CLAWS 2

by Stacey Cochran

  Angie held onto the claw, but someone picked her up and pulled her through the crowd back toward the entrance. Several elderly women screamed at her, and one or two tried to get a slap in on her. Angie was only vaguely aware of where Jonas was. She caught a glimpse of him, swinging like a madman on a group of three huge bouncer-type men that just blanketed him.

  She heard the front door open, and she flew through the air. She felt her foot touch the steps, and she stumbled face first out into the snow. A moment later, Jonas hit the snow next to her. His lip was bleeding. Angie looked at him and smiled. He grinned.

  They both looked back up toward the front porch. One of the big bouncers stood on the porch staring at them. Jonas leapt to his feet and charged him.

  Angie shouted, “Don’t!”

  The big man swung powerfully, hit Jonas across the chin, and the deputy went flying. He staggered back down the steps and hit the snow beside Angie again. Angie looked up at the big man who stood on the front porch with his arms folded.

  Jonas shook his head, wiped at the blood on his lip, then leapt to his feet and charged the giant man again.

  Angie said, “For crying out loud. . .”

  A split second later, Jonas was back in the snow next to her. He looked at her dazed, raised up an index finger as though to say Hold on just a sec’, then much more slowly rose to his feet, dusted himself off, and then charged the big man on the front porch again. A second later, he was back out in the snow.

  This time he didn’t move for about five seconds, and Angie realized he was concussed. She rolled him over and checked his eyes.

  She shouted at the valets who had been watching the whole exchange, “Could you get our car please?”

  “I need your ticket,” he said.

  “It’s the beat-up patrol car,” she said. “The only non-limo that’s been up here all night.”

  The attendant turned, grabbed the keys from the stand, and headed off towards the lot on the hill out beside the house. Jonas mumbled something about “One more time, Angie. I can take him.”

  She helped him to stand and said, “Right this way, champ.”

  A minute later, the patrol car rolled down the hill.

  “Can you drive?” he mumbled.

  “You bet,” Angie said.

  The car pulled up. The valet stepped out, and Jonas opened up the back door and fell inside.

  Angie said, “Thanks.”

  She climbed in behind the wheel, and the giant man on the front porch watched as she put the car in gear and began driving away.

  Eighteen

  Governor Janet Creed was under a tremendous amount of stress. She hadn’t slept well in months. The state press had been taking her to task over the education and health care systems. Her husband was drinking again. She’d found a lump on her left breast, and to make matters worse, Newsweek had run an article the previous week listing the top five hundred high schools in the nation, and not a single one was from Colorado. That had prompted hundreds of calls and thousands of emails to the Governor’s office from angry citizens around the state.

  She was fighting for her political life. Somehow three years had passed, and it didn’t seem like she’d accomplished one single thing while in office. She was depressed, anxious, and all but certain that her opponents would serve her up the worst political defeat of her life in the coming year. She knew that men like Abraham Foxwell were rallying the troops to find a candidate who would blast her out of the water. She often felt like she was a fraud.

  “I’d like to thank the members of the Clear Creek County Parent Teacher Association for having me,” she said. She looked out across the gymnasium and saw a sea of faces. “And I’d like to reassure everyone that despite what certain biased national magazines may imply, our education system from kindergarten to college is one of the strongest in the country.”

  The crowd cheered, voices echoing inside the high school gym, feet stomping on the hardwood floors. The speech was the same one she’d given in Boulder and Summit Counties the day before and Pueblo, Douglas, and Jefferson Counties the day before that. Her whole week was filled with similar speeches at similar educational facilities meant to counteract the Newsweek article.

  “But first, I’d like to address the tragic story that we’ve all heard by now about our friends in Durango. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them, and you can rest assured, we’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll handle the wildlife situation in a prudent and wise manner, never mistaking the richness of this state, its past and its preservation, with its need to grow in an environmentally sound way.”

  The crowd quieted down. Everyone was solemn. Just one year before, Idaho Springs had lost one of its senior cross-country runners when he’d been attacked by a mountain lion a couple hundred yards from the gymnasium in which Janet Creed stood. They knew about loss, and they knew about living with large predators.

  “Our deepest sympathies go to the families and friends of those who died,” Janet said. “And I want you to know that I have my best people working on this. Colorado has long epitomized the balance between humans and nature. We have come to co-exist, and we must respect our environment, our wildlife, and our native habitat, for without that we would not be Colorado.”

  A round of applause stirred through the crowd.

  “It has been brought to my attention that the situation may be more complicated than previously anticipated,” Governor Creed said. “Evidence points to grizzly bears in the region. If this holds true, we have a difficult situation to resolve. My friends in wildlife management tell me that grizzly bears were thought extinct as of 1979 in southwest Colorado—completely wiped out. This new evidence points to the contrary.

  “If the grizzly bear exists in the southwest Colorado, it would represent a unique subspecies more endangered than the Florida panther, perhaps more endangered than any other species of mammal in North America. We must not rush to judgment on this animal, for if we hunt and kill it as some would have us do, we would be exterminating a critically endangered species from the face of the Earth forever.”

  The crowd was less compelled by this. Voters in the state were divided on how to best handle large predators when they became problem animals. Half the people sided with exterminating the animals; the other half did not. They sided with relocating problem animals to deeper wilderness areas within the state. However, this fired up debates with the locals of the regions to which the animals would be relocated because they saw it as just passing the buck, and the problem became theirs.

  Others supported aversive conditioning: shooting problem animals with non-lethal “bean bag” guns to scare them away and teach them to avoid humans. The verdict was still out on aversive conditioning, though, and many experts argued that it didn’t work effectively. But the problem in Colorado was complicated because they were dealing with a critically endangered subspecies.

  “I will be flying to Durango as soon as I leave here this morning,” Janet Creed said. “This is not an easy matter to resolve. I’ll survey the situation, listen closely to the experts, and form a decision within the next twenty-four hours about how best to proceed with this matter.”

  The crowd stared. They wanted to hear about how good their schools were—in the face of the Newsweek article—and how she was working around the clock to improve them. They wanted to hear how she was going to fight for their school’s reputation. Few in the audience cared about bears, grizzly or otherwise. Bears were someone else’s problem.

  Nineteen

  Angie didn’t hear the news about Carson Richards until morning. She was in a chair in a lobby area at a Telluride auto garage at roughly the same time that Janet Creed was giving her speech in another part of the state, and a TV hung from a ceiling mount in the corner of the lobby.

  “As a follow up to the tragic story out of southwest Colorado,” the reporter on the TV said, “regarding nine Fort Lewis College undergrads who were apparently attacked by a bear, the lone survivor Carson Richards
has died in the hospital of a massive heart attack. She was only twenty-one. . .”

  Angie stood up and crossed toward the TV. One other person sat in the lobby, and he looked up at her from behind a newspaper. Angie could see her truck out in the garage. A mechanic in a dark blue uniform was in the front seat fixing the ignition.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  She turned up the volume.

  “Doctors at the hospital have not disclosed what caused the heart attack,” the reporter said. Angie could see the hospital behind the reporter on the TV. “And certainly it seems odd for a woman so young to die like this. Perhaps, it was just the accumulation of shock at having lost eight of her friends. Perhaps, it was fallout from the attack. Whatever the case, the only eyewitness left in this terrifying animal attack has passed away. Doctors say she died early yesterday morning, but they could not release the news until her family had been contacted.”

  Angie didn’t exactly fall to the ground. Her legs just kind of gave out from under her. Her hand went out in front of her, grabbing ineffectually at a chair. She was on the floor.

  The man with the newspaper said, “Are you okay?”

  She was just stunned.

  “That girl,” she said, pointing to the TV screen. “I’m working on the case. . .”

  The man suddenly recognized Angie. He said, “You’re that woman that’s been making the news around town? The wildlife biologist or something.”

  Angie tried to stand on her feet. She rang the bell on the counter, and a girl appeared from the back.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I need to use your phone,” Angie said. “I need to make a call.”

  The girl nodded and started to lift the phone from behind the counter for her to use, but Angie turned and saw the blue lights of the patrol car pulling into the parking lot from the road. She dropped the phone and walked toward the door.

  It was Jonas.

  • •

  Deputy Sheriff Jonas Frommer saw Angie stagger out from the tinted-glass door near the garage’s lobby area. His patrol car’s tires squealed over the pavement, and he rushed toward her. He threw the car in park, threw the door open, and climbed out from the driver’s seat.

  “Did you hear?” Angie said. “Did you just hear the news?!”

  “I got it over the radio,” he said. “I knew you were at the garage this morning with the truck. Oh, Angie, I’m so sorry.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and just hung on.

  “Everything’s gonna be alright,” he said.

  She looked up into his eyes. His face was badly bruised.

  “You know what this means?” she said.

  Jonas shook his head. Several mechanics stepped over to the front of the garage to see what was going on.

  “That girl couldn’t have died of a heart attack,” Angie said. “Not on her own! Not like that. First I was accosted two nights ago, then this!”

  “Angie, calm down,” he said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Don’t you see?” Angie said. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  Angie stepped back from him. She looked slightly crazed, slightly lunatic. Her eyes were wide. She tried to calm herself, but she still looked more than a little nuts. She gazed back at the garage, then out at the street. She looked at the patrol car, then at Jonas.

  “They killed her,” she said.

  “Who, Angie? What?” he said. “Who killed her?”

  “Those men,” she said. “They must be working for whoever’s against Governor Creed, this Abraham Foxwell. First they tried to threaten me; don’t you get it? Then, they kill the only living witness in an attack case that would have proven there was a grizzly bear in the San Juan mountains.”

  “Angie, you don’t have any proof.”

  “What about the men?” she said.

  “Nobody saw them but you.”

  “Who did that to my ignition?!” she said. “Who did that to my truck?”

  “I believe you,” he said. “But there’s no proof.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “There’s no proof that these men that threatened you, that intimidated you, that they had anything to do with this Carson Richards girl. The story is she died of a heart attack. That’s what I just heard.”

  “She was twenty-one,” Angie said.

  “Look, we can look into it, but you’re causing a scene.”

  “Okay, okay, fine,” she said. “No, you’re right.”

  Jonas put his arm around her shoulder, and they walked over to the side of lot away from the mechanics who stood at the front of the garage staring at her.

  Jonas said, “How were you going to pay for your truck?”

  Angie looked at him, and her eyes looked like a deer’s caught in a spotlight.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll cover the truck, but you’ve got to settle down.”

  “Look at your face,” Angie said. Her fingers came up and touched the bruise around the right half of his face.

  “Don’t worry about it. Listen, Angie, you’ve got to pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t handle this,” she said. “I’ve been alone too long. These people may want me dead.”

  “You don’t know that,” Jonas said. “You said yourself, it might have just been a couple of teenagers.”

  “And it might have been some people who will stop at nothing to see that a five hundred million dollar ski resort gets built.”

  “You can’t prove that,” he said. “Listen, the governor’s gonna be arriving about one o’clock this afternoon.”

  “She’s coming here?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  Angie shook her head. “No.”

  “She’s going to want an assessment. She’s going to want to know what we’re dealing with. And if you act like this, you’re only going to lose her faith. Now, I believe in you. I might be the only person in town who does. I know the kind of power that’s planning to build that resort. And I know that they’d kill any grizzly that they could find, if it threatened to halt the resort’s construction. I understand that. I understand that, Angie. And I believe in you. But right now, we’ve got to pull it together. You’ve got to explain the situation to Janet Creed. She’s gonna listen to you, but you’ve got to make your case.”

  Angie looked into his eyes and knew that he was right.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Now, when is your truck going to be ready?”

  “They said by ten.”

  “I’ll cover the bill,” he said. “You can pay me back later.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Jonas.”

  “I want you to meet me at the Sheriff’s office at noon,” he said. “We’ll have lunch, and then we’re going to meet the governor at the airport with everyone else. Can you do that? Can you meet me?”

  Angie nodded and said, “I can.”

  Twenty

  The suits held back a hostile crowd adjacent to the runway. Word had gotten around southwest Colorado that Governor Janet Creed would arrive at Telluride Regional at one o’clock, and someone must have sprinkled some crazy dust over the mountains because the tribe had come out in full force. They held signs, grabbed the fence, and were chanting: “Kill the bears, not the people! Kill the bears, not the people!”

  Angie saw one sign that read “Say No to U.F.O.s” where the letters of “U.F.O.” were an acronym for “Uninvited Foreign Observers.” There was a large pasted photo of Janet Creed’s face atop a crudely drawn bear’s body with insectile antennae poking up from her head. An angry red line slashed across the picture.

  “That one doesn’t even make sense,” Angie said.

  Jonas said, “Crazy people are supposed to make sense?”

  Angie looked to the plane, and they both saw the door open. Several of Janet Creed’s people stepped out onto the rollaway stairwell. They wore sunglasses, suits, and woolen coats. They each had earpieces connected to two-
way radios.

  Then, the governor stepped out. She saw the hostile crowd and managed a friendly wave. The people by the fence went nuts, grabbing the fence and shaking it like angry chimpanzees. They screamed insults. Angie estimated it was only about fifty people, not a huge group, but they were vocal.

  “Angie,” Governor Creed said. “I see you rallied my supporters.”

  The governor’s people let her through, and the two women shook hands. Angie looked into Janet Creed’s gray eyes and smiled.

  “Governor, it’s good to see you. I’ve always tried to remind myself to never mind the mindless.”

  Janet said, “Never mind the mindless. That’s pretty good. Damn, son, what happened to your face?”

  Creed looked at Jonas Frommer.

  Angie said, “Governor Janet Creed, this is Sheriff’s Deputy Jonas Frommer with the San Miguel Sheriff’s Department. And you know Wendy Norton and Dan Gardner with CDW. I’m afraid our group here are about the only people in town who seem to realize the importance of our finding that grizzly bear.”

  Janet Creed had black hair speckled gray like pepper. Her nose was hawkish, and it drew out the well-rounded cheekbones under her eyes. She had wide shoulders, but without a doubt the thing most people were unprepared for when they met Janet Creed for the first time was just how tall she was. She stood nearly six and a half feet tall. Jonas looked up into her eyes.

  “Governor, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

  Dan Gardner said, “We have three helicopters that’ll take us up to the site of the attack. It’s over the mountain range to the south.”

  The group looked up and saw the blades on the helicopters starting to rotate.

  “That sounds good,” Janet said. “That sounds great.”

  They walked towards the choppers. Also with Angie, Jonas, Wendy, and Dan, was Laura Matzenauer from Mancos State Park, Jack Dante of the U.S. Forest Service, and the reporter from the Durango Herald, whose name Angie had finally learned was Chuck Abrams. Governor Creed spoke briefly with Wendy and Dan, and Wendy introduced her to Jack and Laura. Chuck Abrams tried not to act like he was tagging along.