Claws

by Ozzie Cheek

  Ed’s Ford Crown Victoria now was parked next to a Dodge Charger. The cruisers were all black, with Buckhorn Police Department on the sides and the rear in light blue, but the cars remained a pack of mongrels. A second Dodge, out on patrol, had been confiscated from a drug bust. The Ford had been bought used from the Boise city police. The Jeep Grand Cherokee that Jackson drove had been donated by a car dealership that went broke. At home he had the same short-bed Ford F-350 he had owned before his divorce. He seldom used it off the farm. He usually drove the Jeep. With such a small police force, he was never off duty.

  Jackson checked in with Skip Tibbits, the duty officer, and then took a cup of coffee into his office and phoned around to locate the county prosecutor. When Jackson reached Bud Spiegel, he informed him of the latest events and the need to get onto the Cheney property.

  “Could wind up a criminal prosecution,” Bud Spiegel responded. Jackson already knew that or he would have cut the padlock and gone in. “Get a search warrant first.”

  “That’ll mean tomorrow or maybe even Monday,” Jackson said. He hated to wait that long to talk to the Cheneys.

  “Try Judge Vetter. He’ll be playing poker tonight.”

  “Need you to go to Saint Anthony,” Jackson told Skip a few moments later. Skip was working the 4 P.M. to 2 A.M. shift. Regular officers worked four ten-hour days a week.

  “When?”

  “Soon as I can type up the search warrant.”

  “Who’ll take my shift?” Skip was the lone officer on duty apart from a reserve officer working six to midnight.

  “Me. I’ll do it.”

  While Jackson was typing up the search warrant, Skip appeared in the doorway of his office. “It’s Angie.” He waggled the cordless. “She’s in Idaho Falls right now. If you fax the warrant to the judge, she’ll pick it up in Saint Anthony. That way you can go on home.”

  Angie often went to Idaho Falls on weekend nights when she was off duty. Jackson had never asked where she went.

  Jackson parked in front of Benson’s Sporting Goods store. The streetlights were throwing off a bluish glow, while a single streak of red on the horizon sought to keep night at bay. He had gone first to Iris’s house but didn’t find Jesse. Now he knew why. She was gathered with the others around the back of Bailey’s flatbed truck.

  “It don’t look scary to me,” said a man in the crowd.

  “It might if it was chasing you,” Iris snapped.

  “That’s not the same cat,” Jesse said. She looked at Shane. “It was twice as big and –”

  “This is the only tiger out there,” Dell said.

  Jackson heard the exchange as he walked up behind his daughter and said her name softly to avoid startling her.

  “Daddy, this isn’t the cat that chased me.”

  Jackson nodded. “Okay, Jesse. Then it’s not.”

  “That’s crazy,” a woman shouted. “She don’t know.”

  “I know,” a male voice yelled. Everybody looked around to see who had spoken, but Wade Placett was too short to be easy to pick out in the crowd. Then Wade pushed his way to the truck and lifted the head of the tiger. “This thing’s a pussy cat compared to the monster chasing Jesse.”

  An hour later Jackson was on his cell phone arguing with his daughter. Upon learning that the large animal vet had taken Touie back to his clinic, Jesse wanted to spend the night with her horse. Even a Saturday night date with Shane came second to Touie. Jackson finally talked her out of a sleepover in the barn at the veterinarian clinic. He was headed to his car when Pamela Yow caught him.

  “I have the research for you,” she said.

  “That was fast.”

  She shrugged and handed over a large manila envelope that weighed a couple of pounds. Pamela had a thin, boyish body draped in shapeless dark clothes. Only thirty-nine, her hair was graying and cut severely. Rumor had it that she was once a singer in a country band fronted by her ex-husband, but Jackson had trouble imagining it. She told him she was sorry about Ed. Jackson thanked her and then waited for her to leave, but she didn’t budge. “I warned all of you,” she said. “I told the town, the county, all of you to take them cats away and shut the place down.”

  “The cats at Safari Land?”

  “It’s blasphemy, what they’re doing.”

  “What exactly are they doing, Pamela?” he asked.

  “Going straight to hell, that’s what.”

  Once the librarian left, Jackson drove home. He ate dinner and read while seated on the couch in front of the unlit fireplace. Aspen logs filled the grate. The papers from Pamela filled the coffee table. A plate with the remains of a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and some sea salt and vinegar potato chips covered most of the pages. Next to it was a bottle of Sawtooth Ale. In Colorado he had developed a fondness for the Longmont brewery’s beer. An Idaho Falls liquor store stocked it. He had forgotten to ask Pamela Yow the name of her former husband.

  At first Jackson wasn’t going to read Pamela’s research. The tiger was dead. Most everyone believed the problem was fixed. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what Jesse had said: “It’s not the same cat.” So he read.

  Jackson had never imagined that lions and tigers killed so many people. In a mangrove forest in Bangladesh and India, home to the largest concentration of tigers in the world, the cats had killed some 1,500 people. A single tiger once killed 438 people in Nepal and northern India. In Kruger National Park, lions may have eaten up to 15,000 people, most of them refugees from Mozambique trying to cross the park at night to illegally enter South Africa to work in the fields and mines there. What chilled him the most, however, was reading about three generations of lions in Tanganyika, formerly Tanzania, that worked together to kill. The pride was so organized that after grabbing a person, they would race off into the bush, passing the body from mouth to mouth, like a baton in a relay race, until they were miles away and could devour their victim.

  Jackson reviewed his notes. He always wrote notes. It’s what policemen do. He read: The lion is trained from birth to be aggressive, to fight and kill, to be a member of a hunting tribe. Tigers are solo hunters that use stealth more than aggression. Lions prefer open grassland; tigers like woods and trees. Eastern Idaho offered both.

  The last stack of papers he opened were interviews and book reviews and biographical information about a woman named Katherine Osborne. Katy, she was called. Jackson had asked Pamela to find an expert he could talk to about exotic cats. She had given him a writer who looked like a Vogue model. He needed a real hunter, not some poster girl. He looked again at the photographs of her and said, “Wow!” He stuffed the paperwork back in the envelope.

  After her shower Katy decided to skip going out to dinner in favor of room service. She donned a thick, terrycloth hotel bathrobe and leaned against a mountain of fluffy pillows on the queen bed, surrounded by financial reports. She was examining the finances of Skorokoro, her ranch in Botswana, a ranch started by her Uncle Bucky. The hunting ranch was increasingly unable to compete with government-backed safari parks and to contend with increased costs and decreased clientele. She wanted to keep Skorokoro going, and not just for her. Families worked and lived there. It was their home too. But the money she made from books and safaris and the special jobs to kill a man-eater or track down an injured animal left to suffer or to cull a herd to allow the strongest to survive simply weren’t enough anymore. She needed more money.

  Katy tossed down the paperwork and absently stared at the television where a Denver news program droned softly in the background, the modern way of combating loneliness. Suddenly, the image switched from a pair of doll-people behind a desk to a dead tiger with people gathered around it. A scroll along the bottom read Buckhorn, Idaho. Katy grabbed the remote and hurriedly increased the sound. According to a female reporter at the site, an escaped tiger had been shot and killed by local policemen and a man identified as a bank president. The bank president, even in a brief soundbite, came off as a blow-hard.

/>   Another man, dressed more like a rancher than a policeman, thought Katy, was identified as the Chief of Police. He answered the reporter’s questions but used few words to do so. When he was asked if the dead tiger had escaped from Safari Land, the police chief admitted that he didn’t know where the animal came from. In answer to the reporter’s next question, the policeman said, “No, I can’t say for certain that it’s the only big cat out there.”

  “What?” Katy said aloud, her eyes glued to the screen.

  “So there might be another tiger?” the reporter asked.

  “I don’t know,” the policeman said.

  “Chief Hobbs, if we’re not talking about a tiger, then what? Do we have a lion running loose here too?” The reporter managed to sound genuinely concerned.

  “Well, what’s the biggest cat in the world?” the Buckhorn police chief said. “That’s what might be out there still yet.”

  A while later Katy was about to drift off to sleep when she sat up and turned on the light. She was wide-awake now. No way, she told herself. A liger? No way.

  Nine

  Angie Kuka awakened at dawn and for a moment thought she was home. But the sounds and smells were different: a leaky toilet, the scent of incense burned. In slow motion she rolled out of bed and tiptoed to where her uniform hung on the back of the door. Underwear, gun, handcuffs, makeup bag, nightstick, bra, equipment belt, all were stuffed in a duffle bag that said Bank of Buckhorn. Dell Tapper’s bank had given them as Christmas gifts one year.

  “Hey you,” Sharon said, while gazing at Angie’s soft curves. Angie’s skin was naturally tan. Her eyes were dark brown and long-lashed and her black hair cut short to frame high cheekbones and full lips. But despite Angie’s feminine looks, Sharon knew she was capable of wrestling most males to the ground. She even had seen her do it once. Sharon was getting aroused watching her, but Angie wasn’t much for morning romance. “I’ll get up,” Sharon said feebly. She loved to sleep in. Weekdays, she had to be dressed and at school teaching history before her body was even fully awake. “I can make some coffee.”

  “Stay in bed. I gotta go meet the boss.”

  Sharon rolled over to face the wall where her Shambhala meditation banner hung. “You coming back anytime soon?”

  Twenty minutes later Angie tossed her gym bag, now filled with last night’s clothing, in the trunk of her Subaru Outback. Her car was parked two blocks from Sharon’s bungalow outside a male teacher’s house. He was a friend of Sharon’s. Even so, staying overnight was dangerous. Angie knew that she might survive as a lesbian cop in Idaho, if she could handle the abuse, but Sharon, a high school teacher and sponsor of the cheerleading squad of teenage girls, would be out of a job. Sharon’s name made her life hard enough. What parent with the last name Tate would name their baby girl Sharon? Sharon had told her that even kids who thought 1776 was the Civil War era knew about Charles Manson and Helter Skelter.

  Jackson was nursing his coffee and re-reading Pamela’s research when Angie reached the Split-Rail Cafe. “Thanks for coming in so early,” Jackson said as she slid into the booth opposite him. Angie wore a blue uniform; Jackson had on black jeans and a blue-black plaid shirt. “You get it?”

  “If I did, do I get breakfast?” Angie gave Jackson a tri-folded piece of paper without waiting for an answer.

  He read the signed search warrant. “My treat,” Jackson said, offering the slightest hint of a smile.

  Angie ordered a full farmer’s breakfast. Jackson ordered light and nibbled. When they had finished they dropped Angie’s car at the station and, after she retrieved her M4 and body armor, rode together in the Jeep. Neither of them said much during the trip to the Cheney house.

  The gate at Safari Land remained locked. Jackson took a large bolt cutter from the back floorboard and snapped the chain. Then he drove on to the house, where he pulled up beside the Cheney’s battered Dodge pickup. He tapped the Jeep’s horn a few times, but nobody responded.

  At an altitude of over 5,000 feet, the September morning carried a chill, and neither of them had the windows open, so the stench didn’t hit them until they got out. “Oh Christ,” Jackson said. “You smell that?” Anyone who lived on a farm knew the odor. Most cops knew it too. Death stinks. “Vest and rifle.” Jackson called in their location, donned his Kevlar vest, and removed his shotgun. He said, “We walk together. You watch our back.”

  They moved away from the SUV toward a two-storied farmhouse with rotting wood siding and peeling paint. The smell led them to the rear where they disturbed a flock of scavenger crows that nosily flew off. They found a human head behind some neglected evergreen shrubs that had been planted years earlier. A ball cap with an American flag decal lay inches away from gray hair. The head belonged to a man, but the face was too chewed up to be identifiable. Except for some scattered pieces of flesh and cloth, the rest of the man appeared to have been eaten. A wallet covered in blood and other fluids that Jackson didn’t want to think about lay on top of a larger piece of flesh.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” Angie said right before she turned away and emptied her stomach.

  Jackson had thought that a bran muffin and oatmeal had a better chance of staying down if things turned nasty. So far he was right. While he waited for Angie to finish, his eyes swept the yard and beyond. A .458 Winchester lay on the ground some twenty feet away. “You gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah. Except my mouth tastes like shit now.”

  Jackson poked at the wallet with the tip of a ballpoint pen. The Idaho driver’s license he nudged out of it confirmed what he already suspected. “Theodore Cheney.” He used the pen to slide the license back into the wallet. They would need photographs before anything was removed.

  “Want me to call it in?” Angie asked.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here first. Get yourself some water. Then clear the house. Maybe Dolly’s in there hiding in a closet. We need to find her if she’s here. Dead or alive. Then get the camera out of the Jeep and start photographing everything. I’m going to look out back, check the animal cages. We may not be alone.”

  A hundred feet behind the house Jackson found an old school bus faded pale yellow. The bus windows had been replaced by barbwire, crisscrossed to form a net. Next to the bus was the trailer part of a semi. One wall of the trailer was missing. Pieces of rebar had been used to create cells for animals. Both rigs were empty except for feces-infested water troughs thick with Blue Bottle flies. There were a few smaller cages too. Beside them was a partially constructed cage with twelve-foot metal poles set in cement and strung with nine-gauge wire. It was the start of a real animal compound, a replacement for the shabby prisons. The makeshift cages all had hasps and hoods for a padlock. None of them had a lock in place.

  While Jackson checked the cages, Angie drank from a hose in the side yard and then wet her face. She used her shirtsleeve to dry her face as she reached the front of the house. “Police,” she called. When nobody responded, she knocked and then opened the unlocked door. “Anybody here? Hello. Dolly Cheney? Police.” Angie stood still and listened – no radio or TV, no footsteps, no – and then she heard something. She waited but didn’t hear anything more.

  Angie entered the house slowly, glad that she had worn her shoes with the soft rubber soles, even if they were too butch for her taste. She shouldered the M4 tactical rifle.

  The living room was furnished with flea market junk, but the house was clean. A newspaper lay open on the couch – last Thursday’s edition of the Fremont County Journal.

  A doorway led into the kitchen and another to a hallway. A third one seemed to lead to a room that wrapped around to join the kitchen. Dining room, she figured.

  Outside, Jackson searched each outbuilding he saw, those standing and those nearly falling down. He found nothing more except for pieces of a dog or a few dogs or maybe even wolves, and then he returned to the cages. He remembered once seeing about a dozen big cats caged up here. He felt certain the lions and tigers hadn’t gotten t
ogether and hatched an escape plan. Somebody had freed them. That made it a crime scene. He called the communication center in St. Anthony and requested a State Police Crime Scene Response Unit, ISP troopers, Sheriff Midden and some deputies, the coroner, an ambulance, and his own people. When he finished, he headed to the house.

  In the kitchen Angie examined a skillet congealed with grease and a sink with a few dirty dishes. Other dishes were scattered on the floor, most of them broken. An unbroken plate looked clean. She dropped down and ran a finger over it. Not washed clean, licked clean. That’s when she heard it again, that sound.

  “Dolly?”

  Nothing. Slowly, Angie skirted the broken crockery and crossed the kitchen and entered a small dining room set up as an office. She saw Dolly Cheney on the floor in a pool of blood. Angie knelt beside the woman and felt for a pulse in her neck. Faint. Skin warm to the touch. She radioed Jackson and told him Dolly was alive, but barely.

  “I’m on my way now,” he said. “And I’ll call for another ambulance. Do what you can for her.”

  While she waited for Jackson, Angie examined Dolly’s injuries. Her face was clawed. One arm looked like it had been run through a meat grinder. The hand was intact but bloody and holding something shiny. Angie removed a silver cross and chain from Dolly’s fist. She was examining it when she heard a noise behind her – a hacking or a low guttural growling, a big cat sound. The M4 lay on the floor beside her. She slowly reached for it.

  Jackson had climbed the broken concrete steps and looked through the glass panels of the antique side door. He saw Angie squatting beside Dolly, and behind her, he saw a tiger, a Bengal tiger, he thought. The tiger was ten feet away and crouched to leap. Jackson stepped back from the door far enough that he could raise the shotgun and aim it at the tiger, but he didn’t shoot. He wanted to but –