Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  “I’m supposed to meet him here or do something here or maybe he’s bringing her here. To the lions’ den. I don’t know.” For all the running I’d done in the past, I couldn’t catch my breath. Or maybe my heart had just never raced this fast. “This was all I could figure out, just to get here. We kept calling you but . . . ”

  “Shit. I left my phone inside.”

  She was immediately on high alert, both our heads whipping around, looking for . . . anything. Everything. There were so many hiding places. They’d wanted the zoo to look like a forest, and it did. Trees and caves everywhere. Wendy had designed this place; she knew it better than anyone.

  “Let me get outta here, get him back inside,” she said, trying to move Simba along. He didn’t want to go, instead rolling over on his back, for Wendy to scratch his belly.

  “Yes, yes, Mommy loves you, but we’ve gotta go . . . ”

  He swatted her, lightly, to get her attention back.

  “C’mon, Simsy. Inside.” She reached toward his neck to pull him up, but all it took was one swipe of his paw to knock her over.

  That’s when I saw something whizz by, so fast and quiet it was almost invisible. But I could tell that something had happened, by Simba’s reaction. A yelp that said pain. And with it, a stream of blood started to bubble out of his neck, soaking and matting his fur, but not slowing him down.

  “Oh my God . . . he’s bleeding . . . ” Wendy touched it, and the lion struck at her again, harder. A lot harder.

  Then a second something whistled through the air, and this time Wendy was hit. She touched her shoulder, incredulously, and her hand came back covered with blood. Not the lion’s, but hers.

  “Jesus Christ! Wendy, get outta there.” I was looking at her and all around us, trying to find help. Trying to find where Mizell and her team were, who were supposed to be backing me up. Trying to find where the shots were coming from. I reached over the wall towards Wendy, but got zapped by the electrical current I’d forgotten.

  “FUCK.”

  I yanked my arm away and slammed back to the ground, so hard it felt like there was no padding between my lungs and the grass. With my feet, I tried to kick at the glass, but it was too thick. It didn’t budge.

  “Shit. We’ve gotta get the current off. Where the fuck is Mizell?” I was screaming it; I didn’t care who heard me as I raced up and down along the fence, trying to find a way in, but there was nothing. Just glass, and voltage. Designed to keep them in, and me out. The words from the poem were beginning to make sense, horrible sense. Was it Wendy the kidnapper was after, and not Skip?

  A tussle with the king of the jungle . . .

  Becomes a dance of death you don’t want to bungle.

  . . . only question is, bullet or knife?

  That question has just been answered. Bullet.

  Fuck it. I had bullets of my own. I grabbed my pistol, but what the fuck did I shoot at? The lion or the kidnapper, somewhere I couldn’t even see? What if I hit Wendy instead? I couldn’t get a clean shot.

  Clean shot? Any shot. I’d never shot the fucking thing before.

  “NO! Don’t shoot him!” Wendy yelled at me. The lion was still trying to get her to fix what hurt, but she was bleeding more than he was now.

  “Where the fuck is everybody? How do I get in there?”

  The height wasn’t the problem—I cleared 7'6" at Sydney—the electricity was. I could grab the top of the glass wall and pull myself over, but my hands would be fried. There wasn’t any choice. If whoever it was wanted to shoot at me, at least I was wearing a bulletproof vest. Better he do that, than keep shooting at them.

  Maybe I could survive.

  Maybe I would be the distraction, long enough to get Wendy out.

  I circled back and came running at a curve . . .

  . . . braced my body . . . threw my legs over before my torso . . .

  Ankles, calves, knees . . .

  They got zapped in that order. I couldn’t stand up, I could barely breathe, but at least I was inside.

  “Please, please, don’t hurt him . . . don’t . . . ” Wendy was trying to save herself and the lion, but I didn’t know if she could do both. “Cover his eyes. Cover. He’ll stop.”

  I pulled at my coat to get it off, and tried to pull myself along the grass.

  The lion weighed forty-five pounds less than I did, but he was all muscle. I wasn’t, not anymore. All smelly jowls and fur. And slobber. And blood. And now he was sniffing around, almost on top of me.

  “Cave . . . behind you . . . ” Wendy said, trying to point with her arm, but she was moaning with pain.

  I tried to move toward it, hoping the lion would follow. Herky-jerky, on my elbows, face up. The lion, face down. It was the Colosseum, the dance of death that the kidnapper wanted.

  “Come get me, you Goddamn motherfucker . . . ”

  I was growling at both of them now, the lion and the kidnapper; pushing myself up to my knees and then to my electrocuted legs, flinging my coat over Simba’s head.

  He thrashed back—blinded, roaring—everything a blur of tawny brown fur and clothes and paws and arms as the lion took me down . . .

  . . . just as I saw another blur of something out of the corner of my eyes. Somebody, running toward the enclosure: Mizell, one of her sleeves soaked with blood too, but it didn’t get in the way of her perfect aim.

  She shot, I yelled, and the bullet shattered the glass fence.

  And then her second bullet shattered the lion.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “You’ll be happy to know. ‘Daddy’ passed. His first test,” the kidnapper said.

  “What test?” Skip said. “What are you talking about?”

  “All good things. To those who wait. And I am one. Who has waited.”

  He grabbed a nail and hammered it into the wall, as furiously as if he were Ethan, attacking the lion. But this was a different king of the jungle that was being pummeled now, a homemade one being put up on display, made of construction paper and yarn and pipe cleaners and pieces of fur cut off an old jacket. The kind of lion a grade-schooler would make, for show-and-tell up on a bulletin board. But then the hand that put it up there kept stabbing away at it, now with a pair of scissors instead of a hammer. A silly lion, being stabbed to death.

  “What are you doing?” Skip screamed.

  The hand kept stabbing until it was finished, exhausted.

  Then he looked up at his handiwork on the wall, just a few feet below an empty square of institutional green, lighter than the surrounding wall, where the loudspeaker used to be. From that box of golden wood, through a circle of mesh in the center front, the voice of their principal used to come out. Their p-a-l. The Voice of God, they called it, and probably even thought. Now, there was no box, no God, no stranger’s voice, except for the one in his own head, guiding him along.

  “What test?” Skip begged again.

  He ignored her. A bit of light came into the room, from where his helpers had boarded up the windows. A gap here and there, just enough for him to see to put up his outsider art on the four walls. With a few snips and tucks—that old artistry coming back, learned from making his volcano!—he’d already sprinkled gold glitter onto a pair of deer antlers, real ones, four points, that still had skull and bristly hair at the base. He’d smashed a vase into shards for a mosaic. Construction paper and glitter. Elmer’s glue and yarn. Paper plates and wax paper and crayons. Old magazines, Lifes and Looks, that he’d collected at flea markets. Using a peeler, he’d sheared the waxy skin of a yellow apple from its flesh, the spiral unfurling in one long unbroken chain. His DNA may have had a few breaks in its chain, but his slinky of golden apple skin didn’t. And now, the underside of it, bits of pulp left on, had turned brown and decaying.

  He hadn’t made his artworks in order, but he would start putting them up that way. Everything had already been set down, in the record books; the new was what he did with it. And that he had decided long ago; he was going to tell a stor
y. One story, from childhood, from birth even, to death; a master design only he could understand.

  “What did Daddy do? Please. What test? What are you making him do? Let me go . . . I’ll be quiet. I won’t say anything. I don’t know anything. I haven’t seen anything. You’ll be safe. They won’t be able to find you . . . ”

  So many words, a torrent, their first real conversation, but he had stopped listening after the first part: What test? What are you making him do? What did Daddy do?

  “You really want to know?” he asked. “I sometimes find it’s better not to know. Better to be. Kept in the dark. As it were. And there are so many ways. For that to be achieved. Your blindfold, for one.”

  He touched the back of her head, tightening it up; a few stray hairs of Skip’s got caught in the knot; he yanked them out.

  “But if you do know, and you want to forget . . . because Knowledge. Is. Power. And Power. Is electricity . . . ”

  “I . . . never mind. Just . . . I’m sorry I said anything. Really.” Now she was backtracking. He didn’t like that. He wanted a person to say what they meant. He didn’t like weakness. Or excuses. Or changing your mind.

  “No. Keep talking. I love these little chats. Better to get everything. Out in the open. Better to. Finish things.”

  He moved into the adjoining room, the old principal’s office that he’d turned into his command center. This was where he’d really had to acquit himself. A single school desk was fine for her, but for him . . . he needed things. Things for listening. And talking. Monitors. Computers. Webcams. Remote cameras placed ever so strategically, to see everything that Ethan Holt was doing. A phone, with a voice-filtering screen (as if he needed that!) and enough machinery to scramble any attempt to find him. It was the high-tech payoff to all the work he had done over the last ten years, the money he had made building things. If this gig didn’t work out, surely he could get hired on at Radio Shack. Or the Apple Store. At the “Genius Bar.”

  He kept talking, doing his best to project his faltering voice so Skip could still hear, as he dug through the various pieces of equipment he had already prepared.

  “This was one of their favorite ways of keeping us. In the dark. At the home.”

  A long electrical cord was in one hand; something that looked like an old-fashioned pair of headphones was in the other.

  He came back to Skip and put it over her head, moved some hair away so he could adhere the spongy electrodes to either side of her head, just below her ears, just below where the blindfold almost bisected her face.

  “What! What are you doing?” She thrashed more than he imagined a skinny girl could.

  He should have taped her upper shoulders to the chair too, but he hadn’t predicted she’d be so curious about what her father was going through.

  “Things have been set in motion that . . . well, you’ll see. You’ll feel. I call this the ‘killing two birds. With one stone.’ Answer. Share a little bit of myself with you—what I went through at the home. The original ‘time out,’ you might call it. And share a little bit of what your father just went through. To find you. Curiosity killed the . . . well, you know.”

  “But I don’t want to anymore! I changed my mind! Whatever I did to make you mad . . . ”

  “I don’t know exactly how many volts your father felt at the zoo, so I’ll just have to. Guess.”

  Adjusting for size and age, he guessed that 25,000 volts would do the trick for now.

  And it did.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I tried to make Wendy laugh, since it was my fault she was in a hospital bed, just out of surgery, wrapped up in bandages and butterfly stitches, enough damage to keep her there for a few days. I tried to make her do anything except cry, since it was my fault the lion she had raised from a cub was now dead, and she nearly had joined him.

  “Talk about what the cat dragged in . . . ” She was too doped up to get the joke, lost in a fog of painkillers and a forest of hanging bags of blood and thick, clear liquids. Good thing, because it was a bad joke. A horrible joke. A horrible . . . everything.

  Why the FUCK hasn’t he called again? I did what he wanted, didn’t I? Is that it then, the end, no more? He called me there, but . . . a wild goose chase. A fucking . . . if he wanted me dead, he could have just shot me. Instead of Wendy. Instead of the lion.

  “Goddamn it.” I banged at the wall, setting off a searing pain through my arm. They’d put salves all over me for the electrical burns and shot me full of electrolytes; I’d recover soon enough from that. But from this . . .

  That’s when Mizell came in. She’d changed, a new jacket now on, covering up her bandaged arm. Oh yeah. He shot her too, but instead of sympathy, all I felt was rage.

  “You. I told you not to come. He said it. No police. We should have listened. If you hadn’t been there, Skip would have . . . ”

  “If I hadn’t been there, the Lion King would have ripped you to pieces. I’m sorry it had to go down that way, but . . . he’s going after everybody you love. First Skip, now Wendy. You he won’t touch; he wants you to see it all.”

  “Jesus. So he just got us there to set us all up. What kind of sick fuck . . . why didn’t you get him? You said you were backing me up, and you let this happen to her . . . ”

  “I think that’s when I was mopping up my own blood.” Touché, from Mizell; she gave as good as she got. “We found some van tracks, up a few hundred feet away, up on this hill. A perfect vantage point, trees all around; the van could stay hidden. It couldn’t have been designed any better. We’re making tire molds, see what we can find out. But the position . . . high-powered, long-distance. It fits. This was planned, nothing last minute. Nothing left to chance.”

  “So he was aiming at us?” I asked.

  “Hard to tell. Maybe we just got in the way. Because here’s the thing: he wasn’t using bullets.”

  “What the fuck . . . of course he was. Look! She’s got a bullet wound! You do too!”

  “Well, bullets, yes . . . but not with gunpowder in them.” Mizell held up something that looked like a smashed vitamin capsule, only metallic, with a cone nose. Looked like a bullet to me. “The powder was scraped out, and instead . . . ”

  She began digging through her pocket for a piece of paper, which she pulled out. “They ran the lion’s blood. Something called . . . ‘nandrolone.’ That’s what it was,” she said, reading from a strip of torn legal pad that also held a wad of dried chewing gum. “He wanted to get the lion all . . . hopped up, and just see what happened.”

  “Nandrolone? Are you sure?” I asked, stunned. In a split second, I’d floated from that hospital room to the track in Sydney, getting my face pummeled.

  “What? What does that mean to you?” Mizell stared at me.

  “This guy attacked me at the Olympics . . . Mark Casey. They caught him doping. Steroids. That’s what he was taking. Nandrolone. You swallow it, you don’t inject it. It’s not used that much anymore, but in 2000 . . . ” I trailed off.

  Mizell grabbed the dried gum off the paper and stuck it back in her mouth. “This guy gets all juiced up on nandrolone, and the same thing happens to the lion today? Somebody shoots it full of the very same steroid? Isn’t that . . . what’s that word you college guys have? ‘Poetic justice?’”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “So humor me. You get attacked, and you leave this guy off your enemies list? Maybe I’m just a dumb cop, but . . . ”

  “That was nearly fifteen years ago.”

  “‘You’ve kept me waiting?’ Fifteen years? Seems to be right on target.”

  “No. It can’t be.”

  “Why not? Pissed off is pissed off, and it just gets worse over time. Sounds like a motive to me. Where’s this guy now?”

  “You’re not gonna find him. Believe me.”

  “And why the hell not?”

  I finally said what I couldn’t bring myself to say at the party the other night, what I hadn’t wanted to say to Skip, b
ecause I didn’t want to bring it all back. “Because he’s dead. He’s not waiting for anything.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ethan’s teaching assistant, TJ, got the call from the Dean of Students that he needed to take over Ethan’s afternoon class and all of his classes until . . . well, just until.

  TJ had handed out assignments before, he’d taken over for short periods when Ethan had to go to faculty meetings, of course he’d graded papers—harder than Ethan did—but he’d never actually taught before. But teaching was out of the question today, as was having to be the first one to break the news about Skip. They already knew. On a small college campus, news traveled fast. Especially bad news.

  “Professor Holt obviously won’t be here for a few days, so I’ll be filling in. But since nobody feels like studying, I thought . . . maybe we could hand out flyers, see if anybody’s seen her, do something to help . . . ”

  “Do we get extra credit?” asked Matt, the class clown. The other students were used to him, except for now. Nobody they’d ever known had been taken, maybe even killed. And then this asshole kid Matt opened his mouth and made a joke about it.

  “Uh, Matthew, isn’t it?”

  “Matt. True dat.”

  Nobody laughed, not this time.

  TJ knew his name, but he pretended not to. He pushed the hair out of his eyes. He opened his mouth too, and words he didn’t know he had came from somewhere inside him, words that made him feel older and more in control than he’d ever felt before. Words that made him feel worthy of Dante.

  “Well then, Mr. True Dat . . . I could just fail you now, and you don’t even have to show up for the rest of the semester. Doesn’t look very good on all those grad school applications, or on that Fulbright I know you’re applying for, but . . . it’s your choice. That’s what we all have. Freedom of choice.”

  TJ felt like he’d just eaten a steak. He felt like something new and bloody had just gone into him. His stomach grumbled, but for once, he was the only one who heard it.