days Iris knew the boom-boom and the oh-my-gods would return. Teenagers somehow retain a sense of invincibility despite encountering the contrary.

  Iris returned to the budget paperwork on the dining table. Usually, she worked in her law office on Sunday afternoon. Her two-room office was connected to the house by a breezeway, although it also had a separate entrance.

  She did not like Sundays: mornings of guilt and repentance, afternoons of lethargy and dullness, and a night that was time’s purgatory. This Sunday was worse than usual. Today was the Sunday Dell and Shane visited the cemetery. Today was the sixth anniversary of Tilda’s suicide. Even now she could not escape the woman.

  When Iris was in high school, Dell’s parents had pressured him into dating Tilda Flemming instead of her. Eventually, Dell gave in. Eventually, Dell always did.

  Upstairs, the bedroom door closed. What was Jesse doing? Why hadn’t they come down? Were they waiting for her to leave? Earlier, she had tried to talk to Jesse about the animal attack but received monosyllabic replies. All Jesse had said was that she wanted to go to the movies with Shane. Iris had told her “maybe,” but she would let them go. Normalcy would be good for Jesse. Anyway, she had her own plans tonight, plans that didn’t include the kids. She would cook Dell’s favorite meal. She would dress to entice him. She would help him forget the past.

  Dell was hesitant to commit to the relationship because their kids were dating, but Iris wasn’t concerned. If the teen romance didn’t fizzle out, she would end it. Despite what Jackson thought, Iris knew the truth. Jesse had never forgiven her for divorcing her father. Messing with her mother’s romance was Jesse’s revenge.

  The cell phone startled Iris. By the third chirp she found it beneath the budget file. Buckhorn badly needed money. Everybody had an idea for how to get it. They were dull ideas and doomed to fail. She answered the phone.

  Iris greeted Sheriff Midden and Stilts Venable, head of the regional Idaho Fish and Game Department, and then Jackson introduced her to a tall, handsome black man with a pencil mustache and a tailored uniform. “Major Jessup is from Meridian. He’s in charge of region six, Captain Bundy’s boss. Major, our town mayor, Iris … Inslay.”

  After Iris shook hands with the Idaho State Police major, the group sat in folding chairs fanning Jackson’s desk. Mark Venable was six-six and barely weighed two hundred pounds. He had been called ‘Stilts’ since junior high basketball. Beside him, Sheriff Midden sported a fringe of white hair and a mouthful of teeth stained from chewing tobacco. Major Jessup, next to Iris, sat ramrod straight, legs apart, hands on his thighs, the crease in his dark blue trousers sharp enough to cut.

  “So where’s Captain Bundy?” Iris asked. Bundy was head of the ISP office in Idaho Falls that covered Fremont County. Everyone in the room had worked with him.

  “The captain’s in Quantico training with the Feds,” Jessup said. “Something like this, I’d be here anyway.”

  “Then let’s get started,” Jackson said. He had outlined the situation for Iris on the phone while the others either had appeared at the Cheney farm or had been briefed earlier. He began by reviewing what little they knew. Afterwards, they spent an hour discussing how to eliminate the lions, tigers, and ligers loose in Idaho. Poisoning, trapping, and hunting were all considered. Shooting the dangerous cats won out. Less discussion was required to realize that only the Idaho State Police could mount an immediate operation to locate and kill the cats.

  “We can set up by nightfall,” Major Jessup said. “A few hunters, a helicopter, ATVs, and support personnel. We’ll need a place to park everything and motel rooms. Shouldn’t take more than a few days to do the job.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Stilts said. “With deer and elk season around the corner, we need to take care of this fast. Last thing we want are lions attacking hunters.”

  Paul Midden was frowning. After eighteen years as sheriff he was as much politician as lawman. “Choppers, motels, hunters, ATVs? Sounds like a lot of money.”

  “Yes, it does,” Iris said. “So who pays for it?”

  Jessup raised his eyebrows, and Iris noted that half of his right eyebrow was gray, while the other brow and the mustache were dark. “You do,” replied Major Jessup. “The town of Buckhorn and the county of Fremont.”

  “Us?” Iris spat out the word like a hiss.

  “Now, just hold on a minute,” the county sheriff said and threw up his hands in a defensive gesture. “I got me an election next month. People want drug busts and sex perverts jailed. That’s where county money has to go.”

  Jessup was from Meridian, but the rest of them were aware that Midden’s reelection as sheriff in the strongly Republican Fremont County was more secure than the buttons on the blue uniform shirt trying to hold back his belly.

  “The ISP is a state-funded agency,” Stilts said to Jessup. “Why does anyone have to pay you to do your job?”

  “Because this action falls outside our budget.”

  “So ask the governor for extra money,” Iris said.

  “Colonel Rudolph did that already,” Jessup told her. “Governor Hale’s people said they’ll see what they can do.”

  Iris shook her head. “That’s not good enough. I’ll have Dell get his brother to talk to the governor.”

  “Good luck with that.” The state police major smiled at Iris. “Governor Hale’s on his way to China.”

  Stilts Venable, an avid Democrat, moaned. Like many others, he believed Governor Hale, a two-term Republican, wa
s on a taxpayer-supported vacation before leaving office.

  “But our town has no money,” Iris said emphatically.

  “And we have no choice either,” countered Jackson.

  Iris knew that Jackson was right, but there was something besides the cost of the operation making her resist. Something about the plan to use the ISP to kill the cats struck her as … dull and doomed to fail.

  Ten minutes later Stilts left to attend a baseball game, Sheriff Midden to campaign, and Iris to pore over town finances again. This time she would go to her office.

  Meanwhile, Jackson and Major Jessup worked out the logistics: the ISP would arrive Sunday night and begin the hunt Monday morning; their equipment would be parked at the Elk’s Club; and Jackson’s officers would provide support.

  “That seems to cover it,” Jessup said, “unless … now my men are crack shots and game hunters, but we don’t know this area. Having a local guide could help.”

  “So could someone who’s hunted lions.”

  “You mean the banker? I heard about him.” Jessup smiled. “No thanks.” He put on his Mounties’ hat and added, “Find me a real lion hunter, I’d welcome that.”

  Jackson had a bad feeling about sending police officers into the woods to hunt lions and tigers. Deer and elk didn’t attack the hunter; big cats did. As soon as Jessup left, he got a cup of coffee, returned to his desk, and opened the file on Katy Osborne. This time he looked beyond the photographs. He read the interviews and the biographical information. This time he realized that beautiful or not, she was a professional hunter and experienced guide, someone who had tracked and killed lions. In India she had hunted down a Bengal tiger that escaped a reserve and terrorized a remote area. Her achievements were impressive. He also learned that tragedies marked Katy’s life as often as achievements. Her parents had died when she was young, leaving an uncle in Botswana as her guardian. A professional safari guide and hunter, the uncle had disappeared two years ago. There was no mention of Katy Osborne having a husband or children.

  Jackson spotted a note that Pamela had stuck to the file folder. It said that Katy Osborne currently was in the United States on a book tour. He saw the dates of her tour and was surprised to learn that she was in Colorado right now. Pamela even had the name of a hotel in Denver.

  Maybe Katy being so close to Idaho was nothing or maybe it was what one Buddhist philosopher he had read called ‘auspicious coincidence’. Jackson phoned the hotel and asked for her. Then he waited, and a moment later, he heard a telephone ring. It rang for a long time, and then a woman said hello, and he asked if she was Katy Osborne.

  She answered by saying, “Who’re you?”

  “Jackson Hobbs.”

  “Well, I don’t know you, and I’m just leaving so –”

  He quickly said, “I’m a policeman.”

  “Sure you are. How’d you get my number?”

  “We have over twenty big cats loose in Idaho,” Jackson said, ignoring her question. “Yesterday, one of them killed the best man I ever knew.” There was silence on Katy’s end of the phone. “Another one almost killed my daughter.”

  “My god! Tell me your name again.”

  He did and also told her he was from Buckhorn, Idaho.

  This time Katy made the connection. “I saw you on the news last night. You shot a tiger in Idaho yesterday.”

  “And today I found a man’s head but not his body and a woman so chewed up she’ll likely die,” Jackson said.

  This news shook Katy. Even in Africa where lions and leopards and crocodiles kill humans with regularity, where elephants stomp people and Cape Buffalos chase you down and spear you, even where death by nature is no surprise, and even though she in fact had been the bringer of death to those same animals, Katy still felt each death, human or animal, with a sense of despair. She said in a quieter voice, “You said twenty cats. How’s that possible?”

  “Twenty-two to be exact. Mostly lions and tiger.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Two of them are some monster cat called a liger.”

  Eleven

  Despite her hunger, after failing to kill the prey she had chased, Kali returned to searching for her mate. She heard his territorial roar, common in male lions around sundown, from four miles away and found him prowling the same hills Jesse had ridden Touie across earlier.

  Ted Cheney had named the male Shaka after a Zulu warrior king. Shaka was a year older than Kali. Thicker and taller, he weighed over a thousand pounds. While he lacked a full mane, he had a slight, white ruff at his throat. His skin was tawny, like Kali’s, and also overlaid with orangey-brown stripes, but the markings on Shaka’s face were black. There had been two male ligers at Safari Land. When Kali first came into estrus, the males fought to mate with her. Shaka killed the competing male.

  After a reunion of cuffing, rolling, and nipping, Shaka licked the blood that oozed from Kali’s ear where Wade Placett’s bullet had removed a thumb-sized piece. Big cats have been known to carry half-a-dozen bullets in them, so the wound, while an irritant, was nothing more. A while later, Kali followed Shaka out of the wooded hills to the pastures below in search of food. When they reached the Double-D sheep pastures, not only were all the sheep gone, the remains of Shaka’s earlier kill also had disappeared.

  The ligers sniffed around, but large cats rely on sound more than smell. Today, the wind was blowing the wrong direction for them to hear the bleating sheep in Deborah’s barnyard pens. So when they heard a wolf pack in the forest nearby, the ligers abandoned the sheep pasture and pursued the wolves. If they failed to kill a wolf or two, they at least would be headed back to where Kali had found food before, to the farm where she killed Ed Stevens.

  By the time Jackson returned to his coffee, an oil slick with rainbow colors was floating on top, reminding him of a rain puddle on tarmac. He set aside the cold coffee and replayed the phone conversation. Katy had asked him to describe Ed’s body. After he had done so, from the gnawed neck to the gutting, she said that it certainly sounded like an African lion or Asian tiger had killed him.

  “Lions consume the viscera first, probably for the fat,” Katy had said. “Then move on to the denser muscles. If left alone, they’ll eat most every part, even bones.”

  Another time, she said, “Cats mostly hunt at dawn and dusk, and that’s the best time to track them, when they’re moving around. Other times, they like to lay up and hide. Last thing you want is to stumble unaware on a lion or tiger. Before you can get off a shot, you’re dead.”

  He found her friendly enough after the beginning, but she had abruptly ended the call ten minutes later, saying that she had to leave. She gave him a cell phone number and told him to call again if he had more questions. Questions were all he did have. It’s answers he needed.

  While Janet Cook maneuvered the rental car toward the Boulder Turnpike, Katy glanced at her notes or stared out the window at the land. She paid little attention to either.

  “I’d say ‘a penny for your thoughts’,” Janet told her, “but given how weak the dollar is, it’d be an insult.”

  Katy grinned and said, “I got a phone call right before we left.” She then told her book agent about the phone conversation with Jackson Hobbs in Idaho.

  When Katy mentioned the number and kind of big cats that had escaped, Janet tried to furrow her brow. “Ligers? You mean those cute things in the Napoleon Dynamite movie?”

  “I mean a cat big enough to bite you in half.”

  “Oh! So not that cute.” A second later, Janet said, “Funny, I don’t remember ligers in either of your books.”

  “Because they’re not. Ligers don’t exist in Africa or anywhere else in the natural wild. For one thing, lions and tigers don’t usually share an area. And even if they did, they wouldn’t mate. They’re enemies. They’re not in the book because I’ve never hunted ligers. Nobody has.”

  “Nobody?” Janet said. “Really?”

  Stan Ely was waiting for Katy and Janet outside a sma
ll theater on 13th Street opposite Boulder’s downtown park, home to an antique train. Katy’s talk and book signing were taking place in an old brick building. The event was co-sponsored by a local bookstore and Stan’s group, Animal Rescue Kingdom. ARK’s headquarters was in Boulder although their land base, one hundred and eighty acres, was in south-central Colorado near Pagosa Springs.

  Katy did not think about Idaho again until the talk and book signing were over, when she was sitting with Janet and Stan in the ornate Dushanbe Teahouse a few doors north of the theater. Despite the tempting array of teas, Katy ordered red wine. While they waited for the appetizers to arrive, Katy said, “I got an interesting call from an Idaho policeman today, Stan. About Safari Land.”

  Stan surprised her, saying, “I know.”

  “About my phone call?”

  “Un-uh. About the missing cats. The killings.”

  “I didn’t hear anything on the news,” Janet said.

  “Me either,” Stan said. “But the animal rescue grapevine is all over this story.” The appetizers were delivered, and Stan waited until the waiter had fussed over them and left before saying, “So what’d the Idaho cop want?”

  “Advice. Information.”

  “Hmmm. Well, if I can scrounge up enough money, we’ll go up there and rescue these cats.”

  Katy eyed him curiously. The police chief had told her the Idaho State Police were mounting a search and kill operation tomorrow. “Idaho officials agreed to this?”

  “Not yet.” Stan dipped a vegetarian samosa in a black sauce. “But why wouldn’t they?”

  “You’re right,” Katy said. “Why wouldn’t they?” They talked for a while longer about Idaho before the conversation drifted into other areas. Thirty minutes later, Katy and Janet said goodbye to Stan and returned to the rental car. Janet started the engine, but didn’t drive away. “Janet?”