Tailed Read Free

I might get testy.
    After half an hour of looking for the least objectionable mutt, I was getting impatient. If I had a cell phone, I would have called somebody. The bear arm was beginning to worry me, too. Why would Sprunty cut the arm off his own bear mount, and right before an appraisal? Was it possible he’d cut it off somebody else’s trophy on a wager or something?
    Weary of the delay, I determined to barge in on the couple. Half an hour was long enough for Sprunty to have done what he needed to do. Now they were probably just in there having cosmos and cheese curls or something.
    I pushed through the door at the far end of the pantry. When the door swung closed behind me, I was submerged in darkness, awash in ripples of aqua-marine, in the depths of the hushed silence of wall-to-wall carpeting. Across a sizable room and beyond a gargantuan sectional sofa was a large array of sliding glass doors leading to a patio and lighted pool. Ah—they must be out by the pool.
    But moments later I was standing next to the turquoise glow and somnolent hum of the pool. No Sprunty. No cheerleader. No panties. Just the frogs and crickets chirping away.
    I walked back through the sliding doors and felt along the wall for a light switch. Suddenly, Sprunty’s trophy room blazed all around me. I could see that it extended almost the full width of the house, with dark paneled walls, white cathedral ceilings, white wall-to-wall shag, and white upholstered furniture.
    Fulmore certainly had bragging rights. The pieces on the wall were mostly exotic, many full-bodied, and few of them small. A brooding black Cape buffalo the size of a Mini Cooper was parked in one corner, a gnu at full gallop charged out from another. Along one wall, three rows of gazelle heads were arranged by size like some taxonomic display. There were mountain goats standing on fake rocks in the room’s center, a lion jumping a Grant’s gazelle beyond that. Elk, moose, and rhino heads up there, a five-hundred-pound black marlin up over there. A snarling polar bear clawed the air to the left of the stone fireplace, a cougar jumped a pronghorn by the bar, and a wolf gnashed its teeth over the door. It was like one of those sporting goods megastores. Taxidermy overkill. Or just plain overkill.
    My eyes finally locked onto the black bear, which was standing in the corner to my right, his elbows stirring the air. Both forearms were missing, and I held only one of them in my hand. What kind of nut mutilates one of his trophies?
    Even from across the room I could see the bear was out of place. All the other animals here were modern taxidermy. It’s not unusual for collections to include a number of older pieces, but it’s less common to contain only one. Big-game hunting is a passion often passed from one generation to the next, right along with the old money, and many of the collections I appraised contained older pieces passed down from father to son. Whether that was the case with Sprunty I had no idea. It was certainly true for me: my love of “wildlife art” began at a tender age in a home filled with my grandfather’s trophies, even though my father didn’t hunt, and neither do I.
    The black bear was helping the polar bear flank the fireplace on the far side of the large sectional couch, and to get there I sauntered behind the sectional, around the mountain goats, and in front of the bar. Ahead I saw something red.
    The panties. I reached down to pick them up.
    But what I encountered was wet. It was two dimensional. It was a stain.
    My eyes swam—it must be red paint, cranberry juice, grenadine, Campari, raspberry syrup…but then the metallic bite of blood stung my nose.
    I found my back pressed against the front of the bar, my hand reaching for the phone next to the beer taps. Fumble: Carson knocks the phone off the bar and onto the floor behind it.
    â€œNine one one, nine one one…” I was afraid I might