David Koepp - Cold Storage

Thing of it is, even God would have taken one look at the cat and said, “That shit is not mine.”

The trunk was only about six inches open when the first paw came out, claws flexed wide, slashing at the air like it wanted to rip the whole atmosphere a new one. Mooney fell back at that point and the cat did the rest. It leaped straight up, banging into the trunk lid and sending it swinging open the rest of the way. The cat landed on all fours, still in the trunk, and it snarled at him—a look of such profound, intense hatred that Mooney’s response came without thought of any kind, a purely synaptic reflex.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Yes, Mooney apologized to the cat, and it really was the only sensible response. The animal was a mess, and it was all his doing. He’d put the .22 slug through the side of the cat’s head, and even that small caliber was enough to blow off the other side of its face. Now the half cat would never wow the ladies again. Its fur was dark and matted with blood, its eyes a sickly bright yellow, and, unless Mooney was hallucinating (which he still imagined—hoped, really—was entirely possible), its midsection was expanding as he watched.

But the cat looked good compared to the deer it was standing on.

Tuesday night had started out substantially better than this for Mooney, just over forty-eight hours ago. In need of a little distraction, he’d taken himself to the movies, with a real quick stop at Turdyk’s Liquor & Cheese first, where he’d picked up a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes Exotic Berry wine coolers. He didn’t love flavored booze, but they were the only wine coolers that were cold and came in plastic bottles. The plastic ones had screw-off tops and didn’t make a racket if you happened to drop, say, the fourth one on the floor of the movie theater. At his last Mooney’s Private Movie Night & Wine Party, a bottle had slipped through his popcorn-greased hands, and the excruciating clatter of it hitting the cement and rolling down the sloping theater floor felt like it had lasted half an hour. Just about every head in the place turned, and that kind of silent group disapproval was something he could have gotten at home for free.

So, he was no dummy. Plastics.

Wine coolers go down easy; the problem is the sugar headache, but if you bring five or six Advil, you’re fine. Mooney was a big fan of the A vitamin and never left the house without it, so by the time he drove away from the Regal 18 on Highway 16, he was more than fine. He had a nice buzz, and the movie wasn’t half-bad either: mindless enough that you could tune out for whole chunks and not get lost, but not so stupid that you felt bad about yourself afterward. He could have done without some of the language.

But the best part of all was he still had one wine cooler left for the drive home, and it wasn’t even completely warm. Life could be kind. He waited till he got through all three stoplights in town before he opened it. Mooney had a hard-and-fast rule: he never, ever drank while driving in the busy part of town, and he rarely texted or went online behind the wheel unless, you know, it was going to be super quick. He was a concerned citizen who cared about his fellow man, so he didn’t crack the plastic lid on his sixth wine cooler until he’d hit the long flat dark stretch of 16, where it started the big bend.

You’re going to want to, but you just can’t blame the accident on the Bartles & Jaymes. That wouldn’t be fair. Yes, Mooney’s blood alcohol was flirting with 0.15 and his reaction time was down, but 250 pounds of aggressively stupid animal that springs out of nowhere and stands frozen on the center stripe of a dark highway, right in the middle of an unlit curve, I mean, that asshole has to be factored into the equation too. Character is destiny, and that dumbass deer—sorry, that beautiful creature of God—that thing’s character was drawn within the limitations of a non-sentient brain. It stood there, unmoving, as the car closed the last fifty feet on it; it just hunched there, watching Death come hurtling at it, staring at the car like, well, like exactly what it was, there’s a goddamn good reason for that cliché, so maybe it was fitting that the first thing that hit the deer was the headlight.

The rest was a gruesome blur, and Mooney panicked and blacked out most of it, as he did sometimes when things got weird. Next thing he knew he was standing over the wounded animal on the shoulder, staring down at its broken, twitching form and holding his father’s .22 pistol. He kept it in the trunk for situations just like this, which, believe it or not, were not all that uncommon around here. Mooney knew what he had to do. It wasn’t hard; you point the thing and pull the trigger and put the beast out of its misery, that’s what any decent human being would do, and there was no law against it, neither God’s nor man’s. The animal was clearly suffering, its mouth opening and closing soundlessly, steam rising from its blood as it spilled out onto the asphalt, still hot from the exceptional heat of the day.

Just kill it already, but Mooney had never killed before, never knowingly; he didn’t even like swatting flies, it tended to send him off into flights of creepy reverie, reflections on his place in the universe. He’d always figured he was a Buddhist at heart—weren’t they the ones who were on about reincarnation all the time, or was that the Hindus? Whichever. The ones who cared, the ones who loved all living things. That was him. But now here he was, faced with the—

BANG. The gun went off while he was still midthought, and it hit the wounded animal in the gut. It screamed.

Oh, great, now I gutshot the fucking thing—how can this have happened? I am a warm and sensitive and humane person and— Oh my God, what is that horrible sound this disgusting animal is making at me now? I feel bad enough, what is it, hacking spit at me? And Mooney filled with some other feeling, not guilt, not tortured reflection, not the milk of human kindness, but a new one, for him.

Rage. Pure, undiluted rage at this senseless animal that had ruined his night, his mental state, and the front left end of his car. He raised the gun again, put it to the deer’s brain this time, and blasted away, more than once, way more than once. In spirit it was more of a murder than a mercy killing, if anybody was keeping karmic score.

The crying jag Mooney had afterward in the car lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes. Truth is, it felt pretty good as guilt flooded through his veins again; it was at least a familiar feeling, much better than the out-of-body experience he’d been having before that. Now, what to do? You can’t leave a dead deer by the side of the road with three broken legs, a bullet in its stomach, and four more in its head. That’s just, I mean, that’s sick. Mooney needed time to think, which meant that deer had to get off the shoulder of the road and into the trunk of his car.

The sight of Mooney, 180 pounds and half in the bag, trying to get a dead, gangly one-eighth-ton deer into the trunk of his car would have made for some pretty brilliant silent comedy. It may well have taken all night if not for Tommy Seipel, the driver of a 2015 Lexus. Tommy saw what was happening, pulled over immediately, asked one question—

“You loaded?”

—and, sensing Mooney’s answer would be in the affirmative, threw his own considerable bulk into helping hoist the mangled deer into the trunk. He slammed the lid on it, wiped his bloody hands on Mooney’s T-shirt, spoke a handful more words—

“I’d get the fuck outta here if I was you.”

—and went back on his way. Mooney occasionally knew good advice when he heard it, and this was the best advice he’d heard in years. He jumped behind the wheel, slammed his door, and did as told, driving off with the dead deer in his trunk.