Short Money (2 page)

“You see her?”

A motionless patch of tawny fur lay flat on the floor of the container.

“How you want to do this?” Ricky asked.

“Fair chase,” said the doctor. “Let it loose.”

“She comes out, you want to take her right away, Doc. She gets in them woods, we’re gonna have to go get the dogs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Bellweather. “Everything’s under control.”

Anderson stepped back. His heart was hammering; he couldn’t quite get a good breath. Ricky walked the final twenty paces to the cage, peered in at the captive animal. With one hand on the grip of his revolver, he unlatched the door and stepped quickly back. The cougar twisted its body around. They could see its face now, blinking yellow eyes.

The men waited.

“Might take her a minute to figure out she’s cut loose,” Ricky said. “She’s been in there awhile, maybe got used to it.”

Bellweather held the gun with both hands now, the short stock hard against his shoulder, aiming at the open end of the cage. “Come on out, kitty cat,” he called.

“She’s a mean one,” Ricky said. He was holding his revolver loosely at his side, grinning but alert. “Eat you alive,” he added.

It occurred to Anderson that he was the only one there without a loaded weapon. He fumbled with the Weatherby, then realized he had left his shells back in the Hummer.

“Kitty cat,” Bellweather called. He took a few steps toward the cage. “Kitty cat!” No response. “Hey, you want to get the damn thing to come out where I can see it?”

Ricky bent forward, picked up a clod of grass and peat, hurled it at the side of the cage. It hit the wire mesh and disintegrated. The cat hissed and pressed itself against the far side of the cage.

“Shit. You want to move off to the side there, Doc. Get so she can’t see you so good.”

They shifted over a few yards, Bellweather keeping the MAC trained on the cage. Ricky kicked some grass aside and found a rock about the size of an egg. He drew back his arm and hurled it at the back of the cage. The stone struck with a solid thwack; the startled cougar crashed into the unlatched door and was suddenly in the open, belly to the ground, pressed against the limestone wall less than twenty yards away, black-tipped tail lashing.

Anderson stopped breathing.

The cougar hissed, ears flat. It reached out a paw and took a slow step, its side dragging against the rock wall.

“She’s all yours, Doc,” Ricky said, his voice low. The cougar took a step, low to the ground, moving away from the three men. “Better go for it, Doc.”

The sound of thirty .45-caliber hardballs all firing within the space of two seconds sent a surge of adrenaline through Anderson’s veins. For a moment, he thought the doctor’s gun had exploded, but the cat went straight up, twisting in the air, a chain of red geysers erupting from its white underbelly. It hit the ground with an audible thud. Bellweather changed clips as he walked toward his prey.

Ricky said, “Hold up there, Doc. She ain’t done yet.”

The cat was convulsing, its tail lashing wildly. Bellweather slammed the new clip home and charged the dying cougar, firing short bursts as he ran. The sound was nothing like in the movies. Even through the ear-hammering roar of the exploding cartridges Anderson could hear the
thut thut thut
of fat leaden slugs slapping into the big cat’s body. His ears rang, and the landscape seemed to be in motion.

The doctor stood over the motionless cougar, panting, the machine gun hanging empty from his hand. Ricky smiled with one side of his mouth and put his handgun away.

Anderson gulped a ragged breath, his first since the cougar had appeared. The sudden influx of oxygen hit him like a drug. He started to giggle.

Bellweather looked up, his face flushed, sun glancing off his sunglasses. “Goddamn cat almost got away,” he said to Anderson. “You see it?”

Anderson nodded, a loose curve distorting his dry lips. His insides were bubbling. The Weatherby fell from his grasp. The end of the barrel dug into the muck, the rifle flopped over onto the ground.

“Kind of gets your heart going, don’t it, Stevie?”

Anderson nodded, his mouth dry.

Shawn came running up to see the dead cougar. “Man oh man, you pulverized the sucker! Jeez!” Bellweather cupped a hand over the boy’s shoulder.

Anderson looked down at the Weatherby, at the beautifully finished walnut stock, the four-hundred-dollar scope, the mud-covered barrel. He returned his eyes to the cougar, then to the MAC-10 in Bellweather’s hand.

“Will that thing work on a buffalo?” he asked.

Two miles north of Talking Lake Ranch, Joe Crow was celebrating his thirty-third birthday sitting in one of Big River’s four new Ford Crown Victoria patrol cars, parked behind a brush pile just off County Road 5. He popped open his second Leinenkugel and regarded the two fat white lines of cocaine decorating the black top of the police radio.

Thirty-three, he thought. Had he grown up yet? He didn’t think so. He hadn’t felt grown up at eighteen, or at twenty-one either. Real adults didn’t drink beer while they were supposed to be working. Grown-ups did not spend their money on cocaine. Crow looked in the mirror, at the deep adult lines framing his mouth. Even when he pursed his wide lips, the lines were there. They would never heal. And he would never surpass his current five-foot-eight-inch height. In fact, he could probably look forward to getting shorter. Evidence of adulthood. He tore a page from a book of traffic citation blanks, rolled it into a tube, and snorted the coke into one nostril, then the other, one line for each side of his brain. He sat back and watched the early afternoon sunlight get brighter, listened to the birds singing louder, and felt like a boy again.

A car passed. His eyes flicked to the radar display. Sixty-eight. If some hot dog decided to challenge his authority by flying by at eighty-five or ninety per … well, he would think about chasing him down. But first he had to decide what to do with the rest of his life. Officer Crow let his mind wander.

Shortly after noon, Crow decided to quit his job with the Big River police. It was a decision to which he had come many times before. He would open a rib joint. A really great place where you could go to get some really great ribs. Better yet, he would go to Montana and play poker for a living. Buy into one of the poker clubs in Billings. Buy himself a nightclub. In Jamaica, a really cool place with reggae music and Red Stripe beer. By two-seventeen he was seriously considering learning to play bass guitar and starting the ultimate rock band. He drained the sixth can of Leinenkugel. As he laid out the last two lines of coke, he heard, faintly, a rapid series of explosions. A short burst, then a longer one.

Crow frowned. The Murphys, running another hunt. None of his business what they did, but it pissed him off anyway, the untouchable Murphy brothers running their canned hunts, blowing away everything from antelope to zebra. He’d tried to convince his chief to have a talk with George Murphy about the machine guns. It just didn’t seem sporting. Orlan Johnson had listened, then told him he had to learn to mind his own “got-damn beeswax.”

“You get a complaint from some citizen, Crow? I didn’t think so. Listen to me. George Murphy runs a nice clean operation. The man has a class three firearms license. You just do your job, keeping the streets safe, and don’t be worrying about a few got-damn zebras.” Police Chief Orlan Johnson was married to George Murphy’s sister.

Crow leaned over the radio and sucked the coke into his sinuses.

An hour later, his shift officially over, he was still sitting in his car, fighting the yen to drive the 150 miles into Minneapolis for another gram, thinking dark thoughts about his dead-end job, his troubled marriage, his hazy future. The rib joint now seemed like an impossibility, the rock-and-roll band another cokehead fantasy. He would grow old and fat, another small-town cop good for nothing but to provide a little sport for the local teenagers. Melinda would leave him, divorce him, marry a man with prospects.

He felt the burning again in his gut. Stomach cancer, or worse. Something rotting in there. Thirty-three years old, and his innards were dissolving from all the coke, the booze, the fried food. What did he have to look forward to? Melinda had promised him a birthday dinner, something with plenty of red meat and wine. Too bad she was such an indifferent cook, especially when it came to meat, which she wouldn’t eat. They would eat dinner, drink a few glasses of wine, then she would try to start a fight—he could count on that—arguing over something trivial. He saw himself sitting there, staring wordlessly back at her as she yapped at him, numbing his brain with her New Age bullshit. Telling him something she’d seen in her tarot cards.

Or they would have what he thought of as the “feeling fight.” He recalled the last one, Melinda’s voice hitting a new level of stridency when she told him he was a fish. “You are so unfeeling, so flat,” she’d said, “it’s like you aren’t really there. I get to one side of you, I can hardly see you. You don’t know how to share your feelings. You’ve got the emotional depth of a flounder.”

And maybe she was right. Certainly he didn’t feel things the way she did, nor did he possess her rich emotional vocabulary. He had never cried over roadkill or felt the great bolts of joy of which she seemed capable. But he was not a flatfish. He’d said, “If I have so much trouble expressing myself, then how come you know so goddamn much about me?”

As always, the snappy comeback had failed to enrich their relationship.

Too bad he’d used up all the coke. When they were doing coke together, things usually went better. They were going through three or four grams a week lately, which was hell on the bank account but made it easier to be in the relationship. Sometimes he thought the coke was all that held their marriage intact. He knew it couldn’t go on, that sooner or later they would have to give it up. Sooner or later they would bottom out.

The late afternoon sun had disappeared behind a layer of cloud, the sky gone from blue to lead; the temperature was dropping rapidly. The air felt moist and smelled like snow. Crow rolled up his window. Winter coming. He could hear the wind.

A Hummer with a camouflage paint job roared by at 78 miles per hour, 23 mph over the posted limit. That would be Ricky Murphy. Crow had never met George, the elder brother, but he’d run into Ricky too many times. The last time, Ricky had got shit-faced and started slapping some girl around outside Birdy’s. Crow had intervened, given Ricky a couple slaps back, then hauled him down to the station. Ricky had spent almost an hour and a half in the lockup that time—a personal record—before the call came in from Chief Johnson, demanding that he be set free.

What the Murphys did was none of his got-damn beeswax.

A few seconds later, another car flew by—79 on the radar—a bright-pink Jaguar. Crow thought about chasing it down, but his shift was over, and besides, the last thing on earth he wanted was to meet someone who would paint a nice car like that hot pink. Opening the brown coke vial, he turned it over and tapped it against the top of the radio, hoping to dislodge a few last grains, but the vial was entirely empty.

You want to stay in business, you got to take what business you can get.

—BERDETTE WILLIAMS

B
ACK IN 1946, BERDETTE WILLIAMS
had named his joint Birdy’s, but everybody who knew him called him Berdette. Birdy’s was the only decent place to get a bump and a burger between Big River and Montevideo—and it wasn’t all that decent. The tables were sticky, the chairs unstable, the atmosphere a yellow mist of rancid grease, cigarettes, and sour beer. The songs on the jukebox were ten years out of date.

Nevertheless, it remained a popular spot with the locals. Arlene, Berdette’s wife, knew how to fry up a Juicy Lucy, a beer at Birdy’s was as good as a beer anywhere, and if Berdette watered his whiskey, as was rumored, he kept the dilution within reason. A guy could still get a good buzz for five or ten bucks, and most nights there was a card game going at the back table.

Dr. Nelson Bellweather loved the place. “Isn’t this great, Stevie?” he said as Berdette slid Juicy Lucy baskets in front of him and Anderson. “First time Ricky brought me, I asked Berdette here to see the wine list.” He laughed. “He looked at me like I was from Venus—isn’t that right, Birdy?”

Berdette said, “You want another round?”

They were sitting at the big table in back, Anderson, Doc Bellweather, and Ricky Murphy, fresh from the hunt. Ollie Aamold, the taxidermist, sat shuffling a deck of cards. When Ollie wasn’t up to his elbows in the carcass of some large dead animal, he spent his hours at Birdy’s, beer in hand, lower lip distended by a wad of Copenhagen, looking for a game of chance. Ricky Murphy, Stetson pulled low over his eyes, sipped his 7 & 7 and watched Ollie handle the deck. Neither Ricky nor Ollie had ordered food, but they both indicated with hand motions that another round would be fine.

“So I asked him,” Bellweather continued, “if he had any, you know,
imported
beer. What did you say, Birdy? You remember what you said?”

Berdette shook his head wearily and walked away.

Bellweather was not offended. To him, Berdette was part of the local color. He continued his story. “So Birdy said, he said, ‘What, you mean like from
Wisconsin
?’” He exploded with laughter, was dutifully joined by Anderson’s hearty chuckle and a perfunctory
heh-heh
from Ricky. Ollie Aamold’s features, never particularly mobile, remained inert. Grinning and red in the face, Bellweather pushed a cluster of french fries into his mouth, chewed, followed it with a pull from a Bud longneck.

Steve Anderson, famished after the drama of his first hunting experience, giddy from three Scotches and two Budweisers, took a huge bite of his Juicy Lucy. Hot cheese spurted from between the twin hamburger patties, searing his lower lip. “Yow!” he gasped, dousing the pain with a torrent of beer.

Bellweather laughed, snorting through his nose, hitting the table with his palm.

Anderson wiped his mouth with a handful of paper napkins. “Man, that’s hot!” He swallowed a few more ounces of beer, then gave Bellweather a puzzled look. “Hey, Doc, I thought you were a vegetarian.”