Page 96 of Tiger Queen

It was dark in the bedroom. The person inside was crouched down by the dresser, aiming a cell phone flashlight at the iron safe. A tattooed hand twisted the dial, and then it unlocked with a loud KA-CHUNK. Anthony didn’t have tattoos. That confused me.

“Jake?” I asked, squinting at the harsh light. “What are you doing in here with Anthony’s laptop?”

The man who stood and turned on the dresser lamp was not Jake. It wasn’t David or Anthony either. The weird thing was that he looked kind of like each of them. The blue eyes of David. The long eyelashes and cheeks of Anthony. The amused grin of Jake, and the scruff along his jaw. He was totally jacked like the two older brothers, and wore a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

But the cherry-red mohawk was unlike anything I had seen in his sons, and there was a mad sparkle in his eyes. Eyes which looked at me like I was the prey he had been waiting for.

“Carl?” I gasped. “Crazy Carl?”

41

Rachel

My brain rebooted itself at the sight of Crazy Carl. He was supposed to be dead. Yet here he was in the house, his house, opening his safe. It was such an impossibility that the first thing I thought was that it was a ghost. The ghost of Crazy Carl Haines had returned to haunt his house in death.

When he pulled the gun out of the safe and aimed it at me, all thoughts of a supernatural explanation disappeared.

“You’re that bitch who’s dismantling my zoo,” he growled. His voice had a bit of Carolina twang, but not as cartoonish as it was in the commercials I had seen. “If you scream, you die.”

I clamped my mouth shut. Screaming was exactly what I had been about to do.

“You… you’re dead. A plane… a plane. A plane crash. In the ocean.”

He snorted derisively. “If there ain’t no body, honey, there ain’t no death. Easy as shit to fake that! Thousand bucks to the right Costa Rican and they’ll fly over the gulf, call out a Mayday, turn their transponder off, and come right home.”

Before I could think of what to do, he crossed the distance between us and clamped a sweaty hand over my mouth. He twisted me around and jabbed the barrel of the gun into my back.

“We’re gonna walk out of here nice and quiet,” he whispered. His breath smelled like sour beer. “Grab that laptop on the way. Good. Remember, no noise. You make so much as a peep and I’ll put a bullet in your spine.”

With the gun pressing painfully into my lower back, I didn’t need the reminder.

I clutched the laptop to my chest and let him lead me out of the bedroom and into the hall. The floor was normally creaky, but tonight it was magically silent, as if the house itself was one of Carl’s accomplices. I stared at the door to Anthony’s bedroom, then David’s. He was normally a light sleeper, so maybe he would hear us. I focused on the door and silently willed it to open, for one of them to come to my aid…

Down the stairs we went, then out the front door. Carl closed it behind us softly, and then we were going down the porch and across the path toward the zoo. My bare foot stepped on a particularly sharp rock and I yelped, the sound muffled by Carl’s palm. Only when we were halfway to the zoo did he remove his hand from my mouth.

“Where are we going?” I whispered.

“I said shut up,” the crazy man snapped.

The night was alive with the sound of crickets and cicadas. I was terrified of what Carl intended to do with me. He had accused me of dismantling his zoo. The business he had spent his entire life building.

Was he going to kill me?

I remembered how on Tiger King everyone suspected that Carol Baskin had fed her first husband to her tigers. That was super unlikely because tigers had to be starving to eat human flesh… But maybe Crazy Carl didn’t know that. Maybe he wanted to give it a try anyways.

“All my fucking animals,” he grumbled as we entered the zoo itself. “Closing the zoo down and shipping them away from their home.”

“Is that what this is about?” I asked in a trembling voice. “The animals transfer?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “Destroying my entire empire overnight. Comin’ in here and forcing my sons to abandon their heritage.”

Of course that’s what this was about. He had worked his entire life building this zoo, his legacy, and we were systematically shutting it down and sending his animals away. Despite the gun he had on me, and despite all the other bad stuff Carl had done, I almost felt sorry for him.

“I wasn’t trying to destroy your legacy,” I said. “I’m only trying to do what’s best for the animals! We’re giving them better homes, at a national park in Kenya where they will have room to roam and—”

“Shut up.”

Carl led me into the visitor’s center, then into the back office. He shoved me into the chair, took Anthony’s laptop, and opened it on the desk.

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