T. Parker - The Triggerman Dance

"I've captured you," she says. "You're my trophy."

"Are you going to mount my head on your wall?"

"I like you better breathing. How could I throw away all those other good parts? Like you hands and your back and your arms?"

"Well, you could do a full-body job. Stand me up in the corner like a polar bear."

"Ugh. Have you see Dad's trophy room?"

"No."

"It's his sanctuary. His ultimate place. With all of the paintings and sculpture everywhere, all the valuables littered around this place, the trophy room is still the only one he locks. He says it's because of the humidifier and air conditioning, but I know it's just because he loves the place so much. His place. Nobody else's. His little chapel full of animals. Over a hundred of them. Most of them are real trophies, too-Boone amp; Crockett, Safari International-true record-book stuff."

"He gave me a house tour, but didn't mention it."

"It's in the basement, actually."

"Your father is a remarkable man."

Valerie sips her wine. "He truly is. He went a little crazy when Patrick died and mom got wounded. I can't blame him. I do feel sorry for him."

"Crazy?"

"Inward. Secretive. Half-there. I mean, he was always secretive about his work-you knew he was FBI for almost thirty years, didn't you? But after Pat and Mom, well… he got even more vague. He'd sit for hours with a Scotch in his hand and stare out a window. Wouldn't talk. Wouldn't move. Wouldn't even drink. You know something's wrong with Dad when he won't drink. I'd sit down with him and we'd go hours without talking much. It was like sitting with Mom. Pat was killed by that bullet, and Mom was paralyzed by it, but part of it got into Dad, too. Maybe into me, also-I mean, it changed the way I look at things."

"How?"

"It made me love more, and hate more. It made me old. It got into my dreams. It took away two things that were a big part of me, and nothing good can take their place. You have this hole inside, and you've got to protect it, keep the bad things out. I don't know-it's hard to explain."

"I think I understand."

He can feel her looking at him. She drinks more wine. "Yes, you do. When I saw the way you looked at Rusty, I knew you would understand. And when I was sitting across from you at dinner, I knew you'd understand. You're old, too."

"A lot older than you."

"Not years old. Life old. Miles old."

John looks at her bedstand clock: 3:53 a.m. "It's late."

"Who are you?"

He smiles a smile of falsehood. "John."

"Besides that."

"What I told you."

"I'm not fully convinced."

"I'm not who I say I am?"

"No. You're more than that. Much more than that."

"Well," he says, opening the bedroom door. "Let me know when you find out the truth."

At 4:08 a.m. John is back in his cottage, snatching his penlight from the bedstand drawer. A moment later he crouches under the rear bumper of his truck to find the magnetized hide-a-box containing his tension wrench and lockpick.

At 4:16 a.m. he is in Vann Holt's private library office shooting copies of all of Holt's handwritten notes in the "B" file Brief and unrevealing as they are, John has wondered if perhaps Baum is being discussed somewhere here, under a code that only Holt knows. He holds the penlight camera to his eye and listen; to the faint click of the shutter opening and closing as he rotate: the shaft.

At 4:24 he is standing in front of the basement door of what he assumes is the trophy room. It takes him five minutes to get in because the deadbolt has eight springs and he is half drunk and nervous as all get-out crouching here with the penlight in his mouth, the pick clicking in the lock and the sweat running down his neck.

He steps inside and turns on a light.

The room is not what he was expecting. There are no head: on the walls, no antlers, no horns, no ivory, no racks. There are no skins or pelts. There are no flattened bodies with stuffed head: tacked to the wall as decoration.

Instead, there is the natural world. Or something that look: like the natural world.

It is an astonishingly large room, and standing in it John feels like he is in a natural history museum.

Along the eastern wall are dioramas of what appear to be India, China and Nepal. Each stretches from floor to ceiling and is probably forty-feet wide. They are built out from the far wall and literally spill forward into the room. They are separated by massive stanchions of river rock that form a kind of border for each. Opposite, along the western wall, is Africa, the Belizean jungle and the Canadian Rockies. The southern wall offers the Australian bush and the Ecuadoran lowlands. And the middle of the world is an immense North America rising from plains of buffalo and ending high up near the ceiling where a magnificent puma stands alert atop a pile of stones and gazes down toward John.

The dioramas teem with figures that were once alive and now, almost, seem to be living again. Greater Kudu stand alert, on guard for danger, their horns gently tapering and their beards full and pale. A black rhinoceros moves through the veld, one huge foot raised, mid-step. A pride of lions lounges in the savanna, watching a splendid female drag down a fleeing zebra. Hippopotami loiter in a lake while bongo and wildebeest and hartebeest and gnu race past. Water buffalo bathe; tapir drink; a leopard jumps from the jungle, tail trailing up and back, ears back and mouth open, feet extended and claws out, eyes focused on the startled axis deer in front of him. A grizzly bear towers and bares its teeth. A Marco Polo's ram stands at the highest point of Central Asia, his horns curled up, back and out in a spiral more stupendous than any John has ever seen or imagined. Many of the animals are beyond his experience. Tiny red antelope spring through a meadow; spotted, yellow-eyed cats lounge in an Asian treetop; a pure white buck with an eight-point rack peers over his shoulder with an indifferent, patriarchal majesty.

John moves within the world, a tourist. He meanders, walking sometimes forward and sometimes backward, lost in a state of amazement, unwilling to miss anything, eager to see it all at once. Standing in front of the Africa diorama, he begins reading the plaques.

He is even more astonished when the general introduction to Africa blurb instructs him to push the red button on the stand before him when he's finished with this scene. Though unfinished, he pushes the button anyway. His heart jumps as the entire ceiling-high display begins to rotate, smoothly and almost noiselessly disappearing into the wall as another tableau circles forward to take its place.

A bull elephant looms above him, trunk up and tusks hooking toward the sky. His ears are extended-each one, John thinks-the size of a bedsheet. He looks ready to charge, because the taxidermist has captured the huge shift of weight to the animals' columnar rear legs, leaving the front legs lighter, their flesh looser, one mammoth knee just now bending and one immense foot almost ready to leave the grass.

John pushes the red button again and the original diorama returns, like an alternate world gliding into place.

He stands there, heart thumping, ears buzzing, amazed. Then he tries more red buttons. He moves through the great shifting room, pushing one after another. The world is a kaleidoscope.

Australia becomes Montana.

China becomes Kodiak Island.

A wolfpack tears down an elk.

A Cape Buffalo tilts a Jeep.

And perhaps the most interesting thing of all are the little horizontal platforms beside each information plaque. They are tall and narrow as candleholders. And topping each, like a golden flame, is a rifle cartridge. In the light of the trophy room John can see that the casings contain written information. He leans forward to read the engraved brass that is displayed in front of the Cape Buffalo. . 458