Claws (18 page)

Thirty-Four

Kali flicked her long tail at the bothersome Blue Bottle flies swarming around her and licked her muzzle. She could see the prey on the rim of a gully. Unlike the big gray prey she had chased, this prey was smaller and reddish brown. This prey wasn’t running away either. This prey already was dead. Kali had no qualms about stealing another predator’s kill if she could do it safely.

Predators usually return to feed on a kill until it’s all gone, so Kali inspected a stand of locust trees and the spotty patches of gray rabbit brush and silver sagebrush that grew alongside them. She was looking for movement – a twitch of tail or the flutter of ears – but mostly she listened. Sound carries at 1100 feet per second. The forest slows it down some, but the ears tell most animals a predator is close long before the eyes do.

When she saw nothing and heard nothing, Kali moved out from behind the bitterbrush where she was hiding. If she used the gully and approached from below, she could be out of sight until she reached the prey. Even then, she would not eat in
the open. She would tear off a portion of meat and drag it away. Only when she was safe would she satisfy her hunger.

“The land drops away sharply” Katy said, rotating her Leupold Camo binoculars from left to right. The Pocatello gun dealer had provided the expensive binoculars.

“It’s a creek bed. Dry this time of year,” Jackson told her. “Never runs much water now anyway. There’s a gully. Pretty steep in places, but not everywhere.”

“I see something on the edge of the gully, maybe six hundred feet northeast. If it’s what I think it is, you’re not going to like it. But I can’t be certain from here.” There was a knoll with western red cedars between them and the gully, and the viewing angle was poor.

Katy gave her binoculars to Jackson. He adjusted them for his vision and found the gully and traveled along it until he could glimpse the downed animal. After a second, he said, “Oh hell! It looks like Boots.”

Seconds later, Kali leaped over the edge of the gully and pounced on the mare. It was Jackson’s first sighting of the female liger. He saw the giant maneless head and huge body and uttered, “Christ Almighty!”

Kali clamped her jaws on the mare’s foreleg where the humerus attaches to the shoulder. She ripped away twenty
pounds of horsemeat. She slowly looked around, and then tore off a smaller piece of horsemeat and ate it. Her hunger had overwhelmed her caution.

Katy reclaimed the binoculars and located the giant cat. It was her first sighting of the liger as well. Katy’s pulse raced. After a second, she said, “She’ll settle in to feed for a while. If we get the wind in our face, I might get close enough to dart her.”

“How close is close enough?” Jackson asked.

“Under a hundred yards, but the closer the better. Kali’s a big cat. The dosage could be tricky.”

Katy strapped the dart rifle across her back and picked up the .375. She waited for Jackson to gear up, and then without speaking, they set off. Although he was not a skilled hunter, Jackson still realized that Katy possessed a set of trail skills unlike anything he had seen before. Not a twig snapped or a dry leaf crackled when she walked.

When they were a hundred and fifty yards out, Katy ceased even whispering and resorted to hand signals. In this way she told Jackson to stop and sit. He quietly lowered to the ground. She sat beside him, their thighs touching, placed her lips against his ear, and whispered instructions. Her warm breath caressed his skin and made his groin ache.

Katy noticed that Jackson was distracted, and she waited until he nodded yes. Then she handed him the .375 and checked the load in the dart rifle. Satisfied, she pocketed a second dart, nodded to indicate it was time to go, secured the .375 to her back, cradled the dart rifle with both hands, and crawled forward on her elbows and knees. Jackson followed her.

For twenty minutes they crept toward the red cedars on the knoll. When they arrived, Katy unharnessed the .375 and gave it to Jackson. He already had set his M4 aside. She shouldered the dart rifle now and calibrated the scope.

Kali suddenly lifted her head and licked her bloody muzzle. The liger looked straight at Jackson and Katy and held the look for a long time. Then suddenly whipping her head around, Kali sprang to her feet. Katy’s finger was on the trigger housing when Jackson tapped her and pointed toward two female lions bolting from the brush.

In the lion kingdom females do most of the hunting, although males help with large prey, but the main role of the male, other than to procreate, is to protect the pride. The male learns to fight, while the female learns to hunt for food. Even so, the female lions charged Kali. Most prey will flee upon seeing a lion’s flash of teeth, the low tail, and the fast charge. Not Kali. She dropped the horsemeat she was eating and sprinted toward her attackers.

The three large cats met up ninety feet from the horse. It seemed to Jackson that they would crash into one another, but at the last second the two lionesses veered off and attacked Kali from the side.

Lions mostly kill smaller prey by slapping them or hooking them with their claws and then biting the back of the neck or throat. Sometimes a lion will place its mouth over the animal to suffocate it. Larger prey is pulled down. The lion either punctures the throat or strangles the animal, although the kill often requires a group effort.

Since the two female lions lacked the power to pull down Kali, they attacked her neck. A lion’s canine teeth are shorter and his bite less powerful than Kali’s, but a single bite from either lioness still could be fatal. While Kali fended off one attack, the other lioness managed to sink her front canines into Kali’s throat. Fortunately for Kali, the greatest bite pressure is in back near the jaw, and the bite didn’t kill her. Before the lioness could bite again, Kali ripped off part of the attacker’s left ear. In doing so she also left herself vulnerable.

The second lioness swiped at Kali’s face, her sharp claws extended. A lion paw moves as fast as eighteen feet per second, and Kali’s large head was an easy target. Had
Kali not twitched, the lion’s claws could have torn off her nose instead of merely shredding her face.

Kali nipped the leg of the new attacker and drove the lioness back six feet. She then shook off the one-eared lioness as the injured cat tried to jump on her back. Kali forced her to retreat as well. The three animals stood eye-to-eye like boxers psyching out their opponent. All three emitted a deep guttural sound. Blood dripped from Kali’s muzzle; she wiped it with her tongue. The two lionesses sensed that Kali was weakening and charged her. There was a tangled blur of cats rolling and biting and snarling and clawing and springing up.

“Shouldn’t we do something?” Jackson asked as they watched from afar.

“If I dart Kali now, the lions will kill her.”

“And if you don’t –”

“They may kill her anyway,” Katy said.

“Or maybe they’ll kill each other,” Jackson said.

Katy shook her head, rejecting the idea. “I can’t risk that.” A second later, she said, “We can do it, but we’ll have to work together. And it’ll happen fast, with no margin for error. Okay? So when I say I’m ready, you shoot the two lions while I dart Kali. Don’t hesitate. Shoot one, then the other. Got it?” She paused and studied Jackson. He seemed calm. “Can you hit them from here?”

“Guess we’re about to find out,” Jackson said.

Before Jackson could raise the .375, Kali grabbed a lioness by her throat and bit deeply, shaking the five-hundred-pound cat like she was a ragdoll. While Kali was killing the one lioness, the second cat clamped her teeth onto Kali’s rear leg. Legs are vulnerable. Sever a tendon and the liger could not escape or defend herself. Kali released the dead lioness as her injured leg buckled.

“She’s down,” Katy said. “Hurry!”

Jackson had the remaining lioness in his crosshairs and told Katy he was ready. As she was counting down from three, they heard a roar off to their left. They both looked up to see a large male lion and a much smaller adolescent racing toward Kali in a second attack.

“Give me the rifle,” Katy shouted.

Instead, Jackson swiveled the .375 away from the lioness and toward the new attackers. The big-game rifle roared and bucked. The male’s front legs folded. His shaggy head hit the ground a second before the rest of his body. The shot sent the adolescent lion sprinting for cover. Jackson swiveled the rifle back toward the lioness, but she was gone already, and Kali was limping away too.

Katy swung up the dart rifle and, seemingly without taking aim, fired. Kali flinched and kept moving.

Jackson drew a bead on the liger. “Got her.” As he fired, Katy smacked the gun barrel. The
shot sailed high, and Kali disappeared. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What I came out here to do,” Katy said. “Save her.”

“The deal is we stop her, one way or another.”

“You kill her and I lose her and the cubs.”

“Christ, Katy! You don’t even know there are cubs.”

“You’re wrong. I do know. I’ve seen them, one of them anyway. I found a dead cub out on your prairie. But if you shoot Kali, I’ll never find any others.”

“You found a liger cub by my house? When?”

Katy confessed to finding the female cub in the tall rye grass. She also told Jackson about finding the liger track by the corral. He was furious at her secrecy. But even as Jackson chastised her, he remembered how Stan had learned about the liger cubs. It was him; he had caused it. Jackson stopped yelling and silently walked away.

Five minutes later he returned and told Katy what he had said to Stilts and how his words made their way to Stan Ely. “But that still doesn’t mean I forgive you.”

“And I don’t expect you to.”

“Oh, damnit to hell anyway.” He gestured toward the dead lions and Boots. “Let’s just deal with all this.” Jackson started toward the animals.

“Wait,” Katy said. She hurried to catch up with him. “We want to come at the lions from the rear,” she told Jackson as they neared the large male. Once they did she shot the cat in the heart. “In Africa they say, ‘It’s the dead ones that get up and kill you.’ ” She then walked over to the female lion that Kali had killed and shot her too.

Certain the lions were dead, Jackson left them and went to look at his bay mare. She had four white stockings that accounted for her name. The sight turned his stomach.

While Jackson mourned the loss of his horse, Katy examined the creek bed. It was mostly sand and gravel, but it was dotted with rocks that had been rounded by water and wind until they looked like the eggs of some prehistoric animal. Katy located the spent dart, climbed down the three feet high bank, and reclaimed it. The tip of the dart was not broken or bent and the chamber was empty.

“The dose was too weak or the drug was bad,” Katy said. Jackson didn’t respond, and she called out to him.

“I can’t leave these animals out here like this.”

“We’ll bury them,” Katy said.

Jackson shook his head. “Wolves or mountain lions or coyotes, they’ll dig them up.” Jackson stared off into the distance toward Colorado. “I’ll have to burn them.”

Thirty-Five

Jackson and Katy hiked to the house, loaded an old tractor with the supplies they would need, and returned to the gully on the John Deere. They used a logging chain to bind Boots’ legs like a bulldogged rodeo steer and then used the tractor to drag the horse into the gully. After that, they dragged the two lions to the edge and rolled them down the shallow bank next to Boots.

With the wind light and the creek bed wide, there was little chance of a fire spreading, but they cleared the dry grass and brush growing along the top anyway. When they finished, Jackson walked back to the tractor, and Katy climbed into the gully with a gas can. He had asked Katy to handle the burning, telling her that the fumes made him ill. With his back to the gully, he watched darkness douse the daylight while she doused the animals with gasoline.

Katy finished and climbed out again and stood on the edge of the bank while she lit a road-flair and tossed it on the animals. The flair landed, and there was a WHOOSH. Even from where he stood, Jackson felt the burst of
heat. “Thanks,” he said solemnly when Katy reached him a minute later. He was ashamed that he had not done the job himself and trying to justify it wouldn’t change the shame.

They stood in silence for a minute before Katy said, “Remember telling me you had somebody research me?” It wasn’t a question meant for an answer, so she didn’t wait for one. “I did the same thing. I know about Colorado.”

Jackson didn’t say anything.

Katy said, “The Internet says –”

“I know.” He turned to look at her.

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Jackson touched the scar on his neck. It not only itched, it burned. “Do you understand that I was a real supercop back then? That I made detective faster than anybody on the Fort Collins police force ever had? Or that in a small city a detective does whatever comes across his desk, including the takedown of a meth-cooking house?

“None of the stories tell what it was really like that day – how we stormed the house, seven of us wearing body armor and heavily armed, even though we didn’t expect trouble. Nobody told about how fast your heart beats when you ram through the door and rush in shouting. Busts are really more about shock and awe than shootouts. Except this time there were two guys inside, and one of them did
shoot at us. Then all hell broke loose.”

Jackson flinched as the fat behind them popped and sizzled. Then he said, “We took cover and returned fire. Then the house started burning. I don’t know why. But there was smoke everywhere, and we couldn’t see, and we were pinned down. We’re worried the house will blow. Methamphetamine cooking is highly explosive. So we got the order to lay down a barrage – handguns, shotguns, tactical rifles. We killed one man and wounded the other. We dragged them out and called an ambulance, but the wounded guy kept babbling about his little girl inside. By then the old wood house was ready to collapse. We can’t wait for help, so I went back. He told me her name was Nancy Larsen. I called and called for her, and finally, I heard something – a moan, a cry. I found the girl and carried her out. She’d been shot in the neck. I had her in my arms when she died.”

“Sounds to me like you’re a hero.”

“She’d been hit by a stray,” Jackson said. “The bullet came from my gun. She was seven years old.”

“Oh god,” Katy said. “I’m … I’m so sorry.”

They remained with the burning carcasses for another two hours without mentioning Colorado again. When the fire was out they buried the bones. Then they returned to the farmhouse on the tractor.

They entered without talking and went into
the kitchen. Each of them got something to drink. There was awkwardness and wariness between them now. The silence built until it was more uncomfortable than words could be.

“Look, I know what I did was wrong,” Katy said.

“You put my daughter at risk,” Jackson blurted.

“I know.”

“I won’t let anybody endanger Jesse.”

“You shouldn’t. And my being here did that.” Katy started toward the stairs. “I’ll go pack. I’ll leave.”

“No!” Jackson said. He crossed the distance between them in a few strides. He grabbed her and kissed her hard. For a second Katy resisted, and then she responded. When Jackson’s cell phone rang, he ignored it. He ignored his home phone when it rang too. The kisses didn’t stop until they heard Major Jessup’s voice leave an urgent message.

Jackson took ten minutes to shower and change clothes, and then he jumped in the Jeep and drove south. An hour later he found Major Jessup at the McDonald’s on Valley River Drive in Rexburg. Jessup was eating a cone of fries. “My weakness,” he said as Jackson slid into the booth opposite him. “Forget about their burgers, but Mickey D fries, um-uh.”

“I have no jurisdiction here,” Jackson said.

Jessup ate the last fry. “Then don’t shoot anyone.”

They left Jackson’s car at the fast food joint and rode together in Jessup’s Lexus ES. Twenty minutes later, Jessup turned onto a street of ranch houses and bungalows.

The house they approached on foot had pale yellow aluminum siding and a small front yard. Jessup covered the front while Jackson hurried around to the rear. As soon as they were in place, he heard Jessup bang on the door and identify himself as the State Police. Then Jackson heard a small dog yapping inside the house. After that he heard someone running. Then the back door crashed opened. A woman spilled out, pulling a little boy behind her. The boy was carrying a dog.

When Rene’s ex-sister-in-law saw Jackson she screamed. The dog continued to bark. The only one quiet was Eric.

“Back here,” Jackson yelled to Major Jessup.

Seconds later, Jessup handcuffed Sue Dodd, placed her under arrest, and read her rights to her. Jackson squatted to Eric’s height and petted the chiweenie he cradled.

“Is this Panchutz?” Jackson asked.

The boy nodded.

“And I bet you’re Eric?”

Eric nodded again. “I was on TV.”

“I know. I saw your picture.”

“I’m playing hide-and-seek with my mom and dad.”

“Well, son, I think you just won,” Jackson told him.

Eric Stutz was placed in the care of state social service until his maternal grandmother could arrive from Arizona the following morning. Once the boy was safe and secure for the night, Jackson headed back to Buckhorn. He made two phone calls as he was leaving Rexburg.

The town had a rowdy, Saturday night buzz on when Jackson arrived. After one circle of the downtown square, he had seen enough alcohol and motor vehicle violations to keep him busy for an hour, and that was only if he ignored the couple having sex in a car parked behind The Bar-J. He ignored them all and continued on to the police station.

Brian Patterson and reserve officer Bobby Grunfield were on duty until 2 P.M. when Skip took over. Jackson left Grunfield at the station and took Brian with him. When they reached the Green State Park campground, Sheriff Midden and four deputies were already there. They wore body armor and carried shotguns and tactical rifles.

“We expecting trouble, Chief?” Brian asked.

“No,” Jackson said, “just television.”

As Jackson and Brian suited up, Karen Cormac and her news-crew arrived. Midden spat tobacco juice. “Hell,
Jackson, didn’t know you had media savvy in you.”

Sheriff Midden and his deputies took the lead while Jackson and Brian covered the rear. Midden pounded on the camper door. The second it opened, all seven officers stormed inside. Five minutes later they brought out Rodney and Rene Stutz in handcuffs. Midden did not cover their heads or let them avoid the TV lights and camera.

Eric’s parents were taken to the St. Anthony jail where they were booked and interviewed. They admitted to running a scam as a way of gaining notoriety and money, but Rodney denied being involved with the Knights of the Golden Circle. Sue Dodd, Rodney’s sister-in-law, had already told them that the militia group was the mastermind. When Rodney and Rene learned of this, they asked for a lawyer.

Afterward, Midden, Jackson, and Bud Spiegel, the county prosecutor, faced the media outside the Fremont County Sheriff Department. Midden announced the safe return of Eric and the arrest of his parents. It was a good story for everyone, but only Karen Cormac got a scoop.

It was eleven o’clock when Jackson got away and returned home. Katy’s bedroom light was on, but Jackson didn’t bother her. He knew what would happen if he did. He didn’t think it was a good idea to let it happen tonight or maybe any night despite what his heart told him.

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom and started to drop into the raggedy easy chair when he noticed his blue suit draped over the back of it. Instead of hanging it up, he left it there and plopped down in the chair anyway.

So much had happened in one day that his head was spinning just thinking about it all: Tucker was maimed, a tiger was killed and gutted, Pamela Yow was arrested and then set free, his hunch about Colorado had paid off thanks to Gary Peterson, the FBI had come calling, Eric Stutz had been found, he had shot his first and only lion, Katy had almost captured Kali, animals had been burned down to the bone, Rodney and Rene had been arrested and charged with a smorgasbord of crimes, Katy had confessed to lying to him about Kali, by omission if not by commission, he had let shame overpower him, and then he had kissed Katy and –

He fell asleep sitting in the chair. When he awakened, it was after one o’clock. He went to bed.