Claws

by Ozzie Cheek

  A mile farther Ed met Idaho State Police trooper, Ronnie Greathouse, coming from Med’s place. He knew Ronnie was seeing Maryann Fedder. Med’s oldest girl had been in a wheelchair for the past three years, since a horse threw her and cracked her spine. Ed also knew that Ronnie and Tucker, his nephew, his sister Agnes’ boy, both belonged to a white power, anti-government, militia group. If Med ever found out, Ronnie would not be welcome at the Fedder house, regardless of Maryann’s wishes. All in all, Ed figured a crippled thirty-year-old country girl didn’t have a line of men outside the door. Med would not find out from him.

  While keeping his eyes on the road, Ed felt along the driver’s seat for the Marlboro pack. He thumped the box and pulled a cigarette with his lips, leaned forward, and lit it with a match. He inhaled the smoke deeply and then, after lowering the window, slowly let it escape, the way he had learned to do it when he was young and invincible.

  He always figured death would come as a surprise, not a trip he planned in advance, but once the doctors agreed not to tell Eileen how little time he had left, dying had become just another secret to keep. He had kept so many: hater’s secrets, killer’s secrets, and lover’s secrets. A town has many secrets that only a cop knows, some that only the Chief of Police knows. For a while Ed wasn’t sure if he would share his cache. He wasn’t sure Jackson would stick around long enough, and town secrets shouldn’t travel too far. Now, he felt relieved finally to shed them.

  Ed finished his cigarette and started to toss it out before remembering the drought. The winter and spring had been wet and the spring growth lush. But it had been a hot, dry summer. Given a chance, the fields and forests would flame like a barn filled with straw. He dropped the butt on the floor mat and squished it with his shoe.

  Before long Ed swapped the blacktop for a gravel road that snaked past Jackson’s farm. The dust he kicked up forced him to close the car window. He had already written one letter to leave behind, revealing the secret Jackson most needed to know. Tonight, I’ll write another, he thought, and tell him about Tucker and Ronnie and some other secrets too. Just one thing Jackson has wrong, Ed told himself as he turned onto the rutted dirt road to the Placett farm – it’s him, not me, that’s the better man.

  When Jackson entered the meeting room, the talk died abruptly. Jackson nodded a greeting to the four council members seated around two folding tables set end-to-end: Fred Bulcher, owner of a gravel and sand business; Pamela Yow, head librarian and Buckhorn’s self-appointed moral compass; Neil Fennis, owner of the Sportsman Motel; and Clancy Anderson, a retired railroad man. Iris, the town mayor, was at the head of the table. She once had been Iris Hobbs but returned to using Inslay – Iris Inslay.

  At age forty-one Iris still turned heads. While other women might be pretty, Iris was exotic. Petite and Mediterranean dark, her lush brown hair almost black, she claimed to be Portuguese-American. In truth, she was part Mexican and part German-Mormon, but being Mexican didn’t help the ambitious in Idaho, even if being Mormon did.

  Jackson took the empty chair across from Dell Tapper. Besides owning the Bank of Buckhorn, a town institution since the 1930s, he was the father of Jesse’s boyfriend. As far as Jackson was concerned, Dell also was the man responsible for ending his marriage, although Iris, seated between them, would certainly disagree.

  “We all know how busy Chief Hobbs is,” Iris said, her words conveying sarcasm without too much offense, “so let’s move on to the police department’s budget.”

  Due to the sparse population in northern Fremont County and the location of the county sheriff’s office in the southernmost part, Buckhorn police officers held a cross-deputy commission that gave them full law enforcement powers outside city limits. In return, part of the department’s operating budget came from the county, and Buckhorn currently had more officers than the county seat did. The town and the county were at odds about money.

  “Well, to start with,” Neil Fennis said, “none of us have a problem with the job you’re doing as chief.”

  “Or with your officers,” Pamela said.

  “Who at least wear their uniforms,” Clancy said.

  “Tell me, Jackson,” Dell said before Clancy could continue, “how many people did you arrest yesterday?”

  “One. Billy Frasier. His third DUI.”

  “Any unsolved murders?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about car-jackings? Gangs? Drug cartels?”

  “What’s your point, Dell?”

  “His point,” Iris said, “is serious crime almost never happens here. But our budget doesn’t reflect that.”

  Some of the council members muttered agreement or nodded their head. The town had money problems, and Jackson knew they wanted to cut his budget.

  “You haven’t been here as long as most of us,” Dell told Jackson. A year older than Iris, Dell had been her high school sweetheart. He was a big man, fifteen pounds too heavy now, who wore western-cut suits and Paul Bond custom boots. He also wore contacts, but kept it a secret. Dell continued: “Used to be we had timber and farming and cattle. But now we live and die on tourism. Summertime we get fishermen and campers and hikers, and in the fall we get hunters. We count on them spending money. The State figures every deer shot is worth four thousand dollars; every elk, six thousand; a bear’s worth five; and so on. But if hunters aren’t hunting and fishermen don’t fish, our cash flow dries up. We all know what this summer was like and the couple of years before this one. People are hurting and staying home. They’re not coming here.”

  “Amen to that,” said Neil, the motel owner. “I can tell you right now, my reservations for hunting season are half of what they were ten years ago. Half!”

  “I’m a hunter. You all know that,” Dell said. “Fact is the deer and elk and antelope aren’t what they once were. Blame global warming or blame the feds for dumping gray wolves on us and them killing off our game or –”

  Fred Bulcher, who resembled the wrestler that had been governor of Minnesota, piped up with a spew of complaints about the government. Iris finally shut him up just as he got to the Jews and homosexuals ruining the country.

  “We’ve talked it over,” Iris said, indicating the town council members, “and we want you to cut a position.”

  “You mean fire somebody,” Jackson said. “Like who?”

  For a second nobody spoke, and then Iris said, “How many days last month did Ed work?”

  “More than he should have,” Jackson said.

  “I pray for him every day,” Pamela offered.

  Iris shuffled some papers until the one she wanted surfaced. “Paid full-time, worked half, that sound right?”

  “Ed was Chief of Police here for twenty years.”

  “Nobody likes doing this, Jackson,” Neil, the motel owner, said. His nose was etched with red lines from a lifetime of drinking. “But Ed can draw a pension now anyway, and he’s the most expensive officer.”

  “Apart from you,” Clancy added.

  “There’s got to be another way.”

  “There isn’t,” Dell said. “We’ve looked. And so has the county. We agree on this.”

  “Agreeing doesn’t make it right,” Jackson told them.

  “Look at the bright side,” Iris said, “if we make a mistake, you get to tell us about it. And you will.”

  Dell looked at Iris and Iris at Jackson. Jackson looked at the gray Riverton hat he had laid on the table when he sat down. Everybody in the room knew that Jackson and Iris were talking about mistakes already made.

  A Kinder’s Sav-On grocery bag set on the hood of Ed’s cruiser. Mandy had provided the bag and the empty shoebox inside it to use for the remains of the cat. She hadn’t actually seen Muggles’ body, she admitted, but she still knew the cat was dead. Ed removed a Colt M4 tactical rifle from the trunk of the Ford. The M4 was a version of the M16 he had carried in Vietnam. He inserted a ten-round magazine of Remington .223 cartridges, although the M4 held up to 30 rounds, and went around
the house.

  It was not until he saw Josh waving to him from the back porch that Ed remembered the grocery bag on the hood. The M4 was in his left hand, so he flipped a wave at the boy with his right. He could go back for the shoebox if he needed it, Ed thought. The odds were he wouldn’t need it. Mountain lions didn’t usually leave much of a cat or dog behind. The Placett’s dogs were missing too, and that bothered him. A pair of Labs weren’t that easy to kill.

  Ed stopped beside the remains of some firecrackers. From there he watched the door on the old smokehouse bang open and shut. Mandy had told him that a giant cat leaped out of the smokehouse and ran across the barnyard and into the barley field to his right. He scanned the tall, golden grains rippling in the wind but saw nothing else moving.

  A moment later he caught the door of the smokehouse and pinned it open with a dusty shoe. With the stock of the M4 snug against his right shoulder and his finger on the trigger, he peered inside. Bags of feed were stacked thigh high, while empty bags littered the floor. The wind kited one of the empty bags, and as it danced away, he spotted the little brown-and-white head lying in a puddle of blood. “Mother-of-god!” Ed exclaimed. The tabby’s head had been bitten clean off. The rest of the cat was gone.

  When Ed was certain nothing was hiding in the shed, he latched the door until he could return with the shoebox. If he put a stick of wood with the head and wrapped it all in a towel inside the box, maybe the kids would never know.

  Ed checked the toolshed and the woodshed, peering inside both, the rifle held ready. He also peeked in the chicken coop and an open shed that housed farm equipment. He saw nothing dangerous and moved on to the barn.

  At first he searched the barn from the doorway, but his eyes kept bumping into shadows that took on whatever shape his imagination sculpted, while his ears worked overtime to sort the rustles and groans whipped up by the wind. When Ed finally entered, a charge of electricity combed the hair on his arms and neck. He squeezed the M4 and swiveled the short-barreled Colt from side to side.

  As he moved slowly down the center, Ed felt himself stepping on a lush jungle path instead of barnwood, smelled pungent fish sauce instead of dry manure, felt the weight of a fully automatic M16 in his hands, his body young and strong and his senses as sharp as the knife in the sheath strapped to his leg. Left. Right. Slow and careful. In the jungle the survivors move silently. Left, right, left, right, left. He heard a crunch and stopped. If it was a Bouncing Betty beneath his foot, and he moved, the landmine would explode. He looked down, but he didn’t see Army boots. Instead, he saw familiar black police brogues. For a moment there, my god, it had felt so real, thought Ed, that he had tasted the danger of Vietnam again.

  Ed lifted his foot and stepped back to see what was beneath it. It looked like a rabbit’s foot – small, furry, and – no, not rabbit. It was a cat’s paw. The realization and the sound reached him at the same time.

  The animal looking down at him from a twelve-foot high overhang was neither a monster nor a fantasy. It was Ted and Dolly Cheney’s road to riches – one of the giant cats intended to be the feature attraction at a drive-through safari park that federal, state, and county officials had blocked from opening. Ed had seen the liger before, one of a pair held in a disgusting cage at Safari Land. He had seen their claws shred a metal barrel and seen them chomp through frozen chickens, bones and all, like they were potato chips. He knew the huge creature was dangerous.

  Ed swung the Colt M4 around as Kali lunged. Her heavy body flattened him, and his breath was squeezed out with a whoosh. Then her claws clamped his head like a vice set with spikes. A tiger has the jaw power of one thousand pounds per square inch, and lions and tigers often kill their prey by severing the spinal cord. Kali’s bite had far more power, enough to break open a bowling ball. When she bit Ed’s neck, his bones snapped like dry twigs.

  Ed’s final thought was about the cigarette butt left on the mat of his police car. He had failed to pick it up and throw it out. That secret he had planned to keep.

  Three

  Jackson heard Iris call to him as he neared the Jeep and turned to see her approaching. She wore suede boots, a khaki skirt that brushed their tops, and a thin, cream sweater that clung to her curves. He felt the same jumbled emotions he always felt when his eyes remembered her body.

  “You didn’t make any friends in there, you know,” Iris said. She stopped two feet away from Jackson.

  “Ed has a lot of friends in there.”

  “The town is broke, Jackson. We may have to borrow money just to make it through the fiscal year.”

  “Well, don’t forget you sleep with the banker.”

  “And don’t forget I’m your boss either.” After Iris had said it, she looked away. She couldn’t let him goad her. She couldn’t afford a public fight, not in her town. Iris had come to Buckhorn when she was eight. That’s when her father retired from the railroad in Pocatello and moved the family north. She had remained here until Dell broke her heart, and she begged her parents to send her away to college in Colorado. Fort Collins, Colorado is where her romance with Jackson began and for her where it had ended. “We need to talk about Jesse. You seen her today?”

  Jackson nodded. “At the football field.”

  The purse strapped across Iris’ left shoulder had somebody’s initials artfully splashed across it. She reached inside the bag. When she brought her hand out, she showed Jackson the purple foil wrapper of a condom.

  “Thanks, Iris, but I don’t really need one.”

  She jiggled her hand. “This was in Jesse’s dresser.”

  “You searched our daughter’s room?”

  “She’s fifteen, Jackson.”

  “And what’d Jesse say about it?”

  Iris shook her head and let her hand drop back to her side. “If I try to talk to her … you know what’ll happen.”

  “Maybe she found it at school.”

  “There were a dozen more just like this one.”

  Jackson tried to think like a detective instead of a father but found that he could not do it. “Jesus!”

  “I told you, she’ll do anything to spite me.”

  “Even have sex? I kind of doubt that.”

  “Well, you were never a teenage girl, Jackson.” Iris held out her hand again. “So you going to help or not?”

  “I’ll talk to her.” He took the condom. Iris smiled, and Jackson thought about how even her smallest smile oozed sexuality, whether she wanted it to or not. “I’m not going to fire Ed,” he told her.

  Iris turned and walked away.

  When Jackson entered the police station, Sadie Pope, the civilian secretary, dispatcher, and reporter of local police news for the county’s weekly newspaper, was reading the final Harry Potter book. She had waited weeks to get it from the library. “Ed come back yet?” he asked her.

  “Nope,” Sadie said, putting down the book. “He called in his ten-twenty, oh, say thirty minutes ago. Last I heard from him.” Although most law enforcement agencies were using plain language instead of codes now, Sadie was a holdout. She had spent too much time learning them, she said, to ignore them. “Want me to try his radio?”

  “I’ll call his cell phone. Ed never keeps the damn radio on. Not the one he wears anyway.” Jackson picked up the closest office telephone. “So how’s Harry doing?”

  “The usual, saving the world.”

  He punched in the number. “Sounds like a tough job.”

  Sadie grinned. “Oh, you could do it, you had to.”

  Ed’s cell phone rang until it went to voice mail. “Sadie, what’s Wade and Mandy’s number?” He lowered the phone and waited for Sadie to check the county phone book that was barely a half-inch thick and much of that due to advertisements. Fewer than twelve thousand people lived in Fremont County. Some people didn’t have a landline; some didn’t have a phone. Jackson called the number Sadie gave him. After two rings a boy answered. “This is Chief Hobbs,” Jackson said. He tried to remember the name of the olde
r Placett boy. He covered the phone with his hand and asked Sadie. She mouthed the name. “Josh, is that you?”

  “Uh-huh,” the boy said.

  “You know Deputy-Chief Ed Stevens, Josh?”

  “He’s looking for Muggles. Our dogs are gone too.”

  “Is he there right now?”

  “I guess.”

  Jackson didn’t like the sound of it. “What about your mom? Could you ask her to come to the phone?”

  Moments later, officer Angie Kuka, a Blackfoot from Browning, Montana, entered the station while Jackson was listening to Mandy tell him that Ed had gone out back to look for the monster cat, but she hadn’t seen him since. Angie saw the frown wrinkling Jackson’s face, and she quietly laid down the clipboard containing the Lead Sheet Report she had written after answering a family dispute call at the Slater doublewide.

  “Stay inside,” Jackson said. “I’m on my way.”

  “What’s happening?” Angie asked when Jackson hung up.

  “Some kind of big cat on the prowl. Ed went to check it out and he … I need to see what’s going on.”

  “Want me to ride along?”

  “No,” Jackson said, already moving toward the door. “Stay here. You can play chief.”

  Angie patted her mouth and gave a mock Indian war cry.

  When Jackson arrived at the Placett house, the first thing he did was inspect Ed’s patrol car: a grocery bag and a shoebox sat atop the cold hood, Ed’s shotgun was secured between the seat and the dash, and a smashed cigarette butt littered the rubber mat. Jackson unlocked the trunk of the Ford and saw that the Colt M4 tactical rifle was gone. Then he went to the house and knocked on the door.

  Mandy greeted him in the living room. A big, flat-screen television was on but barely audible. Sixteen-month-old Warren was asleep on the couch behind a wall of pillows, while Mandy cradled her five-year-old daughter in her lap, gently rocking back and forth. The girl was sucking her thumb. “That cat nearly scared her to death,” Mandy said, explaining Tammy’s regression.