by Jo McCready
As she took another step back, her heel tipped too far over the edge of a rabbit hole. She went down, her arms cart-wheeling out as she instinctively tried to right herself. As she went down, she saw the jaguar leap through the air towards her.
Chapter 24
The graceful leap through the air would have been impressive had RJ witnessed it from afar and not been the intended target of the powerful black beast. One huge bound from a stationary position saw the jaguar soar over a distance of five meters to land neatly on top of her target.
RJ threw her hands up to protect herself and readied her knife as she went down, watching the cat sail towards her. She didn’t hear the bang from behind her, was aware of nothing except the weight of the jaguar on top of her chest as she was thrown down on the ground.
The heavy body pressed down on her torso, suffocating her and filling her with panic. Its teeth on her neck were unmoving. She stayed still, afraid to move, to do anything that might antagonize it.
Suddenly, the weight was pulled from her and she could breathe again. She stayed down and gulped in lungful after lungful of air, her heart beating wildly.
Stuart appeared in her field of vision and looked down at her; Wullie Carstairs soon joined him. RJ stared up at the two men. She made no attempt to control her breathing or slow her heart rate. She just lay there, trying to process what had just happened.
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Stuart said.
“Yeah, my own. I don’t want to repeat that ever again,” she hissed out between breaths.
She tried to sit up on her elbows, but Stuart gently pushed her back down again. “Just rest a minute, wait until your heart rate calms down. You need to stop it pumping so hard.”
“I’m okay,” she insisted and then turned to see his hand, which rested very close to a mass of red flesh and blood where she’d expected to see her shoulder. Her vision turned gray and fuzzy, everything sounded far away as if she was caught in a fog, and she lost herself to the darkness.
When she awoke, she was on her side, with a rolled-up shirt under her head. “What happened?” she managed.
“You blacked out. You’re okay. Just . . . don’t look at it again.”
“I don’t plan on it,” she told him dryly.
“Thanks to Wullie here, that’s all the damage you got.”
RJ raised an eyebrow. So, it was Wullie now, was it? They were on a first name basis.
“I was in the back of the car with the two boys, trying to keep them down and protect them from seeing . . . well. Anyway, so I was looking after the boys who were huddled down, terrified. We’re lucky that Wullie is such a good shot.”
RJ smiled weakly at Wullie Carstairs.
“This has to end now,” he said grimly. “Too many people have gotten hurt, and if anything had happened to those boys—” Wullie broke off and stared off into the distance.
No one said anything for a long time.
“Right.” Wullie stalked back to his car and retrieved the radio. He thumbed the talk button. Static crackled through the speaker. “I need a car up at Acre’s Ridge. Samuel, you’re to take the boys home. Tam, bring another car up. Bring the big first-aid kit with you. You’ll be retrieving a carcass when you get here, so bring John up with you, too.”
RJ eased herself up to sitting position. She looked back at the car. Two little boys with eyes the size of dinner plates stared out of the back window.
“You can’t keep this a secret anymore, not now.”
“You really think anyone will believe those two?” Wullie asked her.
“You can’t just ignore it. Their mother will have to be told. They’ll need help through it.”
Wullie Carstairs stared at her, looking both angry and exasperated. He stalked back to the car. “Right, lads. When you go home, not a word to your mum about what really happened, eh?”
They nodded quickly at him, faces white with fear.
He sighed and looked back at the jaguar that lay dead and bloodied on the hill. “I’ll be down tonight to talk to your mum. I’ll tell her everything. For just now, though, you need to keep your mouths shut. Do you understand?”
They nodded again, clearly ready to agree to anything in that moment.
RJ could only wonder how their young minds were processing this crazily unique situation. Goodness knows her own was having trouble, so they must have been all over the place.
The engine of a car came gradually closer. Another Land Rover pulled up, and a tall man, presumably Samuel due to the absence of a first-aid kit and dressed in the same manner as Carstairs, got out. The blood drained from his face and he looked as shell-shocked as the twins.
Wullie nodded in greeting, but Samuel was oblivious as he looked at RJ’s shoulder, then over it at the jaguar that lay dead on the ground.
“Samuel, take them back down. Tell their mum we had to rescue them from the rogue stag. That’ll explain their reactions, for now anyway.” He turned to the boys in the car and opened the door. As they hopped out, he stopped them before they went to Samuel, laying a hand on each twin’s arm. “Remember what I said boys. Not a word.”
“Yes, Mr. Carstairs,” they answered earnestly in unison.
He continued to look in their eyes for a minute before ushering them off to Samuel and their ride home.
The three people left on the hill watched the car until it disappeared out of sight, knowing, each one of them, that it could have ended very differently.
“Right, get in then,” Carstairs told them as he got into the driver’s seat of the old, beat-up Land Rover.
Stuart held out his hand and helped RJ to her feet. “Okay?”
“Yep, okay.” She got into the front seat, ignoring the seatbelt and preparing to hold out her good arm against the dash for when they went over any bumps.
“I’ll try to take it as easy as I can,” Carstairs promised, looking directly at the red slashes on her shoulder that were dripping fresh blood onto the upholstery, turning it crimson.
Carstairs was good to his word, driving slowly around dips and rocks, taking his time on the descent down the hill. He slowed even further when they approached an oncoming ATV. He rolled down his window and nodded at the driver, who mirrored the action, unsmiling. The driver handed over a hold-all that Carstairs set on his lap legs before driving off down the road again.
The adrenaline that had been coursing through RJ’s veins started to wear off in direct correlation with the increasing pain she now noticed in her arm and shoulder. She winced and looked at the bag on Carstairs’s lap. “That’s a pretty big first-aid kit.”
“It’s a pretty big estate, and a working farm, if you haven’t noticed. Someone could get hurt and we’re miles from help out here.”
“What have you got in there?” Stuart asked, leaning over from the back seat.
“Everything you’ll need, except the tetanus jab. There’s even a suture kit . . . but the most I’ve ever done before was sliced fingers.” He looked out of the window and blew out a breath, his mouth forming perfect O.
“No worries about that. I’ll handle it,” Stuart said as if sewing up slashed shoulders was an everyday occurrence for him.
“You two, you’re not really private detectives, are you? I figure PIs would’ve gotten the police involved by now, or at the very least insisted on a doctor.”
“No,” RJ answered.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who you are?”
“No,” RJ said and looked out of her window, watching the green grass roll by.
“I figured you weren’t, not after . . .” He waved vaguely in the direction of her injury. “Most people would have panicked or insisted on phoning 999. Not you two, though. It makes sense. I couldn’t see the Sullivan widow hiring any old private investigation firm.”
“She didn’t hire us.” It was the only thing RJ conceded, but she felt no danger in letting him know.
“Oh.” His expression fell even more than it had be
fore. The lines on his face were deeper, his skin sallower than when they had first seen him. He looked like a broken man. He sighed repeatedly, as if he had a war waging within himself.
“There are things you have to understand.”
“Two people are dead. Now we know why. What’s left to understand?”
“It’s not as simple as that. I’ll explain everything, but I need to show you something first.”
They drove up to the house, skirting around the edge of the building and driving past it.
“Where are you taking us?” RJ asked, suddenly wary. She had no idea where her knife was. She must have dropped it either in the scuffle with the jaguar or afterwards in the confusion of her injury.
“I just need . . . You won’t understand until I show you. It’s not what you think. You can’t even begin to imagine what it’s been like. No one can, except those of us who work here. You have to see it.”
They trundled on for what must have been two miles or more, eventually coming to a stop outside a large gray barn, squatting in a flat valley that had been carved out by an immense body of ice hundreds of thousands of years previously. The barn—or maybe it was a shed—looked newer than she would have expected a building on a farm or estate such as this to be. Breeze blocks towered out of the ground for about fifteen feet and stopped where the curved steel roof started arcing up to the sky like a depressingly mundane rainbow. Nothing in its surrounds or on the building itself gave any clues as to its purpose.
They got out of the car, with RJ moving slower than the others. Tears pricked at her eyes as she gently unfolded herself from the passenger seat. There was time for a quick glance between her and Stuart before they followed Carstairs up to the door in the center of the structure. The glance told her all she had to know. What have we got to lose?
Carstairs keyed a number into an electronic keypad that seemed incongruous with the country building, then took a key from his pocket and turned it in the lock under the pad. “Double entry system,” he explained, without actually explaining anything at all, and then walked through, expecting them to follow.
She glanced at Stuart again. He shrugged and followed him through. Having little other choice, RJ did the same. It occurred to her they were an unlikely bunch: Stuart with his scabbed face and pronounced limp, her with her shoulder ripped open, and Carstairs the haggard gamekeeper. It was like something out of a horror movie or a haunted house, one of those ones where made-up, scary characters jump out from the dark corners, terrifying willing patrons.
Her hand felt empty without her knife, but she assumed Stuart still had his gun. She wasn’t afraid, just wary. If Carstairs had wanted to kill them, he could have easily taken them out earlier. There was no reason to give her access to first aid if they were going to be dead soon. Even so, she was on her guard, ready to fight if needed.
A corridor ran tunnel-like to a door at the end. The walls were made of the same rough breeze block of the walls outside. Carstairs opened the door with another key, lighting the lock with a tiny torch on his key ring.
They couldn’t see anything as they walked into the dark, but the smell was overpowering. Straw and the stench of animal feces, mostly, along with something else RJ didn’t recognize.
“I’ll just get the light,” Carstairs said. They heard him shuffle away, saw the tiny beam of light from his torch on the floor, and then there was the click of a switch before the light illuminated the room. It took a second for RJ’s eyes to adjust to the bright light. When they did, she was completely blown away. It was not at all what she’d been expecting. She looked at Stuart to see his mouth hanging open in wonder.
“Holy shitballs,” he said to no one in particular.
Chapter 25
Cages lined the walls like kennels—or perhaps it was more accurate to think of them as pens—enclosed with concrete blocks and wire mesh on each of the walls in front. The cages ran up the sides, reaching right to the far wall, and formed two lines up the middle of the building. The roaring and growling started as soon as the lights came on, growing in intensity as the animals fed from each other’s apprehension. No good ever came from the presence of the humans or the lights, except the sustenance that failed to keep them truly nourished in either body or soul.
RJ walked up to the first pen, knowing what she would find but still needing the confirmation that seeing it with her own eyes gave her. Shriveled in a corner at the back sat a female lion. The pen was separated by a wall of bars, an open door leading to the mirror image of the cell she was in. Her fur was dull and thin and her abdomen painfully extended. She bared her teeth in a show of defiance, but RJ doubted the feline would have the energy to even try to defend herself if the need arose. Tears burned the back of her eyes and she had to force herself to move on.
The next pen held a jaguar nursing four little cubs. All five cats looked much healthier than the lion. The mother looked at RJ with interest but gave no other indications of her feelings towards the situation. Her golden coat and dark markings shone in the artificial light as her cubs squirmed, fighting each other to latch on to their mother’s waiting milk.
The next pen held a black jaguar that eyed her warily, its head down as it sat at the back of its enclosure.
“Are they all like this? Does every cage have a big cat in it?”
“No, just this side.” Carstairs pointed out the middle pens, which held what looked like juvenile cats. “When they’re big enough they get their own pen while they wait for a booking. Some are kept for breeding, but Buchanan likes to reuse the same ones for that.” He looked in disgust in the direction of the old lioness. The poor cat didn’t look like she would survive another birth.
RJ studied his face, trying to read his reaction. He didn’t meet her eye but she watched as the skin above his collar began to turn a deep red. He was up to his neck in this and he knew it.
He led them around to the other side of the barn. “We’ve got a variety ’round this side.” He sighed deeply and stared at the floor.
RJ and Stuart walked the aisles to find a bear, zebra, wolf, and a huge buffalo that towered over RJ. The buffalo grunted at their presence and RJ instinctively stepped back. It looked like it wanted to charge, its horns terrifying and deadly weapons. The front of the cage was reinforced with steel bars, but that wasn’t enough to reassure her. When she turned to see Stuart’s pale face, she knew he felt just as vulnerable. The beast swiveled its head to follow them as they backed away, the only movement it could make comfortably in a cage where it wouldn’t be able to turn round. Its eyes told a story of the knowledge of its entrapment, a combination of fear mixed with acceptance of its fate. The confronting stare forced RJ’s eyes to the ground, and she struggled to swallow the lump that had formed in her throat.
“It’s mostly cats,” she stated once she found her voice again
“Aye, they’re easier to get and to breed.” He thumbed towards the side of the building that resembled a lonely ark. “The ones on that side are special orders.”
RJ and Stuart looked at each other, neither able to put into words what they were thinking. Carstairs stared at his feet. “Come on,” he said. “You need to get that arm seen to.”
He led them back to the entranceway where a table and chairs sat waiting in an open area beside a huge sink. The room was barely more than a holding area. Off to the side, RJ could see what looked like a sterile laboratory bathed in darkness: hard white surfaces, stainless steel, and what looked like a microscope on the bench. Hanging inside the door were two tranquilizer-dart rifles.
Stuart followed her gaze. “It looks cleaner in there. Shouldn’t we go in there to do it?”
“Aye, right enough. It’s restricted access. Only a handful of people are allowed in there. It’s the laird’s domain. I only have the code in case we need the tranquilizers. I don’t really suppose it matters anymore who goes in there. It’s over now. It’s all over.” He closed his eyes, and RJ could practically see the relief wash over him and t
he tension and stress that he’d been holding leave his body.
He got up and keyed another code into the access pad. The door clicked open. They stepped into the room, then RJ took a seat on a stool while Stuart set about washing his hands with the medical soap at the sink.
When he was done, he examined the wound. “Could’ve been a lot worse. There’s nothing obvious there, but I’ll have to clean it out. It’ll hurt, but it’s necessary.” He rifled through the cupboards until he found what he was looking for. After cleaning out a bowl, he filled it with soapy water, then soaked some gauze. As gently as possible, he began to dribble the mixture down RJ’s arm and shoulder.
She clenched her jaw at the sting, though it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. But when he gently wiped at the areas surrounding the slashes, getting gradually closer to the wounds, she gripped the table with her good hand and inhaled deeply, gritting her teeth through the pain.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like ribbon. She cut you up like a grass skirt.”
RJ shot him a look that told him to shut up, careful not to look down at her bloody arm.
“What? Not squeamish, are we?”
“Not when it happens to someone else. When it’s me that’s torn up, it’s a different story.”
“That’ll change,” he told her with a hint of sadness in his voice. “You won’t always have a partner to sort you out. There’s been more than one occasion when I’ve had to dig a bullet out of my thigh or sew a knife wound up.”
“Enough already!” RJ barked as Carstairs’s eyes went wide at the thought. “Save your stories from another time. When you’re not sewing up someone’s arm, for example.”
Stuart held his hands up and grimaced, “Sorry, sometimes it helps to talk, that’s all.”
“Not in this case,” RJ assured him. She flicked her eyes towards the shocked gamekeeper.
“Oh right, I was in the army,” he reassured Carstairs. “I’m not some sort of mad psycho.” He chuckled, which didn’t exactly help his case, but Carstairs’s eyes gradually returned to normal.