Stuffed

by Brian M. Wiprud

  I blinked and my eyes stung with sweat, either mine or Ballet Boy’s. How could this have happened? How? I sell taxidermy. I’m not a gangster. I had definite plans to die in my sleep, preferably while taking an afternoon nap after a nice lunch, maybe some wine. Getting shot in a meat-processing plant was way, way off target.

  My eyes refocused—a foot slid around the corner. Rats! My reverie and outrage had wasted a few precious moments of mental preparation. Something felt funny about my neck, and I realized it was the short hairs standing straight up. My entire body was tingling in dread and anticipation.

  My hand tightened around the barrel of the gun. I lifted it, like a tomahawk at the ready.

  Now. Now, Garth. NOW!

  I missed my intended target—his head—but the gun slammed the side of his neck like a solid karate chop.

  Pete Durban went down next to Ballet Boy without so much as a pirouette.

  A flood of agents and their radio squawks suddenly filled the hallway. One of the agents shot me a disgusted look and took my gun as paramedics crowded in.

  Back toward the door. Into the night. Fresh air. Noggin filling with tiny bubbles. Vision swimming. I staggered, sat on a car hood. Flashing lights swirled and swirled. Tiny bubbles fizzing. Don Ho. Hula girls. Singing “Tiny Bubbles.” I closed my eyes.

  After you go through something like that, through an incredibly intense, adrenaline-charged experience, what follows is the exact opposite. Your brain shifts to neutral and you coast, you float. Or in my case, you get Don Ho, who began singing “Pearly Shells.”

  “Oh my gosh! Garth!”

  I opened my eyes, looked at Angie, and said, “Aloha and mahalo.”

  Next thing I knew I was flat on my back in an ambulance, muttering, “Take me Coconut Grove—it’s opening night,” all the way to the hospital.

  Turns out a rival gang—actually named Fu-King—had followed Smiler to the meat plant and tried to ambush him when he left. Pete and U.S. Fish and Wildlife had no choice but to jump into the fray as all hell broke loose. And wouldn’t you know? The armored surveillance van was riddled with bullet dents. So nice to know Angie was out of harm’s way.

  The authorities rounded up Smiler’s crew, found a stash of pelts and some bear bladders. But the operation was well compartmentalized, and it was widely believed that they only got a fraction of Smiler’s hoard. I got my money back and a USFW travel mug for my trouble.

  One other thing they didn’t get: Smiler. He made it to the Hudson and dove in. Police boats searched for hours, but they never found him. Or his body. Just his oversize glasses and one of his Brioni shoes.

  Danger? Been there.

  Aloha.

  Chapter 9

  Me, paranoid? How about preemptively cautious?

  With Angie snug in Cabin #9, I crept to the Lincoln’s trunk, grabbed a tire iron, the jack, some twine, and one of the grizzly rugs that had been recovered from the bridge safety nets. Crafty as the Grinch, I had a diabolical plan to make Bret go boo-hoo.

  Inside Cabin #1, I pulled the flimsy mattress off the bed and used the sheets to tie it around the bedpost, over which I draped the grizzly rug. The looming beast I’d built was tall, hunched, ferocious, and ready to pounce on any intruder. I looped the twine around the ceiling-lamp fixture, suspended the jack about chest and face level, then tied the twine to the curtain rod opposite the door with a slipknot. The loose end of the twine I ran under the bed, around a dresser leg, and across the doorway at shin height. If an intruder pushed the door all the way open, or stepped into the room, he’d pull the slipknot loose. While he stared at the towering grizzly, the jack would swing out of the corner and smack him in the chest or head. Wile E. Coyote, eat your heart out. I only hoped it turned out better than most of Mr. Coyote’s snares.

  The trap set, I slipped into the cold May night, planted myself in the shadow of the tavern, and held vigil over Cabin #1 with the tire iron in my grip. In the hour that followed, I heard the barmaid eject the last patrons and throw the lock on the front door. The kitchen phone rang, and she had a long chat while doing the dishes. Then she went into the back room and asked her cat—or perhaps a dog—if “my weedle fat boy wanna have a yummy.” (If it was a husband, God bless.) She and her pet then settled down to watch the Late Nite Show, recognizable by the brassy, hyperbolic theme music and protracted adulation of the audience. Aunt Jilly never left the green room, taking a backseat to Stupid Bird Tricks and the latest teen idol. Thin walls. Hey, I don’t care if A.J. makes the boob tube, just as long as the check clears.

  Here we go again, I thought as I huddled next to the heating-oil tank. I’d let my curiosity—and no little amount of Angie’s, thank you very much—get us involved in something sinister. Unlike the gallbladders, I did recognize the white crow for what it was when it wasn’t recovered from the bridge nets. I knew that it was probably missing for a reason. Knew may be too strong a word. Felt may be more like it. But how often do you feel something and it turns out to be wrong? Besides, like most people, I don’t just feel one way about things. In my case, there was a cootie of vengeance needling me, a seam squirrel of malevolence in my shorts, vendetta’s weevil burrowing under my skin. People throwing yours truly down the basement stairs and smacking Angie rub me the wrong way. To tell you the truth, I was expecting to come up to Bermuda, not find out much, and put all this behind me. But reprisal’s lice and I were hoping we would find the culprits.

  In the shadow of the motel, I started getting itchy just thinking about the vengeance prickling my brain. Go figure.

  Groans chorused from a row of spruce behind the cabins as the wind gusted and bent the huge trees. Shards of light from the streetlight danced through the trees across the green cabin roofs and white siding. I saw Angie’s reading light switch off, and before long everybody was asleep. Except me.

  The wind swirled some leaves around the parking lot for a while, then got bored. Around 2:00 A.M., I was less itchy than cold and coming to the conclusion that I was a complete lunatic. Nothing was going to happen, no Road Runner was going to slam into my trap. A trap? What the heck is wrong with me, anyway? My imagination took flight and my senses with it.

  What a chucklehead. Now I’d have to get up early in the morning to dismantle the whole thing. I’d rather have sung “I’m a Little Teapot” in a biker bar than have Angie get a load of this idiocy.

  I dusted the leaves off my pants and trod the shadows back to where Angie was fast asleep.

  There must be something wrong with me. First, an excellent job offer has me in a panic, and now this. I seriously wondered if some professional help wasn’t in order. Most people don’t do these things. They get a great job offer, they smile, and they take it. So why was I different? Why was I building booby traps and shivering in the shadows of an oil tank? Was it a chemical imbalance? Had I clicked over 100,000 miles and needed Miracle Lube in my crankcase, a healthy dose of Prozac and Viagra to unstick the valves in my brain?

  I went straight to the bathroom, gloomily brushing my teeth in the dark. The cabin was chilly and so was I. The clothes would stay on until I made my dive for the covers.

  I had just spit and was tapping the water from my toothbrush when I heard a car whir slowly down the road. I listened. The car started to pass by.

  Then it slowed.

  Then it killed its engine.

  I dropped my toothbrush. Sure as shinola sounded like the whir of Bret’s old Honda.

  Tiptoeing past the bed, I stuck a finger in the blinds. All I could hear was Angie sawing balsa. Outside I saw nothing. At first.

  Then a shadow crossed the streetlamp’s glare.

  I felt around on the chair where Angie’s clothes were for the tire iron, which fell with a clunk to the floor. I froze, and Angie rolled over with a slight groan, her golden hair fanned out across her pillow, a sleepy smile on her lips. She gave a protracted sigh, and I knew she was still out.

  This could be anything, Garth. Somebody with car trouble. A bread de
livery. A garbage pickup. A traveler stopping to look at a map, check the oil, take a whiz. This could be anything.

  I was itchy again as I eased the front door open. Moving lightly off the porch, I slipped around to the back of our hut.

  It didn’t seem cold out anymore even though it was. I stared toward the streetlight and the long shadows it cast across the lawn and driveway. My ears were sonar, as though the pinging in my brain might help me hear danger’s approach.

  A shadow flicked the edge of the light and my heart skipped a beat. My hands began to sweat, and I caught my breath as I saw someone skirting the shadows in the direction of Cabin #1.

  I was actually trembling with excitement. By golly, I had to admit to myself that it was fun lurking in the shadows and trying to catch this guy in my trap, and I felt very clever indeed. Like I’d invented that Milton Bradley brainchild Mouse Trap. Player opens door (A), which pulls string (B), causing slipknot (C) to release jack (D). Jack swings into unsuspecting intruder (E), intruder flies back through door (F) onto porch (G) into an unconscious state (H).

  Although my mouse was in dark clothing and wore his ski mask, I could tell by the assassin’s lumbering gate that it was Bret Fletcher. It was the same way he’d come at me across the square in Bermuda the first time I saw him, splay-footed, chest out, arms back. I guess Slim and Scotty held Bret accountable for my involvement, seeing as how he’d lost the crow, and now had sent him to do the dirty deed. I didn’t doubt they were somewhere nearby.

  Bret didn’t appear to have a gun. But you never know. How come I don’t have a gun? I have a lousy tire iron. Other people always have the guns when this crap goes down. First thing tomorrow, I’m getting me a friggin big-ass Dirty Harry gun.

  Then I remembered the smell of the hand grenade, Compadre’s blood spraying my face, hiding in the meat-packing plant hallway, listening to Pete Durban’s footsteps.

  I realized I’d zoned out for a second, just like in the meat-packing plant, and my jaw seized with panic. I’d lost track of Bret. I rubbed my face, blinked away the cobwebs.

  Checking my perimeter, I felt I’d better move to a spot where I could see beyond Cabin #8. I darted along the rear of the cabins until I was flat against the back of Cabin #2.

  I jockeyed an eye around the corner of Cabin #2, and Cabin #1’s porch came into view.

  Like a strobe light, muzzle flash projected the grizzly’s silhouette on Cabin #1’s window shade. Echoing gun blast masked the sound of glass raining from the window. But it didn’t block out the clank of the bumper jack against Bret’s head.

  Like a cowpoke ejected from a saloon, Bret crashed backward through the cabin’s screen door, pistol held loosely in one hand while the other groped for stability. He flipped over the porch rail, another shot cracking flame off into the sky as he crashed into a yew bush. Bret pawed at his face, cursed, and staggered to his feet.

  Lights popped on in the tavern’s back room, and Bret stumbled a few indecisive steps toward the road. Flood lamps flared in the yard and there was Bret plain as noon, ski mask dangling in one hand, the gun in the other. Blood smeared his face like the winner of a pie-eating contest. Cherry pie.

  He wheeled and galloped gridiron-style across the lawn toward the road.

  And for whatever reason, I bolted out after him, itchy as all hell.

  I’m no cornerback, but I almost did catch him, just before the goal line. Perhaps the tom-toms from his heart, the indoor gun blast, or the clank to his head deafened him to my approach. And to the approach of the pickup truck.

  Perspicuous to a fault, I yelled some concise warning like “Hey!” or maybe “Whoa!”

  If Bret heard me, it may have only made him run harder, which in itself might have helped. If he’d been faster. Or if he hadn’t stopped right in front of the truck.

  The truck pegged him right to the macadam. You’d have thought Frat Boy would have flown into the air, or off to the side. But one second he was upright, the next he was flat. And I mean flat.

  Flecks of streetlight and shadow from the trees sliced through the truck’s windows. From the fractured imagery in the driver’s side I was sure I saw the profile of Slim’s hat. But from the passenger side, as it passed not three feet in front of me . . . I don’t even dare say what it looked like. But I saw something, a shape that didn’t make any sense.

  I didn’t hear the truck hit Bret, maybe because I was making some unintelligible exclamation like “Guh!” at the time. But a millisecond after it, there was just the sound of the truck trailing off down the road, steam hissing from its radiator, bent metal and valves rattling as if nothing had happened. I looked at Bret and noticed first that his shoes were missing, socks hanging from his toes.

  Gloved hands were twisted into the air, fingers tightly twitching like he was working an invisible piccolo.

  More likely a harp. Needless to say, Bret was extremely dead.

  Chapter 10

  Would it surprise you to learn that I spent that night, or shall I say morning and the next day, in jail? Well, I have to admit that if I were the cops, I would have been pretty leery of letting me slip away. I looked Constable Bill straight in the eye and told the whole story of the white crow, but as I got to the part of how I came to build that bear n’ bedpost booby trap, the way he scratched his big head of white hair seemed to signal that he’d heard better fish stories.

  Of course, I now see how my actions that night could be construed as reckless endangerment, or even manslaughter, what with me effectively hitting Bret in the face with a jack and chasing him into traffic. In my favor was the gun, which with any luck would have Bret’s fingerprints on it, as opposed to mine. Then again, nobody actually saw Bret shoot the bear rug, not even me, which might not necessarily be viewed as intent to shoot me. For all the cops knew, I tried to apprehend him, shot, missed, and chased him into a fatal collision.

  And I could now see how it sounded improbable that I might have chased an armed man with a tire iron, and that he suddenly stopped in front of an oncoming car. My case was further weakened by the bar owner, who sided with the roadkill rather than the stranger. She told Constable Bill that she knew I was trouble when I rented the second cabin. Great.

  On top of all that, Angie, bless her heart, was furious with me for not clueing her in to my cunning trap. She also kindly pointed out that if I hadn’t insisted on being so clever and brought her in on what was going down, I might have had a corroborating witness to the fracas with Bret.

  Yeah, and I seem to remember thinking I was very clever when setting the trap. Sitting at the cigarette-scarred institutional-blue table in the Brattleboro courthouse basement, I felt like a dunce. But mostly I was still stunned by what I had witnessed. Bret smashed into the pavement, his fingers still wiggling . . . It was the first time I’d seen anybody killed. Or seen anybody dead, outside of a funeral home. I don’t count Compadre—it was dark and I didn’t really see him die. And Ballet Boy survived being a toboggan, though life in a wheelchair meant no more Nutcracker.

  “If you thought you were in danger, why didn’t you call the police?” the State DA said, twirling his glasses by one ear rest. I looked up at my public defender, Phil, who shrugged at me. He took the pencil from his mouth.

  “My client was merely suspicious. He couldn’t be positive of the assailant’s potential. C’mon, Danny, Mr. Carson set up a grizzly bear in his room to lure this guy in there so he could murder him? That doesn’t make sense.”

  Danny DA stood up and began waving his glasses.

  “I’m just trying to establish what led him to believe Bret Fletcher meant to harm him. That’s all, Phil. I mean, somehow he says he knew Fletcher was going to come and try to kill him. From what he said to Constable Bill . . .” Danny DA fished around some papers and came up with one that made him smile. “He said, ‘I saw him see me in the tavern. He was there with this cowboy and a Scotsman. After I left the bar I watched the cowboy and Scotsman leave, and they gave Bret a knowing look kinda thin
g.’”

  Phil the defender looked at me and shrugged—like he had fathered the village idiot—and put his splintered pencil behind an ear.

  “My client had a hunch, Danny. What was Carson supposed to tell the police if he did call them? He was just being cautious—Constable Bill even said Bret took a swing at Carson outside Gunderson’s a couple weeks back, so Carson had good reason to think Bret might want to harm him. Don’t forget, Bret’s car was there, on the side of the road. And he had a ski mask in his possession.”

  “Doesn’t mean he was sneaking in with a gun. It was cold, so he wore a hat. You know how many kids wear hats just like that down at the mall? Carson and Fletcher could have had a meeting, been discussing a deal, and it went sour.”

  Defender Phil gestured at me hopelessly.

  “A deal? A meeting? The barmaid said they didn’t talk in the bar. My client didn’t flee the scene or ditch the gun. Carson’s got no record and was not in the possession of any illegal goods. Your case is a load of crap, Danny, and you’re gonna have to substantiate some of this to make the judge buy into it.”

  Danny smiled sardonically, pointing to the police report in his hand. “Flipper?”

  I felt my face warm, and I resisted looking at Phil, who stammered.

  “It says here,” Danny chimed, eyebrows wiggling with delight, “that: Carson reported that he could not see the occupants of the truck except that the driver had a hat similar to the one worn by the man in the bar with Bret. In the passenger side, Carson reports he saw . . . a flipper. Really? What kind of flipper? Like a dolphin?”

  “Okay, Danny.” Phil stood. He was blushing too. “You’ve had your little joke.”

  “A joke, Phil? Not at all. Please, Mr. Carson, tell us, what kind of flipper was it?”

  I expected Phil to jump in, but when I raised my eyes from the floor, I found them both looking at me expectantly.