Tiger

by William Richter

Wally opened the box. Inside were at least a hundred snapshots—some regular photos and many Polaroids—of women. They weren’t porn shots or anything, just regular candid shots of women on the porch of the lodge, in fishing boats, at the dining table, cooking waffles in the lodge kitchen. Some must have been taken by a third party, because Townsend himself was included in a good many, often with a sly, drunken grin on his face and his arm around the woman. By their condition, Wally figured that none were recent, and in fact were probably well over ten or fifteen years old.

  The Richard Townsend in the photos was at least that much younger than the most recent newspaper photo of him that Wally had found. He looked to be in his early forties and still quite lean, lacking the barrel chest that more-recent shots revealed. In the photos, his hair was still dark or salt-and-pepper gray, rather than the full silver of his latest photos. Wally was struck by how much he looked like Kyle in the shots, a similarity that was harder to see in some of the later images.

  For their part, the women seemed happy enough to be in Townsend’s company. From small details—clothing, hairstyle, makeup—Wally could also tell that they came from various socioeconomic groups. A few looked like they might be local women, while others had a prissy, refined look that suggested Townsend might have brought them to the lodge from the city.

  There had been a time in his life when Richard Townsend was quite a player, and the lodge had been his getaway bachelor pad. The age of the photos suggested that his wild years had coincided with the time of Kyle’s birth. Almost every one of the many, many women was a potential candidate to be his biological mother. Wally checked the photos front and back, finding no labels or marking that would help identify them individually.

  For Wally it was an exciting discovery, but to Kyle it would feel like a disaster—the odds of tracking down more than a handful of these women were slim, and it would be nearly impossible to identify Kyle’s birth mother without more clues. Wally emptied all the photographs into her messenger bag and included whatever documents from the desk might be helpful later on. She wouldn’t tell Kyle about any of them, for now. Wally regretted the necessity of the lie, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

  She was about to restore the banquette seat to its original position when she heard a sound—what was it? It was soon followed by the distinctive sound of footsteps, just outside on the porch. She froze. Was Kyle out there looking for her? Wally moved to the door of the den, opening it just enough to see that Kyle was still asleep on the couch they had shared. She closed the door again and stood still, listening. She soon heard another series of footsteps outside, louder and closer this time. A second person, larger than the first.

  Wally tried to imagine who they could be, other than more of Townsend’s men. They could be thieves who had come to burglarize the lodge, assuming it was too early in the season for the place to be occupied. In that case, they would have seen the rented Explorer parked outside and abandoned their plan. Could they be hunters, poaching the private land? Poachers often “spotlighted” deer from vehicles late at night, but then they wouldn’t be on foot, scouting out the lodge. Neither of the options seemed likely, and Wally wondered how Townsend’s men had tracked her and Kyle there. She had been so careful.

  13.

  WALLY’S MIND SPUN, SIFTING THROUGH HER OPTIONS. First things first: she returned to the cache and pulled out the SIG. She chambered a round as quietly as she could, then retrieved a box of ammo for the weapon and placed it in her jacket pocket. She also grabbed one of the survival knives, slipping the sheathed blade inside her right boot.

  Her first thought was to go back into the main room and wake Kyle up, but it seemed likely that the intruders were watching through the windows. Crossing the floor in plain sight would make her a vulnerable target. For now, they probably had no idea where she was, and that was an advantage.

  Now another sound came to her: more footsteps, this time from above. At least one of the men had found his way into the lodge and up to the second floor. How? He was slowly moving from room to room as if making a systematic search.

  Her heart racing now, Wally felt trapped inside the den. She needed to get outside, where she would be free to move. Wally slid the gun under the belt of her pants and swung her messenger bag over her shoulder. She chose one of the windows and unlocked it. She pushed the sliding window upward. It squeaked a little, but Wally raised it just a bit at a time, making sure the noise was kept to a minimum. It took almost a minute, but she finally opened the window enough to be able to crawl through.

  The outside shutter was still closed. She pulled the survival knife from her boot and carefully slid the blade between the two shutter doors. She moved the blade upward until it hit the outside latch. As delicately as she could, Wally raised the knife blade more until the latch flipped over, making a slight rattle, but no more. The shutters were unlocked.

  There were no more sounds of footsteps outside, so Wally blew out the oil lamp and edged the shutters outward, just enough to poke her head out and get a look around. The grounds outside the window—bathed in bright moonlight—were clear. As quickly as she could, Wally rolled headfirst out the window and eased herself onto the ground. She closed the shutters behind her and pulled the SIG out from behind her waistband.

  With the handgun held high in front of her, Wally stalked methodically around the lodge. She encountered no one—both men were probably inside by now. She made her way back to the porch and surveyed the main room through the window. One of the oil lamps was now lit, and the blankets on the couch were thrown back. Kyle was nowhere in sight. Wally’s heart sank. Was he looking for her, or had the men already grabbed him? Could he be hiding somewhere in the lodge?

  Her thinking was interrupted by a chilling sight: the second security man from outside Harmony House—the farm boy tight end with the blond goatee—emerged from the kitchen and crossed the floor of the main room. He moved carefully, a cold and focused expression on his face and a gleaming steel .44 automatic raised high in front of him. His eyes scanned the room as he walked, searching. From where she crouched on the porch outside, Wally could see the dark bruising on the man’s neck from the devastating clothesline maneuver she had used to strike him down. Most men would still be in an intensive-care unit after an injury like that, and to see him hunting her was unnerving. He reached the far end of the room and disappeared from view, moving in the direction of the lodge’s staircase.

  Something else about the sight of the man got Wally’s attention: when he and his partner had confronted her and Kyle outside Harmony House, neither had shown a weapon, even after Wally had wounded them. Clearly the men’s mission had been to retrieve their boss’s son unharmed, and they hadn’t risked bringing weapons into that situation.

  Something had changed. The men had come with guns this time, and Wally considered the reasons: Kyle knew incriminating things about his father’s business, and said that Townsend would do anything to keep him under his control. Maybe the old man had decided his son was beyond saving—especially now that he had involved Wally, an outsider. If getting rid of Kyle was the new mission, Wally figured the goatee guy was more than ready to make it happen . . . and disappear her at the same time.

  “Let me go!”

  Kyle’s terrified cry sounded from the second floor.

  Shit. Wally moved immediately toward the doorway and grabbed the handle, ready to charge in, but stopped herself short. Going straight up the staircase would be stupid . . . and probably what the intruders were hoping for. From her circuit around the lodge, she remembered a firewood rack on the east side that stood at least six feet high—within reaching distance of the overhanging eaves.

  Wally shrugged off her messenger bag and set it down at the base of the wall. She slid her gun back inside her waistband and clambered up the heaping woodpile, pulling herself up onto the eave. The lodge had a narrow roof that ran
all around the building, between the first and second floors. There were two shuttered windows on that side of the lodge, and Wally moved as quietly as she could along the shingled surface to the nearest window. She flipped open the latch and swung the shutters open. She tried to lift the window, but it didn’t budge at all—locked. She sidled along the cedar shingles to the second window, opening those shutters and trying the window. It was tight, but Wally pushed upward with all her strength and the window slid open just enough for her to slip through.

  She heard Kyle yell out in pain, the sound sending a chill through Wally. The cry was muffled and distant—he was somewhere at the far side of the lodge and he was suffering.

  Moving carefully but with a new sense of urgency, she crawled in through the window and reached down to feel the floor underneath. It was covered with some sort of rug, but there was no furniture in her way, so she lowered herself to the floor of the completely dark room. She could light her way by the glow of her cell phone, but when she reached for her messenger bag she realized that she’d left it behind. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing: a light would reveal what was ahead, but it would also give away her position. She decided she was better off moving covertly in darkness, even if that meant feeling her way along.

  Wally had no idea what sort of obstacles were in front of her, so she decided to stay as low to the floor as she could. She began sliding slowly across whatever room she was in, feeling the way in front of her with her hands. She edged around a single bed and a storage trunk, finally reaching the far wall. Her hands found a closed door. When she reached up and pushed it open, the door creaked loudly. She froze, but if anyone heard there was no response.

  She crept through the open doorway and found herself on a wood floor, its surface rough and heavily grooved from decades of use. She spotted a dim, yellowish light far ahead—it looked like light from one of the oil lamps leaking out from under a closed door, at least fifty feet away. The second floor had one long hallway that ran the length of the building, and the room with the light in it was at the far end. She could hear movement in the room, and the sound of murmured speech. She couldn’t make out the words, or who was speaking.

  As she crept on, Wally’s senses of hearing and touch became hyperalert, helping her navigate along the nearly pitch-black hallway. It seemed like every movement and sound in the entire lodge reverberated through the wood and up into her body. She heard a very faint scratching sound and stopped to listen. The sound grew closer and closer until it was upon her, and a small creature—a mouse or rat—scurried over her right hand. Wally couldn’t stop herself from recoiling at the repulsive feeling of tiny claws on her skin, and her hand clenched around the grip of her gun, nearly firing a round before she brought herself back under control.

  Wally cursed silently, and took a moment for her breathing to return to normal. She continued on and began to think about her strategy once she reached the closed doorway....

  “I came alone! There’s no one else here!” Kyle shouted desperately from behind the closed door. His words were followed by the sound of a fist landing hard on flesh and a groan of pain.

  Shit. Kyle was behind that door trying to cover for her, and was being brutally punished for it. Wally’s blood raged—her first impulse was to break into the room with the SIG blazing, but she knew she had to be smarter than that.

  What was the best way to go in? If she found another room on this hallway, she could climb back outside and onto the eaves, working her way around the lodge until she had a view into the room where Kyle was being held. Wally could use that position—outside in the darkness, looking in—to her advantage.

  She inched along—feeling the wall for a doorway—but had only moved a few feet when her hand located an object sitting on the floor in the middle of the hallway. It was a rubbery-feeling rectangle about a quarter of an inch high. Easy: a smartphone, with the screen facing down.

  One of the intruders must have dropped it. The phone could end up being a good source of information about Townsend’s security team. Without thinking twice, she grabbed it. The screen lit up and instantly cast a dim blue glow all around her.

  The guy with the goatee was crouched low—right in front of Wally—a large, unlit flashlight in his hand and a cruel, shit-eating smirk on his face.

  “Hello, bitch,” he said.

  Before Wally could react, he pointed the flashlight at her eyes and switched it on. Her world went completely white—the pupils of her eyes had been dilated from so many minutes spent in total darkness, and the powerful beam blinded her.

  In a flash, Wally jumped to her feet and raised her SIG, firing random rounds at the spot she had last seen goatee guy but aiming high to make sure Kyle wouldn’t accidently get hit—Blam! Blam! Blam!—then spun herself around in every direction and kept firing blindly—Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!—until a fist crashed down on her forearm, sending the gun flying.

  A muscled arm reached around her chest and pulled her in, but Wally spun free and kept spinning. She performed a series of high strikes at face level with knee-high sweeps mixed in. One of the kicks landed hard on the guy’s chest, and Wally heard him stumble backward. She used that momentary advantage to turn and run back down the hallway in the direction she had come, but after just a few steps she heard a tumbling sound behind her and then something rolled under her feet—the big flashlight—and she stumbled.

  She smashed hard into the floor, and when she sprang back up it was right into the grip of two powerful arms. They wrapped around her from behind, reaching under her armpits and then up around her neck. Two massive hands clasped together behind her neck to complete an unbreakable headlock, and then the person lifted her body up until her feet were off the floor, hanging free. He had to be at least a foot taller than she was. Wally flailed and kicked, but the hold was firm and her resistance futile.

  To conserve her energy, Wally commanded her body to relax. Her lungs were burning, and she struggled to regain her breath. Soon she felt his breath on her cheek—hot and humid, smelling of minty-sweet chewing tobacco.

  “That’s it,” a deep, calm voice whispered into her ear. “Just relax . . . ”

  Wally felt a tickling sensation just behind her ear as the words were spoken—facial hair. His goatee.

  “How’s your throat?” she snarled, still struggling for air.

  “It still hurts bad,” the man said in a deep southern accent. He tensed his arm muscles so that Wally’s arms bent awkwardly at the shoulder joint, sending a hot, searing pain through her entire body. Wally gasped, trying to breathe her way through it, feeling like she might pass out anytime from the pressure he applied to the arteries in her neck.

  She was determined to keep her brain working no matter what.

  “You know, Alabama,” she spat, taking a guess, “you look like a white-trash moron with that goatee. ”

  She felt him react to the sound of his new nickname and figured her guess had hit the mark. This was good. If she could unnerve him in any way, she might create an opportunity for herself.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled, his sickly-sweet tobacco breath swirling around her ear, making her gag. “Alabama is right. Good guess.”

  “You seem like someone who has some legitimate skills,” Wally kept at him, “maybe even elite. Military, right? A job like that has real meaning, especially during wartime. But look where you are now—you’ve traded on that service to become an errand boy for some rich asshole. That must leave you with an empty feeling.”

  “It’s gonna get bad for you, little girl,” he said, his voice sounding more stressed now.

  Wally struggled again, trying to break free from the hold even though she knew it was pointless. Her eyesight had begun to return, and slowly the doorway at the end of the hallway came into focus. A man stood there, an oil lamp in one hand. Wally couldn’t make out anything in the room behind him.

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nbsp; This second man was Asian with a short, stocky build and long black hair swept back. He walked down the hallway toward them, stopping a few feet in front of Wally and looking her body up and down.

  “This is the one?” the Asian guy said flatly. “This little thing took you down?”

  Alabama hesitated before answering. “Yes.”

  “That’s an embarrassment. You have a hundred and fifty pounds on her.”

  “He’s hurting me,” Wally croaked to the second guy. Speaking was difficult from the tight headlock, but she made the effort to sound even worse. “I feel sick.”

  “Like I give a shit,” the Asian guy said, expressionless.

  But now Wally could see his mind working on the question of her well-being. She had an opening. Wally suddenly began struggling again, twisting and writhing in Alabama’s arms, and he tightened his grip. She made a choking sound for a moment, then went completely limp, her eyes shut and legs dangling loose. She held her breath. The men were silent at first, but she stayed with it. Ten seconds, twenty. Forty. Wally’s chest began to ache badly, and she wondered how long she could keep it up. She must have started to turn blue or something, because the Asian guy finally spoke up.

  “Jesus,” he said to Alabama. “Is she really out? If you break her, you bought her—you can answer to the man yourself.”

  Wally’s lungs were about to burst, but she held tight. She heard some movement—it sounded like the Asian guy was crouching down, and then a slight metallic tone: the oil lamp being set on the floor. The man stood upright again and Wally could feel him moving close. He laid his hand on her rib cage, feeling for movement.

  “She’s not breathing. . . . ” he said, sounding anxious. She opened one eye very slightly, enough to see that he had moved in close.

  “Back off!” Alabama warned.

  Too late. Wally flexed her muscles and brought her right knee up as hard and high as she could. It struck the Asian guy in the mouth, and Wally could feel the man’s teeth shattering on impact. Blood spurted in every direction as he reeled back, howling in pain and rage. He quickly regained his balance and lunged at Wally.