Endangered

by Ann Littlewood

  She sighed, straightened up, and walked inside. She returned in a few minutes and resumed her post. The barn door opened, revealing a white jumpsuit and hood. The figure pulled off a paper dust mask and became a woman. I made my pitch and learned that she was with the health department. Negotiations led to a determination in our favor, at least for a brief inspection. The price was jumpsuits, face masks, vinyl gloves, and disposable booties. “No one told me we’d have two more people to outfit,” the health department woman said. “We’re going to run out.”

  She sent the deputy off to the parking lot rather than ruin her booties in the mud. We waited in the drizzle until the deputy returned with an armload of packages and an even less hospitable attitude. I hoped the gear was top quality and we wouldn’t be poisoned for some theoretical reptiles. We suited up and walked in like astronauts exploring a new planet.

  Inside seemed at first to be a typical farm barn. It was cold and smelled like motor oil. The inadequate light from a dirty window and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling revealed a room crowded with an aging tractor, shovels hung on pairs of nails, coils of hoses. That was the front room, maybe a third of the barn. We walked through an interior door into the main room. A few fluorescent fixtures, nothing like the banks of them in the first barn, threw a cold blue light. Another box heater kept it warm. Sharp chemical smells penetrated my face mask. I quelled the urge to hold my breath.

  “Make it quick. Still dust and vapors in here,” said a muffled male voice from another astronaut outfit.

  On the left was a kitchen—sink and stove, pale laminate counter top. Plastic litter overflowed a shiny galvanized garbage can. The counters looked like a classy high school chemistry lab. Tubing, an assortment of glass flasks and plastic bottles. Bunson burners, a digital scale that would be ideal for weighing baby birds, a box of Red Devil lye. A new fridge, nicer than mine. The perimeter was barricaded with red tape strung around the barn’s support posts. White figures worked inside the tape, photographing and fingerprinting and stuffing items into bags.

  I stopped gawking and pivoted to follow Denny. On the other side of the barn, a few heat lamps hung over a low plywood corral. Twenty or so tortoises of several shapes and sizes moved sluggishly over dusty straw bedding. Again, far more animals than anticipated and in equally primitive housing.

  Denny stood with his hands resting on the plywood barrier. I could see only his eyes, but he looked to be wearing the blank expression he put on when he encountered something marvelous and desirable. “A grab-bag of expensive torts. No sulcatas. Radiated. Pancake? Damn—is that a spider?” he muttered into his face mask. “What the hell is that one?”

  I gathered he was pawing through his mental catalog of tortoise species.

  He leaned over the wall and picked up one the size of a baseball. The tortoise waved its stumpy legs in the air, then cried out shrilly and peed a surprising little flood. I jumped.

  Denny put it back. “They urinate in self-defense, and they look dehydrated already.” He walked around inspecting the corral. “Water bowls are dry because they’re set under those cheap heat lamps, and the little ones couldn’t reach into them anyway. I’m seeing scraps of iceberg lettuce and that’s all, so crappy nutrition.” He waved an arm, encompassing the corral. “This is an amazing collection in lousy conditions. It makes no sense.”

  The implications clicked. “These aren’t pets,” I said. “This is a wildlife smuggling operation.”

  Chapter Two

  The drugs that led to this bust weren’t our business. The animals were. I fumed while Denny studied the tortoises. The parrots were terrified because they had no experience with people, at least not until they were trapped in a Mexican forest, jammed into containers of some sort, and smuggled into the US. A similar fate must have befallen the tortoises. This wasn’t a food market in China or a pet market in Bangkok or any of the other places that regularly hit the news with confiscated wildlife. These were smuggled animals in our very own Washington State. They were to be sold over the Internet and shipped to people who didn’t know or didn’t care that they were getting frightened, sick animals with poor prospects for survival.

  Staying in this barn wasn’t going to help the survival of anything. I could feel vile molecules soaking into my lungs and swimming up to my brain. “Let’s load these tortoises and get out of here before we’re all tweakers.”

  “You can’t just throw turtles in your van,” said the health department woman. “They’re contaminated with meth.”

  “We’ll rinse them,” I said.

  The man in the haz-mat suit nodded. “That should work. Clean the turtles and seal them off from the air circulating in your van so you won’t breathe in any dust.”

  Denny and I looked at each other. No way were we going to put animals in air-tight boxes.

  I swiveled to look at the kitchen area. “We’ll use that sink.”

  The woman shook her head. “Not today. The Narcotics team isn’t done with this area yet. Red tape means hot area.”

  Denny’s arms flew wide. “They need to be out of here. They get poisoned like anything else that breathes.”

  The haz-mat man said, “Nobody coordinated with us. The site should be cleared tomorrow. Time’s up.”

  We were ushered back outside, Denny sputtering. I stripped off the face mask and, for once, appreciated the cold damp air. I led him away from the woman guarding the barn. Our protective gear cut the wind and blocked the rain. “Denny, stop ranting. We’re not rolling over without a fight. I’m going to find out who rules this scene. Try not to piss anybody off.”

  Leading the way from barn to barn to house porch, I talked with several uniformed officers of the peace as well as Health Department staff and a woman from the Department of Ecology. We ended up on the porch away from the steady drip from leaking gutters, me and Denny, a Washington State patrol officer, a deputy from the narcotics team, and the Department of Ecology woman. I did my best to sound professional. It didn’t help that my jumpsuit had a lot in common with the fleece sleeper I zipped my two-year-old, Robby, into every night. Our position was simple: We needed to move the tortoises today because they were exposed to toxins.

  The replies were variations on “come back tomorrow, or maybe the next day.”

  Denny, mouth tight and grey eyes stormy, rocked on his heels and crossed and uncrossed his arms. For the most part, he kept quiet.

  A sheriff’s department car pulled up in the parking area, setting off the same big dogs that had barked when we arrived. A white pit bull crawled out from underneath the VW camper and joined the chorus. A man with a catch pole in his hand and “Animal Control” on his jacket emerged from a white truck and approached her. The hubbub interrupted the deputy who was employing a great many words to say “no” to me.

  Our group on the porch was further distracted by two deputy sheriffs escorting the photographer in the black jacket off the property. He limped a little, but managed to retain his dignity despite the hand of the law on each elbow. A man leaned against the TV station van and watched with a video camera on his shoulder.

  “The Tiptons are going to be famous,” I said.

  Denny erupted. “Do you want the media to hear you let these animals die?” he demanded of no one in particular. “You got the dog catcher here to look after a bunch of mutts, but you’re going to let endangered reptiles die because you can’t bother to fingerprint a kitchen counter?” The trooper scowled and Denny stopped, but the point was made.

  We were abandoned on the porch as the officials regrouped in the kitchen.

  The trooper emerged and said, “Go ahead and move the birds first, and we’ll see if we can clear the kitchen in the meth barn.” Denny left it to me to announce we couldn’t do the parrots today. We didn’t have enough carriers and the birds needed to settle down and eat. This was not a welcome message since it meant t
he electricity couldn’t be turned off in the marijuana barn. It was raining too hard for the barn to burn down, but my heart sank when I realized we had to come back a second day.

  More official consultation. Next offer: take the tortoises out of the meth barn as fast as possible. We could have half an hour.

  I took a deep breath. “You said we need to rinse them to remove toxic dust, and you’re right. We can’t rinse them outside in icy cold water. You won’t want us to bring them into the house and contaminate it. Is there a water heater in the marijuana barn?”

  A reluctant head-shake.

  “Then we have to rinse them at the kitchen in the meth barn.”

  We were ordered, rather than invited, to strip off the protective gear on the porch and drop anchor in the house, Command Central, and wait. The implication was that the technicians would hustle through their work at the meth lab, but no one promised anything.

  We’d barely settled ourselves on rickety wooden chairs around the kitchen table when a shattering scream erupted. Three men in various uniforms sitting in the dining room smirked when we jumped. The blast came again, raucous and piercing.

  Another animal health disaster? I followed my ears. In a back corner of the living room stood a seven-foot-high wire cage, about four feet by three feet, holding two huge macaws. The corner was dim, but their blue wings and gold bellies were vivid. These birds didn’t act frightened. They seemed aroused and irritated. Side by side, they shifted their feet on the single perch running across the middle of the cage and let out the occasional unnerving shriek. The upright cage was large for a living room, but not big enough for them to fully spread their wings, much less fly. Their food bowl still held a little seed mix and scraps of orange peel. Another bowl had an inch of water. The cage held no toys, mirrors, or other entertainment options. The concept of environmental enrichment hadn’t made it to the Tipton farm.

  One bird was bare-bellied, half naked from neurotic feather plucking. These looked like the pet birds I was expecting. When I reached in to top up the birds’ water and seed bowls, the less-plucked one side-stepped toward me and implied that he or she would bite me good with an enormous curving beak if I didn’t get my hand out of there pronto.

  I chatted with them, explaining that I was on their team in all this chaos. I promised a much better life in a much bigger space. The one closest to me seemed to listen with declining hostility. The other shrieked and clambered around the cage, maneuvering with beak and feet. I’d worked with smaller parrots, but these big macaws were new to me.

  It was almost noon. We fetched our lunches from the van and returned to waiting in the kitchen. I hand-fed my carrot sticks to the macaws, who each grasped one with a foot and nibbled on it, biting off chunks and letting most of it fall to the floor, wasteful feeders like other parrots. The friendlier one rewarded me by allowing a fingertip to scratch his emerald forehead through the bars.

  Each bird wore a closed band on one leg, near-proof they were hatched in captivity since that kind of band must be put on when the bird is only a few weeks old. Each also bore a blue band, probably from their breeder. The blue ones were “open” bands, C-shaped strips of aluminum that were closed around the leg with special pliers at any age. The blue bands were dented and scratched where the birds had chewed on them.

  I washed up and sat down to eat. My sandwich was soon gone, and no one came to tell us to move the tortoises. The sense of victory over officialdom oozed out, replaced by a suspicion that we’d been conned into docility. I half-expected a health officer to come back and say, “So sorry, didn’t work out, come back tomorrow.” Denny fidgeted and brought up treatments for reptile lung problems, biker gangs as meth customers, and the stupidity of shipping raw logs overseas instead of milling them in the US. I opted to ignore all of this.

  He got up and paced. “Every minute they breathe that crap is a minute closer to pneumonia.” He finally took himself outside. Through the kitchen window, I could see him juggling four apples. He was pretty good at it.

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to do that would pass the time. It didn’t help that the house was threadbare and sad. The vinyl kitchen floor was faded, the pattern worn off in front of the sink and stove. Linoleum counter tops in an old-fashioned pattern of speckles were also worn colorless. The walls and hand-made plywood cabinets wore the same dull beige paint. But it wasn’t dirty, not even the chipped enamel sink. The kitchen spoke of poverty, hard work, and limited lives.

  The cops in the dining room griped with each other about budget limitations on the gear they wanted and issues with leave time and holiday pay. It sounded remarkably similar to zoo keeper griping.

  All these agencies were focused on the drug bust. I had to wonder how much they cared about trafficking protected species. Would they go the extra mile to bust the criminals who wholesaled these animals to the Tiptons?

  Nobody paid any attention when I walked through the dining room and living room and found the bathroom. After I flushed, I took a peek into the vanity drawers. Knowing more about the Tiptons couldn’t hurt. The drawers revealed a big assortment of over-the-counter stomach remedies on the left side, kelp pills and primrose oil on the right side. Herbal remedies such as “women’s rejuvenation” and “whole-body tonic” in the medicine cabinet. Some of the Tiptons hadn’t been feeling well. An opened box of tampons below the sink. No makeup. A can of Bag Balm. Cheap toilet paper. The mirror showed mud on my chin, cause unknown.

  The hallway to the three bedrooms was lined with posters and framed prints of the US flag, the Declaration of Independence, and political slogans, among them “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants.” Another: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” The doors were open and I peeked into each bedroom. No animals. One room held two twin beds, the other a double bed. Both were messy—clothes on the floor, beds unmade. The third room was tidy, with one twin bed and an old dresser. A picture of Paul Revere on a galloping horse was taped to the wall.

  The living room was faded, but also surprisingly clean, given all the mud outside. No file cabinet. Disconnected gray cords dangled from a small desk in a corner—the Tiptons had a computer, nowhere to be seen. I yearned to get my hands on it and explore their email for information on animal suppliers and collectors. No family pictures in the living room or dining room or on the fridge.

  The three men in the dining room were drinking coffee and sharing a bag of tortilla chips. Either they were on break or they had soaked up their quota of rain for the day. The crew-cut Clark County deputy sheriff texted on his cell phone. An older Washington State Patrol officer thumbed through a gun catalog. The third was an electrician who had objected when we said we couldn’t move the birds today and therefore he couldn’t shut off the electricity—the parrots needed the heater. I scanned the living room one more time and walked back through the dining room toward the kitchen.

  “Patriotism and crime, quite the combo, eh?” Boredom had overcome any grudge the electrician held for the inconvenience we’d caused. He was over-fed, straining the buttons on a standard blue work shirt. He leaned his chair back to a dangerous angle.

  “Part of some extremist group?” I asked.

  “Can’t say. It looks to me like a homemade mix of Bible-thumping and survivalism. The back porch is stacked with boxes of canned food. I saw a metal box full of seed packets, from one of those apocalypse outfits.” He put the chair and his life in jeopardy by rocking back and forth. “You’ve got your anti-government super-patriot thing going. Lived way out here so they didn’t have to deal with the real world. But that’s only my opinion. Not like I’ve worked a lot of crime scenes.” He seemed to savor the words “crime scenes.”

  Had he been here for the bust? More likely he was good at eavesdropping. The cops looked as if they were about to tell him to put a sock in it, but they didn’t. Mr. Hefty set his
chair down with a thump. “They didn’t hold with doctors, either. That wife could hardly walk. They’ve got her in the hospital.”

  “Where did they get the parrots and tortoises?” I asked. “They don’t know anything about how to take care of them.”

  Three sets of shrugs.

  “Have you found any international connections? Do you know yet who wholesaled the animals to the Tiptons?”

  Three puzzled head shakes.

  The electrician said, “Now I understand, and I could be wrong, that meth labs are kinda rare these days, what with the controls on cough medicine.”

  “Controls” seemed to be another tasty word and this topic was more interesting to his companions. The state patrol officer said, “Harder to get big quantities of pseudoephedrine now. They could have found another source—another state or Mexico—and brought it here to process. Lord knows the demand is still in place.”

  The deputy sheriff stood up, stretched, and left. I caught his name tag as he passed. Gil Gettler. The state patrol officer walked toward the bedrooms and made a phone call in a quiet voice.

  So much for my pitch about wildlife crimes.

  I wandered back to the living room and pulled out a drawer in the computer desk. It held only pens, pencils, and rubber bands. “Don’t touch that,” said the patrol officer, phone still in hand. “Why don’t you stay in the kitchen, please.”

  What were the hazmat people doing? I could have stuffed the entire lab into garbage bags six times over in the time we’d waited. Clocking out by four o’clock was a lost cause, and being late to pick up Robby at day care was a strong possibility. I settled disconsolately into a kitchen chair. Denny came back inside, shook water off his head, and began a monologue about tortoise nutrition with analyses of fresh greens and hay.

  The Animal Control guy arrived and saved me. He sat down in one of the two empty kitchen chairs with a sigh and poured coffee out of a steel thermos.