Mammoth

26

"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."

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.

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.

"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.

DARRYL was no Einstein, but he wasn't stupid.

He saw the chief walking down the corridors, following him with three cameras in sequence, saw him reach the place where he should have turned to reach Fuzzy's quarters... saw him hurry right on past it.

Saw him go into the parking lot, get in his car, and drive away.

Something funny here.

There was a red button on his console that they called the panic button. It was only to be used in the event of fire, explosion, terrorist invasion, earthquake, or the second coming of Jesus. It had a clear plastic cover so you couldn't accidentally punch it. Darryl had wanted to punch that button from the first moment he saw it.

Ed was second in command—what a joke, the man hadn't stirred for hours, could have had a heart attack and died for all Darryl knew. He decided to show some initiative. That's what officers were supposed to do, wasn't it?

He ran all the way to Fuzzy's enclosure. He glanced through the window into Susan Morgan's office. No one there. He looked over the rail at the recumbent mammoth. It was twitching alarmingly now. He had never been this close to the star of the show. Hesitantly, he climbed over the rail and eased up on the beast, thinking about getting kicked by one of those big feet.

He felt a sudden urge to throw up... then an even worse feeling as he saw no blood on the eyeball, saw that it was hanging out of the socket on wires, saw metal in the empty eye socket.

What the fuck?

He got back to his station in half the time it took him on the way out, flipped up the plastic cover on the panic button, and slammed it with his fist.

The alarm was so loud Ed Crane woke up and fell out of his chair.

IT started to rain as they walked Fuzzy down the ramp. Fuzzy stopped and looked around. The poor thing hasn't been outside in so long he's forgotten what rain is, Matt realized. He got his washing from hoses and his—very clean—wallow tub, and his drinking water from a tank. Susan got him moving into the second unit she had rented, which was strewn with hay and had a basket of Fuzzy's favorite fruits. Matt drove the truck and trailer out of the storage yard and parked it two blocks away under some tall trees that met over the street, the best they could do to foil aerial surveillance, which was their biggest fear. He hurried back and found Fuzzy had decided to sleep off his drug hangover.

"Snoozing," Matt observed.

"Yeah. Trouble is, so is the other one. I got a call from Jack Elk. Fuxxy went haywire. Jack ran off; nothing he could do about it. The alarm is out by now."

Matt saw she was shivering. He was soaked to the skin but she welcomed his arms around her. She had done so much, so incredibly much, planning it all out, making the contacts, able to do most of it only on Mondays when she wasn't a prisoner of her job, in some ways a slave to her love for Fuzzy. Now she seemed at the end of her rope. She needed reassurance... and he was happy that he didn't even have to lie to her.

"Makes no difference," he said, stroking her hair. "Howard gains a couple hours."

"I don't know... I feel we should just get him back in the trailer and run."

"Big mistake. If the cops are looking for us, we're screwed, we both know that. If we move now, we stand out like a sore thumb. He'll have us before the sun comes up. We stick to the plan, it's the best one we have."

"But it gives him more time to—"

"He'll expect us to keep moving. Every minute the circle he has to search gets wider, and he'll concentrate on the circumference of that circle. We stay here, the most intense part of the search spreads away from us, the search gets harder." She smiled up at him. "Okay. You're the guy who can do the math, I guess."

He hugged her again. The only trouble was, he knew, Howard was no slouch at math himself.