John Sandford - Escape Clause

“I want to see the cats before you get money,” Zhang said.

Peck looked at him with what he hoped was a hard, intimidating glare, then said, “Put your car in the garage. I want it out of sight.”

–

Zhang took his time doing that, careful not even to brush any of the various brooms, shovels, snowblowers, or racks in Peck’s garage. A one-inch scratch on a Ferrari was maybe ten grand, if you wanted a perfect Ferrari, and his father did; the car was in his father’s name, not his.

As Zhang eased the car into the garage, Peck thought about what a perfect dumb motherfucker Zhang actually was. Zhang’s father, on the other hand, was not. Zhang Min was a Chinese refugee currently ensconced in Pasadena, California, where he was easing back into criminal activity after fleeing his life of industrial crime in China. The elder Zhang had noticed-this wasn’t hard-that there were 2.2 million former mainland Chinese living in the United States, effectively cut off from their supply of traditional and illegal Chinese medicine.

A fast man to sniff out an underserved market, he’d begun weaving a drug distribution network centered in Los Angeles; his problem was supply. Peck was part of his answer.

–

Peck went into his house and found a ski mask he actually used for cross-country skiing, then backed his Tahoe out. He pointed Zhang at the passenger side of the Tahoe, dropped the garage door. Peck took them out to I-94 and east out of St. Paul.

“How’s your father? Still doing well?”

“He is angry, as always,” Zhang said.

“Angry with me? With us?”

“With me,” Zhang said. “He is impossible to please.”

“He is sort of an asshole, but we need him, you and I. At least for the time being.”

Zhang looked out the window, scowling.

–

When they passed Radio Drive, Peck handed Zhang the ski mask and said, “Put it on backward. You can roll up the bottom enough to breathe.”

“I’m not gonna…”

“You do it or we go back and forget the whole thing,” Peck said. “That would make the old man happy, huh? Dropping everything? I’m not gonna let you see where we’re going, X.” Peck couldn’t actually pronounce Xiaomin’s first name, and they agreed he could shorten it to X, which X seemed to like. “You run your mouth too much; you do stupid shit all the time. It’s my ass on the line, too.”

“Fuck you,” Zhang said, but he pulled the mask on backward, leaving the end of his nose and mouth exposed.

Peck drove on for a few more miles to Manning Avenue, got off the highway, turned north, did a couple of laps around the parking lot of a Holiday station, to confuse things, then went back out to Manning Avenue and turned south.

“Are we there?” Zhang asked. “I’m getting carsick.”

“Hang on for another couple of minutes,” Peck said. “Don’t go puking in my truck.”

The farm was eight or nine miles out, a run-down place waiting for the suburbs to arrive. The house had last been lived in by two community college students, two years earlier. It had functioning electricity; a functioning well; a semifunctioning septic system that the day before had leaked water onto the yard, which Peck had stepped in; and a barn out back. The farm was owned by a New York investor, the guy waiting for the suburbs to arrive. They pulled into the barnyard, and Peck said, “You can take the mask off.”

Hayk Simonian came out and stood in the headlights, a burly man in a blood-spattered apron, carrying a long skinning knife in one hand. He was smoking one of his Black Flames, a yellowish cloud of nicotine and tars swirling around his head. Peck turned the headlights off, and then he and Zhang walked to the barn where Simonian said, “We still got a long way to go. What are you doing here? Why’s this asshole here?”

“I need to show X that we got them,” Peck said. “It’s a money thing.”

Simonian said, “We got more than tigers. We got a whole shitload of trouble. You been watching the TV?”

“No-but we knew they’d freak out.”

“More than that. They put the state cops on the case. The state DA says they’re gonna catch us and they’ve got enough crimes already to lock us up for thirty years. Life, if we kill the tigers.”

“Nonsense. Besides, they’re not gonna catch us,” Peck said. “There won’t be the hair of a tiger around here in a week.”

“Where’re the cats?” Zhang asked.

“Inside,” Simonian said. He tipped his head toward the barn door. Simonian was wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops, and an LA Dodgers T-shirt under the plastic apron. All the clothing showed splashes and speckles of blood.

He led the way into the barn, where three work lights provided high-contrast lighting over the central part of the barn floor. The dead male tiger was hanging from a ceiling hook, above a big, blue plastic tarp. The tarp was smeared with blood.

The tiger’s hide had been removed and was lying on another tarp at one side of the barn floor, like a cheap rug. The naked torso of the tiger might have been a huge, oversized man… except for the head, where the bared teeth shone like antique ivory daggers.

The whole place smelled of blood, intestinal sludge, tiger poop, and sweat.

Simonian nodded at a row of Tupperware containers on the floor near the pelt. “Eyes, whiskers, claws, balls, cock, all separate, like you said. I’m looking at the pictures and I can get the kidneys and liver, but I sort of fucked up the spleen.”

“You’ve got to be more careful. That spleen was probably worth a couple grand all by itself,” Peck said, peering at the heavy naked muscles of the tiger’s body.

Simonian said, “All I got is a comic-book picture of his guts to go by. Anyway, I still got it, only it’s sort of mushed up.”

“Keep it, then, but get it in the dryer before it goes bad,” Peck said. And to Zhang: “You satisfied?”

“Yeah.” Zhang had walked a long circle around the hanging torso, continuing to the back where the female tiger stared at them from her cage. A few feet from her cage, he made a sudden aggressive move forward. The tiger reacted, moving forward herself, but faster, harder than anything Zhang was capable of. Zhang jumped back, startled, laughed nervously, and then turned to Peck and said, “Can I shoot her?”

“Not now,” Peck said, the irritation riding in his voice. “We don’t have a lot of refrigeration here, as you can see, so we need to keep her alive until we’re done with the big boy.”

Zhang went over and stroked Artur’s pelt, then picked it up; the hide was heavy, and he strained to lift it. “Help me put it on my shoulders-I want to take a picture of it.”

“No,” Peck said. “Put it down. You hear what Hayk said about thirty years? All you need is a picture of you with a tiger skin on your head on Facebook. Put it down.”

Zhang dropped the pelt like a rag. “You guys are pussies.”

Simonian said, “What?”

Zhang poked a finger at him, as he had with Peck. “I said…”

Simonian stepped toward him and Zhang slipped back in his snake pose. Simonian turned to Peck and asked, “What the fuck is that?”

“A martial art thing,” Peck said. “It’s the beaver stance or something.”

Simonian said, “Yeah?” and casually reached out and slapped Zhang on the side of the head, nearly flattening him. Then he slapped him four or five more times, making a rapid pop-pop-pop sound, using alternate hands, as though Zhang’s head was a speed bag.

Peck said, “Okay, knock it off, knock it off.”

Simonian stopped and said, “Martial bullshit,” and Peck said to Zhang, who’d staggered to the side wall and was leaning back against it, “You’ve seen the cats. Let’s go.”