Couldn’t see anything at the bottom, but figured his feet were no more than six or seven feet off the ground.
He let go, hit the stone edging of an ancient flower bed with both feet, the pain lancing through both ankles and up past his knees as he fell down. He’d sprained both ankles, he thought: goddamn cowboy boots. He got to his feet and tried to run away, but he heard the bedroom door smash open-Peck must’ve heard him kicking the window out-and he started juking back and forth as he ran toward the nearest cover, which was the barn. He was ten feet away, waiting for the impact of the bullet tearing through his back, when Peck fired and the bullet… missed.
But it was close enough to hear it go by, an actual zing sound that was unmistakable if you’d heard it before.
Virgil hit the barn door like a linebacker and sprawled inside, in the bright light, rolled out of the line of fire as another bullet smashed through the rebounding door. Virgil rolled over next to it and kicked it shut.
And here he was, no gun, his ankles screaming at him.
Beside a door that was as good as a target, in the basement of a building with no other door and no windows. One good thing: the walls were made of stone, so Peck wouldn’t be knocking holes in it.
He looked for something he could use to block the door, which opened inward, but nothing seemed likely to be heavy enough: there was a table, but it was made from a sheet of four-by-eight plywood laid over sawhorses. He limped over to one of the dryers, but it probably didn’t weigh more than twenty pounds.
And he had no time. Peck was coming.
His best chance, he decided, would be to try to take the guy in the dark. There were three bright lights overhead, and Virgil grabbed a knife off the plywood table and stabbed the first bulb, smashing it, smashed the second one, and as he was about to smash the third one, noticed an unremarked-upon feature of the whole tiger-cleaning lash-up.
There, he said to himself, is an interesting possibility.
He smashed the third light and in the sudden impenetrable darkness, fished his cell phone out of his pocket, punched the recall button for Mattsson, and clutching the knife in one hand, crawled into the vacant tiger cage left behind when the Simonians dragged out the dead Artur.
Mattsson answered the phone and said, “I’m on the way…”
“Listen!” Virgil said. “I’m in deep trouble. I’m trapped in the barn in back and Peck is coming for me with a rifle. I lost my gun…”
–
Peck was crossing the barnyard with his best Airborne Ranger combat-killer simulation, his rifle at his shoulder, one round visually confirmed in the chamber, the safety off, ready to go.
As he got closer, he could hear somebody talking inside the barn, and not, he thought, from right behind the door. Sounded farther away than that. He tiptoed up to the barn door and listened.
Flowers was saying, “Don’t let him quit. If he gets me, kill him. He’s got that rifle, you’ll have every chance in the world, and nobody will question it. Kill the motherfucker.”
Peck was quite calm about it, hearing his own death sentence. It was apparent that Flowers had given up on some level, but on another level, was making sure that Peck would pay.
Peck started to tear up again: that wasn’t fair. He’d won. He’d beaten Flowers fair and square, and now Flowers was ratting him out to the world?
He didn’t burst into the barn to stop it, though. Instead, he pushed the door open a quarter inch and put his good right eye to it. Everything inside was dark, except the cell phone, and as he watched, he could see the reflection off Flowers’s face.
There was no kind of tricky thing going on, like with the cell phone being in the back of the barn, while Flowers hid behind the door. He kept his eye to the door, fished out his own cell phone, brought it up, and turned on the flashlight app. He pushed the door open with his foot, aimed the rifle at Flowers, and stepped inside in the dark.
He said, in his best Airborne Ranger combat-killer voice, “You’re all done.”
Flowers’s cell phone light went out as Flowers apparently dropped it facedown in the dirt. That didn’t help him, though, as Peck aimed his own cell phone light at the back of the barn and stepped out across the barn floor. Flowers, he realized, had hidden himself in Artur’s cage.
Flowers said, from across the barn floor, “I still don’t think so.”
“Know what I’m going to do?” Peck asked. “I’m gonna dump twenty gallons of gasoline on-”
Flowers interrupted: “You know what I already did?”
Peck couldn’t help himself. “What?”
“I let the other tiger out.”
Peck momentarily froze, or most of him did. His hair didn’t: it stood up all over his body. Mouth open, Xanax totally failing, Peck turned the cell phone light to his right and saw two amber coals glowing in the dark.
Close. Getting closer.
–
What Virgil had seen before he smashed out the last light was the two simple snap-shackles that locked the chain-link farm gates of the tiger cages. They were secure enough-a tiger wasn’t going to figure them out-but they were also easy enough to undo. If he knelt inside of the empty cage, he could reach over the half-closed door of that cage and unshackle Katya’s door.
He did that, in the light of his cell phone, and pulled his own door shut, and shackled it just to be sure the cat couldn’t somehow get in.
Katya didn’t move right away, but when she did, it was all at once, the big golden orange-and-black cat rolling to her feet, nosing out through the open door.
The barn door opened inward, so Virgil thought the cat probably couldn’t get out of the barn on her own; but if he could get Peck inside, without getting shot himself…
Peck did like to talk. Would probably want to claim victory.
–
Now Peck’s cell phone flipped up in the air as he tried to bring his rifle around but he was way, way too late.
Katya hit him like a furry cannonball and Virgil put his hands to his ears and closed his eyes, not willing to witness the rest of it, even in the dim light of a cell phone. Thankfully, the screaming ended with a loud crunching of skull bones.
Then Katya roared.
A full-bore, full-throated, Siberian forest, after-the-kill roar, and some atavistic gene in Virgil’s personal gene pool sat up and screamed, “Run, dummy.”
He couldn’t. He sat and listened to Katya make a dug-dug-dug sound. A moment later, she started dragging Peck’s body back to her lair. She had trouble getting the body across the gate stop-bar on the floor, but managed after tossing her head for a moment or two, settled in the far corner, and after giving Virgil an appraising look, went back to work on Peck.
Virgil eased his cage door open, one inch, two inches, ready to slam it back in place. At six inches, he reached one arm out, and managed to hook Katya’s cage door and pull it shut. Katya stopped chewing, gave him another look, and went back to Peck.
Still kneeling behind his own door, Virgil got a snap shackle back in place on Katya’s cage, then pushed his own cage door farther open and got the second shackle on.
He turned back into his cage and picked up the phone; Mattsson was shouting at him.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“Where’s Peck?”
“He’s uh… uh, Peck’s at dinner.”
35
When Mattsson turned her truck into the barnyard, her headlights played across Virgil, who was sitting in the barnyard in the dirt, his legs out in front of him, talking on his cell phone to Jon Duncan.