It took a few seconds for what he was seeing inside to sink in. Piles of crates, boxes and bales… And piles of tusks. Elephant tusks, a couple of hundred of them. Walrus tusks. The fire had the piles between him and them, but he pushed into the smoke, close enough to confirm what the heavy burnt-leather reek had told him. The skins were polar bear, and grizzly, and tiger, and sea otter—stacks of them, hundreds at least.
“Oh, my God!” he said, acutely aware of the utter inadequacy of the words. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
That wasn’t up to the occasion either, but it did a better job of expressing how he felt. Tully’s amazing flow of scatology and obscenity was a little better, and more sincere than usual—the smaller man’s Arkansas accent was notably thicker.
The SWAT team came back, coughing and crouching as the smoke grew heavier and came closer to the floor. One of them held a big cage, with an even bigger bird jammed into it, something like an enormous vulture, thrashing and screeching hoarsely. A really enormous vulture…
An adult California condor.
Tom felt his teeth show in an involuntary snarl of rage. There weren’t more than a couple of hundred of those in the whole world, and only a captive breeding program had saved them from complete extinction. This one warehouse could have pushed a couple of species halfway to the brink! The rising shuddering roar of the fire, the rumble of sheet metal buckling and twisting, the ptank! as rivets gave way, all seemed to pale before the thunder of his own blood in his ears.
The officer in charge of the SWAT team grabbed him as he tried to push farther in; the offices were in a glassed-in enclosure up against the far wall, and it was there that any evidence would be found.
“No use!” he shouted, flipping up his face shield. “They must have had some warning—the charges there went off first. We took everything we could find, but I think there’s thermite planted here that hasn’t gone off yet, and sure as shit someone drenched the place in gasoline. Out of here before someone gets killed!”
They did, retreating before the billowing rankness of the smoke made by things not meant to burn. The leader of the SWAT team pulled off his helmet, coughing and rubbing at a gray-and-red mustache.
“Son of a bitch!” he said, as they dodged aside to let the first wave of firemen wrestle a hose forward. “I didn’t think there was that much ivory in the world,” he said, grinning through smoke-smuts. “These must be some seriously energetic smugglers you’re after.”
“There are only two hundred forty-seven condors in the world,” Tom said grimly. “That one your people got out is one half of one percent of the entire goddamn species. Congratulations on that, by the way.”
“Oh,” the LA policeman said, then nodded to them and walked away.
“Also Known As,” Perkins muttered.
“As the bear said, I’m a rabbit,” Tully said, his grin making his face look even more like a garden gnome’s than usual. “Guy must have been a marine.” Perkins raised her brows, and Tully went on: “Marine—Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Essential.”
Tom took a deep breath, not even minding the air much—or that Tully had stolen the Ranger joke. Anger seemed to burn the impurities out of his system. “You know what makes me really mad?”
“No, Tom, what makes you really mad?” Perkins said.
The evidence had been set up temporarily in the back of one of the LAPD vans; the condor was farther in, in shadow with an improvised cover thrown over the cage, and seemed to be all right except for being agitated. And rather smelly; condors were naturally carrion eaters, and messy diners at best. The rustling of the great bird’s wings inside the confining cave gave a slithering undertone to the murmur of the growing crowd, the noise of the fire and the firefighters’ machinery. The LAPD evidence team were at work with their Baggies and tweezers, making sure everything was preserved properly, and taking continuous video as they did.
“My father and the potholes, that’s what makes me angry.”
Perkins’s thin eyebrows went up; she noticed that she still had her 9mm in her hand and put it back in the holster at the small of her back and let the thin polyester jacket fall over it again.
“Told you my dad farmed, didn’t I?” Tom said; she nodded, and he went on: “Well, up in the Red River Valley, the land’s flat as a pancake—a lot of it had to be tile-drained before it could carry a crop; it’s naturally swampy all through the spring and fall. Some of it’s still in these little isolated marshy lakes, we call ’em potholes. And it’s on a big migratory bird flyway. Millions of birds depend on those potholes to get to and from their breeding grounds. Problem is, after you’ve drained them, those potholes are prime land… and there’s not a farmer in the world who can afford to pass up another hundred acres, even if he’s farming twenty sections, which Dad wasn’t. The bigger you are the bigger your debts get. So we’re coming back from duck hunting one fall; one of those sunny crisp days, with a little haze on the horizon, the wheat’s in but some of the sunflowers are still nodding in the wind.
“And I’m on top of the world because it’s the first time I’ve been allowed to take a shotgun out with Dad and my brother Lars and we’ve each gotten a couple of mallards, and it’s been the best goddamned day in my life. And we stop at a crossroads and talk to a neighbor—who did farm twenty sections—and he says that if he was Dad, he’d have drained that pothole for his kids’ sake, not wasted it on ducks.”
Perkins looked at him a little oddly. “What did your father say?”
“Nothing, until the neighbor was on his way. Then he turned to us, Lars and me, and smiled, and said: ‘And if I did drain it, you boys would never get to see the ducks going over in the fall, or go hunting with your kids. Better than getting a motorbike for Christmas, eh?’”
Tom kicked the wheel of the van, remembering the rough hand tousling his hair, and the smells of pipe tobacco and Old Spice he’d always subliminally associated with his father.
“Dad worked himself to death keeping that farm going, but he wasn’t going to steal that from his grandsons. And now some son of a bitch had that place stuffed to the rafters with the carcasses of animals maybe nobody will ever see again except on a recording, and for what? For money to shove candy up his nose, to give some hooker a diamond, to buy some three-a-dollar Third World politician.”
He very carefully did not slam his fist into the side of the van, letting the fingers unclench one by one. “Sorry,” he muttered, embarrassed by the outburst; he normally wasn’t a very verbal man.
Perkins patted him on the shoulder as she came up to his side. “Hey, that’s more emotion than has ever been shown in Sweden before,” she said. “No, it’s all right, Christiansen. Every good cop has got to have a little passion in them about something in the work, or they burn out. Your passion is critters and trees; that’s OK. I like collaring scumbags: this bunch, terrorists back in the war, whatever. Our passions coincide.” A grin. “Don’t tell my husband I said that.”