by Mark Morris
He stared at his bike. He reckoned the distance between the front door and his ride wasn’t one he could cross before the tiger cut him off. Even though the animal was probably half-starved from its keepers’ neglect, it could see, hear, run and kill better than he could on his very best day. The damn thing had almost got him when all he was sprinting for was the door at his ass. He had to find the rifle. He needed more power, and a scope. Hunt it like they did in Africa or India or whereeverthefuck a tiger like that was from. He ducked inside and immediately wanted back out again.
Orrin breathed through his mouth, trying not to smell the rot breaking down Val’s body. She smelled worse than the carcasses they threw in the animals’ cages. Of course she did. She was whole, guts and all. She was human.
That was his way out.
But before that.
* * *
TUESDAY
Raymond asked, “So, you’re the lawyer for the county now too?”
“Nosir. I’m just doing my job. You asked and I told you. And since you’re here looking me face to face, it doesn’t matter if I put these in your hand or toss ’em at your feet. You been duly served as I see it.” She held the papers out and waited another couple of seconds. Raymond reached over and snatched them out of her hand with a sound like “Fuck you” beneath the rattle of the envelopes, but definitely not a clear “Fuck you,” or else Pat would have been inclined to take another step or two up onto the porch after him.
“Unconstitutional!” he shouted. “It’s my goddamned property, and I can do what I want with it.”
“Tell it to the judge. Afternoon, Raymond.” Pat didn’t need to stick around to watch him open the envelope. She’d done her duty. Though she wanted the extra pleasure of seeing the results of her effort play out on his face, it would only aggravate him more to linger. Her job was to deescalate conflict. So, she tipped her hat and turned to leave. Pat stepped down and started back toward her truck. She heard the sound of paper being balled up, but didn’t care. If Raymond ignored the summons and they issued a bench warrant for his arrest, all the better. She’d be happy to come out again and gaffle him up personally. She’d even do it on her day off. Hell’s sake, she’d do it on Christmas if it meant shuttering Tigertown for good. It wasn’t until she heard the sound of something hard sliding against leather that she realized she shouldn’t have turned her back on the man. She spun around, flipping the leather tab off the hammer of her revolver and tried to draw. The bullet from Raymond’s gun caught her in the thigh and sent her sprawling. She lost hold of her gun and it bounced out of her hand and slid away in the dirt. Heavy footsteps raced toward her as she tried to scramble for it. But the broken bone and screaming hole in the back of her leg kept her from reaching it in time. A shadow fell on her and she turned over, holding up her hands.
Raymond loomed over her, his expression dark and angry. He hadn’t had time to regret what he’d done yet, but it would come. His face would change when he realized what a terrible mistake this was.
“It’s a fucking injustice and I won’t stand for it. This is my property and this is still America.”
“S-stop. Stop this. The D-deputy Sheriff knows I’m here. Everyone… knows. Th-this is… is official business. It’s not personal,” she lied. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming out to Tigertown. She’d seen the envelopes awaiting service and, instead of handing them on to her deputy, had taken them herself. She wanted to see his expression when she served him. Because it was personal.
Raymond’s face fell. Fury changed to fear and the realization that he’d just lost everything. His house, his farm, the cats, and now his freedom. Maybe, eventually, his life at the end of a needle. No matter what, he was going away. Pat felt a hint of satisfaction at the idea of it. But while the day was hot, she was starting to feel cold and tired and satisfaction soon became fear and realization. Oh, shit. I’m bleeding out.
She tried to reach for the radio transmitter on her epaulette. Raymond stepped on her arm and bore down. It hurt less than her leg, but still, it hurt goddamn bad. She couldn’t help it and cried out in a way she never had done on the job. The only female sheriff in all the state’s forty-six counties, she didn’t have the luxury of a high-pitched cry. In her own ears, she sounded like one of her sons. The seven-year-old had a way of keening high at his hurts. Pat thought she sounded like him just then.
She thought of her sons.
Raymond reached down and yanked the transmitter cable out of her radio. He took the whole thing and threw it back up toward the porch. It squawked once and was silent. “Pigs don’t squeal in Tigertown, Sheriff. It gets the cats too excited.”
* * *
FRIDAY
Orrin found the gun locker in a room downstairs. It might have been a dining room once, some place for the family that built this house to gather at the end of a long day of honest work and eat together. Orrin knew hard work, though he wasn’t sure he could call much of it honest. And if his family had ever taken a meal together, it was before he was old enough to hold on to such a memory. In the corner stood an oak gun cabinet like the one his grandfather had owned. The glass door and tiny lock wouldn’t keep anyone from getting their hands on anything inside—it wasn’t a safe, it was a china hutch for rifles. And Raymond had a collection. Any other time, Orrin would be considering taking the lot of them home with him. There was a pump shotgun, a pair of .22 calibre rifles, and exactly what he was looking for: a Remington bolt-action .30-06 with a scope. He tried the door and wasn’t surprised to find it unlocked. He grabbed the thirty-aught and considered taking the shotgun as well. He could only fire one rifle at a time, though, and if his plan worked, he wouldn’t need the shotgun at all. Still, while he’d have to leave the deer rifle behind to make it look like Raymond had put down the cat before taking himself out, the Mossberg was going to be Orrin’s reward for having to endure this mess of shit.
He pulled out the drawer underneath the cabinet. Boxes of ammunition were stacked neatly inside. It seemed to him the only space in the house that had any order. He dug through until he found the right calibre and took the box. He loaded four long rounds into the rifle, stuffed the remainder, still in the box, into his jacket pocket and returned upstairs.
His stomach did a hard flip in the doorway to the bedroom and he gagged again. Time in the house wasn’t doing anything to help him get used to the smell. He set the rifle by the door and shrugged out of his leather jacket, letting it drop to the floor. The buckle on the kidney belt made a loud clank as it hit the hardwood and he flinched a little. He pulled off his T-shirt and wrapped it around his face the way he’d seen kids playing in his neighbourhood do, pretending to be ninjas. He tied the short sleeves behind his head. The shirt was sweaty and smelled like his body odour and engine grease. Though the house was stifling and breathing through the cloth only made him feel hotter, the smell of it was soothing in its familiarity. Those were the aromas of sitting in his garage working on his bike, smoking a little weed and drinking a beer. They were the smells of normality and peace. Still, there was much more than a hint of Val’s stench getting through. He’d heard stories of how the smell of a dead body never came out of things. That you could smell it in a house for years afterward. He could burn his clothes and buy himself brand new ones, all except for the denim cut-off jacket he wore over his leathers—his kutte. He couldn’t replace that or the club patches sewn on it. He’d slice off the tattoo over his heart and throw that in the fire first. His kutte was therefore destined to always stink. If he survived this, he’d happily smell like a corpse. But first he needed to get out with both it and his skin intact.
Orrin took a deep breath through his mouth and approached the bed. Val’s skin was grey and mottled with long purple streaks, like her veins were swollen with dark ink. Her lips were the same purple and starting to blacken on the inside. Touching her felt like a very bad idea, even with his gloves on. As if death itself might rub off onto him. Bacteria was eating her up from the inside. He k
new it couldn’t hurt him. He could wash up and everything would be fine. Still, he felt a powerful repulsion at the idea of getting too close to her, like the prehistoric fear of death he’d inherited from his most distant ancestor, calling out to him from across millennia: this is unclean. This is a bad thing. But he couldn’t listen to that voice. Moving Val was the only plan he’d come up with, and nothing else was springing to mind.
He grabbed her wrist and yanked. He’d expected her to be stiff with rigor mortis, but she wasn’t. Her body was loose, and he pulled harder than he meant to, jerking her to the edge of the mattress. Moving her made the smell worse and a wave of stench hit him like a fist even through the shirt covering his face. He looked at the mattress where she had been, and though there was an indentation, there was no bloodstain. The bullet that killed her hadn’t exited out her back. He was thankful for small miracles. He bent over, slid an arm behind her shoulders, the other under her knees, and lifted her off the mattress. She was skinny and light, though her limp body was uncooperative. He had to hold her tightly and close. She was dressed for summer in a crop top and a pair of shorts. The feel of her cool skin against his naked belly made him feel ill. He hadn’t thought to put his coat back on and zip it up, and now it was too late. They were skin to skin, and he didn’t want to prolong it. He kept breathing through his mouth and walked out of the room holding the dead woman.
He carried her down the stairs and into the front room where her old man still sat cooling on the sofa. Orrin felt angry and wanted to kick the shit out of the fucker. Even if he was dead and couldn’t feel it, at least he’d know Raymond was getting the beating he deserved. He left the dead man alone and looked outside. There was no sign of the tiger that he could see. Just the porch and the drive and his bike.
At the door, he dipped down like he was curtsying to twist the deadbolt latch. Val’s head lolled around and he reflexively squeezed tighter to keep from dropping her. Like it would matter if he did. The feeling of her body giving in his arms broke him a little. She was soft and felt like a person. There was something wet on his arm. He tried not to think about it. Pulling the door open, he waited for a second, ready to kick it closed if he saw the blur of a big cat racing toward him. When nothing came running out of the weeds, he let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, and pushed at the screen door with Val’s hip. It opened with a pop and a loud creak. He stepped outside.
The stairs groaned beneath his weight as he descended. The sound made his back tense and his heart beat a little quicker. At the bottom, he stopped and listened. He couldn’t hear much above the breeze and his own breathing in the makeshift mask. He hazarded a glance back at the porch. Though there hadn’t been anything there a moment ago, he wanted—needed—to be certain he could get back inside. It was one thing to run a few feet into the house, but if it cut him off and he had to run the other direction, it was all over. It was a comfort to see nothing in between him and the front door. He took a few more steps out into the open and knelt down to lay her body in the dirt. He looked over his shoulder at the window to the second-storey bedroom. Crouched where he was, the window was clear of the eaves. Good enough.
Sunlight glinted off the rear-view mirror of his motorcycle, and with no sign of the animal around, the urge to sprint toward it pulled at him like a hook in his flesh. But my fuckin’ kutte’s in the house. Orrin chided himself for leaving it behind. Stress and fear were going to kill him as sure as an escaped tiger. He needed to get his shit together if he wanted to ride away from this place.
He stood and began walking quietly, but quickly, back to the house. Behind him he heard the rustle of the tall weeds. It might have been the breeze. Or it might have been a beast. Either way, his bladder almost let go and he sprinted for the front door.
He leaped up the stairs, nearly falling as he cleared the bottom four, but not the last two. He scrambled across the deck and ripped open the screen. It banged against the side of the house, and Orrin was inside and slamming the front door before the screen swung back into place.
“FUCK! YOU!” he screamed, ashamed at his naked terror. He shook and slammed a fist into the door. Pain reached up from his knuckles into his wrist, but he didn’t care, and he punched it again, shouting out his frustration. Taking a deep breath, he looked at his hand while he flexed it. It wasn’t broken. Sprained maybe, but as long as he could hold a throttle it’d be fine. More importantly, he felt sure he could still pull a trigger.
A soft sliding sound and a muted thump made Orrin jump again. He spun around, arms up in front of his face.
Raymond’s corpse had slumped over on the sofa. Whether it had been the reverberations of Orrin’s violence or simply gravity, the result was the same: Orrin’s chest felt tight and he was breathless. His vision blurred as he tried to keep from hyperventilating. “I hope you’re sweating in Hell, motherfucker!” he hissed from between clenched teeth. He went to the window and looked outside. If the tiger had been behind him, it wasn’t there now. He was beginning to feel like the animal was a dream. Raymond had drugged him somehow and he was hallucinating everything. Except, he could see Val out there dead in the road, and Raymond was spilling what was left of his brains onto the couch behind him. And this was still Tigertown. He wasn’t hallucinating. Somewhere out there, death was waiting, tooth and claw.
He stumbled into the kitchen and searched the cupboards until he finally found what he wanted in the one above the refrigerator. A big plastic jug of tequila stood next to a smaller bottle of cheap margarita mix with a woman wearing fruit on her head on the label. He grabbed the tequila, twisted off the cap, and took a healthy couple of gulps to settle his nerves. He forced himself to stop, replaced the cap and then the bottle. Just enough to give him the Dutch courage he needed.
He stomped upstairs, snatching his jacket off the floor and slinging it on without untying the T-shirt from around his face. He grabbed the rifle and went to wait at the window.
Earlier.
* * *
WEDNESDAY
Val stood in the doorway watching Raymond pull his stained shirt up over his head. He dropped it on the floor. She picked it up to throw in the fire pit along with the Sheriff’s uniform. “Did you get through? Did you try calling again?”
He shook his head. “Nope. They ain’t answerin’. I can’t imagine what the Soldiers can do to help, anyways. With what we already owe ’em too? There’s nothin’ in it for them.”
“Horseshit. They won’t get any of their money if we go to jail. Cats’re already takin’ care of the bitch. We throw this in the burn pit with her uniform,” she said, holding up his shirt, “and all we got left to do is get rid of the truck in the barn. Choppin’ a truck is the least bad thing those sons a bitches get up to. It don’t cost them a thing.”
Raymond stepped out of his pants. His tight, off-white underwear sagged off of a skinny ass that was twenty-five years past firmness. He looked at his wife with tired eyes and said, “We’re fucked up way past fixin’. You ought to pack a bag and go. I reckon they’ll be out tomorrow at the latest lookin’ for her. I’ll say you went to see your sister up in Mercy Lake and you weren’t here when she came by to give me the papers. Takes a whole day to get there, so nobody’ll be able to say for sure just when you hit the road. Evelyn’ll vouch for you.”
“And what are you going to do?” Her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open. “You’re not gonna…”
“Go grab your bag.” He stepped into a pair of jeans he pulled off the top of the overflowing hamper. “Pack up what you need and get on the road. No sense in both of us getting caught up in this.”
Val didn’t say anything as he walked out of the room. She didn’t ask him to come back, or offer a better plan. She just let him go.
When he returned, she had the bag on the bed and was stuffing clothes into it. She looked up from what she was doing. Her brow knitted as she saw the gun in his hand. “Are they here already?”
He raised the pistol and fired.
>
* * *
FRIDAY
Sweat moistened the shirt on his head, but the cloth kept it from dripping in his eyes while he watched the road. He’d scanned the weeds and the far edges of the property with the rifle scope, but he wasn’t catching sight of the tiger. He’d thought for certain Val’s body and the promise of an easy meal would lure it out, but it had been forty minutes and it hadn’t taken the bait. He wondered whether it had wandered off, looking for other prey. There was no shortage of horses and cattle in the countryside around the county. Sheep and a few alpacas too. He decided he’d give it another twenty minutes, and then he was going to try sneaking out to get away. And then he saw it.
It was stalking around the opposite side of the house by the barn, instead of where he’d seen it when he tried to take the shot with the pistol. His heart thumped harder at the sight of it. The thing was big and moved like liquid. It was beautiful and terrifying. A perfect thing. He almost regretted having to kill it.
The tiger slowed its pace and lowered its head as it came closer to Val’s body, sniffing at her. Orrin centred the crosshairs on the top of its skull and waited.
What are you waiting for? Dig in.
The animal looked around as if it was trying to figure out where Val had come from. It reached out with a paw and grabbed at her. Val’s body jerked like it was a child’s doll and the tiger bit down on her neck and quickly started to drag her back the way it had come. At the edge of the road near the weeds, it plopped down and tore off a long strip of her flesh.
Bile burbled up Orrin’s throat, stinging and threatening to choke him.
He swallowed, re-aimed, and squeezed the trigger.
The sound in the bedroom was deafening and he thought he might have let out a yelp of pain, though he didn’t hear it if he did. His ears were dead and ringing; his head hurt a little. He pushed past all of that to pull back on the bolt handle and eject the spent casing. He shoved the bolt back into place and chambered a new round. Through the scope he saw the tiger lying next to Val. A pool of dark blood was spreading from its skull and muddying up the dirt. He contemplated putting another round in it, but deaf or not, the rifle was loud, and he didn’t want to risk attracting any more attention than that shot might’ve already. Even this far out in the boonies people didn’t like hearing rifle reports near where their kids got off the bus, or where they were grazing their livestock.
