DAY THIRTY-THREE
Surprisingly, Sturm hadn’t been pissed about the bear’s escape. On the contrary, he had been delighted. “Got me a genuine killer grizzly—no, no, a goddamn killer Kodiak,” he shouted over the phone at sunrise. It sounded like he’d been up all night. The skull and teeth were going on his desk, right next to the tiger. “Get to the yard soon as you can. Got someone I’d like you to meet.”
Frank fed all the cats at the vet office, then packed fifty pounds of meat into an ice chest in the trunk of the long black car and drove through town. He felt like he’d lived in here his entire life. He could dimly remember the night out in the desert, when he was trying to break the plastic cuffs, but the memory was so distant it might as well have happened to someone else. His mother still lived within his memories in vivid, precise details, but the images of his father often flickered into images of Sturm, like overlapping radio stations.
* * * * *
When he got to the auction yard, he found a new truck, some overhauled refrigerated vehicle, parked in front. The engine was shut off, but the cargo cooler wheezed laboriously under the midmorning sun. Sturm and another guy were standing in the shade at the back of the truck; Sturm raised a hand as Frank drove past and parked.
Sturm said, “Like to introduce you to Billy…” Sturm obviously didn’t know the guy’s last name. “Well, he’s brought us something special.”
Billy reminded Frank of a squirrel that had lost a fight with a riding lawnmower. He was mostly bald, except for a braided foot of hair where the hair grew at the top of the back of the neck. A long, stringy goatee erupted off the end of his chin; there was no hair above his lip. A couple of sores at the left side of his mouth looked like they might be infected and his upper teeth probably came from a toy vending machine that waited near the exit doors in a supermarket. Whatever was left of the bottom row, that was all his, no question.
He grabbed Frank’s right hand and shook it like he was trying to rip it loose. Something about the guy’s grip felt stunted and curiously lumpy, but Frank couldn’t have pulled his hand away if he had tried. He was too busy trying not to breathe air contaminated with Billy’s breath.
“Heard all about you, that’s right, friend of the animals and all that. Well, any friend of animals is a friend of mine. Them cats are in damn good shape—feeding ’em meat, right?” Billy answered his own question. “Right.” He finally released Frank’s hand.
Frank backed up slightly, eyeballing a row of fresh beer bottles, ice still clinging to the glass, lined up along the truck’s bumper.
Billy followed his look, and handed a Frank a beer. Frank couldn’t help but notice how mangled his hand was, like it had been slammed in a pickup door a few times and the tailgate too, just for the hell of it. A few fingers were gone, Frank couldn’t actually tell exactly which ones—only a few nubs peeked shyly around the sweating bottle. Billy’s thumb looked suspiciously like a big toe.
“Much obliged,” Frank said.
“Betcha,” Billy said. “Always got some on hand, since I gotta keep the truck cold anyways.”
Frank nodded, as if this made perfect sense. He figured maybe Billy had a dead animal on display and he needed to keep the corpse frozen. When Frank was around nine or ten, his mom took him to the county fair and he paid fifty cents to walk into an air-conditioned semi-trailer and see a big plastic-looking shark behind sheets of rippled glass that were supposed to be ice. Still, the shark had been huge, and Frank had stayed for hours, squinting through the ripples, trying to see the shark better. Finally, the truck owner had to kick him out.
“Go on, son,” Sturm said. “Ask him what’s in there.”
Frank looked at Billy. “What’s in there?”
Billy smiled. The top row of teeth looked like it had frightened the bottom row into rotting and melting away. He leaned into a quick spiel. “A genuine dinosaur. Right in front of your eyes. Guaranteed. Biggest reptile you’ve ever seen. It eats crocodiles for breakfast. Deadliest predator to stalk the Earth. Spanning the ages all the back to the dreaded Paleolithic Era. Which is before the Jurassic Park era, just so you know. It is nature unleashed in all her raw fury. Behold…” Billy snapped the latches at the back of the truck open and swung the thick door wide. “The awesome power of the Komodo Dragon.”
The dragon stared coolly out at Frank and flicked its tongue at the wall absentmindedly. Frank hadn’t been expecting the thing to be alive. But it made no move to dart to the back end of the trailer, content only to lethargically move its eyes. Frank touched the metal interior and it was cool, but not freezing, like a knife that had been left out all night.
“I keep it cold so he stays calm,” Billy said.
Frank realized Billy and Sturm were waiting for his reaction.
He said, “That’s a damn big lizard.” And it was true. The Komodo Dragon easily stretched across the eight foot trailer, even with the head curled around slightly and a solid three or four feet of tail along the opposite wall. The head and neck looked like an uncircumcised penis that had gotten surly one day and grown teeth and a tongue.
The claws, incredibly, were even longer than the Kodiak’s. These were thinner. Sharper. Meaner.
“The spit alone will make you sicker n’ hell,” Billy said. He held up his mangled hand. “When it was just a pup, sonofabitch got hold of my hand here, and I kicked it in the head, got it off. Didn’t think it was so bad at first. Hell, just poured some tequila over it. Shit. Inside of two days I woke up, found myself in the emergency ward. That shit fucked me up but good. That monster, he ain’t nothing to fuck around with.”
“You gonna shoot it?” Frank asked Sturm.
“Hell no,” Sturm said. “Jack and Pine are picking up a motherhumping white Siberian tiger as we speak. I don’t need to tell you that that’s one of the rarest goddamn animals on the planet right now. And,” he lowered his voice, “story goes, it’s the same tiger that went after that faggot magician few years back.”
“No shit?” Billy asked. “I heard they had to put it down.”
“Supposedly, they switched it with a tiger that was already dead.”
“I’ll be damned,” Billy said.
“Tonight, we got ourselves a regular rumble in the jungle; this damn dinosaur is gonna to go toe-to-toe with that tiger in the bottom of the town pool.”
* * * * *
When Frank came over the slight bridge that traversed the dry creekbed that cut across the north end of the valley on his way back to the vet hospital, he saw Mr. Noe’s Mercedes parked on his side of the highway. It was late, and the nearly horizontal rays burned the back of the Mercedes into a slippery white fire. Frank’s first instinct was to just hit the gas instead of the brakes and just crash right into the fucker. But he managed to at least take his foot off the gas, and coasted up on the other car.
Mr. Noe stood in the sunroof, aiming his rifle at something in the empty irrigation ditch. He fired, twice. Theo, in the driver’s seat, glanced at the rearview mirror. By then, Frank was close enough to see Theo’s eyes narrow as Theo caught sight of the long black car.
Frank drifted over into the oncoming lane and stopped directly across from the Mercedes. Mr. Noe turned to look, gave a little bow, and then turned and fired a third time. Something cracked inside of Frank’s head and filled him with unease. This was all wrong. These two fucks weren’t just shooting pheasants or raccoons. He shut off the car and got out.
Mr. Noe waved and dropped back into the passenger seat and Theo made the little car leap forward and by the time Frank had crossed the dotted yellow line in the center of the highway, the Mercedes was twenty yards away and gaining speed.