Escape Clause

14

Peck was lying in bed, listening to WCCO radio, when he heard the news. Hamlet Simonian had been pulled out of the St. Croix River.

“Oh, mother of God,” he groaned to the thumbtack in the ceiling. He’d used the thumbtack for meditation exercises, before he’d discovered the full efficacy of Xanax. With his luck, he thought, the thumbtack would come unglued some night and land point-down on his eyeball.

After a while, aloud, he said, “They found Hamlet. How could they find Hamlet?”

He’d managed to keep his shit together during the interview with Flowers with the help of an extra tab of the Xanax. Drugs wouldn’t help him with Hayk Simonian, not after the bullshit he’d laid on the older brother.

He’d told Hayk that Hamlet Simonian was driving back to Glendale, California, where their family came from, where he planned to hide out until the heat dissipated. When Hayk had later complained that he couldn’t reach his brother on his cell phone, Peck had told him that Hamlet had turned it off, so the cops couldn’t check his call history. He’d suggested that Hayk go to the Apple lost-phone locater service and look for the phone’s location. Hayk had done that and the phone was shown as being in Des Moines, and later, moving west from Kansas City.

Hayk had been satisfied with that and had gone back to work, drying out tiger meat. He’d planned to work most of the night, finishing the soft-tissue part of processing Artur, and then he’d move on to grinding the bones. He was probably still asleep in the farmhouse: but Hayk spent a lot of time listening to Minnesota Public Radio and when the noon news came up…

Only one thing Peck could do about that.

–

Peck went down to the garage and got the rifle out-not the tranquilizer gun, but the.308 that Hamlet had used to shoot the male tiger. Peck didn’t know a lot about guns, but he’d fired a few, knew how to load the rifle, knew how the safety worked: guns were simple machines and a child could operate them. Children often did, as illustrated by the accidental death statistics.

He left the gun unloaded and worked the bolt a few times and pulled the trigger, getting the click of the firing pin, then slipped a.308 round into the chamber, put it in the Tahoe, and headed out to the farm.

The Xanax was still at work. He was worried, even frightened, but functioning.

In the run-up to his company’s bankruptcy, he’d been handling the daily stress with Ambien at night to help him sleep, and Xanax during the day to smooth himself out. That had worked for a while. Then one night, while on Ambien and Xanax simultaneously, he’d had a couple of evening margaritas at a St. Paul bar, had gone outside, and had physically frozen on a street corner. For nearly half an hour, he’d been unable to pick up a foot to move.

Since it was St. Paul, nobody had noticed. He might have stood there for a week if something in his brain hadn’t finally broken loose, and he found himself able to walk again.

He had thrown the Ambien away, but kept the Xanax and now was rolling through the warm morning with a smooth chemical calm. He didn’t think about the consequences of what he’d done with Hamlet Simonian, or what he was planning to do with Hayk Simonian, because the consequences were simply unthinkable. The Pecks were physicians: they did not go to prison.

Were the Pecks psychopaths? He didn’t think so. Sociopaths, probably, since he had to admit that he really didn’t feel much for his fellow human beings. He even had a hard time figuring out what it would be like, feeling something for his fellow humans.

His father, he thought, was probably the same way, since he hadn’t apparently felt much for his wives or his only child. He didn’t know about Pecks IV, III, or II, but his father had owned a photograph of Peck I standing next to a wagonload of severed legs, supposedly taken during the fighting at Cold Harbor in the Civil War. Peck I was leaning on the wagon, a cigar in his hands. He was smiling.

Basically, Peck VI thought, he was carrying out an old family tradition.

–

At the farm, Hayk was up and sitting on a stump outside the barn, smoking a cigarette, wearing a wifebeater shirt and jeans. He yawned, apparently just up. Peck parked and got the gun out of the back. The safety was off, so he kept his finger away from the trigger as he carried it toward the barn.

“Gonna shoot the girl?”

“No, but you are, when the time comes,” Peck said. “I thought I better leave the rifle here. It makes me nervous having it around the house.”

“A lot of shit makes you nervous,” Simonian said. He yawned again.

“Because I think ahead,” Peck said. “You should try it sometime. How’s the drying going?”

“Should be done by tomorrow, then we can start on the girl. The testicle slices came out good. You can start grinding and bottling if you want.”

“Probably tonight,” Peck said. He could hear classical music coming from inside. Public radio. “You hear from Hamlet?”

Simonian shook his head. “Nobody has. I called Mom, she hasn’t heard a thing. You’d think he’d call from a pay phone or something.”

“You tried to find a pay phone lately?” Peck asked.

“There’s that,” Simonian said. He stubbed the cigarette on the stump, then snapped the butt into the driveway. “Back to the salt mine.”

Peck led the way inside, which stank from the electric dryers; the temperature in the place must have been over a hundred. Peck pulled the door shut behind them. A collection of bones lay on a blue plastic tarp on the floor and a pile of tiger meat on another tarp. Simonian had pulled all the teeth and they lay on an improvised table, along with pans of dried flesh. Still carrying the rifle, Peck bent over the table, looking at what amounted to tiger jerky.

“Good,” he said. “You’re doing good here. Anybody been snooping around?”

“The mailman stopped this morning-I was out by the road and he asked if we were moving in. I told him no, we were getting the place ready to sell off. Probably take the buildings down. I told him we wouldn’t be using the mailbox or getting mail, and he went away.”

“All right,” Peck said. He looked at the tiger meat, including the defleshed, toothless skull, and said, “We’ll grind up all the bones separately, by type-keep the femurs away from everything else. Anything we’re not gonna use, we can bury out back. You ought to use a hammer and break up the skull, but keep that separate. I’m not sure, but I suspect we’ll get more for skull bones, or brain-pan bones. I’ll ask old man Zhang about that.”

“How would anybody know if it was brain-pan bones or leg bones, after it’s ground up?”

“Well, I would,” Peck said. “There are some ethical standards involved here.”

–

Simonian yawned and turned away from Peck to look at the bones, which was what Peck had been waiting for. He was five feet from the other man, and when Simonian turned, Peck lifted the rifle and shot him in the back.

Boom!

Again, the muzzle blast was deafening; and at the last second, Peck flinched, remembering the ricocheting bullet the first time the gun had been shot in the barn. He wasn’t hit this time, though, and he looked on with interest as Simonian lurched away, one step, two, and reached out toward the remaining strip of tiger bone and meat hanging from the overhead hook, turned, and gave Peck a puzzled look, then fell facedown on one of the blood-spattered tarps. Nothing dramatic happened-no last words, no struggle for life, scrabbling across the bloodstained floor.

Peck looked at the suddenly deceased for a moment, then went to the barn door, pushed it open a crack, and looked out. The barn was set well back from the road, and nobody was on the road.

So it was done.

Peck had known from the start that he’d have to get rid of the Simonians, though he’d hoped it would be later than this-now he’d have to finishing processing the tiger meat on his own. As that thought occurred to him, he felt the prickling of hair on the back of his neck, and turned to see Katya peering at him with her golden eyes. She seemed to be waiting.

“What do you want?” Peck asked the cat.

Katya stared back at him, unmoving, making no noise.

–

A pan sat inside the cage, empty. They’d known they’d want to keep the female tiger alive for a few days, until they were finished processing the male, so they’d provided a water pan. Hayk apparently hadn’t been filling it.

A hose came in from outside-Hayk had been using it to wash down the tiger carcass-and now Peck set the rifle aside and dragged the hose over to the cage, turned the nozzle on, and filled the pan through the fence. Katya didn’t move.

“It’s there if you want it,” Peck told her.

He turned to the problem of getting rid of Hayk’s body. He could back the Tahoe up to the barn door and get the body out without being seen, but getting a 240-pound body into the truck would be a problem. Three of them had struggled to get the male tiger onto a six-inch-high dolly, when they’d only had to lift a bit more than two hundred pounds each, and Hayk had lifted a lot more than his share.

Katya made a rumbling sound from her cage, and Peck glanced back at her. She hadn’t eaten in three days, probably hungry.

He turned back to the problem of moving Hayk, and then thought, Wait, a hungry tiger? He had 240 pounds of fresh meat. Hayk was heavily built, especially from the waist down and one of his legs probably weighed between forty-five and fifty pounds, if he remembered his medical texts correctly.

Removing the legs would seriously reduce the load, he thought, and all the tools for doing that were right here in the barn. Two birds with one stone. He looked at the cat.

“Got the munchies?”

Katya didn’t say anything, but lay back and watched him.