Mammoth (36 page)

Then Susan jammed the controller deep under a pile of hay, closed the gate behind her, and moved out of camera range with Matt and Fuzzy.

He followed them down several hallways to a point where a right turn would lead them into the arena, and a left turn to a big door to the outside. They turned left. He checked the external camera. No one out there. He got out his cell phone and punched 1, which dialed Susan’s phone. He saw her answer. She said nothing, and he punched the number 2, which sent the text message
ALL CLEAR
. He watched her switch off, and punched the electric door opener. He gritted his teeth, imagining the racket the thing was making. If somebody were to drive into the wrong parking lot right now…

They left the building, the door rumbled back down (silently, to Jack), and the unlikely trio headed out across the parking lot to where Susan had parked her big pickup and monster fifth-wheel trailer. Before they even reached it the tailgate was coming down. From his angle Jack couldn’t see inside, but he knew there was a dune buggy parked in the garage in back. Susan had been parking the rig there every Sunday night for months now so she could get an early start for the Oregon Dunes near Florence, or some other off-roading destination to spend Monday, her only day off.

The next part was tricky. Jack couldn’t see most of it because of the angle, but it seemed to go smoothly. In fifteen minutes Susan climbed into the driver’s seat of the pickup, started the engine, and pulled away.

As soon as she was out of camera range Jack punched nine buttons, ejected nine cards into his hands, and replaced them with the proper ones. There wasn’t even a flicker on the screens as the recorded views were replaced by the real ones. The Unknown Hacker’s magic was still working.

SUSAN
pulled the truck up beside the security booth and braked gently to a stop. Harry, the night guard, left his booth smiling. He liked Susan. He wouldn’t after tonight, but there was nothing she could do about that.

“Off to the dunes?” he said cheerfully.

“Getting a late start,” Susan said. “Probably head east a bit, there’s a good place around Bend.”

“Don’t break your fool neck, okay?” Harry noticed Matt sitting on the other side.

“He’s my guest,” Susan said.

“Sir, could you give me your visitor card?”

Matt handed it over, and Harry swiped it through a device that agreed that Matt had been legitimately allowed entrance. Susan opened the door and Harry stepped back to let her out. He followed her around back, and Susan keyed the ramp to come down.

“Damn stupid, having to search this damn thing, Miss Morgan, but you know how it is. Rules are rules.”

“I don’t mind a bit.”

Harry stepped onto the ramp and walked up to the dune buggy parked in the back. There was room to walk around it and into the kitchen and living area. He shone his flashlight around, all the way to a narrow hallway where the bathroom was, and three steps leading up to the bedroom. If Susan was stealing office supplies or circus costumes or even computers she could have concealed a lot of them in this place, but why on earth would she? It would be insulting to Miss Morgan to do a thorough search of this rolling Hilton every Sunday night, and nobody had ever asked him to. He was supposed to make sure nobody in a large vehicle absconded with one of the bigger robotic creatures, and there sure as shit wasn’t enough room to hide any of them in here.

And Fuzzy, of course. Harry chuckled at that idea. He closed the door, edged around the buggy, and jumped down to the ground beside Susan.

“Wagons ho!” he said. “Head ’er out!”

“Good-bye, Harry,” Susan said. She got back in the cab and drove away.

NOT
far down the road Susan pulled onto the shoulder, leaped from the cab, bent over, and threw up. Matt came around the front of the cab but she waved him away until she was through. After a moment, she stood up and gestured to the cab.

“You drive. I’ve only ever driven it from Portland once and to and from work. I
hate
driving this thing.”

Matt thought about telling her that he didn’t have all that much experience towing, himself, but knew she didn’t need to hear that. And he had pulled a trailer, on the very day that his life had changed forever on his great Trout-Fishing Adventure, when Warburton came down in a helicopter and tempted him into the clutches of Howard Christian. It hadn’t been that tough.

He only hoped he didn’t have to back the damn thing up.

“DID
you know Houdini made an elephant disappear on stage?” Matt asked.

“Damn right I do. What he did, he led an elephant into a big box, closed it up, had stagehands turn it ninety degrees, and then raised curtains in the front and back. There were two big holes in the box, it seemed like you could look through it and see the back of the stage. No way an elephant could be in there. The thing is, he did it with mirrors. I couldn’t figure out a way to make that work with Harry going inside. Take this exit.”

They were barreling through the night at a perfectly legal fifty-five miles per hour. The freeway was straight and nearly empty. It was half an hour since Matt had taken over and they were passing through the community of Troutdale. Matt eased the truck onto the exit ramp and followed a city street up and over a railroad track.

They had discussed this leg of the journey. “You’re the mathematician,” Susan had said, “you figure the odds.” It was a complex equation.

Howard Christian would discover his most prized possession was missing by about six at the latest, three hours away. That would happen when Fuzzy’s morning attendants arrived for work and found the woman they were supposed to relieve, the graveyard watcher, had not been there all night. (“Of
course
Howard would never leave Fuzzy unattended, not even for a minute,” Susan had said when Matt asked. “That was the easiest part of this whole deal. There are two girls who work that shift, and I told each of them the other was on duty tonight.”) By then they could be almost to their goal.

Almost. If they kept moving they would avoid the morning
rush hour in Portland, but would probably encounter a lot of traffic later on.

Was it better to travel at night, when they were conspicuous, or during the day, when they were one of thousands of big RVs roaring through the scenic Pacific Northwest? Keep moving, and moving fast, or lay low for a bit and lose yourself on the maze of roads that connected I-84 to I-5 to…well, to anywhere.

It all hinged, of course, on Howard.

“Turn in there,” Susan said.

Taking it slow and easy, Matt turned into a small parking lot and drove up to a sliding chain-link gate next to a small building with a sign reading
TROUTDALE MINI-STORAGE
. Susan handed him a card and he swiped it through a security device, and the gate slowly rolled back.

“Just up the hill there, turn left. Unit 142.”

Matt did as instructed. As the truck was still slowly rolling Susan jumped out and stood by an orange garage door directing him, then held up her hand and he stopped. The ramp was already coming down on its cables as Matt got to the back. Susan hurried inside, tossing him a key on a string. He opened the lock, lifted the garage door. The unit was big enough for a fair-sized boat and trailer, and it was empty.

Susan sat in the dune buggy, released the parking brake, and let it roll backward and down the ramp. She hopped out and steered with one hand as she and Matt rolled it into the garage.

“Nasty thing,” she muttered. “I’m glad to see the end of it.”

“Did you ever actually drive it?”

“Once. Just so I could talk about the joys of off-roading, if I had to. Let me tell you, it’s vastly overrated as well as being environmentally harmful. Come on.”

They got into the trailer and Susan released a hidden catch. They struggled to lift the false floor…and there was Fuzzy, lying on his side, his big, horny feet toward the rear, his head scrunched up against the top of a wheel well. He was in a space that he fit into almost as snugly as a guitar fit into a guitar case.

“God, I’m glad this part is over. He loves to go bye-bye—
don’t
you, sweetie?” Susan patted his hairy cheek. “But I was
afraid this would take him back to that box they put him in to transfer him from the truck to the zoo compound…never mind. The tranquilizer I gave him did the trick.”

Matt had been amazed at how quietly Fuzzy had stood as Susan stuck a big needle in a vein in his ear and injected the drug, and how obediently he had gone down on his side. There was something unnatural-looking about an elephant or mammoth lying on his side, but he knew it was a natural behavior for them. And the space he was in…well, Matt was a mathematician and if you had asked him to walk around the trailer and look in the open back door he would have strongly doubted a seven-foot, two-ton mammoth could fit where he was. Susan had had the trailer specially adapted—by a customizer who probably thought she was planning to smuggle a
lot
of pot somewhere—the floor and sides beefed up, the trap door disguised, extra shocks installed.

“You know, one of the leading theories of how Houdini did that vanishing trick was that he simply had the elephant lie down in the box. Most people don’t know they even do it, and practically nobody realizes how much
shorter
it makes them.”

Matt stood back as Susan coaxed Fuzzy to his feet, where he swayed for a moment, looking a little lost and confused and…well, maybe a little drunk.

“In another year, this trick wouldn’t have worked,” Susan said, stroking his face. She started to coo at him, which he seemed to like. “Look at the
tusks
on this baby boy. Aren’t you proud of them, sweetie? Why, in another year they’ll be three feet long and starting to curve….”

This was new to Matt. He had seen her handling the big elephants with kindness, touching them, talking to them, but had not detected a personal attachment. He realized he had a real rival in her affections. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t jealous…and knew he damn well better not be, because he knew Susan wouldn’t put up with it.

“Okay, Matt, I’m leaving it up to you, because frankly I’m too tired and too jazzed at the same time to make a decision. Stay, or move on?”

So they were back to Howard.

Everything depended on whether Howard would call the
cops. If he did, they had to go to ground, and do it for a month, at least. Maybe longer. In which case they would head south, where Susan had rented a farm (Matt hoped she had been
very
careful with that) with a barn big enough to hide Fuzzy and the trailer.

But Susan didn’t think Howard would put out the alarm. In fact, she admitted she probably never would have got started with this if she thought he would. The farm was a backup, something neither had much faith in. Once the word was out that Fuzzy was…mammoth-napped…every barn in Oregon and Washington would be examined, by police or a Fuzzy-crazed public, then Idaho, then California, clear to Key West, Florida. She had prepared a hideaway in the barn, but she wasn’t Houdini, and had no faith it would stand up to a determined search. No, if the police were called in, their chances were a thousand to one against. A
million
to one.

On the other hand, if Howard
didn’t
call the cops…Matt figured they had not much better than one in ten odds. Probably worse.

But Matt didn’t think that Howard would let the news out until he absolutely had to. Twenty-four hours, minimum. Maybe as long as three days. Howard had had a
lot
of bad publicity during the legal fights over ownership of Fuzzy, and he
hated
that. Howard hated to lose, hated to look like a fool, and would not want to be remembered as the man who let a
mammoth
be stolen out from under his nose.

“We stay,” Matt said.

AT
just about that moment, Fuxxy fell over.

Only Jack saw it happen. That particular camera was not displaying at Darryl’s station at the moment, though it would soon come up in the regular rotation, and a marching band parading through the room would not have been likely to wake up Ed. Jack watched the stinking, lousy, bug-ridden, useless hunk of junk topple in disbelieving horror. Burned-out fuse, busted gyroscope, loose screw…
something.

Jack didn’t encourage idle talk with his crew. They were supposed to stay alert, speaking only when there was
something to report. But any movement of the star of the show was a reportable event.
Fuzzy’s moved to the other side of his pen
, he heard that a dozen times a night.
Fuzzy’s taking a nap. Fuzzy just dropped a
big
load, chief.

A minute passed.

“Looks like Fuzzy’s taking his nap, chief,” Darryl said. He waited, but Darryl said nothing more. Three minutes passed.

“I don’t like the way Fuzzy’s looking, chief.”

“He’s taking a snooze. What’s the problem?” But he could see it himself. The damn thing was twitching its legs, jerking around. Not horribly, not an epileptic fucking
fit
or anything, but Fuzzy usually slept like a log, and when he got up it was in one smooth motion, surprisingly graceful. Jack knew that and so did Darryl.

“Where’s that night girl?” Darryl said. “Come to think of it, I ain’t seen her go through that room once all night.” The night girl spent most of her shift in Susan’s office, where there were no cameras, just a window to observe Fuzzy.

“Chief, I think I better go down there and see what’s up.”

Okay, that’s it.
Jack stood.

“I’ll go. Stay where you are and I’ll run take a look.”

Jack hurried out of the pit, flew up two flights of stairs, tried to walk calmly down the hallway but ended up almost running, slammed into the outside door, walked to his car, got in, headed for the exit at the posted limit of 15 mph, slowed down and waved his gate pass and smiled at Harry, who smiled and waved back…then frowned. Jack accelerated down the road and into the suddenly threatening night.