John Sandford: Escape Clause

“I can do that,” Virgil said. “That old bed is shot anyway.”

Frankie said to Bill, “You can go ahead and fuck Sparkle, but I don’t want her squealing and screaming and all that-keep it quiet. I got kids.”

Bill said to Sparkle, “Maybe we ought to find another place.”

“No, no, no… this is convenient and I like hanging out with my nephews,” Sparkle said. “Another thing is that Castro’s goons won’t find me out here. Besides, if you tie me up and gag me, nobody’ll hear a thing.”

They all looked at Bill, who said, “Sometimes I have to struggle to keep my head from exploding.”

“That’s called the Sparkle effect,” Frankie said.

–

The four of them paddled around for a while, until, from the bank of the swimming hole, a phone began playing the theme from Jaws . Honus stood up and woofed at it, then lay back down, and Frankie said, “Uh-oh.”

Sparkle: “What’s that?”

“The priority number from the BCA,” Virgil said. “It usually means the shit has hit the fan, somewhere. I gotta take it.”

He’d hoped the other two would leave before he had to get out of the water, but all eyes were on him as he manfully waded out of the swimming hole, sat on the bank, and fumbled the phone out of his jeans.

Jon Duncan calling. “Jon, what’s up?”

“We need you up here,” Duncan said. “Right away, this afternoon.”

“What happened?”

“That whole thing down in Iowa, at the state fair last week, has upset the apple cart,” Duncan said. “You know our fair starts this week, there’re gonna be more politicians up here, campaigning. We’re worried about copycats.”

Virgil groaned. “Man, don’t make me work the state fair.”

“No, no, we got that covered,” Duncan said. “But everybody’s committed now at the fair, and we’ve got a new problem. A big one.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Somebody stole the Amur tigers from the zoo last night,” Duncan said. “Apparently shot them with a tranquilizer gun and hauled them out of there. Since it’s a state zoo, it’s our problem.”

“What? Tigers?”

“Yeah. Somebody stole the tigers… two Amur tigers. Pride of the zoo. Listen, man, you’ve got to get up here,” Duncan said. “There’s gonna be a media shitstorm starting tonight on the evening news. We gotta get the tigers back: and we gotta get them back right now . And alive .”

They caged the tigers separately in the bottom of the old barn, in what had once been cow stalls. Since a chain-link fence had been enough to keep the tigers separated from any number of chubby, delicious-looking Minnesota Zoo visitors, they’d wrapped the stalls with more chain link. The cage doors, made from chain-link fence gates, were locked with steel snap shackles.

There’d been no electric power in the barn, the ancient wires gnawed through by rodents, so they’d bought two long orange cables, which they plugged in at the house and then laid across the barnyard into the lower level.

Inside, the Simonian brothers had rigged up three work lights from Sears, hung from the rafters, and screwed in hundred-watt bulbs. The work lights were plugged into a power strip at the end of one of the orange cables. The light was bright, harsh, and threw knife-edged shadows over the interior of the barn.

There were no windows.

Against one wall, they’d installed a makeshift table made of a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, sitting on aluminum sawhorses and covered with plastic sheeting. Five waist-high meat dryers were plugged into the second orange cable. Four plastic tubs would hold discarded guts and unneeded tiger organs. A hose, also strung over from the house, would wash everything down.

Though the barn had not housed cattle for decades, there was still an earthy odor about it, not entirely unpleasant, which took Hamlet Simonian back to happier days on his grandmother’s farm in Armenia. Happier at a safe distance, anyway.

–

They’d wheeled the inert tigers into the barn and into the two separate cages on the dollies, then rolled them off the dollies onto the floor. The male tiger was tough to move, even though they only had to move him a foot or so off the dolly. His formidable muscles were slack as bedsheets and simply hard to get hold of, and the cage was small enough that they couldn’t work standing up.

When they finally got it done, they locked the cages, locked the outer door, and went and hid. Neither tiger was yet stirring. They’d give it until the next day before they returned to the farm, in case somebody had been watching and got curious about all the activity in the middle of the night.

–

They met again at the farm the next morning to start work.

“Shoot the fuckin’ tiger, Ham,” said Winston Peck VI. Peck popped a Xanax. “Do it.”

Peck was a tall, round-shouldered man, brown hair now touched with gray. He had a tight brown Teddy Roosevelt mustache and wore gold-rimmed glasses with round lenses. He looked like a college athlete going to seed in middle age: he was thirty pounds too heavy.

“I dunno, man,” Hamlet Simonian said. He was bulb-nosed, with dark hair, what was left of it, and sweating hard. He had a Remington.308 in one hand. The night before, they’d used a tranquilizer gun, shooting darts, to take the cats out of the zoo. “Now it seems kinda… terrible. A terrible thing to do.”

“You knew what was going to happen,” Peck said. “You knew the plan.”

“I didn’t know I was going to be the shooter. I thought Hayk…”

The two tigers looked through the bars of their separate cages with a kind of quiet rapaciousness. They were beautiful animals, gold and white with ripples of black, and orange eyes. They were hungry, since it hadn’t seemed to Peck that there was any point in feeding them.

If the snap shackles on the doors were suddenly undone, Simonian had no doubt what would happen: they’d get eaten. Forget about the gun, forget about running, those tigers would eat his South Caucasian ass like a hungry trucker choking down a ham sandwich. A Ham Simonian sandwich.

“Ham, shoot the fuckin’ tiger.”

“Why don’t you do it, man? I don’t think I got the guts,” Simonian said. “Maybe we ought to wait for Hayk. He’d do it.” Hayk was Hamlet’s older brother by ten months, and he was much larger, stronger, and meaner than Hamlet.

“Because I don’t know how to do it,” Peck said. He was getting seriously impatient. Killing the tiger wasn’t the only thing he had to do this day. He was a busy man. “I’ve never shot a gun in my life. And we need to get started. Now.”

That wasn’t strictly true-he’d shot rifles on several occasions, and a shotgun, in the company of his father, but he wasn’t sure of his skills, and mostly didn’t want to be the one to shoot the tiger.

“Ah, shit.” Simonian edged up to the male tiger’s cage. He was by far the larger of the two, though that wouldn’t matter much if either one of them got out. The smaller female, Katya, weighed nearly four hundred pounds and to the nervous Simonian, it seemed like twenty pounds of that was teeth and claws. Getting taken down by Katya would be like getting attacked by a four-hundred-pound chainsaw.

And forget about it with Artur, the muscular male. He was six hundred and forty pounds of furry hunger. He could take your head off with one swipe of his well-armed paw, and then squish it like a grape between his three-inch canine teeth.

“Shoot-the-fuckin’-tiger,” Peck said.

Simonian lifted the gun and looked down the iron sights at Artur, who stared calmly back at him, unafraid, even though something about his eyes suggested that he knew what was coming. Drips of sweat rolled into Hamlet’s eyes and he took the gun down and wiped the sweat away with his shirtsleeve, then brought the gun back up and aimed right between the tiger’s eyes, five feet away, and yanked the trigger.