Escape Clause

31

Peck was at a Walgreens off I-94, pushing a Xanax prescription across the counter, hoping it wouldn’t bounce. The clerk looked at it, typed into a computer for a while, then asked, “Do you want to pick these up later or wait?”

“How long if I wait?”

“Fifteen or twenty minutes,” the clerk said. The clerk seemed to be looking at him oddly, but Peck couldn’t think why.

“I’ll wait,” he said.

Drug secure again, he wandered off to the magazine rack, popped the last Xanax in his pill tube, and started paging through People. The magazine confused him: Who were all these celebrities? A few of the names were vaguely familiar, but most were not. One prominently displayed woman seemed to have an enormous ass and was famous for it. This was an ass that should have been on a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Yet, as awkward and obscure as they were, all these people seemed to have media skills, either smiling directly into the camera lens or hiding bruised eye sockets behind dark glasses. Or showing off their asses.

These people, both the smiling ones and the bruised ones, needed to take more Xanax, he thought.

He noticed that his left foot was tapping frenetically on the floor and stopped it. He got down another, cheaper celebrity magazine and was sucked into an apparently imaginary story about Jen. Jen’s last name was never mentioned, and he had no idea who she was, although he thought he might have remembered her from some TV show a long time ago. That was confirmed when he got to the last paragraph of the story: the show was Friends, and it had ended eleven years earlier.

Eleven years: Peck would give everything to have had those eleven years back. For one thing, he wouldn’t have messed around with those women in Indianapolis. If he’d gotten a regular doctor job, he’d be driving the big bucks now, fixing everything from Aarskog syndrome to Zika virus.

Mostly with Xanax.

Done with the magazines, he started pacing the aisles, trying not to look impatient or worried. Trying to look cool. He went by a cosmetic counter and caught an image of himself in a mirror. Even with the calming drug flowing around his brain, he knew why he’d gotten the odd look from the clerk: he was wearing a green golf shirt, but it was on backward, the collar up so it looked like a turtleneck.

He wandered some more, purposefully now, until he saw a sign for the restrooms. There was only one, a unisex, but it was open. He went inside, locked the door, turned the shirt around, splashed some water on his face, checked his fly, smiled at himself, and went back out.

–

Five minutes later, he got his new tube of Xanax with no further comment or looks from the pharmacy clerk, and he went out to the parking lot and spent fifteen minutes searching for his car. He eventually remembered that it had a remote panic alarm on the key fob, and he set it off, found the car, and crawled into the driver’s seat, where he went to sleep, still clutching the paper sack that contained the new tube of pills.

He woke sometime later, with a woman rapping on the partially rolled-down driver’s-side window. He looked at her and she stepped back and asked, “Are you okay?”

“A little sleepy,” he said. His mouth tasted like chickenshit smelled. “I’m fine.”

She went away and he muttered after her, “Mind your own business, you old bitch.” He smacked his lips, realized the temperature inside the car was near the boiling point-would have killed a dog, he thought-and he started the car, put the AC on high, and wheeled out of the parking lot. The sun was much lower in the sky than it had been when he went into the Walgreens. How long had he been asleep? He looked at his watch and was surprised to see a mole on his wrist, but no watch. Must have forgotten to put it on. And where was he going? He had some other mission besides the pills…

He sat at the stop sign and had to think a moment. He knew it was close by, and so it must…

Ah! Walmart. He needed a meat grinder. Hayk Simonian had not yet picked one up, at the time of his unfortunate accident.

He drove over to Walmart, a trip of five minutes or so, and when he got there, sat in the parking lot, trying to remember why he was there. Remembering was tough. He tried running through the alphabet, thinking of things he might need starting with an A, then a B…

He’d gone all the way through to Z and was still sitting stupefied in his car, when he remembered: meat grinder. Before getting out of the truck, he automatically touched his pocket, checking to make sure he had his medication. He could feel it on his leg: he pulled the amber-colored tube out and almost panicked when he found it was empty.

But he distinctly remembered Walgreens and looked at the passenger seat, where he saw the white paper bag with the new prescription. A surge of relief. Drug secure again. But the old tube, the date… the date on the tube was two days earlier. Could that be right? He took out his cell phone and checked the date, and it was right. He’d taken thirty Xanax tabs in two and a half days? Jesus: he might have a problem here.

Had to slow down with that shit. Maybe… three a day. Okay, maybe four. No more than four, and only on bad days.

–

He went into Walmart, functioning better now, found a hand-operated meat grinder. As he was walking down the aisle toward the checkout counters, a woman, talking on a cell phone, accompanied by a clutch of children who appeared to be about seven, six, five, four, and three years of age, was approaching with an overloaded shopping cart. He tried to dodge but she crashed the cart into his legs, looked up, and said, “Hey, watch where you’re going, asshole.” As she walked away, he heard her say, “Some weirdo walked right into my cart.”

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.”