Stuffed (18 page)

“Prize?”

“Pay dirt,” he mocked, spitting his toothpick on the floor. His face welled up with a mass of mean-spirited squinty wrinkles. “Buyers comin to take that ol’ bird offa our hands to the tune of three hundred grand. Be surprised what folk’ll pay good money for.”

“You stabbed MacTeague over a couple hundred grand?”

He checked his perimeter again. I looked around too, for the first time. The room was a library. Tex was backed up against a stately desk, beyond which was a wall of hanging tapestries. Right and left, walls were filled with bookshelves and another array of taxidermy. You don’t suppose any of the shelves concealed a hidden staircase? There was a chandelier overhead, a vaulted wood ceiling above that—way up in the stratosphere. Behind Angie and me, opposite the desk and entrance to the room, large multipaned windows covered almost a whole wall. I could hear the ocean through them.

I sat rigidly like I was in the dean’s office at some exclusive university, about to be expelled for being the class clown. Or maybe this was Clown College? But it was no laughing matter.

“T’wasn’t me killed him,” he hissed, wiping his brow. “It’s that fool.
Flip.
And the little fellers. They’re around here somewhere too.”

“Flip?”
I ventured. “Who . . . who is
Flip?
And the pygmies? What’s up with that?”

Tex paled.

“He killed MacTeague, now he’s a-tryin’ to kill me. A double-cross. No three-way split. This whole thing? It was Flip’s idea. Yeah huhn. He seen Partridge on TV. Good idea too. Collect the reward for the Big Foot with a gaff. Little fellahs jes’ do whatever Flip sez, is all. They got thrown outta work too. We all did. Back end shows jes’ aren’t PC.”

I stared at him as he waved his gun around the room, ready to shoot anything that moved. Wasn’t going to be me—I sat rigid as a truant freshman. Angie, of course, had little choice but to sit still, though I could hear her breath coming fast and nervous through her nose.

Lamplight glittered on Tex’s sweaty face, his eyes wide and trying not to blink lest his guard be compromised. I wasn’t stalling by talking to him—he seemed content to let us wait with him for whatever was lurking beyond the door. Of course, having him distracted by conversation posed the possibility that his guard might be down at the crucial moment. I didn’t have much at my disposal under the circumstances. So I clung to the hope that when Flip, or the pygmies or the Werewolf or The Mummy or whoever, came at him, Tex would get into a struggle. The gun would be trained elsewhere, possibly affording a window of escape for Angie and me. Possibly.

I had to ask.

“So how did you come to take the crow from Partridge? You were here to sell him a gaff Sasquatch.”

He spat derisively. “We gets here, an’ ol’ Partridge sees through MacTeague’s gaff. He sez he ain’t no fool. But Flip, he sees the crow and sez,
We gotta have that. It’s valuable. Real valuable.”

“Valuable? What made Flip think it was valuable?” I shrugged, my eyes scanning the room for something, anything that might get us out of the dean’s office.

“I guess you’d have to say Flip has a special sense about things, about people.” He winked at me. “Could use that crow to make things happen. So Flip takes out this ol’ carvin’ knife and does Partridge. We take the crow. Didn’t know Flip was gonna stick Partridge, he was gonna die. Fletcher took the bird back to Vermont for safekeepin’ until we could figure out what to do with it. I thought the whole thing was crazy, but Flip said a buyer would find us. The freak was right, all right. But thing is, ol’ Flip has prob’ly screwed the pooch this time. Buyer won’t show up now!” he shouted. This statement was obviously meant for Flip, wherever he was hiding.

“Flip . . . is he Korean?”

“Whut?” He looked at me in disgust. “Shut yer trap, clown!”

That was all I was going to get out of Tex. He began yelling at the walls instead of me.

“C’mon, now, Flip! Let’s put an end to this, call off the little fellers. I don’t wanna hafta shoot another one. MacTeague is dead, an’ that’s okay with me. But half is better than nothin’. You don’t cut this out, we ain’t gonna see any of that money.”

The heavy oak door creaked and Tex swung the gun on it. I could see sweat was stinging his eyes. His thumb slid forward to make sure the revolver’s hammer was back and cocked.

There was a coo. I scanned the ceiling to see if there was a dove in the rafters. It built into a sweet crescendo, a giggle that seemed to come from beyond the door. Then there was a breathy pause, like Shirley Temple being presented with a lollipop.

“How do I know you won’t shoot me, Tex?” It was a little girl’s voice. The distant voice I’d heard at the mothballed sideshow.

Angie and I exchanged glances, pupils dilated. Those goose bumps were back, surging across my arms like the ocean swells outside. Creepy? I didn’t know the half of it. Yet.

“I promise, on a stack of Gideons, Flip.” Tex grinned. But he kept his gun pointed at the door. “You just come on out and we’ll get that money. Not two o’clock yet. We still have time to make the deal go down.”

Not two yet.
Was the buyer showing up at two? Tex, MacTeague, and Flip had arrived early, and this cat-and-mouse erupted?

The little girl began to sing:

“Watch me, swingers, and let’s all strive

To do the Mambo Rumba Two-Hand Jive

Get down low, and back up high

Shimmy those hips, give it a try.”

Her high, mildly nasal voice was a dead ringer for Belle Beverly, that early sixties’ pop singer. Uncanny.

“Stop playin’ games, Flip. C’mon out and let’s get back on track.”

“How can I be sure?” the girl’s voice said.

Tex took a step toward the door. He meant to shoot her, all right, and was trying to make sure he didn’t miss. How could this little girl
—Flip?—
have killed MacTeague?

“You know, Tex, the white crow is very powerful,” the little girl’s voice chimed. “I think maybe we should use the New York buyer. It’s a lot more money.”

“We already talked about that. Ain’t goin’ back to New York and dealin’ with those slanty-eyed sleazeballs. We voted to sell it here. Tonight. ’Sides, I’m thinking you like that crow too much.” Tex took another step, his lantern held out toward the door. “I don’t think you have any notion of selling it at all.”

“Feel the music in your feet

The gang on the beach has the beat

Let your hands show your honey

You’re no square, on the money.”

More Belle Beverly. And there I was without my surfboard—not exactly the set of
Beach Blanket Bingo.

Tex’s neck muscles flexed, and he looked a little unsteady on his feet, possibly from the poison on those wicked little pygmy arrows. “Now, that’s enough of that.”

“It was a three-way vote.” She chuckled. “Before I made MacTeague a bloody mess. Now the vote is fifty–fifty. So who wins?”

“Stop the tomfoolery, Flip. We got these two New Yorkers we gotta take care of. Soon as they go missing, I wanna be long gone.”

I heard myself gulp and purposely didn’t exchange glances with Angie. My eyes were glued on Tex, my reflexes keyed to what was going to happen next. I had a move of my own to make. The window of opportunity would be small, the chance for escaping unscathed smaller. Timing would be essential. I knew my first move was to knock Angie back with my right arm onto the floor, hopefully under the line of fire. After that? I guessed I’d go for Tex and the gun. The little girl, I reasoned, would be easier to subdue. One knuckle sandwich to the face and she would go down and stay there. Hey, it’s not like she was peddling Minty Melties for a new scout camp. Tex said she had a carving knife, and by the looks of MacTeague, she wasn’t afraid to use it.

I registered motion in my right peripheral vision. Turning, I saw the tapestries behind Tex bulge. He saw my head swivel and started to spin. But Flip was already upon him, shrieking, knife in the air.

Flip was tall. Wide. Not little. A girl? There was no way of telling. There were denim coveralls, bare shoulders, a bare head. She, or it, looked like a giant thumb. But the voice had seemed to come from the doorway.

I flung my arm out and knocked Angie back, and heard her tape-muffled scream as the high-back chair clunked heavily to the carpet. Spilling out of my chair and onto the floor next to her, I ripped the tape from her mouth and frantically went to work on the tape around her arms.

“Angie, are you okay?”

“Garth, why are you dressed like a clown?” she shouted over the ruckus between Tex and Flip.

“It was on accident—I mean, by accident—with a pen and some handcuffs and Detective Walker.” I growled. “Just hurry!”

Tex and Flip still struggled against the desk, cursing. It was all I could do to concentrate on the tape.
A giant thumb? In coveralls?

I wanted to look, to make sense of it, but was busy trying to free Angie. I heard the lamp hit the floor and glanced up to see kerosene gushing onto the carpet and back toward the wall. The whole area burst into flame. The flickering shadows of the two combatants danced across the windows.

To one side, the elongated shadow of the crow shimmered on the bookcases, a seemingly sinister observer of the fiery mayhem.

I felt the growing heat on my face and saw the curtains swirled in flames.

That’s when Otto kicked open the door and charged into the room, his mother’s gun and steel dental work flashing like the Frito Bandito. He squinted in our direction before spinning his pistol toward Tex and Flip, who were still doing their tango. Otto’s mother would have been proud. Gun at his hip, he fanned the trigger like he’d just hit Dodge City. Fire spiked from the barrel, dealing a deafening roar and tumult of gunfire. Take it from me, kids, don’t fire a gun in the house—it’s so loud you’d swear someone was clonking your ears with ball-peen hammers.

Books exploded behind Flip and Tex. Glass shattered. Splinters jumped like grasshoppers off the desk. His aim was all over the place. I guess Mama neglected to admonish him about hitting his mark.

Then Tex’s gun fired two shots.

Otto shouted,
“Khuy!”
His gun dropped to the floor, and he staggered to the wall. He was hit.

Angie had one hand free and we were both clawing at the tape on the other.

Tex’s gun went off again, and an antelope head fell from the wall. Flip shrieked with glee. Something cracked, like a tree branch snapping.

Angie was free. She rolled to one side, away from the chair.

I looked up, my ears ringing from the gunfire. The bell jar, the crow, was nowhere to be seen. In its place was broken glass.

Tex was half sitting, half leaning on the desk. Flip was gone. White feathers floated to the floor. Off toward the bookcases, on the carpet, I could see the headless white crow lying on its side, still clutching its little branch. Next year’s birthday? Angie is getting a vacuum cleaner.

Tex slid from the desk onto his knees. His eyes were just white, no pupils. He fell forward, face flat down, onto a bed of the feathers. I heard his nose snap. His body rolled in one direction, his head the other, in a way that didn’t look possible. Not without a broken neck.

I grabbed Angie’s hand and pulled her toward me. The flaming tapestries had touched off the bookcases, and the temperature in the room was rising rapidly. There was no dousing this fire—it was hungry, and you just knew it was going to devour the whole house.

My eyes stung with the heat and smoke, but I found Otto, still crumpled against the wall, rocking slightly.

I pushed Angie toward him and paused, scanning the room for Flip, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula, or any other monsters, but saw only Tex twitching on the floor. Then my eye caught cinders falling like flaming snow around the headless crow.

Don’t ask me why, but I darted over and grabbed the crow by the branch it was attached to before joining Angie and Otto. There was blood on Otto’s arm, on the wall, on the floor. Not a lot. But that didn’t mean anything. He could be dying. I looked at the door. There were no flames blocking our escape.

It was open.

And then it wasn’t.

Standing before the closed door was the giant thumb.

I can’t say that I’ve ever—before or since—found myself so utterly terrified, my veins all ice. If for no other reason than understanding the full freakish menace of what stood before me took me a good ten seconds. And then some.

Way at the top of the thumb, set preternaturally high in a bald head, were little blue eyes; not just any eyes, but the kind that glow in the slightest light. Flames danced in those tiny blue eyes. I knew those eyes. They had flapped at me from the torn canvas at the abandoned sideshow.

Below the eyes was the rest of the thick, meaty, and expansive head. The nose was tiny, shaped like a peanut; the mouth was a red bud, kewpie-doll lips.

It looked sort of like Tweety Bird with a thyroid problem. Sylvester the Cat would have had his hands full with this canary. So would the bulldog, for that matter.

The ice in my veins hardened and cracked. What the hell was this thing? Could it be real? I was still trying to take it all in.

The neck and chin were indistinguishable from the shoulders, which sat like a rotting pumpkin atop a wide chest. Past a prodigious belly, at the bottom where the coveralls ended, were some orthopedic shoes, each different. Black. Ugly. The kind with lifts and shunts. The feet were huge and splayfooted.

At the top of the coveralls, to the sides of the hideous head and neck, where the arms should have been, were flippers. Big, pimply-looking flippers that came down to the giant thumb’s waist. They were thick but flexuous, the ends curling like a squid’s tentacles.

One was wrapped around a carving knife. One part Tweety, one part octopus, both parts psychotic killer.

I heard Angie catch sight of Flip. She yelped like she’d just gotten a paper cut.

Flip was no girl, big or little. Add a tuxedo . . . I suddenly thought about Reggie in my trunk.

This was
FLIP THE PENGUIN BOY. A Living Legend!
This was the Reaper in our apartment. This was the shadow in the truck that smooshed Bret. This is what threw the boulder at me. This is what called for help at the sideshow, luring me into range of the pygmies’ arrows.