–
Peck went into his house and found a ski mask he actually used for cross-country skiing, then backed his Tahoe out. He pointed Zhang at the passenger side of the Tahoe, dropped the garage door. Peck took them out to I-94 and east out of St. Paul.
“How’s your father? Still doing well?”
“He is angry, as always,” Zhang said.
“Angry with me? With us?”
“With me,” Zhang said. “He is impossible to please.”
“He is sort of an asshole, but we need him, you and I. At least for the time being.”
Zhang looked out the window, scowling.
–
When they passed Radio Drive, Peck handed Zhang the ski mask and said, “Put it on backward. You can roll up the bottom enough to breathe.”
“I’m not gonna…”
“You do it or we go back and forget the whole thing,” Peck said. “That would make the old man happy, huh? Dropping everything? I’m not gonna let you see where we’re going, X.” Peck couldn’t actually pronounce Xiaomin’s first name, and they agreed he could shorten it to X, which X seemed to like. “You run your mouth too much; you do stupid shit all the time. It’s my ass on the line, too.”
“Fuck you,” Zhang said, but he pulled the mask on backward, leaving the end of his nose and mouth exposed.
Peck drove on for a few more miles to Manning Avenue, got off the highway, turned north, did a couple of laps around the parking lot of a Holiday station, to confuse things, then went back out to Manning Avenue and turned south.
“Are we there?” Zhang asked. “I’m getting carsick.”
“Hang on for another couple of minutes,” Peck said. “Don’t go puking in my truck.”
The farm was eight or nine miles out, a run-down place waiting for the suburbs to arrive. The house had last been lived in by two community college students, two years earlier. It had functioning electricity; a functioning well; a semifunctioning septic system that the day before had leaked water onto the yard, which Peck had stepped in; and a barn out back. The farm was owned by a New York investor, the guy waiting for the suburbs to arrive. They pulled into the barnyard, and Peck said, “You can take the mask off.”
Hayk Simonian came out and stood in the headlights, a burly man in a blood-spattered apron, carrying a long skinning knife in one hand. He was smoking one of his Black Flames, a yellowish cloud of nicotine and tars swirling around his head. Peck turned the headlights off, and then he and Zhang walked to the barn where Simonian said, “We still got a long way to go. What are you doing here? Why’s this asshole here?”
“I need to show X that we got them,” Peck said. “It’s a money thing.”
Simonian said, “We got more than tigers. We got a whole shitload of trouble. You been watching the TV?”
“No-but we knew they’d freak out.”
“More than that. They put the state cops on the case. The state DA says they’re gonna catch us and they’ve got enough crimes already to lock us up for thirty years. Life, if we kill the tigers.”
“Nonsense. Besides, they’re not gonna catch us,” Peck said. “There won’t be the hair of a tiger around here in a week.”
“Where’re the cats?” Zhang asked.
“Inside,” Simonian said. He tipped his head toward the barn door. Simonian was wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops, and an LA Dodgers T-shirt under the plastic apron. All the clothing showed splashes and speckles of blood.
He led the way into the barn, where three work lights provided high-contrast lighting over the central part of the barn floor. The dead male tiger was hanging from a ceiling hook, above a big, blue plastic tarp. The tarp was smeared with blood.
The tiger’s hide had been removed and was lying on another tarp at one side of the barn floor, like a cheap rug. The naked torso of the tiger might have been a huge, oversized man… except for the head, where the bared teeth shone like antique ivory daggers.
The whole place smelled of blood, intestinal sludge, tiger poop, and sweat.
Simonian nodded at a row of Tupperware containers on the floor near the pelt. “Eyes, whiskers, claws, balls, cock, all separate, like you said. I’m looking at the pictures and I can get the kidneys and liver, but I sort of fucked up the spleen.”
“You’ve got to be more careful. That spleen was probably worth a couple grand all by itself,” Peck said, peering at the heavy naked muscles of the tiger’s body.
Simonian said, “All I got is a comic-book picture of his guts to go by. Anyway, I still got it, only it’s sort of mushed up.”
“Keep it, then, but get it in the dryer before it goes bad,” Peck said. And to Zhang: “You satisfied?”
“Yeah.” Zhang had walked a long circle around the hanging torso, continuing to the back where the female tiger stared at them from her cage. A few feet from her cage, he made a sudden aggressive move forward. The tiger reacted, moving forward herself, but faster, harder than anything Zhang was capable of. Zhang jumped back, startled, laughed nervously, and then turned to Peck and said, “Can I shoot her?”
“Not now,” Peck said, the irritation riding in his voice. “We don’t have a lot of refrigeration here, as you can see, so we need to keep her alive until we’re done with the big boy.”
Zhang went over and stroked Artur’s pelt, then picked it up; the hide was heavy, and he strained to lift it. “Help me put it on my shoulders-I want to take a picture of it.”
“No,” Peck said. “Put it down. You hear what Hayk said about thirty years? All you need is a picture of you with a tiger skin on your head on Facebook. Put it down.”
Zhang dropped the pelt like a rag. “You guys are pussies.”
Simonian said, “What?”
Zhang poked a finger at him, as he had with Peck. “I said…”
Simonian stepped toward him and Zhang slipped back in his snake pose. Simonian turned to Peck and asked, “What the fuck is that?”
“A martial art thing,” Peck said. “It’s the beaver stance or something.”
Simonian said, “Yeah?” and casually reached out and slapped Zhang on the side of the head, nearly flattening him. Then he slapped him four or five more times, making a rapid pop-pop-pop sound, using alternate hands, as though Zhang’s head was a speed bag.
Peck said, “Okay, knock it off, knock it off.”
Simonian stopped and said, “Martial bullshit,” and Peck said to Zhang, who’d staggered to the side wall and was leaning back against it, “You’ve seen the cats. Let’s go.”
Outside, Zhang held one hand to an ear and, with the other, poked a finger at Peck. “I’ll come back and kill him. I’ll come back and tear his heart out and eat it raw.” There was a bit of blood under one of his nostrils and at the right corner of his mouth.
“X, Hayk could beat you to death by accident. You’re a silly, useless asshole, and you’ve got to learn to live with that,” Peck said. “Get in the fuckin’ truck.”
“You will tell Hayk to treat me with respect…”
“Hayk’s basically your father’s man,” Peck said. “I don’t tell him much.”
–
Winston Peck VI was the son, grandson, great-grandson, great-great-grandson, and great-great-great-grandson of physicians, going back to Winston I, who served with distinction in the Union Army during the Civil War. Peck VI had actually gotten an MD degree, by the skin of his teeth, only to be subsequently banned from the profession for unusually intrusive examinations of young female clients during his residency at a medical clinic in Indianapolis. He had been lucky to escape sexual assault charges. For what? Copping a feel? Nothing that didn’t happen every Saturday night behind the local high school. And the women had been unconscious, so they didn’t even really experience it. All very discouraging.
After that episode, he’d moved to St. Paul to be close to the money of his mother, first wife of Peck V, but when she died young, in her early sixties, he was appalled to find that most of her estate went to her second husband. Peck was dismissed with a hundred thousand dollars, which had lasted a bit more than a year.