Claw

by Katie Berry

  The Lawless Works truck pulled up to the marble column-framed entrance. Austin released his seatbelt and opened the passenger door of the truck. “Okay, I’ll run in and file a quick report with Fred inside…” Austin paused before climbing out, feeling his phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out to find a new voice-mail waiting. “Hang on a second, Trip.” He autodialled the number to retrieve the message, putting it on speakerphone so Trip could hear.

  “Hi, Austin!” Clara’s voice chimed. “That nice, young conservation officer called and would like you to stop by to see her this evening at about six o’clock at her office if you could make it. She said she has some very interesting news regarding that scratch and sniff out on Highway #4 this morning.”

  Austin deleted the message and hung up. “Looks like we’ve got one more stop when we’re done here, Trip, if you’re up for it.”

  “No problemo, Boss. I’ll just chill here while you give the 5-0 the lowdown, same as the hospital.”

  “You’re awe and some, my friend! Back in a few minutes.”

  “De nada, Boss.” Trip pulled out a Snicker’s bar and began to unravel the wrapper with an almost comical look of anticipation on his face.

  Austin smiled and checked his watch. It was 5:30 pm. He should have just enough time to fill the local constabulary in on the mess up at Gold Ridge and still make it over to the conservation office for six o’clock.

  As he pushed through the large, revolving, brass-framed entrance door, Austin marvelled as he always did when he saw the police station’s interior. Apparently, it had last been renovated in about 1975, and it showed. The chairs in the waiting area were day-glow orange plastic -- the kind of colour that makes your eyes start to ache after looking at it for more than three seconds. The walls of the lobby were almost as nauseating with a yellow and orange-striped paint job that made you want to ask the desk sergeant on duty if him you could have fries and a Coke to go with your misdemeanour.

  The LPD’s seven-member force included an elderly German Shepherd named K-12. The ageing dog was so named by its owner because he got along great with the children whenever he toured the schools, from kindergarten right up to grade twelve. He lay on the floor next to the front desk, gentle snores coming from his greying muzzle. The senior sniffer kicked its legs in the air, occasionally grazing the leg of his equally grey-haired handler. Desk Sergeant Fred Paulson was currently scribbling away, filling out a report and ignoring the dog's naptime knocks against his socks.

  “Looks like he's running down some perps, Fred.” Austin nodded his head toward the dozing dog.

  Looking up from his paperwork, Fred said, “Hey Austin! Yup, he’s always on the job, that dog! What can we do for you this afternoon?”

  “Well, I’ve got something that’ll perk you both right up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Might have some missing persons and a possible bear attack.”

  “Hmm… Now that is interesting. I’d say you’ve got our attention!”

  At the mention of the word ‘bear’ the elderly canine raised its head from the floor for a moment, then dropped it back down with a thud and a resigned sigh. It was as if the dog’s advancing years had affected not only its ability to get up off the floor but also its ability to get excited about pretty much anything at all anymore, even bears.

  After Austin filled Fred and K-12 in on the events at Gold Ridge, the desk sergeant told him he’d make sure get some of the boys out there by first light to investigate things. Austin thanked him, scruffing the sleeping dog's head as he did. Pulling a one-eighty, he pushed back through the revolving door. As he walked down the steps to the street, he blasted off a quick text to his son, Alex, asking him to start dinner without him this evening since he and Trip were running late.

  “You look less than impressed,” Austin said, pulling open the passenger door of the Works Silverado.

  Trip looked up from his phone’s screen, a scowl on his face. He turned his phone around, and Austin squinted at the screen while Trip held it less than a foot from his face. The current NHL league standings were scrolling across the screen, and Austin now understood the reason behind his friend’s consternation. He and Trip were both in a hockey pool with several city workers from other departments, including fire and police. Trip had been doing quite well in his picks, at least up until right about now, judging by his newly frown-knitted brow. Austin winced when he read the standings and shook his head in commiseration. “Okay, my friend, one more stop today and then we’re calling it quits. I know with scores like that, you'd probably like a beer at Fred’s right about now.”

  Trip stuffed his phone back in his pocket with a sigh. “You read my mind, Boss, but I’m up for one more stop.” He started the engine. “Where to?”

  “To the Moon.”

  “You already used that one, Boss.”

  “I know, but it never gets old.”

  With a grin threatening to sprout through his beard, Trip said, “Yeah, it does.” He put the truck into gear and drove forward into the swirling mist.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Christine stood in the middle of a thick, grey tarp temporarily covering several square metres of the conservation office’s workshop floor. Bag after bloody trash bag of dismembered body parts surrounded her. Each bag now had a number on it. She’d decided that some form of labelling would be good to have on the bags for whenever she needed to put stinky back out on display for further examination. Though she’d only placed the trash bags into the newly delivered chest freezer a couple of hours earlier, the squishy bits and pieces inside had firmed up quite nicely within its icy confines. Hopefully, that would keep the smell to a minimum for the next hour or so while she gave the boys a rundown on the raccoon when they arrived.

  Carefully lifting the dental bone reproduction out of the container near her feet, Christine held it next to the pad of one of the raccoon’s still intact paws. A quick comparison of the two verified her suspicion — the predator preying on the wild turkeys at Geraldine Gertzmeyer’s and the furry stink-wad surrounding her on the floor of the shop looked to be one and the same.

  “Well, well, my smelly little friend, it looks like we’ve identified the turkey gobbler,” she said, smiling at her own pun.

  She placed the casting back in its container, standing up in the process. The buzzer at the front door suddenly activated when someone entered the front office. “I’m in the back!” she called out.

  The heavy, insulated door to the shop opened, and Austin Murphy walked through, closely followed by a rather morose-looking Trip Williams.

  “Hi, Christine,” Austin said with a slight grin, “Good to see you again.”

  “Thanks, Austin, you too!” Christine said, smiling softly. She looked past Austin to Trip, saying, “Hey Trip, how’re you doing? Did you see those NHL standings on TSN? Crazy stuff, huh?”

  Trip brightened, surprised by Christine mentioning one of his favourite sports. “It made me feel like I was living in an alternate universe for a moment!” he enthused, a grin trying to flourish from beneath his thick, white whiskers.

  Christine smiled once more. She’d remembered seeing Trip looking at hockey scores earlier that morning while she’d briefly talked with Austin after they’d finished picking up the scraps of the disassembled scavenger. He’d seemed so quiet when she’d first met him. She figured by throwing the hockey reference out there, she hoped it would help to bring him out of his shell by sharing a common interest — and it seemed to have worked. His cheeks now flushed beet red, making him look like a short, bald Santa Claus, only dressed in tan and orange for safety, instead of red and white for Christmas.

  “So what’s the word on our putrid little friend here?” Austin asked, poking the nearest body part with the toe of his boot. He wrinkled his nose from the smell of the rotting carcass. Its stench was almost palpable despite the fact it was still frozen and surrounded by a thick plastic bag.

  “Yes, our little friend here is
getting a bit ripe, isn’t he?” Christine concurred.

  “I think you could use an Airwick or two in here, Chris, or maybe a case of them,” Trip said, his eyes narrowing to a ‘stink-eye’ expression as he sniffed the air. He looked how a person sometimes gets when they walk into a stall in a public washroom, only to discover the person before them had just suffered a bout of explosive diarrhea. “Did you figure out what it is, yet?” He nodded toward the creature, still squinting from the aroma.

  Deciding she’d kept the pair hanging long enough, Christine said, “Yes, we think we may have identified this creature. Although in doing so, it looks like we may have opened up more questions than we answered.”

  “What do you mean?” Austin asked. He removed his ball cap and ruffled his short silver-brown hair.

  “Well, as you can see, it looks like a raccoon, but not like any that I’ve ever seen,” Christine said. She walked around the tarp as she spoke, circling the larger parts while stepping fluidly over the smaller ones.

  “Me either.” Trip piped in.

  “Exactly. But when I showed the digital pictures of this animal and the picture of the casting to my colleague, Zelda, she almost fell out of her chair!”

  “Really? Why?” Austin cocked his head.

  “Because this creature doesn’t exist, at least not anymore.”

  “Not anymore? What do you mean?” Trip asked.

  “That’s the part that floored Zelda, and me,” Christine added, moving toward a laptop computer on a nearby workbench.

  “Well, don’t keep us in suspense! What did your colleague have to say?” Austin asked, still gawking at the laptop’s screen.

  “Let me show you.” Christine tapped the spacebar of the laptop, and a full-colour artist’s rendering of what the animal may have looked like in life blinked onto the screen. For comparison, next to the animal in question stood the silhouette of an adult human, with a Volkswagen Beetle in the background for contrast. The creature was easily the size of a black bear, looking to be almost two metres tall if it were to stand erect. Trip and Austin looked at the picture on the screen, dumbfounded. Christine let them soak in the image for a moment before continuing.

  “That is one mother-loving huge raccoon!” Trip said, eyes wide and unblinking.

  Christine nodded and continued, “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet ‘Chapalmalania Altaefrontis’, more commonly known as a giant raccoon.”

  “Where would something like that come from?” Austin questioned.

  “More to the point, WHEN did something like that come from?” Christine countered.

  Trip added, “I know that when I’ve gone hunting, I would have remembered it if I’d seen one of those things skulking around out in the forests!”

  “Well, that’s not surprising. Apparently, our friend here lived during the late Pleistocene era and has been extinct for over fifty thousand years, give or take a millennium or two.”

  “What? That’s impossible!” Austin said, his mouth agape from surprise.

  “You read my mind once again, Austin,” Christine said, playfully. “Those were my exact words!”

  “Does it only eat meat?” Trip asked.

  “Actually, it was an omnivore and would eat just about anything. Fully grown, these creatures weighed between one-hundred and one-hundred and sixty kilograms, and they were much more aggressive than their modern-day, garbage-picking cousins. And it turns out our putrid friend here had recently partaken of a wild turkey dinner sometime late last night, before shuffling off this mortal coil earlier this morning.”

  “Turkey dinner?” Austin wondered.

  “Yes, Geraldine Gertzmyer had most of her wild turkeys living around her property killed and eaten by something last night. And I believe this may have been our culprit.”

  “Geraldine’s turkeys?” Trip said. “That’s just wrong; she loved those birds!”

  “I know, she showed me some of her photo albums over tea this morning when I was out there,” Christine said, smiling in recollection.

  “Then that would certainly explain the abundance of guts and entrails all over the road when Ray Chance hit this thing — it must have been still digesting those birds. And it must have been damned full, too! No wonder it exploded like it did from the impact!” Trip said.

  “You’re right, Trip. But I was also wondering if somehow this might maybe be related to the shitstorm we found up on Gold Ridge this afternoon,” Austin said.

  “What did you find?” Christine asked, her own interest now piqued.

  “One very cold and very scared man and a LOT of blood,” Austin replied.

  “What? Up on Gold Ridge?”

  “Yeah, it looks like an attack occurred at a campsite up there. Must have happened sometime in the last twenty-four hours; otherwise, the survivor we found wouldn’t have made it due to exposure,” Trip added.

  “A survivor?”

  Austin said, “Yeah, only one. But it appears that several people may have been attacked at the site, though.”

  Christine inhaled sharply, "Omigod! Was anyone killed?"

  "We don’t know for sure. But there wouldn’t even have been the one survivor if he hadn’t gotten lucky when his sled went over the edge of Gold Ridge. Fortunately, we were able to extract him from the ledge he landed on, then we brought him into the hospital ourselves. He’s in the ER at the moment. The Doc there thought he seemed kind of delirious and said she was going to keep him sedated until she could stabilise his vitals. Hopefully, we should know a bit more later tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Then we need to talk to him as soon as he’s lucid to find out what happened,” Christine said, her mood brightening. “There’s a good chance it could have been this creature that attacked him.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Trip interjected.

  “What? Why’s that?”

  “The tracks we saw in the snow out there were too big to have belonged to this animal,” Trip concluded.

  “Too big? What? Did you take a picture?”

  “No, sorry, we were otherwise occupied,” Austin said.

  “How big was this print, anyway? Any idea what it was?”

  “Slow down a second. The tracks we saw in the snow looked to be at least three times the size of any bear I’ve ever seen,” Trip said.

  “Three times the size? Did I miss the signpost up ahead and we’ve already stepped into the Twilight Zone here?” Christine asked.

  “Well, they looked like they hadn’t been affected by any melting and they were huge — and Trip an I have both seen our fair share of bears and their tracks, ” Austin concluded, his mouth a grim line.

  “Then we need to get out to that camp at first light to check it out!” Christine said excitedly.

  Austin responded, “That’s what I thought you were going to say. All right, let’s call it a night then, and queue it up for tomorrow morning. We’ll swing by here for you at oh-six-hundred .”

  “I’ll be here with bells on.”

  “Actually, something just a little bit warmer than just those might be in order,” Austin said with a grin.

  “Bells and thermal underwear, then,” Christine said, walking the men into the front office to see them to the door.

  “G’night, Christine” Trip said, blushing once more.

  “Goodnight, gentlemen. I’ll see you both on the flip side,” she said, smiling lightly as she closed the door behind them. Christine locked the door as they walked to their truck. A moment later, the headlights flared alive, and with a peep of the horn, they drove off into the foggy night. She turned and leaned against the door for a moment. The cold glass caressed her slender neck, sending a chill down her spine to match the one already created by her racing thoughts.

  What the men had described at the campsite seemed beyond belief! But was it somehow possible that what they said was true? In addition to the giant raccoon, was there something else now prowling the local forests with an appetite for fresh meat? Something hungry for more t
han just a turkey dinner? Something that made the raccoon on her shop floor look like small fry in comparison?

  Christine Moon shuddered once more and flipped off the office lights. “Time to put someone back on ice,” she said, wrinkling her nose as she walked back toward the closed shop door.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Manny was perturbed. His charter flight had made him late, and he was rerouted to Kelowna due to fog in Castlegar. He’d finally blown into town several hours later than he’d wanted driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee that he’d liberated from the Castlegar airport.