Claws

by Ozzie Cheek

  “Shot the fucking deer!” Dell said.

  “The liger is running away!” Wade shouted.

  “Get down! Hurry!” Dell ordered. “Follow it!”

  The men scampered down the rough, homemade ladder nailed to the fir. Shane was the last one to the ground. His ears were ringing from the shot, but he still heard his father say, “Shot the fucking doe; I can’t believe it.”

  Twenty

  Jackson and Katy were crossing a barley field when they heard the shot. They stopped and waited, expecting more shots. When none came, Katy said, “On safari I know where the guns are. Out here, I don’t. That worries me.”

  Jackson, who thought about being shot each time he rushed through a door or got between an angry husband and wife or pulled over a car on a dark road, said, “I know the feeling. Comes with the job, I guess.”

  “I’ve been lucky.” While she spoke, Katy scanned the land, looking for movement. “But my uncle was shot once.”

  Jackson remembered reading about her uncle in Botswana. “Your uncle that’s missing?”

  Katy nodded. “Two years ago Christmas morning. When Uncle Bucky went blind, he took it hard. Working the ranch, safari life, he missed them so much. I got up to exchange gifts, and he was gone. We looked for him but …”

  “I’m sorry,” Jackson told her.

  She nodded. “That’s how he wanted it,” she said softly. “To walk off onto the land and just disappear.”

  Jackson couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say, so he remained silent. He turned away and eyed the horizon, and when he looked back, Katy was examining the ground.

  Her sadness, her memories had been put aside. “You ever shoot anyone?” she asked. “I mean, as a policeman.”

  “Probably.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “More or less,” Jackson said. “So what now?”

  It was obvious that Jackson did not want to discuss it further, so Katy moved on ahead, looking for signs of the ligers. A moment later she squatted and pushed aside the golden barley. There were two main ways to identify the kind and number of animals that passed over a land and the direction they went in: their droppings and their tracks. The tracks Katy found in the barley field were unmistakable. “Both ligers went north,” she said.

  “Goddamn cat’s toying with us,” Dell said. He was looking three hundred feet north at the liger. The cat and the hunters had been playing hide-and-seek since the men left the hunting blind. They hunters had stopped in an aspen grove. A few leaves had turned gold. The ground was thick with last year’s leaves. “Let’s get closer,” Dell said.

  “Wait a sec,” Shane said. “I can’t. I mean, my stomach feels bad. I gotta go before –”

  Dell had not spoken to his son since Shane shot the doe. Now he interrupted him to say, “We don’t need the details. Just get downwind of us. And hurry it up.”

  Shane went behind a thick clump of aspens sixty feet away. His stomach was churning. As he unbuckled and unzipped, he could hear bits of conversation: “ … goddamn cat … risky to go off alone … just watching us … shot the fucking deer …” He was about to drop his jeans when he saw the liger. No fucking way! The big cat’s out front; it can’t be back here too, he told himself. But it was.

  Shane stepped back and bumped into a tree. Without taking his eyes off the liger, he reached down, found the Weatherby leaning against the aspen trunk, and lifted the gun by its barrel. He tried to say, “Dad, Dad, Dad,” but only croaked. What happened next happened so fast that it did not feel sequential. It felt like time collapsed.

  The liger charged, and Shane, his rifle halfway up, fired a wild shot. The cat kept coming. Then there was a loud boom from behind Shane, and the animal jerked. There was a second loud boom, with the cat in the air now, and Shane slid down the white tree and landed on his tailbone. He fought against releasing his bowels. Then there was a third even louder boom, and the liger seemed to stop dead still in the air. Then it crashed to the ground.

  Dell and Dan reached the liger first. Wade and Stilts were right behind them. Stilts stuck his Mossberg shotgun in the cat’s ear, but Dell said, “Don’t! You’ll destroy the head.” Dell placed the Weatherby .375 over the lungs and shot the animal. The big cat jerked and then lay still.

  After that, everybody talked all at once except for Shane, who sat on the ground and stared blankly ahead.

  “Take a drink of this.” Dan held out a leather-covered flask until Shane focused on him and took the cognac. “It’ll put bristles on your balls.”

  “I don’t get it,” Wade said, amazed. “The cat was way out in front of us. I was watching him the whole time.”

  “He’s still out there too,” Stilts Venable said, for he was not looking at the dead liger but was watching a second liger, some two hundred feet away from them.

  “Not he, she,” Dell said, while checking the genitals of the dead liger. “It was a goddamn trap. The female’s out front, and the male here was sneaking up behind us.”

  “Damn!” said Wade. “Cat’s really do that?”

  “Feeling better?” Dan asked Shane.

  “Go easy on that stuff,” Dell told his son.

  “So they’re not just big, they’re smart,” Stilts said.

  “Not smart enough,” Dell said. “This one’s dead.”

  It took an hour for the hunters to hike back to the vehicles. Everyone but Wade and Shane got into the Escalade and, with the State Police trooper leading the way, drove off. Wade and Shane stayed behind to transport the dead liger.

  They set off in the Shetland Service Station wrecker. Wade first eased it down a rutted logging road, then maneuvered the truck through a rocky field, and eventually had to thread it through the forest to reach the kill site. Neither Wade nor Shane said much during the drive or when they got there, and when they did talk, they did not talk about what had happened earlier in the aspen trees.

  As they worked to load Shaka, from time to time they would stop and search for Kali or some other danger lurking in the woods. Even so, neither of them saw the liger, although Kali watched them struggle to get the sling beneath the giant cat before lifting him off the ground and depositing him on the bed of the wrecker. They also did not see her keep pace with the truck once Wade drove off.

  The return trip went faster, and when they reached the barley field, Wade said, “Listen, I’m going to stop and show the cat to my wife and kids, so you go on to town.” Shane mumbled “okay” and started to leave. Wade put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Anybody can miss a shot. I’ve missed my share. I bet your dad has too.”

  Shane bobbed his head, and his eyes teared as he got out. Wade waited for Shane to safely reach his Toyota and drive off before he phoned Mandy and told her about the liger. He was still talking to her when he started home.

  Two miles later Wade stopped beneath a trio of sugar maples. They were near where the dirt road intersected with the blacktop. He put the truck in neutral, set the parking brake, and climbed out. At the rear of the wrecker he tugged on the ties that secured the big male liger. He would be driving faster on the paved road, and he wanted to make certain that the animal would not slide off.

  Just as Wade climbed back into the cab, he heard a thump overhead and felt the cab rock. A second later, a giant cathead appeared in the windshield upside down. Wade yelped! Kali then thudded off the roof and onto the hood and with a whack of her giant paw cracked the windshield.

  Wade fought the manual shift, grinding the gears in his haste to escape. He felt as much as saw Kali jump off the hood. Once the truck was in gear, Wade stomped the gas pedal. The truck lurched but didn’t go anywhere. The emergency brake! He released it and was reaching to close the driver’s door when Kali sprang into the cab.

  Neither big cats nor hunters appeared after the flurry of shots, so Jackson and Katy returned to the Placett house. Mandy met them with the news that Wade was on his way home with a monster cat they had shot.

  “Male
or female?” Katy asked sharply. Mandy did not know the answer to Katy’s question. After a tense thirty minutes of waiting, with no sign of Wade and the dead liger, and no answer to their many calls to Wade’s cell phone, Jackson and Katy left Mandy and her children at home and went to look for him.

  By the time they found the wrecker, a moonless night blanketed the land. Jackson stopped fifty feet away and pointed the Jeep headlights at the truck. When the light hit it, Katy cried out and Jackson said, “Christ Almighty!” The cracked windshield was splattered with red and the driver’s door hung askew, torn half-off the wrecker.

  “Stay here,” Jackson said as he got out.

  Katy thought about some of the awful things she had seen in Africa, the mauled and chewed up bodies, things she never talked about. “No,” she told him. “I’m coming too.”

  After a second, he nodded, and they slowly got out, one of them watching while the other retrieved the rifles. They each had a flashlight, and they approached with the guns and the lights pointed at the truck. Even at night, when red appears black, they knew it was a bloodbath.

  They circled and came from the rear so that the headlights did not blind them. They stopped fifty feet away. “Watch my back while I get closer,” Jackson said. Katy nodded, and he crept to the driver’s side. When his flashlight beam shone on the driver’s seat, the seatbelt was pinning a man’s shoulder and arm against the seat back. The bodypart was all that remained. Jackson fought against the bile that climbed up his throat but lost the fight.

  An hour later, Mike Hawn, a portrait photographer who worked for the police when needed, finished photographing the dead liger on the wrecker and the cab and what was inside it. Powerful lights driven by a small generator had been set up to light the truck and the area around it. “Looks like I’m done here,” Hawn told Jackson. “Anyway, I should get home. My wife and kids …” His voice trailed off, and his eyes darted around. Hawn was scared.

  “How soon can I get the pictures?” Jackson asked. Hawn used both film and digital cameras but liked to print his shots since they might be used in court.

  “They’ll be waiting for you at the station,” the photographer answered. “I sure don’t want ’em around.”

  Mike Hawn left without asking how soon he would get paid, something he always did. Still, he had stayed longer than some of the others, thought Jackson. Dustin Falmouth, a young doctor elected county coroner, left shortly after stating that he could not pronounce Wade Placett dead without a DNA analysis, since that was the only way he could identify the remains as Wade. “I can barely identify them as human,” he said.

  Sheriff Midden left after Falmouth allowed the EMTs to remove ‘the parts.’ Some State Police troopers had come and gone without doing much more than gawking. Jackson’s own officers searched for Wade’s body, but they did not venture far away from the lights or look all that hard.

  Katy was one of the first to leave. She had not wanted to go, despite having turned ashen, but once Angie arrived, Jackson had her take Katy to town. Now, the crime scene processing was complete, and Jackson sat alone in his Jeep in silence looking out at the yellow and black tape illuminated by his headlights. The tape looked foolish surrounding the truck out here in the open. He drove off.

  A short time later, Jackson pulled up outside the Placett house. Mandy rushed outside onto the porch as he exited the Jeep. Jackson looked at her and shook his head, and she dropped like a boxer hit with a knockout punch.

  Twenty-One

  Katy preferred her outdoor shower in Botswana to the motel bathtub. Even so, she was on her second tub of hot water. She had cried and cried during the first bath. Now, she simply lay in the too-short bathtub, a rolled towel pillowing her head, her legs up and resting on the ridge, while she drank wine and tried to forget. Her phone rang again, and she looked at the number, hoping it was Jackson and not more reporters calling. It was neither.

  “Some good news and some not so good news,” Stan Ely said by way of hello.

  “Good news first.”

  “Good news is we filed the injunction, and we drew a great judge. A ruling might even come tomorrow.”

  Katy felt her mouth move, but no sound came out.

  “Katy? Hey, what’s wrong?”

  It took a while. There were stops and starts and sobs, but she eventually told Stan about finding the – she wasn’t sure what to call it – the torso of Wade Placett.

  “F-me! No wonder you’re freaked out,” Stan said.

  Katy wiped her eyes with a corner of the bath towel. The minimum makeup she sometimes wore was rubbed off long ago. “You said there’s some ‘not so good news’.”

  “Oh man. People are guarding their checkbooks like a Jewish mother guards her daughter’s virginity.”

  Katy groaned and said, “So what will you do?”

  “I need something to entice the donors. Something special to tell them or somebody like you to make the public take notice. What do you say?”

  Although Katy often supported animal rescue groups, she didn’t want Stan and ARK in Idaho, not yet anyway, and she didn’t want Stan knowing about Kali or her baby ligers. “If you get funding, how soon would you come?” she asked.

  “An operation takes planning. Maybe a day or two.”

  A day or two? A lot could happen by then, Katy thought. “See how your injunction goes, Stan. If there’s a problem, I’ll get on board publicly, okay? Or maybe I can come up with something even better for you.” After the conversation ended, Katy remained in the bathtub although the water was cool now. Deception made her feel dirty.

  When Jackson returned to town, Bobby Grunfield, a reserve officer, was manning the station, while Brian Patterson and another reserve officer were on patrol. Grunfield, retired from the Air Force, was watching a TV interview of Iris. “She’s good,” Grunfield said.

  Jackson watched long enough to learn that Iris remained in favor of the public lion hunt despite the attack on Wade. “Anything I should know about?” he asked.

  Grunfield ticked off the incident reports with trained precision: a camper had been broken into and some money stolen from a Nebraska family; a minor traffic accident had sent a local man who was too old to drive to the clinic; two citations were handed out for public intoxication and one for indecency; and last night’s fighters had made bail. When Grunfield asked about Wade Placett, Jackson begged off from talking about it and went to his office.

  A large manila envelope lay on Jackson’s desk, and he opened it. After looking at a few photos he leaned back in the expensive desk chair he bought after hurting his back in an arrest scuffle and thought about Mandy Placett.

  Once he got her up and into the house, she had sent Josh and Tammy upstairs where the baby was asleep. She told them to stay there. She ignored their repeated questions of “What’s wrong, Mommy?” and “Where’s Daddy?”. After that, he followed Mandy into the kitchen where she poured two shots of bourbon. Seated beside a refrigerator covered with yellow duck magnets and kid’s artwork, he told her what little he knew for certain and some of what he suspected. She listened to it all with dry eyes and a blank face. When he finished, he removed the untouched glass of Wild Turkey she had been squeezing the whole time and said he would call someone to come over.

  “Rhonda Fedder,” Mandy said before she got up and walked out.

  Jackson listened to her climb the stairs, each step as heavy as if her ankles were weighted, and then he heard a door close. He phoned Rhonda Fedder, told her what had happened, and sat in the kitchen to wait for her to arrive. A few minutes later, the wailing began. Even muted by a closed door, it was as piercing a sound as anything Jackson ever had heard. He had not been the one who told Nancy Larson’s mother the girl was dead. He knew that it was cowardly, but he was grateful when Med Fedder’s wife arrived and, after talking to her, he could leave.

  “Chief?” Bobby tapped on the open door, and Jackson covered up the photos. “Chief, there’s a woman here to see you. The gal that does the local
evening news on ABC. She says you know her. Says you’re friends. She’s not the first reporter to come here tonight. I told her that.”

  Karen Cormac was waiting by the entrance. She was a small and shapely brunette who wasn’t pretty enough to get a national news desk. Jackson had met her three years earlier while helping to search for two missing girls near Rexburg. Cormac had shown more sensitivity and dignity than most other reporters when the girls’ bodies were found. They shook hands, and he said, “Friends, Karen?”

  She smiled sheepishly and told Jackson she wanted to interview him about the latest lion attack. Lion had become the generic word used to mean all of the cats.

  “Go interview the mayor instead,” said Jackson. “She likes it.” He didn’t mind answering questions if it helped solve a case, but the media could not help the dead.

  “I already tried,” Cormac said. “But she prefers the national desk to regional.” The reporter paused to see if Jackson objected to her comment. When he didn’t, she said, “Just a few questions. And I won’t ask for graphic descriptions. But you were there, Chief Hobbs. You discovered the body. Don’t you think people should know how dangerous these wild cats really are? Hunters need to be told the truth.”

  Jackson thought it over. “Okay. A few questions, that’s it. And we do it outside.”

  Jackson donned his gray Riverton hat and blue nylon police jacket. The camera crew was waiting and ready in the parking lot. Cormac began by asking him to confirm Wade’s identity, but Jackson refused to do so pending the coroner’s report. She asked about the ligers and then moved on to the public hunt in general. Some questions Jackson answered and some he avoided. To end the interview Karen Cormac said, “Chief Hobbs, do you have any advice for the hunters? What can they do to be safe?”

  “Stay home,” Jackson said.

  Iris stormed into Jackson’s office a half-hour later. Bobby Grunfield, trailing behind her, gave a helpless and apologetic shrug.