She hopped out of her truck and heard him say, “We need everybody out here-Crime Scene, medical examiner, the zoo people, and tell the zoo people to bring a tranquilizer gun. We’ve got to get that tiger out of its cage before she eats the rest of Peck.”
Virgil clicked off the phone as she trotted over to him and asked, “What happened?”
“That’s a little hard to explain,” Virgil said. “It got really complicated.”
“Why are you sitting in the dirt like that?” she asked.
“I sprained both my ankles when I jumped out of a second-story window.”
“What?” She turned to look at the farmhouse, where in the reflected headlights of her truck, she could see a window frame dangling from a few nails on the second floor.
“I told you, it was confusing,” Virgil said. “Help me up. I need to find my gun.”
“What happened to your gun?”
“Well, see… I fell through the floor of the front porch…”
Mattsson supported him with an arm around his waist, and he put one of his arms around her shoulders, as they limped over to the front porch. On the way, he gave her the whole sequence from the time he arrived at the farm, until he managed to lock Katya back in her cage with Peck’s body.
“If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t believe it. With you, I think, ‘Yeah, probably,’” she said. At the porch, they didn’t see a gun and Virgil said, “Peck must have picked it up. He never fired it, though.”
They worked carefully around the hole in the porch deck and stepped inside the house. There was no pistol in the entry and Mattsson climbed the stairs to the second floor and returned empty-handed.
“There’s some.308 brass on the bedroom floor up there, so I was in the right room, but I didn’t see any 9mm,” she said. “I’ll get a flashlight.”
She got a Maglite from her truck and left Virgil sitting on a porch step, contemplating the quiet of the night, as she traced Peck’s route from the bedroom down to the barn. She came back and said, “Nothing in the barn. The tiger’s sitting there staring at Peck, what’s left of him, anyway. I don’t see a gun on his body. Really stinks in there.”
Virgil thought for a moment, then said, “Look down the hole in the porch.”
She did, shining the flashlight down it, and a second later said, “I see it. Can’t reach it, though.”
“Embarrassing as hell,” Virgil said. “But if you’d been here…”
Mattsson said, “Yeah,” and “Just a minute.” The porch had a skirt of weather-worn wooden slats, in no better condition than the rest of the porch. She kicked out a half-dozen slats, then crawled under the porch, got his gun, backed out, and handed it to him. She said, “Maybe we won’t have to mention the whole gun thing.”
“Yeah, we will-because if we don’t, the whole rest of it doesn’t make any sense.” There was some tall uncut grass growing up next to the porch steps, and Virgil pulled out a blade and chewed on the stem, savoring the sweetness of it, and tried to forget the pain in his ankles.
“You got a tiger back,” Mattsson said. “That’s a wonderful thing, Virgil.”
“I suppose,” Virgil said. “But basically, it was just more crazy shit.”
Mattsson cocked her head and asked, “Hear that?”
Sirens. Several of them, still a long way out. “About time,” Virgil said.
Mattsson sat on the porch next to him, looked out at the road. A greenish yellow light blinked in the weeds out along the road and she said, “Last firefly of the year.”
Fireflies weren’t supposed to last this deep into the summer, Virgil knew. Maybe he was getting a signal from God, from one of God’s bugs. But what would a yellow light mean? Caution? A little late, huh?
–
Virgil’s ankles were on fire, but he couldn’t leave the scene until all the relevant crime-scene processing was under way. Mattsson met the first responders, a couple of Washington County sheriff’s deputies, and asked them to park in the road because most of the barnyard was a crime scene.
Two BCA agents were next and they began taping off the scene. An ME’s investigator arrived, followed the BCA crime-scene crew, followed by Jon Duncan.
“The zoo people are getting their stuff together; they’ll be here in a half hour or so. I talked to the TV stations; they all got something on the end of their newscasts. They’ll be sending out some trucks to get video for tomorrow.”
“I’m kinda hurting here,” Virgil said. “Could you and Catrin talk to them?”
Duncan and Mattsson could. The TV trucks got there before the zoo people; Virgil was making a recorded video statement on the porch of the farmhouse when the zoo people arrived with a truck and a man with a tranquilizer gun.
There was some back-and-forth between the zookeepers and the crime-scene crew, but eventually one zoo guy was allowed inside the barn. He shot Katya, and he and two crime-scene crew members lifted the unconscious cat onto one of Peck’s dollies, and they rolled her out to a truck.
The TV crews were allowed to stand on the shoulder of the road and film the transfer of the tiger to the zoo truck. A minute later, the hatch was closed and the sleeping Katya was on her way back to the zoo.
“Hope she makes it,” Mattsson said, looking after the truck. “The zoo guy told me that tranquilizing them can be dangerous.”
The ME’s investigator and the crime-scene people began consulting about the removal of Peck’s body. The investigator told Virgil, “She didn’t eat him much, but she did crush his head like an English walnut.”
Jenkins and Shrake arrived way too late to do anything-in fact, they weren’t even supposed to be at the farm, but when they heard what happened, they’d driven out hoping to get in on the action. Instead, Duncan asked for a volunteer to drive Virgil first to a hospital for X-rays, and then home. Jenkins volunteered to drive him and Shrake would follow with Virgil’s truck.
Jenkins and Shrake helped Virgil out to Jenkins’s Crown Vic; the process was filmed by the TV crews, and Jenkins said, “We’re all gonna be famous.”
“For tomorrow,” Virgil said. “The day after, not so much.”
–
At Regions Hospital, the ER was enjoying a low-key night, and Virgil got the X-rays done and examined in an hour: getting his cowboy boots pulled off hurt almost as much as the original fall. The doc said, “Nothing broken. You need some RICE.” Rest, ice, compression, and elevation; Virgil had been there before. The doc wrapped his ankles and gave him a supply of cold packs, then Virgil was driven home by Jenkins, with his tightly wrapped, freezing feet up on the Crown Vic’s dashboard.
Virgil talked to Frankie as he and Jenkins drove south through the Cities, and she met them on Virgil’s porch. She’d already asked him how bad the ankles were, and now she asked, after kissing him, “You can’t walk?”
“I can, but it hurts,” Virgil told her. He was carrying his cowboy boots.
“He’s being a sissy,” Jenkins said. “I’ve been hurt a lot worse than this and still played basketball.”
“Bullshit, Jenkins,” Frankie said. “I’ve seen you stung by a wasp and you cried like a baby. Anyway, get him inside. I won’t be able to help much…”
Shrake arrived, and they all got Virgil on the living room couch, with his feet up on a couple of cushions, and put the used cold packs in the freezer. Jenkins and Shrake left to go back to the Cities, and Frankie, who was a bit of a cop groupie, settled into a chair opposite him and said, “I’ve heard enough about your ankles. What I want to hear is, what happened when you figured out where he was? I want it minute by minute, with all the blood and spattered-out brains and stuff.”
He told her, minute by minute; she flinched when he told her about being shot at in the upstairs bedroom, but was nothing but delighted when he told her about the walnut-crunch sound of the tiger crushing Peck’s head.