Claw

by Katie Berry

  “You know, Reggie, gold can make a man do things they’d never normally consider. Even the laziest of men can get energetic with enough motivation, and it sounds like there’s plenty of that up there.”

  “Well, there was no sign of them anywhere. The back of that cavern turns into a real maze, as I said. And then you’ve got that bloody aquifer running through it creating all the goddamned steam, and you can’t see a frickin’ thing! Between that and those friggin’ chasms in the floor it’s a regular deathtrap up there...” he trailed off, shaking his head.

  “Sounds like you need to watch your step.”

  “Oh, hell yeah! If a fella took a wrong step and fell into one of those pools the hot spring feeds, it’d be game over, man! You wouldn’t be dragging your sorry ass back out of that water cause it’s hot enough to flash-cook a damned lobster! And then if you missed out falling into one of those, you could still kill yourself falling into one of those huge frickin’ holes in the goddamned floor! There’s big ones and small ones. They’re kind of round and look more like tubes really. At least a half dozen of ‘em closer to the back. Goddamned tough to spot in all that steam, too! Constable Olsen almost bought it when he stumbled on a rock near the edge of one. If I hadn’t been right there and grabbed him by his jacket collar in time, we’d be advertising for a new constable right now!”

  “Did you look to see if there were any bodies at the bottom of these ‘holes’ at that time?”

  “Yeah we looked, but there was nothing that we saw. They’re really, really deep. The flashlight I’ve got is over two-thousand lumens, and even it couldn’t pick out the bottom. I dropped a few rocks down a couple of them but gave up listening for them to hit bottom after a minute or so. I figure they probably go all the way to goddamned China!”

  “All right, let’s back it up a second and see where we stand. You said think they may have killed themselves by accident or might have been attacked by something and panicked, perhaps falling into a hole or a pool. But you collected all the gold?”

  “That’s right, once we determined they were MIA, we grabbed all the sacks we could find and took them back to town with us.”

  “No evidence that you or any of your men were ever there?” Nichols leaned forward in his chair.

  “We’re not complete amateurs, you know,” VanDusen growled.

  “That’s open to debate,” the mayor said, scowling back.

  Ignoring the comment, VanDusen said, “No, we made sure. Anybody looking for them would probably think they’ve bugged out with the gold.”

  “And speaking of which, how much did you get and what did you do with the gold?”

  “I have it all in a secure location somewhere in the valley. We picked up two dozen sacks all together, as I mentioned.” VanDusen neglected to tell the mayor that the secure location he was using was the root cellar in the basement of his house.

  Nichols pulled out his desktop calculator. “Twenty-four bags of ore, you said?” He clicked at the calculator’s keys for a moment. “And how much do you think each one of them weighs?”

  “I’d say a little over twenty kilograms each.”

  Nichols continued rapidly pecking away at the calculator’s number pad for a moment, then said, “Good lord!”

  “What is it?” VanDusen leaned forward in anticipation.

  “At current gold standards that works out to over thirty-two million dollars Canadian!”

  VanDusen’s eyes widened slightly. “That is a tidy sum, to be sure, Mr. Mayor, but there’s at least ten times that amount still stuck in the walls up there.”

  Nichols clasped his hands together and closed his eyes for a moment as if to contain his enthusiasm. Reggie thought he looked like he was literally vibrating with excitement at the thought of the vast fortune the cavern contained.

  Nichols said, “Good, I don’t want Chance to know that I’m compromising our little partnership. As far as he knows, he and I are fifty-fifty partners. I don’t need him to know I’m dipping into his half, and I want to keep it that way. I need you to keep an eye on things up there, Reggie. With Chance sending our friend, Oritz up to the cavern to use as his ‘security specialist’ it could create problems for us. If it looks like Oritz might tumble to things and try to screw us over, I expect you to get rid of him as well — just use one of those pits up there, it sounds like they’re going to come in handy.”

  “Wait a minute! That was never part of our agreement! It was supposed to be a one-shot deal with that conservation officer! Now you want me to waste that crazy bastard, Oritz for you?”

  Nichols made a concerned face, puckered his lips a bit, and said, “Waste is such a harsh term, Reggie. I prefer something more laid back, like ‘have an accident’ or help them ‘meet their maker’. It so much more friendly!”

  “Semantics, Nichols! Either way, it’s going to cost you more!”

  “How much more?” The mayor leaned forward in his chair, the aged leather creaking as he did.

  “I want half of what I’m stealing from the cavern for you.”

  Nichols's face went white with rage, and he shouted, “You avaricious son of a bitch!” slamming his open palm down on his ornate teak desk. He leaned forward, slightly out of his seat and finished, “That’s goddamned highway robbery!”

  “I’m a highwayman then!” VanDusen smiled thinly, trying to adjust his position once more and creaking in his seat. “Anyway, I’ll need the extra contingency money. It’s not cheap to erase people you know. And besides, you’re the one that just upped the ante, Mr. Mayor. Chance won’t make any waves, even if he’s convinced there’s something or someone affecting the operation -- he wouldn’t want any bad publicity that would affect the casino, would he? And he’ll definitely want to keep things on the down-low, so no word gets around about the gold, at least not until most of it’s been extracted. And there’s also one final thing you’re forgetting.”

  “What’s that?” Nichols asked, his rage barely contained.

  “The fact that you don’t want Chance knowing that you’re making premature withdrawals from his half of the fortune as well as your own!”

  Nichols sat back in his chair. He rested his elbows on the armrests and tented his fingers under his chin. “That’s fine. But if you screw me over, you’re going to find yourself out of a job, or worse.”

  VanDusen hefted his bulk out of the chair. His cowboy boots cracked against the hardwood floor of the study as he sauntered toward the door. Before opening it, he paused and turned back toward the mayor. Hand on the resting on the doorknob, the Chief said, “I’d recommend you be careful of who you threaten, Mr. Mayor, there’s still plenty of room down in those pits in that cavern floor.” Quietly closing the door behind himself, he smiled as he cut off the tirade of rage and profanity spewing from Nichols’ mouth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Christine Moon spread the large, black polyethylene tarp out onto the floor of the conservation office workshop. She was about to examine the raccoon and the last thing she needed was blood and guts dribbling out of the garbage bags all over the floor while she pieced it back together. Walking to the large, steel-slat roll-up door that took up most of one wall, she grabbed the chain hanging next to it and pulled down hard, cranking the door wide open. Once she’d brought it inside, Christine needed to keep the room cold to avoid defrosting her ring-tailed roadkill. In addition, the fresh, fog-filled air wafting in was an added bonus as the stench from the creature was nauseating.

  After arriving back from the accident scene, Christine had unloaded fifteen garbage bags from the bed of her truck, leaving them outside the workshop bay door momentarily. Now, she grabbed one bag in each hand and began moving them inside to the tarp. The twenty-five-millimetre thick plastic bags did little to staunch the stench of the creature. Grabbing another quick gulp of fresh air before going back inside, she said, “All right, let’s see what you actually look like, my stinky little friend.”

  It was not unlike putting together a rath
er disgusting jigsaw puzzle, Christine noted with grim amusement. Carefully examining each gory garbage bag, she began the stomach-churning task of putting the various bits and pieces back together. First arranging them by colour, she next toured around the putrid parts, orienting them as needed. The striped and ringed pattern of the fur on the creature aided her greatly in aligning things. The skull was the easiest, still mostly intact, except for a portion between the left temporal and occipital lobes which had made contact with Ray Chance’s Land Rover.

  As much as the creature looked like an indigenous raccoon, it didn’t fit within the same genus as those found locally. The needle-sharp teeth of the animal were particularly interesting, especially the canines - much longer and sharper than anything she’d ever seen in a regular raccoon’s mouth. And the size was astonishing as any of the examples she’d seen in the wild were never anywhere near this large. Most of the time, their scavenging diet didn’t allow them to get much bigger than eight to twenty kilograms, but this creature looked to be over a hundred.

  Using her cell phone, Christine took a photo of the skull to send off to a classmate from college now living on the coast. The picture of the creature’s skull and canines would most certainly pique her friend’s curiosity. After many years of study, Zelda Wolowitz was now a professor of zoology at Simon Fraser University and widely respected in her field. Christine hoped to give Zelda something to whet her appetite while she took more detailed, high-resolution photographs of the animal with her Canon Rebel camera. The cell phone photo she sent had the caption, “Would you like to know more?”

  Ten minutes later, she was finished shooting the little stinker and checked her cell phone. A text message Zelda was waiting for her. She smiled, now knowing that her colleague was definitely more than just a little eager to see the new, higher-res images. Zelda’s reply to Christine’s picture was only one word long, and it one that she rarely used on others: please.

  Satisfied that she’d covered the animal from all angles, Christine took the camera to her office and transferred the pictures to her laptop, uploading them to her cloud storage account at the same time. With cloud access, Zelda wouldn’t have to deal with any issues of oversized emails containing the data-hungry photos getting rejected by the servers at her end. And if there were any other pertinent data concerning the creature, Zelda could upload it to that same account and share it with Christine immediately.

  With everything done, Christine returned to the garage and stood in the loading bay doorway, surveying the creature laid out before her on the tarp. She was going to have to bite the bullet and use a government requisition and buy a chest freezer to store the creature temporarily. But it was going to have to stay where it lay for now. She wanted to have the carcass on display in front of her during the teleconference with Zelda later that afternoon.

  Though it was now quite cold in the room, at the valley bottom, it wasn’t quite cold enough to keep her funky friend frozen solid. Soon enough, it was going to be more pungent inside the shop than a garbage dumpster in the middle of an August heatwave. And she definitely didn’t want that scent lingering around the building as no amount of potpourri could hide it; of that, she was quite sure. And as much as she wanted to leave the large door open, she didn’t want to attract anything else wandering the area. A rotting raccoon was most assuredly a scent that would bring the local scavengers running. Sighing with regret, Christine took one more massive inhalation of fresh, foggy air and rolled the steel door down, securing it with the attached chain once more. She double-checked that the heat was all the way down and turned off the light, firmly closing the weatherproof door that separated the shop from the offices.

  The phone suddenly began ringing at the front of the building, and Christine hurried through to her office, arriving just as the answering machine picked up. Her recorded voice echoed through the empty building, “You have reached the Ministry of Conservation for the Kootenay Interior Region. If you have a wildlife concern or complaint, press one now…” Christine picked the handset up, automatically disengaging the recording.

  “Good afternoon, Ministry of Conservation. Officer Moon speaking, how may I help you?”

  Sounding relieved, an elderly woman at the other end exclaimed, “Finally! I’ve been trying to get through and speak to someone at your office all morning, dearie!”

  Christine looked down at the LED call counter flashing on the top of the answering machine and was surprised to see she had twelve missed calls while out and about. She mentally chided herself for neglecting to switch her call forwarding over to her cell phone when she went into the field earlier that morning. After a glance at the caller ID, she saw all the calls were from the same number, the one to which she was currently connected. This woman was not the type that was content to leave just one message, or so it would seem.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I was unavailable in the field all morning. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Well, you’d better stop standing out in your field, dearie, you’ve got bigger problems now!”

  “Yes ma’am, what seems to be the issue?”

  “First of all, cut out that ma’am crap! This is Geraldine Gertzmyer out on Valley Drive calling! My wild turkeys are all dead!” The poor old dear sounded almost ready to burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that, ma’am, I mean Mrs. Gertzmyer. What happened to your turkeys?”

  “They’re all dead! Didn’t I just say that? Didn’t you listen to my messages?”

  “I only got back to the office just now, Mrs. Gertzmeyer, if you…”

  The woman cut her off, saying, “It doesn’t matter, dearie! What does matter is that some vicious, wild animal has slaughtered all my wild turkeys! I don’t know if any escaped since its such a mess out there, but I hope some of them got away!”

  “That’s very unfortunate. How can I assist you, Mrs. Gertzmeyer?”

  “You can assist me by coming out to see what some bastardly thing did to my sweet, precious little babies! Come and see, and then go out into the forest, find it, and kill it!”

  “Okay, Mrs. Gertzmeyer, please calm down for a moment. I should be able to pop out to see you this afternoon and tell me where you're located, exactly?” Christine jotted down the address the distraught woman gave and assured her she would get to the bottom of the wild gobbler killing spree. Since she didn’t have anything else pressing at the moment, she decided to head out to the woman’s property after first requisitioning the chest freezer,

  Before departing, Christine glanced at the large topographical map on the wall of her office. As the crow flies, Geraldine’s acreage was only a few kilometres away from the scene of the raccoon’s demise -- directly in line with the Gold Mountain Casino and Resort.

  Killing the office lights, she looked toward the shop and sniffed the air. There was no smell emanating at the moment through the thick, insulated door, thank goodness. She shuddered briefly, thinking that the darkened room where the foul-smelling creature now rested must be as black as the hole from which it must have recently emerged. She turned and left the building, locking the door behind her, saying, “Curious and curiouser.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Easily visible on a clear day, Gold Ridge was a sight to behold. Its rocky prominence jutting out at the back of the valley and running for several kilometres before terminating at the base of the Kootenay Glacier. Unfortunately for the occupants of the Lawless City Works truck, today was not one of those days. The thick fog obscuring the road ahead gave Trip little time to react to the numerous twists and turns when they suddenly appeared out of the ether. Compounding things, when they eventually ascended high enough to be above the moist inversion layer of fog, it was replaced by a layer of ice fog that settled over the warmer valley air at night, trapping it in the valley. This caused the road to quickly change from damp and grippy to white and slippy in a matter of seconds. It made an already slow journey even slower.

  Austin sighed, looking a
way from the blank windshield and glancing down at his cell phone. The screen was off. He was watching the signal strength bars in the upper right corner of the phone’s OLED always-on display. When the bars were at their weakest, they’d be getting close to the end of the winding logging road. And that looked to be right about now, Austin noted with a slight smile. “Looks like we’re just about there, amigo.”

  “Yup, I’m on it, Boss,” Trip said, glaring through the windshield.

  Austin looked up from his phone and grinned when he saw Trip’s expression. It was so intent, he half expected to see laser beams shoot from the man’s eyes at any moment, vaporising the fog ahead and clearing the way for them. When he finally tore himself from Trip’s gloomy gaze, he looked back through the windshield and saw they were just arriving at the end of the plowed portion of the road.