Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  She didn’t know if burglars generally did their business armed, but it seemed foolish to wait inside. Better to go straight out the front door and sprint over to Rita’s place. She had a key to Rita’s front door on her own key ring; she could lock herself over there and call the police on Rita’s phone.

  When she stepped back into the living room, now partly lit up by the overhead kitchen lamp, she saw that a vase had been knocked off her little end table. It was unbroken, but the water had spilled and a few of the gladiolas looked mashed. The end table’s single drawer had been pulled open.

  What she saw near the front window gave her a good long gaping pause. An empty plastic crate as large as her kitchen table rested on its side, and nearby lay what must have been the lid.

  The only thing that made sense to her was that someone planned to stuff the crate with loot. But Amy didn’t think she had enough of value to fill it even halfway.

  She took another step toward the front door, heard a noise from the kitchen, and froze. She heard it again: a light thump against the back door. Then someone was pushing the door against the tilted chair, but without much force, as though testing it.

  The next thump was harder. The guy was going to crash through any second now, and if he pursued her, she probably wouldn’t have time to make it to Rita’s place.

  Instead of heading outside, Amy charged into the kitchen and retrieved Andre’s Lahti L-35 – she finally remembered the latte burner’s real name, as if it mattered now – from the top of the fridge. She switched off the safety, crouched and aimed at the door.

  “I’m armed,” she shouted. “And the police will be here in about thirty seconds.”

  If someone came crashing through the back door, she would shout for him to stop, and then shoot if he didn’t. She’d never shot at a person before. She’d fired tranquilizer darts at a few foxes and ocelots and other Great Plains fauna, after Andre had insisted on tagging along with the wildlife researchers whose work they’d helped fund. Other than that, no living targets.

  Nor did she have to shoot at any now. No one came bursting through. No more thumps.

  There was no possibility of going outside anymore. She had to get to the phone in her bedroom. She kept hold of the gun and walked softly down the hall. The bathroom was on the right, the bedroom three paces further, at the end of the hall, its door a few inches ajar.

  The bathroom was wide open. Holding the gun one-handed for a moment, she flicked the light on. No one there. She stepped back into the hall, both hands back on the weapon.

  Just outside the bedroom she crouched, pushed the door open, and shouted, “Police! On the floor now!”

  No sound came from within. She stood and turned on the light. Nobody there. She switched on the safety, put the gun in a pants pocket, and picked up the phone by her bed.

  The 911 dispatcher told her to stay inside until someone came. Because of the winding roads in her section of the foothills, it might take up to twenty minutes.

  She deep-breathed herself into a less alarmed state, then headed back into the bathroom, now that she was relaxed enough to use it. As she finished up, a light breeze rustled the pink plastic curtains on the window over the bathtub.

  Amy knew she had closed those Dutch windows this morning, because she remembered a squirrel seeing her, fleeing, and briefly getting stuck in the thicket of wisteria.

  She pulled one curtain aside and saw that one of the windows, which opened inward like doors, had been pulled off of its lower hinge and unlatched where it met its twin. It hung at an odd angle. The vines looked like they’d been pulled apart. Someone could easily have gotten into the house this way.

  Or could have gotten out this way. Maybe the person who kicked in the back door had been in the bathroom when Amy got home, had heard her unlocking the front door, and had frantically scrambled out through those vines.

  She reached over to try and latch the broken window closed, but immediately a loud scuffling came from just outside.

  She let the curtain fall back in place and took a step backward, intending to run, but then stopped. If an intruder had come back, it would probably be best to confront him while he was pushing his way through that window instead of waiting for him to be on his feet.

  The gun was back in her hand, the safety off.

  The next sound she heard made her wonder if she’d simply lost her mind somewhere in the whirlwind of travel and near calamity that had marked these last weeks. It was the gentle whimpering of a young chimpanzee.

  Possibilities flooded her mind. Had someone broken in and left a chimp for her as a present? Crazy.

  Had some anti-environmentalist crippled a chimp and given it to her as a threat? Not impossible, but it seemed like an extraordinary effort for whatever payoff it might deliver. Why not just send a couple of guys to kill her?

  The rustling continued, and the curtains fluttered.

  Then they parted as the head of a juvenile chimpanzee pushed through them.

  The animal seemed to be struggling, apparently still hobbled by the dense vines. Its eyes were squeezed shut.

  Amy didn’t know whether to help the animal in through the vines or go out back and try to coax it down into her arms.

  Those thoughts were cut short by the sound of footsteps and hushed male voices, one of them chuckling. The chimp also started at the noise, and pulled its head back outside. The curtains fell closed again.

  The voices seemed to be coming from the walkway between her house and the neighbor’s fence, footsteps coming around to the back yard.

  Thinking at first that the police had arrived, she nearly called out to them, but stopped herself, wondering why they would go to the back door. Why wouldn’t they announce themselves? And why hadn’t she heard the deep, urgent rush of a big V-six engine a moment before?

  She ran back to the living room and looked out the front window. No patrol car.

  Back in the kitchen she peered through a window that faced the walkway, and saw two men just disappearing around back. One had a rifle, and both wore uniforms, but not the light gray of the L.A. County sheriffs.

  A cop had once told her that burglars tended to be small, good at getting through the tiniest of openings. One of these guys fit that description, but the other looked like a defensive lineman.

  She grabbed her car keys from the kitchen counter and headed straight for the front door, planning to run for her car and get out of the neighborhood.

  Just as she reached for the door handle, a crash came from behind her and she knew the back door had just been kicked in again. She pulled the front door open and took one stride outside, but a cry of surprise made her turn her head.

  “Oh fuck!” came the next cry. “Get it off, man. Get it the fuck off me!”

  Amy saw the big man stumble forward into her kitchen, struggling. At first it looked as though the little chimpanzee was on the man’s back, its face buried in the side of his neck. But this animal had a long tail dangling down, so it was something else. Were there two animals?

  And then all her thoughts were suddenly scrambled. A scent she could not precisely identify surrounded her now. It was a strangely comforting smell, like someplace she’d lived with Andre years earlier. It was so overpoweringly pleasant that she felt a momentary, insane impulse to go toward the men and the animal, rather than away from them. It was like breathing in an ocean breeze, full of jasmine or gardenias. She could even smell the bed sheets, and Andre there with her.

  The intruders were still shouting and Amy still hadn’t run for her car. She saw the big guy stumble out the back door and dive to the ground, trying to shake the animal off. The smaller man’s face was obscured by the rifle he was aiming at the animal, having a hell of a time because the other guy was moving around so much.

  In the distance she heard a police loudspeaker give off the strident, electronic burp that means Clear the way! She looked down the street, but the patrol car wasn’t in sight yet.

  When she turned ba
ck, the short man with the rifle had disappeared.

  A second later she saw him sprinting out of her driveway and across the road, now with a black hood pulled over his head, rifle barrel clutched in one hand. He turned left, away from her, and disappeared behind the line of parked cars on the far side of the street.

  The patrol car appeared coming from her right, slowing down as it neared her address, the spotlight sweeping the house fronts. Amy pocketed her gun again and ran to meet the car, then pointed in the direction the man had gone. “The burglar’s running,” she shouted. “That way.”

  The deputy at the wheel floored it, and probably didn’t hear her add, “He’s got a gun!” The flashing lights came. The loudspeaker barked an order for the runner to stop. Although he was no longer visible on the road. The patrol car slowed down and the spotlight swept across the front yards.

  Ten seconds later, an engine started. An SUV that the patrol car had already passed pulled into the road. It sped straight toward Amy, forcing her to dash out of the way, then roared around the corner before the deputies could turn the patrol car around on the narrow street. Amy tried to flag them down, tell them there was another guy in her back yard, but they were going way too fast for that.

  She turned and looked back at her home. The front door was open and she could see right through to the back. She could see movement and, with the cars gone, she could hear the big intruder’s voice again, but he wasn’t screaming anymore.

  He was…singing?

  Nothing she recognized, but he was definitely crooning some kind of melody.

  Then she saw him stumbling around with the animal on his back, not at all alarmed, just like he was carrying a kid on his shoulder. He was going away from her house, further back toward the hills.

  The back yard was so overgrown that Amy could barely see the waist-high fence that separated her lot from the county-owned land beyond. She went through the house to the kitchen and turned on her backyard floodlights just in time to see the hulking man tumble over the fence with the animal still on his back. Then he was out of sight.

  She went out front again, crossed the street and sat on the ground between two parked cars, watching her front door, her driveway, and the road. The patrol car didn’t return for fifteen minutes or more. When it did, she tossed her gun under one of the parked cars, hailed the deputies, and led them to the back yard. They cautiously moved toward the spot where the man had gone over the fence.

  She didn’t see any point in telling them about the not-quite-chimpanzee she’d seen the burglar struggling with, but did say she’d heard one man screaming and telling the other to get something off of him.

  After ten minutes of searching the hillside with their guns drawn, the deputies radioed for another car, and soon there were four men combing the area for a potentially armed burglar and possibly a dangerous animal.

  Half an hour later, one of the deputies came in Amy’s back door and asked her to come up on the hillside and say whether she thought the dead man they’d just found was the intruder.

  It was. All his visible flesh had been badly scratched, and the deputies told Amy that her life might have just been saved by a wild animal.

  The men were gagging from what they said was an awful stench, but Amy didn’t smell a thing except the greenery of the hillside, and she couldn’t remember it ever smelling more beautiful.

  They pointed out the same stench just outside her back door. Amy said she had no idea why it smelled, but the cops filled in the blanks, saying that maybe the cougar, or whatever had gotten the guy, had pissed or sprayed right in her door.

  “Could happen,” she agreed, happy to leave it at that.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Marcel was in the Land Rover that had once been Amy’s, headed home to the outskirts of Prospérité, to the brick house he’d persuaded Sanderson to rent for him back when the boss was at his most malleable. He was wondering whether he should just get the hell out of the country for good.

  Sanderson had paid Marcel and the guards the promised price per head for the animals they had so far delivered to the rail yard. Three deliveries, twenty-five animals, and Marcel now possessed seventy thousand euro in the bank. A month earlier that sum would have been an impossible dream.

  There would be more to come, maybe twice as much as he already had, but caution was nagging at him, insisting that he should take what he had and head back to Niger. Seventy thousand would carry him for a long, long time, in admirable style. He could buy land, hire workers, start a farm or even a store.

  The old man had already left the country, urging Marcel to do the same. His reasoning had been hard to dispute: If Marcel disappeared, the guards could split Sanderson’s price per animal two ways instead of three. They would be able to handle the rest of the deliveries by themselves. So what motivation did they have for not killing him?

  The more Marcel thought about it, the more he became convinced that the guards would make their move soon, and he’d been looking over his shoulder all the time lately. But when he made the second-to-last turn before reaching his house, he did not see the tall figure slip behind a parked truck.

  Marcel parked on the street and started straightening up the back seat, thinking that very soon he would need to load all his possessions into the Land Rover and head for the border.

  Behind him, there was the unmistakable sound of a shoe scuffing on dry ground.

  The tall guard was ten feet away when Marcel turned around and saw the long blade in his hand.

  He wondered whether he could make it to the front door of the house, open it and lock it behind him faster that the guard could catch him.

  Not a chance. He looked at the junk he’d just pulled out of the back seat, picked up an empty plastic crate and threw it at Tall Guard’s face to slow him down. It bounced harmlessly off his shoulder. Marcel simultaneously kicked a pile of clothes at his attacker’s feet, hoping to trip him while he was distracted dodging the crate.

  And it worked, or so it seemed at first. Tall Guard suddenly sank to his knees. But then Marcel realized that the wad of clothing had fallen about a meter short, and had not entangled the big man’s ankles at all.

  Still, there he was, collapsing. He had dropped the machete and was reaching out to Marcel as though trying to steady himself rather than grasp at his prey. His face was pulled into a tight, puzzled frown.

  Then Marcel felt arms grasping his own from behind, locking them strongly, and realized he’d never had a chance, the guard had not come alone. Handcuffs closed on his wrists and a cloth sack came down over his head.

  Three sets of hands held him, and he was pushed into the back seat of his own Land Rover. As he lay on his stomach, someone heavy knelt on him while smaller hands searched his pockets.

  Two of his captors spoke for the first time. Neither voice belonged to the guard who had dropped so mysteriously. One sounded familiar, though he could not remember yet where he’d heard it before. The French was a far more educated variety than Marcel’s. The speaker insisted on the need to hurry. Another voice said, “Alright. Let me check the other side.” Some more digging in his pockets, then, “Here they are.” Marcel heard his keys jingle, and a moment later the engine started.

  “Let’s get the other one into the very back.” The familiar voice again. “He’s out already. Must have gone straight into an artery.”

  “What if he wakes up?”

  “It’ll take at least two hours.”

  “What then? We just dump him somewhere?”

  “Have you got a better idea?”

  Marcel listened to several more minutes of grunting, heaving, thumping, and cursing before he heard the rear gate of the Land Rover close.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stephen Stokes had made a nightly ritual of brewing espresso, spreading his notes across the kitchen table, and closing the cats up in his bedroom – just in case his prolonged lack of attention to them should inspire the young tabby to lead the other two in an airborne
assault on the table.

  He discovered that the contents of the bundle were indexed, although Mario’s packing job had thoroughly mixed up their order. The index was in two parts, definitely written by different people at very different times. One listed medieval material, the other the colonial pieces. Both sets had been kept together in an archive, and that archive had been stolen and brought to the New World, eventually to be buried below the floor of a mission in Baja and ultimately forgotten.

  Each index listed the documents simply by assigned number and category: 23, correspondence; 24, illustration; 25, correspondence; 26, record of sale; 27, kennel maintenance log; 28, correspondence…and so on. Each document or drawing had a number written on its otherwise blank reverse, in the same hand that had written the index.

  Tonight, Stephen finally finished translating a letter apparently written by the same person who had penned the medieval index. The handwriting looked identical, and it was on the same size and type of parchment.

  Written in Latin, the letter was addressed to one bishop and signed by another, but the names themselves had been carefully obscured with dark loops of ink. This had once been a favored and very effective means of redacting documents. Laser micro-spectroscopy might reveal what lay beneath those heavy swirls, but Stephen, working alone in his apartment, didn’t stand a chance.

  The date was not redacted. The letter had been written in the early 1500s, so the index must also have been, although most of the material it catalogued was from much earlier periods.

  Parts of the document had suffered water damage, and the ink had spread and blurred. Stephen often had to make several guesses at certain word based on their context. Where entire lines were badly smeared, even a reasonable guess was impossible.

  The letter was a progress report made during the author’s visit to a remote region outside of Italy. The region was not identified, at least not in those sections still legible. There were only a few vague clues, such as a reference to the area’s mountainous terrain. The thrust of the report was that it had been extraordinarily difficult to convince the local elites to destroy the beasts in question and to relinquish all the records they had kept of the animals that their families had owned for generations.