“All right. I’m going to call Davenport and I’ll call you back if he says it’s okay.”
“Do that,” Virgil said.
Strait called back five minutes later: “He says you’re okay. Where are you?”
“I left the Aarle snake barn maybe ten minutes ago, heading south,” Virgil said.
“Then we could meet up in New Ulm. You go straight on south until you hit the river, take a right, come across the bridge,” Strait said. “There’s a Taco Bell off on the right side of the road, couple blocks in.”
“When?”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” Strait said.
–
Beans and corn, beans and corn, beans and corn, all the way down.
Strait was leaning against the back of his Chevy pickup, a soft drink cup in his hand, when Virgil pulled into the Taco Bell parking lot. Strait was a short, husky man in a canvas outdoors shirt, worn loose, and jeans and boots. He was wearing a camouflage PSE hat and mirrored sunglasses.
Virgil climbed out of his 4Runner and noticed the lump under Strait’s elbow and said, “You’re carrying.”
Strait lifted his shirt to show Virgil the butt of a full-sized Beretta, and said, “Wouldn’t you, if you were me? I still can’t walk right and maybe never will. I do got a carry permit.”
“Where’d she hit you?”
“Back of both legs. Didn’t lead me enough.”
“Looks like she got the elevation wrong, too,” Virgil observed.
“Well, it was a snap shot, and I was running. I got to give her that much,” Strait said. “She ain’t a bad shot. I saw her get out of her truck and I knew what was coming-this was back at my place in Owatonna-and I started running to get behind my truck. I was carrying, then, too, and when I went down, I got behind the tire and emptied a whole goddamn magazine at her. I measured it off later at three hundred and twelve yards. I gave her about six feet of elevation shooting my Beretta, which turned out to be right. That was the clincher when they arrested her-bullet holes and bullet dings on her truck. They got a slug with rifling marks that matched my gun.”
“Lucky that she didn’t have time to get set up,” Virgil said.
“You’re telling me,” Strait said. He hitched up his pants. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for those stolen tigers.”
“I don’t have them. I got enough to do with my bears and my snakes,” Strait said. “To tell the absolute truth, you’d have to be crazy to snatch those tigers. I mean, Jesus Christ, didn’t those people know what was gonna happen? That they were gonna have a world of shit rainin’ down on their heads? All of our heads. I knew goddamn well that when somebody stole those tigers, somebody would be coming around to give me a hard time. It’s just ain’t fair to legitimate businessmen to get painted with this broad brush.”
“I don’t know what they were thinking,” Virgil said. “That’s something I’d like to know.”
“They wouldn’t have done it, if they knew about my situation-that goofy twat Maxine hunting me down like I was a rabid dog.”
“You’re an expert in this stuff,” Virgil said. “If they’re processing these tigers for medicine, how long would it take?”
Strait took his hat off, brushed his hair back with one hand, and looked up at the sky. After a while, he said, “They were full-grown, right? I’d say a couple, three days apiece, if they got access to a good commercial dryer. That’s if they’re processing the whole animal. With tigers, over in Asia, sometimes the poachers will only take the eyes, heart, whiskers, teeth, penis and balls, and femur bones. You could do that in an hour, maybe, put everything in a sack. When you do that, you leave a lot of money on the ground.”
“What are the femurs for?”
“Well, all ground up, they’re supposed to cure about anything,” Strait said. “Everything from ulcers to burns. Then there’s the baculum-that’s a bone in the penis. You could get anything up to five thousand dollars for an Amur tiger baculum alone.”
“Really?”
“That’s the fact, Jack.”
“Who would you look at for this?”
Strait stuck a pinky finger in his ear, wiggled it around, then said, “Well… Amur tiger’s gonna be worth some serious money, but you’d have to be able to prove it was real. That’s probably why they don’t care about the publicity-maybe even want some of it, to prove it’s real Amur they’re talking. There’s a premium for endangered species. What I’m saying is, I don’t know anybody local who could handle two tigers, but there’s enough money involved that it could be an outsider. Crew goes around, looks at a bunch of zoos, picks out the most likely one, hits it.”
He hesitated, then said, “Of course, grabbing the tigers seems totally batshit anyway. Too much risk, no matter what the payoff is.”
“Nobody local.”
“There are some local people who handle animal products, I just don’t see them hitting the zoo.”
“Give me some names,” Virgil said.
“Three that I can think of. There’s a company in St. Paul called Carvin Exports, which mostly deals in wildlife hides-not furs, but deer hides, wolf skins, bear skins, that kind of thing. I sell them bear hides and some snake, though they’re at the lower end of the market. I can’t see them involved in this because they’re too corporate. Too many people would know, although I suppose the company business could have given the employees some ideas, and they went off on their own…”
“But doesn’t seem likely to you?”
“No, it doesn’t. Then there’s a guy in St. Paul named Winston Peck… a doctor…”
“I’ve been looking for him already,” Virgil said. “Haven’t been able to find him.”
“All right. I don’t think he could handle a tiger on his own. He buys in small amounts for his retail clientele. You know, for patients, and for people who go to his traditional medicine website. There’s a woman over in western Wisconsin who does deal in animal musks and so on. Her name is Bobbie Patterson, don’t know exactly where she lives.”
Virgil said, “Toby, I really hope you’re not involved in this. If I find out you were, I’m going to call up Maxine and tell her how to find you.”
“C’mon, man, don’t even joke about that,” Strait said. He looked nervously up and down the street. “In fact, I’ve been standing around too long. I’m getting the fuck out of here… but, uh, why don’t you get out first?”
“Don’t trust me?”
“I’m not saying that… but why don’t you pull out first.”
“All right, but give me a phone number. I might need to call you,” Virgil said.
“Don’t be giving this out. Maxine’s mad as a goddamn hatter.”
“You’re good with me,” Virgil said, as he entered Strait’s phone number into his cell phone’s contact list. “As long as you don’t have those tigers.”
10
Virgil pulled out first, going a block down Seventh Street to Broadway, got caught at the light. A left turn on Broadway would get him home in a half hour or so. As with any kidnapping, time was crucial in finding the victims alive… if they weren’t already dead. At that very moment, though, he didn’t know what he could do in the Twin Cities that he couldn’t do in Mankato.
Still, he thought, he was probably on the wrong side of the Minnesota River, which didn’t have a heck of a lot of bridges. If he stayed on the south side, where he was, he’d wind up back in Mankato-but if he left New Ulm on the north side of the river, back across the bridge, he could tend down toward Mankato, but also leave open his option of returning to the Twin Cities by a much shorter route.
He could try to call Peck again, and check with the BCA tip line, the zoo director, and whoever else might help, before he had to make a decision whether to go south to home or north to the Cities. How had he survived in the job before cell phones?