The Xanax worked to keep his temper under control-he put it all down to a Walmart moment-and Peck continued to the checkout. He paid cash for the meat grinder, went back to the car, drove out to I-94, and turned east. He was ten miles from the farm, with a stack of tiger jerky to grind up and another cat to kill. He really didn’t want to do it anymore, the whole thing had spun out of control.
But he needed the money. It had to be done and he had to do it by himself; nobody to help old Peck now. A tear gathered in his left eye, and he wiped it away. Nobody to help old Peck.
–
Five miles down I-94, Peck passed a Minnesota highway patrol car sitting in the median, running a speed trap. He reflexively tapped the brake and looked at his speedometer, found that he was only going fifty miles an hour. He hadn’t noticed that all the other cars were passing him, but they were. He sped up a bit, the patrolman looking at him as he went past. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror, but the patrolman never moved.
The sight of the cop made him nervous, and when he got to the farm, he drove his car around behind the barn, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.
In the barn, the cat stood up and hissed at him. She really hated him, he knew, and he found that amusing. He picked up the rifle, carried it close to the cage, and the cat pressed against the wire mesh. He aimed the rifle at her eyes.
“Who’s the big dog now?” he asked her.
He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He worked the bolt and looked down into the chamber. Nothing there, and nothing in the magazine. Fuck it.
The temperature inside the barn must have been a hundred and thirty, he thought; one of the dryers was still running, and he walked over and turned it off, and then opened the door, which he propped open with a rock. The incoming air felt cool on his skin, compared to that inside the barn, but he knew the outside temperatures must still be in the nineties, after touching a hundred earlier in the day.
He went back to the dryer, opened the door, and looked inside. The last of the tiger meat was more than crispy: it looked like bacon that had been hard-fried for ten minutes too many. He left the door open to cool the meat and went to the worktable, where he’d piled up three stacks of dried meat, each a foot high.
He took the grinder out of its box, used the screw clamps on the bottom to clamp it to the worktable, and started grinding. After a while, the silence got to him, and he turned on Hayk Simonian’s radio, which Simonian had tuned to the public radio station, and listened to All Things Considered.
Last thing up was a commentary on the missing tigers, with an interview with a state cop named Jon something.
“I can tell you that we’re picking up more and more material, more and more evidence, to work with, and we’re going to solve this. I was talking to our lead investigator this morning, and he thinks we’ll have a break of some kind today or tomorrow. We’re keeping our fingers crossed: we hope the tigers haven’t been hurt, but we have to live with the possibility that they have been. I don’t want to upset anyone, but that’s the reality of the matter.”
The interviewer said, “We’ve seen an intimidating list of crimes that the thieves could be charged with. Do you really think that the perpetrators could be charged with anything like what we’ve seen? Fifteen or twenty separate crimes, possibly even including murder?”
“From what we know now,” the cop said, “we believe there have been at least two murders committed in the course of this crime-we’ve got the bodies of two brothers who we know were involved. Persons involved in this crime now fall under the felony murder statute, which means that they didn’t have to pull a trigger, or even know about the murders, if they were involved in the initial crime. When we catch them, they’re going to prison. Thirty years in Minnesota, no parole. There is, of course, the matter of prosecutorial discretion: if somebody involved were to come forward, to help us clear this matter up, a prosecutor could well decide to recommend leniency. That would have to happen soon, because I believe we’re going to solve this crime on our own, in the next day or so, and start rounding up the perpetrators.”
Peck changed to a classic rock station and continued grinding.
When he was done, he had fifty or sixty pounds of rough-ground dry meat, which he packed into five plastic buckets from Home Depot. The meat would eventually be poured into plastic tubes the size of his pill containers, and sold for anything up to twenty-five dollars.
He had, he thought, at least fifty thousand dollars’ worth of meat right there, and he hadn’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.
The bones would have to be broken up with a hammer before they could be ground. Hayk Simonian had bought an anvil at an antique shop for that purpose, along with a heavy ball-peen hammer.
Peck was too tired for that. Maybe dehydrated from the heat. He needed a quart of cold water and an icy margarita and a nap. Xanax for sure. He picked up the rifle and the box of cartridges and started for the door. Katya hissed again, and he turned and said, “When I come back, I’m gonna blow your brains out, kitty cat. Right after I take my nap. Look forward to it.”
32
Virgil spent part of the afternoon making phone calls, staying in touch with Minneapolis homicide about the younger Zhang, checking the tip line, talking to people at the zoo, avoiding calls from the media. Most of it was unpleasant, from his point of view.
Brad Blankenship had been picked up by a Blue Earth County deputy and taken to the jail in Mankato, but Mattsson had called to tell him about a chat with the Blue Earth County attorney. “He’s going to try to push Blankenship into a corner, try to get him to deal up for Castro, but he doesn’t think it’s going to work. Blankenship made a call to an attorney from the jail here, and the county attorney tells me that that guy is also Castro’s attorney. If what happens is what I think is going to happen, Blankenship will be out on bail by tonight, on Castro’s money.”
“Then he’s probably not going to deal up,” Virgil said.
“Probably not.”
“What if we said he was a danger to witnesses?”
“The bail will probably get larger, but that’s all,” she said. “We’re still going to get the guy, but…”
“It’s not exactly what we were hoping for. It’d be nice if we could deal up and get whoever paid him, but I want to see Blankenship doing time, too.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, because that might be what we’re gonna get. If you’re happy, I’m happy, and I already talked to Frankie about it, and she’s okay with it. Alvarez… I think Alvarez and her husband are probably headed back to Mexico. Sparkle isn’t too happy about that, but Sparkle doesn’t have to go back to the pickle factory,” she said.
“I don’t much care what Sparkle is happy about,” Virgil said.
Mattsson said, “Okay, then. Listen, I’m up for the rest of the day-do you need help with the tigers?”
“I don’t even have enough for myself to do,” Virgil said. “If I need help, I’ll call.”
“Do that.”
–
Howser called from the Minneapolis homicide office and said they hadn’t gotten a warrant for Zhang’s shoes. “Got the wrong judge, in the wrong mood, and we were a little thin to begin with. Goddamn Zhang went out of here dragging his shoes on every carpet he saw.”