The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  All the time he talked, he was using pliers to remove the quills, the largest of which were as long and almost as big around as pencils. When the shafts came out, they were smeared with a thin film of blood and dotted with a globular, puslike substance. Blake traded the pliers for hemostats and began removing the smaller quills.

  “Sometimes I have to use a scalpel to expose the base. I try to make the incision as small as possible and still grip the quill. You pull a hundred and eighty degrees from the direction it went in. Then you wipe with antiseptic and put on a topical antibiotic and hope for the best.” Lecturing Sean now.

  “What happens to me?”

  “Why, she kills you.” His voice was matter-of-fact.

  “How will you manage that trick?”

  “The same way I did with Buster. Think about it. It will come to you. Here, I’ll give you a clue.” He reached into the backpack and removed a mechanical device about two feet long, a sort of artificial forearm made from leather and metal and armed with what looked like cat claws. Sean had seen it in the enclosure, but not clearly, and, only half conscious then, he had not divined its purpose.

  “The claws are real,” Blake said. “They belonged to a man-eating lion killed in the Tsavo district, in Kenya, in 1954. It was my father who shot it.”

  “So that’s what happened to your sister. You raked her body with this . . . robot.”

  “It’s not a robot. It is an apparatus to manipulate the claws. I will show you.”

  He pulled the sleeve of metal over his right arm and inserted his fingers into the leather fingertips that held the claws and metal hinges. He opened his hand and the claws emerged from their sheaths and flared out. He squeezed and they folded closed.

  “We made a pact, Scarlett and I. We would cut each other with the claws, then press our bodies chest to chest as we made love. Blood brother, blood sister. I used the claws first. Scarlett passed out from the trauma and developed an infection. By the time the antibiotic treatment ran its course and she recovered, our pact no longer held an allure for her. I offered my chest, but she couldn’t bring herself to cut me. Now she wears the scars as witness of her love for me, and I reciprocate in other ways. Our relationship is instinctual. We try to do exactly as we feel. That can create drama. It recently has. She had done something that required another session, one that was not performed in love.”

  He nodded. “There now, I think that’s the last quill. I’ll apply the antibiotic. I call it the purple nightmare. The hope being it tastes so vile she won’t lick it off. She’ll be under another half hour, or another half minute—you can’t be sure with a cat. Of course I can give her an antidote, but I prefer she comes to on her own time.”

  “What happens then?”

  “She will be groggy. One moment she will be struggling to her feet, the next she will be up and gone. I have tranquilized many cats. Aggression, upon recovery, is not in their nature.”

  “You’ll sit here beside me?”

  Blake laughed. “She is not that tolerant. I’ll move away a bit. She needs to see clear avenues of escape. But there’s one last thing I must do for her.” He drew his belt knife and slipped the blade under the tight leather collar mounted with the radio transmitter. The leather was rotted and cracked and the knife sliced through it easily. Blake put the collar in his pack. “Now she is untraceable.”

  “It’s the skull, isn’t it?” Sean said. “What’s left in your bag of tricks. Hiding in plain sight on the shelf in your home. You took it before we came up here.”

  “Excellent, Sean. But as you might have noticed, that cat had only three canine teeth, and the wounds in Buster’s throat had a fourth puncture.”

  “You could have improvised the fourth puncture.”

  “I could have. But that is a tiger’s skull, not a cougar’s. It is much too large. A cat of such size bites with a force of more than a thousand pounds per square inch. The depth of the wounds and the spacing of the teeth would have raised suspicion. No, I had to make another model specific to the task.” He brought a skull out of the pack and set it on the stump where he had placed the tranquilizing gun.

  “This is the skull of a mountain lion that one of Buster’s clients shot. It is similar in size to Zahara’s skull. But the jaws work on a different mechanical principle than the tiger’s jaws. With the tiger’s, you had to screw the jaws together one half-turn at a time. Messy. It was not pretty to see the effect. This model is much more efficient.”

  “You’ve killed with it before.”

  “I tested it on a deer carcass. I am not a sadist, Sean. The jaws are made of aircraft aluminum and exert compound leverage. You simply crank this lever.” He tapped it. “A jaws of death, if you will, so user-friendly that a woman could operate it. Not that the details of its operation will be your paramount concern. After the next injection, you won’t feel anything, and if your body is ever found, and that I doubt, then you will be simply the latest victim in the career of a man-eating cat.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Ninth Life

  Martha was hoping to hear it, had her rifle in her hands. But when she heard the caterwauling of the cat, as if floating down on some hellish wind, she had to fight the urge to run either away from it or toward it. Toward it because it sounded like the cry of the dying, and someone in desperate need of succor. Away from it because it sounded like the breath of the devil, the most horrifying sound that Martha had ever heard. That it was a mating call was hard to fathom. No human being in the throes of passion screamed like that.

  In the confined walls of the canyon, the caterwauling reverberated and echoed out. Martha switched on the radio receiver and pointed the antenna in the direction she thought the sound had come from. Deliberately, she turned in a three-quarter circle, sweeping the antenna in a smooth arc, as Scarlett had instructed her. Nothing. Again she swept the receiver, holding the wand out in front. She moved the antenna back and forth.

  At first, the blips were so faint she couldn’t be sure she’d heard them. She adjusted the volume knob, turning it a little to the right. She could hear the blips fade out, then get stronger. Below the tree line? She began to pick her way down the steep mountainside.

  * * *

  • • •

  SEAN SAW ONE of the cat’s rear legs stir. Blake hadn’t noticed; he was smearing the purple ointment up and down the withered foreleg. Now both rear legs were stirring, pumping the pedals of an invisible bicycle. Surely he can feel the movement, Sean thought. But Blake was looking away from the cat into Sean’s eyes, his mouth was smiling, he was saying something, listening to himself expound.

  Sean saw the heavy tail lift an inch, then twitch against the snow. Past the cat, at the edge of the trees, something else moved. It was a tawny color, and for a long moment Sean thought that there was a second cat, that Blake had called in a male, too. Then the color shifted and Sean saw the figure of a woman. The woman was swallowed up in a heavy canvas coat, and he could not believe what his eyes were seeing. It was Scarlett, walking toward them with effort, limping as the cat had limped minutes before. Her eyes were trained on the ground and she did not appear to understand what was happening. Sean wanted to shout at her to turn and run, but said nothing. Blake was still speaking as he worked on the leg of the lion.

  “What do you mean?” Sean said. He didn’t care what the man was saying; he only wanted his focus to be anywhere but on Scarlett or the cat.

  “Well, it really goes back to the Bible,” Blake said.

  Sean would never know what went back to the Bible. For abruptly, without warning or sound, the cat drew her foreleg back from Blake’s treatment. She crouched. Then she sprang. Sean saw an amazed expression on Blake’s face, saw his head jerk, and then felt the air rush as the cat flashed by, a tawny streak, no more than a foot from the tree he was tied to.

  As she sprang past, her body elongated, her tail high,
she made a splash of tan against the pines. The cat leapt again, stretching like a rubber band, and then once more, clearing a pile of downed timber. In three heartbeats she was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  MARTHA SAW THE FLASH of color and knelt on the forest floor. She eased the fore-end of her rifle over a branch of a Ponderosa pine and looked through the scope. It was the new Leupold Vari-XIII that Sean had bought her for Christmas, after their ordeal on the Smith River, where Martha had found her old K-4 Weaver lacking in both power and clarity. By comparison, the Leupold was the eye of God, and with the power knob at nine, its highest setting, she could see Sean’s face in profile and his upper chest. He was at least two hundred yards away. Ground cover obscured the rest of his body. Nothing of Blake. Where her chest pressed against the trunk of the tree, she could feel the pounding of her heart.

  Where are you, you bastard?

  Then, at the edge of the scope’s field of view, she saw something that could be the bare trunk of a tree. She shifted her rifle so that the patch of color was centered in the scope. She was looking at Scarlett. Was but could not be. She would have to have hiked here from Martha’s Jeep, there was no other explanation. How could any person whose body had been tortured the way that hers had been manage such a feat of strength and endurance? But then Martha had seen determination before. She knew that people under duress were always sold short, and that when the adrenaline kicked in they were capable of the impossible. She was looking at an example now. She checked the loads in her rifle to make sure there was one in the chamber and rested her thumb on the safety. She began to toe down the slope.

  * * *

  • • •

  SEAN’S EYES HAD FOLLOWED the cat and now they returned to Blake, who still had a stupefied look on his face. He was clutching at the collar of his jacket. He brought the hand in front of his face. It was slimed with blood.

  “Why isn’t it pumping?” he said. There was a note of wonder in his voice. “Why, it’s hardly a scratch.” He looked into Sean’s eyes. “She caught her dewclaw on my jacket. That first jump. She couldn’t have missed my carotid by an inch. If I believed in God, I would take it as a sign.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t care,” Sean said.

  Beyond Blake’s left shoulder, Sean watched Scarlett. She was stepping in line like a cat. In ten steps, Sean judged, she would reach the stump where Blake had set down the tranquilizing gun beside the skull.

  “Hurry!” Sean wanted to shout. Instead he dropped his eyes. Do not look past him, he told himself. Don’t give him reason to turn his head. Keep his attention.

  “Tell me,” Sean said. “Since it won’t matter anyway, there are a couple things I’ve wondered about. The bullet I found in the dog, and the claw Buster wore around his neck. They placed him where the herder was killed. I can’t understand how they got there. It’s never made any sense to me.”

  “Ah, that would have been me.” There was a note of pride in the voice. “A bit of misdirection. Buster was dead, you see. I knew his body might be found, that it was only a matter of time before his truck and his horse trailer were spotted. But the longer the interval between his death and his discovery, the better. Rain would fall, perhaps even one last snow. It would sweep the evidence of his death like a broom. Any possible connection to me would be erased. So I fired his rifle into a dirt bank and dug out the slug. I was going to make a show of finding it where the herder was killed, but then you took me to the dogs. The first one had been eviscerated and it was easy to tuck the bullet under a flap of skin. The claw I placed where you found it. If you hadn’t spotted it, I would have drawn your attention to it. It would concentrate the search where he wasn’t, you see. Later, I thought I was being too clever by half—the bullet or the necklace, either one, would have served the purpose.

  “You said there were two things you wondered about. What is the other?”

  Sean searched his mind. There was no second question. He had been lucky to have thought of the first.

  “The DNA,” he said after an interval. “There was lion DNA found on Garrett’s body. How did you manage that?”

  “So there was.” Blake nodded. “If you bother to compare it to samples of DNA taken from the lions in the study, you will find that it matches the DNA collected from a female lion whose collar quit transmitting three years ago. We always took blood and saliva samples for future studies. Carson kept the main data bank, as it was his project, but I took samples, too. For safekeeping, in case one was degraded or lost. All I did was smear it in a few places on Buster’s body.”

  “You thought of everything.”

  “No, I did not anticipate you would come to the yurt so soon, or find me engaged in a domestic spat.”

  “If that’s what you call ripping a person apart.”

  “It was necessary. Now, I think, no more talk of the past. We return to the present. Unfortunately for you, it will be a brief return.”

  As Blake rose from his crouch, there was a sharp cracking sound and Sean saw his body flinch. Blake swatted at the small flower that had bloomed between his shoulder blades. He couldn’t reach it. He twisted his torso and swatted with his other hand. Then he saw his sister for the first time. She stood, her arms at her sides, the muzzle of the tranquilizing gun dragging on the ground.

  “Scarlett, my darling, will you please give me the antidote.” His voice was calm and measured, though his hands, Sean saw, were trembling. “It is on that space blanket. I love you, my darling—you know how much I love you.”

  Sean saw her collect the syringes off the space blanket.

  “Thank you so much, my angel.” Blake was moving toward her, a little drunkenly, his legs seemingly unable to track in a straight line.

  Scarlett put the syringes in the pocket of her coat and picked up the skull. She looked at it curiously, then dug her fingers into the cavernous eye sockets and began to walk away, the skull in one hand, banging against her thigh, the gun in her other. She did not appear to be in a hurry, or even to acknowledge the staggering figure in her wake, or his pleading declarations of love, which now had a desperate quality.

  “Please,” he said.

  She stopped and turned to face him.

  “I can’t live without you, Scarlett.”

  “But I can live without you.” She turned and walked into the trees.

  Blake began to reel. Sean saw him place his hands on his right leg and move it forward. Then follow with the left. He staggered a few more feet and fell. He got to his feet and fell again. The second time he fell, he began to roll down the slope where Sean couldn’t see him. He was behind the trees where Scarlett had disappeared. Sean heard him and then he didn’t.

  After that, nothing for a minute. Then Sean faintly heard a grinding noise that went on and off intermittently, and much louder, a gagging, guttural sound that seemed to go on forever, but probably for no more than half a minute. He had an awful moment of realization, when he knew what he was hearing.

  “Don’t do it,” he called out. But it was too late for that, and he knew that if Blake was not dead already he soon would be, a victim of his own medicine in the end, his self-described jaws of death.

  Sean heard Scarlett begin to wail then. First it was a woman’s wailing, then she was screaming, caterwauling like a cat. Sean recalled Blake saying that she could duplicate the sound using only her voice. This was a cry from the wilderness, a last lament, calling out not for Drick, to whom she had been bound by tortured love, by blood, and by hate, but for Buster, Sean thought, the lover who was now forever beyond the sound of her voice.

  The caterwauling died away.

  Sean craned his head. He’d heard something behind him, and for just a second he thought it could be the cat, that it was returning, drawn to Scarlett’s call. But this was something heavy, coming quickly, branches breaking underfoot. He heard a voice call out, a voi
ce that he knew.

  “Martha, I’m over here!” Sean shouted.

  She came into the opening. “Jesus,” she said. “What the hell happened here?”

  He pointed with his head. “In the thicket. I think she killed him.”

  “I’ll cut the rope.”

  “No time,” he said.

  “You’re my priority. I’m cutting the damned rope.”

  Sean’s circulation had been cut off so long that his hands were numb. They lay on his lap like lobster claws. Martha tried to help him to his feet, but the tranquilizing solution was still in his system and he sat back down.

  “Go,” he said. He told her what to expect, and Martha began to walk toward the thicket, her rifle held at port arms. When she was just out of sight, he heard her say “Jesus.”

  Over the next ten minutes or so, Sean heard voices intermittently, the words garbled by the wind moving through the trees. More time passed. The burn began in his fingers and he finally managed to stand up and stay up. Martha was slogging back up the hill.

  “Where’s Scarlett?”

  She unshouldered her rifle and blew out a breath. “She’s with him. She won’t leave him. And he’s not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT EVENING, after Scarlett had been ambulanced fifty miles to the hospital in Dillon and the usual suspects had arrived, including a coroner from Anaconda to state the obvious and four deputies from Beaverhead County to tape off the scene and remove the body on a litter, Martha told Sean the rest of the story. She said that when she reached Scarlett, she was bent over her brother’s body and her right hand was cranking a handle that operated the jaws of the cat skull. It reminded Martha of churning ice cream with her mother’s bucket maker, how you really had to bear down to turn the crank. It wasn’t the teeth that killed Blake but the pressure of the bite, the crushing of his trachea. That gagging sound Sean had heard? It was the ninth life leaving the body, as Scarlett put it to Martha. After that, she’d just kept killing a corpse.