Annie crinkled her forehead and looked at him with bemusement. She was used to dealing with drunks.
This wasn’t going the way he had been hoping the last two weeks. Finally, he just said, “Let’s go on in and see her.” He fumbled for the keys while she worked her toes into the other flip-flop.
He got the front door open, and Petunia came barreling down the hallway, claws scrabbling on the linoleum. She stopped short when she saw Annie, hesitating only a half second before launching herself at the girl. Petunia hit Annie so hard she knocked the girl on her ass. The impact made Frank wince, but Annie just squealed in delight, closing her eyes and letting Petunia attack her face with her fat, wide tongue.
After a moment, Petunia backed off just enough to ram Frank’s knees with her broad head, her other way of showing affection. Frank wanted to offer Annie his hand, to help her up, but it felt weird, like it was too intimate, too fast. Christ, he thought. He felt like some sixth grader wondering how he should hold a girl for a slow dance.
If Annie felt uncomfortable, she didn’t act like it. She simply reached out and grabbed hold of the front of his belt and hauled herself up. Petunia bounced around like a happy rubber ball, pleased as punch with her two humans.
“She sure seems better. Can I take her home?” Annie asked, scratching wildly behind Petunia’s ears.
“I think so, yeah. No infection. She’s getting around fine. Just—be careful. Hate to think of her getting hurt again.”
“Don’t worry. My brothers and I have come to an understanding. I don’t want my dog to get hurt and they don’t want to be wearing their balls for earrings, so everybody’s happy.”
Frank didn’t know what to say; he didn’t want to end it, didn’t want to let her go. “Do you need a leash or anything?”
She laughed.
“Any dog food?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Well. She likes it when you scratch real hard at the base of her tail—right on top of the hips here.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been reading to her. I think she likes that. Mostly medical, vet stuff, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Frank squatted, pulled Petunia’s head in close, rubbing the top of her nose and stroking the loose folds at her throat. “Okay then little girl. You be good.” He kissed the top of Petunia’s flat, broad skull and stood up. “Take good care of her.”
Annie nodded, but her eyes were on the floor. She shifted back and forth, stuck her hands in her pockets, then pulled them out again just as quickly. Finally, chewing on her bottom lip, she met his eyes. “Hey. Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow, I mean, tonight?”
“Yes. Yes I would.”
She smiled, that round face beaming, damn near glowing. Frank almost squinted from the dazzling brightness and he couldn’t help but grin back.
“Good.” She tried to tame her smile, pressing her lips together, but the dimples in her cheeks gave it away. “Tonight. At six. Okay?”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’ll be waiting.” And with that, Annie and Petunia left. Frank watched Annie’s rolling ass, barely contained in her cutoff jean shorts, as she headed across the lawn. Petunia padded happily alongside the strong brown legs. They walked down the middle of the empty street, silhouetted from streetlight to streetlight, until finally slipping into the darkness.
* * * * *
The hospital was empty and hollow without Petunia following him around. Frank went in and talked to the pound dogs for a while, but it wasn’t the same. The immediate, insane barking kickstarted his hangover, hammering a throbbing headache to his skull with blunt nails. The big cats just stared him down with careful, precise eyes. They didn’t hiss or snarl anymore. How was it, he wondered, he could understand exactly what the cats were thinking as they watched him, but he had absolutely no idea what the hell was going through Annie’s mind when she invited him to dinner.
Frank took a hot shower and scrubbed himself raw. He fell onto his cot, but couldn’t sleep. As the storeroom’s walls and pallets took shape in the gray morning light, he thought of her dimples as she tried not to let the smile get away from her. Her belly. Those brown legs. That ass.
* * * * *
He stopped pretending to sleep when the phone rang at noon. It was Sturm. “We’re having a meeting at my place. Appreciate it if you were there.”
“Yeah, sure, of course.” Frank panicked, thinking of his date with Annie at six. “When?”
“Be here in an hour. I can have one of the boys pick you up, if you’d rather not have that car out and about.” Frank had hidden the long black car in the barn, in a large empty space next to the rhino.
“No, that’ll be okay. Better for it, turn the engine over once in a while. How you feelin’?”
“Never felt better in my life. See you in an hour.” Sturm hung up.
* * * * *
Frank fed the animals and himself. He took another shower in case he didn’t have a chance before six, then drove out to Sturm’s ranch. Jack, Pine, and Chuck were already there, sitting on the front steps, yanking off their cowboy boots. Inside, Sturm had the air conditioning going full blast. Frank’s sweat instantly froze to his skin and everyone left damp footprints on the smooth wood as they walked through the house in their socks.
Sturm sat in one of the kitchen chairs while Theo carried the rest into the office. Frank peeled the medical tape off Sturm’s chest and started to say, “Good thing you don’t have much hair,” but caught himself just in time. The wounds were clean and showed no sign of infection. Frank applied fresh bandages and everyone moved into the office.
They clustered around the desk. Frank was surprised to see a laptop; it looked out of place in the farmhouse, almost anachronistic, like John Wayne drawing a laser gun out of his holster. Sturm explained, “While all of us have been sleeping, Theo’s been busy.” He sounded proud, but almost relieved, as if his son had finally given him a reason to be proud. He nodded at the laptop. “Theo?”
Theo came forward, suddenly shy and hesitant, his movements the only sound in the muffled quiet of the book-filled room. He dragged his forefinger across the mouse pad and attacked the keyboard like a puppy going after a frog.
An image of the twin towers appeared, morning in New York, and the first plane came streaking out the sky from the right side of the screen and burrowed into one of the buildings. A title appeared above the towers, stark black. “DEATH LIVES IN US ALL-The Most Brutal Site on the Net.” A menu faded in on the left side of the screen. “Videos.” “Photos.” “Links.”
“Show ’em everything,” Sturm said. “It’ll curl your toes and pucker your assholes, boys.”
Theo clicked “Videos.” Another list came up, and Theo started at the top. The twin towers crumpled in fire and dust and smoke.
A paunchy, middle-aged guy in a suit stood behind a table in a nondescript meeting room, handing out manila envelopes. He was sweating and pale, trembling like he had stomach flu. “This was all be explained in a minute—moment,” he stuttered. His voice matched the color of his skin, cottage cheese that had been left out in the sun. It appeared to be some kind of last-minute press conference, but the camera angle didn’t show anyone else. Finally, he reached the last manila envelope and pulled a large revolver from it.
There were panicked shouts, falling chairs. Someone shouted, “Wait!” and there was another hoarse, quick voice, “Don’t!”
The man waved the gun around with a shaking hand and sputtered, “Please. Please, don’t come any closer. Someone—someone could get hurt with this.” And then, anxious to get it over with, he put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Almost too fast to follow, part of his skull hit the wall behind him and he dropped like a cinderblock off an overpass. The camera tilted down, finding the man slumped against the wall. Blood suddenly erupted from his nose and mouth as if someone had quickly cranked on a faucet. His eyes
were still open, sad and unblinking. The image went black.
“Jesus humping Christ. Ain’t never.” Chuck breathed. “Holy fucking shit. Shit!” Frank couldn’t tell if Chuck was disgusted or excited.
That was just the beginning. The images were thick with death. They watched machete beheadings. Soccer riots. Helicopter disasters. Racetrack explosions that sent burning chunks of the cars into the crowds. Police chases. Bulls goring matadors; the clowns laughed like hell at those. Shootouts. Hot air balloon mishaps. An abortion, up close and personal.
The clowns acted as if they were watching porn, calling out in ecstasy “Oh fuck YES!” when a cop stepped in front of a semi on a busy freeway and disappeared, leaving only the faintest red mist behind. One poor sonofabitch got sucked through a jumbo jet engine. People jumped out of a burning high rise in India and bounced when they hit the concrete. A mob in Africa literally tore a man apart with long knives and their bare hands.
They hit a stretch of animal attacks. Some misguided dipshit in Taiwan climbed over a zoo fence and tried to bless a couple of lions. He’d nearly completed the sign of the cross when one of the lions casually flicked a paw out and sent the guy spinning to the ground, probably wondering why his God had abandoned him. Another Asian guy, Frank couldn’t tell what country it was, let his concentration falter for just a second, and the nine-foot alligator clamped down on his arm and just rolled and rolled and rolled, twisting that arm like a wet towel until it finally came off, right above the elbow. Frank wasn’t the only one that flinched.
One genius tried to brand a horse. The horse gave a kind of squeezing flex, then, the next instant, the guy was gone as if he’d never been born. The website showed it again in slow motion. The horse kicked the dumb sonofabitch square in the chest and he flew backwards out of the frame, branding iron spinning in midair. Even Frank got to laughing at that one. But he had to fight not to tremble. Sturm had the temperature down in the sixties, and to Frank, who had stepped out of the 107-degree heat, it felt like he’d just parachuted into the Antarctic in his underwear.
The cool air just made the clowns scratch a lot.
Frank wished he had his flask.
It was already three o’clock.
After the videos, Theo clicked through the collection of still images, mostly black and white crime scene photos. Shotgun suicides. Scissor stabbings. Mob hits. Then black screens with white words; jokes like “What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?” The next image was an infant girl in a white hospital shirt and nothing else impaled on a wrought iron fence with the text underneath. “You can unload one with a pitchfork.”
One photo showed a giant dead crocodile, wetly gutted at the edge of a pier. It was night, coldly lit from the flash bulb. A slimy, blue, human leg spilled out of the gaping stomach.
At the very end, there was the picture. And there they were, in the middle of the street with the tiger. It had been framed so you could see the park off to the left, bank and post office off to the right. It looked like these six men had chased a tiger out a safari photo in some particularly corrupt country and shot it dead inside a Norman Rockwell painting.
* * * * *
“Holy fucking shit!” Chuck screamed. “That’s fucking awesome!” Pine blurted at the same time. Sturm ginned back at them.
Frank wondered how many people had seen this photo. He resolved to shave off his long hair the first chance he got. In the bottom left corner was a web address, black against the mottled pavement. It was too small to read, so Frank pointed at it.
Sturm nodded. “Wondered who’d find it first.”
Theo rolled the cursor over to the number and clicked on it. This opened up several other windows. He went through them, tapping out passwords. The last window had a ten-digit number, nothing else. It was a phone number. “Somebody call that number,” Sturm said.
Pine was the only one with a cell phone. He dialed. The phone on Sturm’s desk rang. He picked it up and said, “Hell of a picture, ain’t it?”
“It sure as hell is,” Pine said.
“Shit, you’d think that was taken right here in America. Must be one of them faked photos you see on the net you see from time to time. Can’t be true. But hell,” Sturm loaded his bottom lip with tobacco. “Wouldn’t that be something. To stalk and kill an animal that exotic, that magnificent, on the streets and backyards of Small Town, USA.”
“It sure as hell would.”
“Chance to be thirteen years old again. Yessir. Can you imagine something like that, hunting and fucking just like you could when you were that age? But for real this time. Goddamn. This ain’t no pussy canned hunt. No sir. This ain’t for goddamn pansies who can’t handle stalking and killing an animal. And it sure as shit ain’t for those cocksuckers that don’t have a problem shooting an animal tied to a stake. They try that around here, I’m liable to tie them to a fucking stake and start shooting. No sir. This is the real goddamn deal, hunting a genuine jungle predator. Hell I believe I’d pay just about anything for a shot at something like that. I tell you a figure I wouldn’t blink at, I wouldn’t think anything of paying ten grand for something like this. If the opportunity presented itself. Not for something that much fun.”
Pine swallowed. “No. I wouldn’t blink at all at a figure like that.”
Sturm said, “Then I would suggest arranging for a trip say, around late August, somewhere around August 21st.” Sturm hung up.
He leaned forward. “This photo has been sent to a very exclusive group of gentlemen. Men who do not blink at spending ten thousand dollars or more to hunt anything they want.” Sturm rapped the desk. “That ten grand? That’s just to get here. The gentlemen are then free to gamble among themselves.” Sturm opened his large palms. “And naturally, in a situation such as this, it’s only reasonable that the house deserves thirty percent of every transaction.”
Everybody tried to quickly calculate the amount. Frank said, “We got six lionesses left. That cheetah.” The amount got bigger.
“The monkeys,” Chuck suggested.
“The dogs,” Jack said.
“The rhino,” Theo said.
Sturm nodded. “We got ourselves a chance to make some real money. But it ain’t gonna just fall out of the sky. We have some work to do. First up. Walkie-talkies. I ain’t got time to driving over half creation to find you.” Theo handed the walktie-talkies out. Everyone got one, except for Frank. Sturm explained, “You stay at the vet’s, so I know where to find you if I need you. The rest of you, you keep these charged and close. I expect you to answer quick if I call. Jack, you and Chuck head down to Redding. We’re gonna need three, four big tents. I mean big. Big as you can get. And as much goddamn liquor as you can carry. You come talk to me soon as you get back.
“Pine, you go get as much ammo as possible. You need to leave immediately, so you can head back and unload at least a couple of times before our guests arrive. Hit Redding, then head over to Reno. Stop at every gun store, bait shop, and especially goddamn Wal-Mart you pass. Go down I-5 and clean that valley out. We need every .12 gauge and rifle shell they got.”
“You bet.”
“And you, Frank.” Sturm rolled his fingers across the top of the desk in a staccato burst. “Without them animals, this whole enterprise is nothing but a bunch of hicks with their thumb up their ass, trying to peddle a few silhouette targets. The Roman army had a special rank for getting their on exotic animals for the Colosseum games. Called ’em venator immunis. That’s you. So you’re gonna be my right hand man in this. Them cats, they’re an investment. A serious investment. We put their health first. ’Til the hunt, of course. But we will deliver what we promise. A chance to hunt one of the world’s biggest and lethal predators through the streets of a small town. I want them cats healthy as if God himself blessed them with his grace. And you’re gonna do that for me. For us.” Sturm stood up. “Gentlemen. We have thirteen days to whip this town into shape. There’s a whole shitload of
work to do, so I suggest we all get to it.”
As they were leaving, the phone on Sturm’s desk began to ring.
* * * * *
Frank got back with enough time to feed the animals and take another shower. Standing in the cramped bathroom, he eyeballed his reflection critically, said to hell with it, went out and found the clippers and shaved his head. He wondered if he should wear his suit. In the end he decided against it, and went with jeans and a clean gray cowboy shirt. He wasn’t sure where they would head for dinner, fairly certain that Whitewood didn’t have any kind of restaurant or diner or café or anything like that, just a sliver of a cinderblock bar over by the railroad. That meant they’d have to drive to another town, and he wanted to look like just another field hand.
The dead tree was empty. Frank still parked where he’d watched the cop car park, protected by the satellite dish. The gas station across the street was closed and dark. The sun was setting and a persistent wind came down from the north. He felt almost cool as he stepped out of the car.
Smoke rose from the house as he came up the wide trail of baked bare earth that marked the path to the front door. Other than the smoke, the place was lifeless. Frank had been doing pretty good, wasn’t too nervous up until then. He’d seen Annie take care of her brothers on at least two occasions, and he knew she could handle them without worries. But up until now, Frank hadn’t thought of the mothers. He wasn’t sure how this little date would go over at all, wasn’t sure how they would react to a man taking their daughter out. He hadn’t seen them since the night of the BBQ and carnival. He wanted to just say hi, get Annie out of the house, and take off.
The front door was in his face, daring him to either knock or get back in the car. He knocked. It opened immediately. Two brothers, twins, both around seven or eight, waited stiffly inside. They wore identical clothing, deeply bleached white shirts ironed into sharp angles, black bow ties that matched the black pants and plastic wing tips, a white bathroom hand towel over their right forearm. Their hair was neat and slicked back. One of them had a Band-Aid on his chin.
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