“I got it! I got it!” Fairfax screamed.
“You didn’t shoot shit, dickhead,” Pine said. “Fuck, it’d be halfway to Idaho by now if it was up to you.”
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Sturm ripped the rifle out of Fairfax’s pudgy hands. “You. Stupid. Goddamn. Asshole. You’re paying for all that damage, so help me God.”
Fairfax stood stock still, mouth open, realization sinking in like concrete in his veins. He licked his lips a few times, but nothing came out.
Sturm glared at him. “You fucking stupid, or do you just not give a shit?”
“I…I…oh good Lord.”
The men tried to hold it in, but snorts of laughter escaped anyway, sounding like they were trying to suck snot from somewhere up near their brain. Sturm growled through his teeth, whirled, and flung the rifle as far as he could into the field. Frank figured Fairfax was lucky Sturm didn’t just shoot him. Without another word, Sturm climbed into the Jeep. Theo started it up and everyone followed it back to the house.
* * * * *
They found Sturm on his knees in the dog pen, a little enclosure wrapped in chicken wire, set off in the back of the yard. Frank hadn’t realized that Sturm even had a dog until he saw Sturm cradling the black lab’s head. Frank immediately saw how a bullet had torn through the dog’s guts lengthwise. Bluish gray intestines had spilled out in a wash of blood on the concrete. The dog was still alive, breathing in low, keening sounds.
Sturm stood up, pinching at the bridge of his nose. He yanked his rifle out of the Jeep, shoved it up into Fairfax’s chest, eyes searing holes in the lawyer’s skull like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. “This is your doing. Now you finish the job, you sonofabitch.”
Fairfax’s fingers clasped the rifle against his will, but he knew better than to protest. He looked like he wanted to throw up. He stumbled over to the dog pen, put the barrel against the dog’s head, just in front of the soft ear, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Afterwards, he couldn’t move, just stood there with his head down, shoulders hitching once in a while. Bob Bronson went inside and pretended he didn’t know him.
Sturm hurled a shovel at the pen as hard as he could. It hit the chicken wire behind Fairfax with a clang and he flinched. “You show my dog some respect and bury her deep out in the corner of the yard, over by the corn. Deep! You hear me, you fucking dumbshit? It best be deep, by God, or so help me, I’ll shoot you myself.” He turned back to the men. They were silent, subdued, respectful.
Sturm said, “Let’s go hunt us a tiger.”
* * * * *
When they got back to the vet hospital, the tiger looked like it was still unconscious. Still, nobody was in a rush to jump into the stall and find out. Instead, Chuck and Pine produced an oil barrel filled with ice and a beer bottles in the back of Chuck’s truck. Frank gladly accepted a beer. It was ice cold and tasted almost sweet. A few minutes later, a few bottles of Jack Daniels got passed around. Frank filled his flask and passed the bottle on.
When the tiger hadn’t moved in over twenty minutes, they picked it up by its paws. Nobody knew if it was male or female, nobody’d gotten brave enough to look close. They carried all six hundred pounds of cat out to the horse trailer.
Sturm had given Bronson the honor of hunting the tiger. But this time, he wanted to make sure that it was more of a real hunt and less like shooting fish in a barrel. So this time they went farther out, out in the foothills at the edge of Sturm’s property, to a dry creek bed cut from the hill by winter storms. Over the last hundred years, the creek had wandered back and forth with impunity across the five miles of level valley floor. Where they had parked the trailer, the creek was nearly twenty yards across, filled with dead creek grass, brittle and draped close over rocks as if the grass remembered when water ran over the gravel underbelly of the creek. Now, in the brutal summer heat, the gravel was covered in a chalky white crust, burnt in the sun.
Farther up, the creek’s banks rose sharply into loose, sandy soil, shrinking to only a fifteen-foot width. Pine backed the trailer up to where the creek narrowed, tires crunching on the white rocks.
Inside the trailer, the tiger didn’t make a sound. Frank got scared that the Ace had done something permanent, and once Pine turned off the engine, he got out and peered through the slats. But the tiger was awake, and watching him back. It growled low, then suddenly sprang, snarling and ripping at the chicken wire.
Everyone except Fairfax, who was back at the house burying the dog, gathered at the back of the trailer. Sturm took a stick and drew a map in a sandy stretch; it looked like a long, S-shaped crude drawing of the esophagus, stomach, and large intestine.
Sturm told Bronson, “We’ll drop you at this end here, up a ways, where the creek widens out.” He jabbed at what would have been the stomach in the drawing with his stick. “That’s where you wait. Then Pine and Frank’ll release the tiger and send it your way. We’ll be spread out up along the edge on top, just in case, but hell, in that narrow stretch, the bank’s at least fifteen, twenty feet high. That tiger, he’ll stick to the shadows in the ravine. He’ll end up right in your lap. You just be ready, right?”
Bronson slapped the butt of his rifle and grinned. “Shit. That tiger won’t know what hit it. Hope you’re hungry boys. That abalone was damn fine, but we got tiger on the menu tonight.” He licked his teeth. “And if it’s a male, then by God, I’m gonna eat the penis. Fella in Chinatown claims it’ll turn you into a goddamn sex machine.”
“Suppose the tiger doesn’t head father into the creek,” Frank said. “Suppose it decides to head the other way. What then?”
Sturm mulled that over. Frank could see he wanted to dismiss that possibility, but after the last two hunts, he’d realized these goddamn big cats were unpredictable, to say the least. “Shit.” He nodded. “Shit.”
“Looks like we need a dog is all,” Bronson said. “Tell you what. Frank here, he’s the expert, why don’t you drive the tiger up in there.”
“What do you suggest I use? Foul language?”
Sturm snapped his fingers. “Rock salt.” He went to the Jeep and started digging around in the tool box. “Get your shotgun.” Frank’s Winchester was resting in the gun rack of the pickup along with Pine’s M-1. Sturm held up a fistful of .12 gauge shells. “Loaded these last year, after I caught a couple of them fucking Gloucks on my property. Just rock salt. Won’t kill anything bigger’n a squirrel, but it’ll sure sting like a sonofabitch.”
“There we go. Problem solved,” Bronson said.
“Yeah,” Frank said, pumping the shotgun, spitting out the lethal shells. He didn’t sound convinced. He put the shells in his shirt pockets, just in case, and reloaded the shotgun with the new loads.
Sturm handed Pine a walkie-talkie. “When we get in place, you let it loose. But not before I tell you, got it?” Everybody piled in the Jeep. Sturm drove this time.
* * * * *
Pine said, “Well. Don’t that suck donkey dick.”
“Yeah.” Frank took a gulp from his flask and passed it to Pine. In this kind of sun, he’d found that an ice cold glass of fresh squeezed orange juice with two fifths of Appleton Estate Jamaican Rum was better than just about anything. But today the raw Jack Daniels worked damn near as well. They crouched in the sliver of shade of the horse trailer and passed the flask back and forth for a while, not saying much.
The walkie-talkie beeped. “Let her rip.”
Pine wouldn’t look at Frank. “Good luck.”
Frank checked for about the hundredth time that the safety was off and there was a fresh shell in the chamber. He backed slowly away, dull black shotgun heavy and slick in his sweaty fingers. Inside the trailer, the tiger was quiet as death.