Tahoe Blowup Read online

  Dick hung up the phone and turned back to the animal on his table. “How’s she doing?”

  “Doesn’t look to be any change,” I said even though I knew that he had only asked to put the noise of some words into the heavy silence that surrounded the wheezing of the lion.

  Dick pulled out an oxygen tank, set it on a rolling cart and rigged a mask over the lion’s snout. Next, he hung an IV bag on a pole. He shaved some fur on the lion’s leg and inserted a needle into a vein. Fluid dripped into the clear plastic tube that ran into the animal.

  Dick lifted her jowls. “She’s young, maybe two years old if I’m any good at reading her teeth. Solomon will give us a more accurate idea when he gets here. Hope that’s soon.”

  “Sounds like her lungs are worse,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’ve got to fight. She’s likely to drown in her own fluids. Next hour or two will tell.” He picked up the note he’d written on while talking to Solomon.

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “We need to weigh her before I stuff anymore drugs into her system. I’ll hold her body, but her head will droop. You can hold it up.”

  I held the lion’s head and the IV pole while Dick scooped her slack body up, and we walked over to the scale. I helped slide the weights. Then we laid her back down while Dick weighed himself.

  “One hundred twenty-four pounds,” he said after he did the subtraction. “Next thing would be for you to watch out front for Solomon.” He slid a rectal thermometer into the lion while he spoke. “Drives a green pickup. Direct him around to the back door so he doesn’t waste time pounding on the front door.”

  I took that as my cue to make an exit and get out of his way, so I went out the back door, checking to make sure it wouldn’t lock behind me, and went around the front to wait for the other doctor.

  Solomon showed up twenty minutes later, whipping his old pickup into the lot like a cop. He jerked to a stop and was out the door in a second, a big, black bag in his hand. The man was a generation older than Siker and I. His hair was white and stood up as if he were under permanent electric shock. “Solomon Reed here to see Doctor Siker!”

  “Around back, doctor.” I led the way at a trot.

  “You found the lion?” he said.

  “My dog did. I don’t know how bad he hurt her. She may have been dragged pretty far.”

  “I don’t get it,” Solomon Reed said. “Your dog dragged the lion? What the hell kind of dog is that?”

  “Great Dane.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  I opened the back door and showed Dr. Solomon Reed to the room with the lion.

  Dick looked up as we came into the room.

  Solomon rushed over to the lion, opened her eyes, looked in her mouth, then put his ear down to the lion’s mouth and nose and listened. He grabbed Dick’s stethoscope and listened several places. “Let’s see the blood work.”

  Dick handed him some notes.

  Solomon studied them for a minute. Then he once again used the stethoscope to listen to the lion’s insides, more thoroughly than before. When he was through he sighed and spoke. “Only fair thing is to put her down.”

  It hit me hard, this pronouncement of death for an animal my dog had wounded. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked.

  Solomon looked up at me as if I were a troublesome, overgrown child. “Yes, there’s something we could do. If we had the facilities of a big university’s veterinary school, we could put this cat on life support, open her up and do some serious arterial repair where your dog’s teeth tore her up. Problem is, we’d have to do it in the next couple of hours. Furthermore, it would cost many thousands of dollars, and even then she’d probably still die.” The old vet’s watery blue eyes looked enormously sad. It was obvious that he wanted the lion to live as much as I did.

  Dick spoke up. “The Sierra Wild Animal Network,” he said. “Wouldn’t SWAN pay for her treatment?”

  “We could take her to the university in Reno,” I said.

  Solomon turned away from me, put his hand on the lion’s neck and gently caressed her. “Davis has the best vet school in the country,” he said. “If she’s going to have any chance, we’d have to take her there. But there isn’t time to drive. We’d have to fly.”

  “There’s a charter company at the local airport,” I said. “They might have a plane ready. Or, for that matter, I can fly. If I can rent a plane on short notice, I could have the lion at UC Davis in an hour.”

  “What if the Sierra Wild Animal Network won’t pay for it?” Solomon said. “Flying an animal to Davis is only a small portion of the expense. Her treatment will be a lot more.”

  I thought of what my dog had done to the lion. I thought of how quickly we dispense with animals when their welfare becomes too expensive or inconvenient. “I’ll pay for it.”

  Solomon turned away from the lion and looked at me for a long moment. Then he spoke to Dick. “Siker, you got the number for Davis?”

  I left the room and went down to Dick’s office while they spoke. I went through the Yellow Pages, called every possible source for an airplane and got nothing but answering services.

  When I went back to report my lack of success, I heard Solomon on the phone. He spoke in a loud and rising voice.

  “I don’t care if everyone at the hospital is asleep! Last I heard you don’t need anymore sleep in Davis than you do in Tahoe! Wake them up! Tell them we’re bringing in a beautiful mountain lion in the next two hours! If she doesn’t get proper treatment, she’ll die before morning. Do you want that on your conscience? No, I didn’t think so. I don’t care what it costs. We’ve got the expense covered.” He hung up the phone. Solomon and Dick exchanged a few words and I sensed that there wasn’t much else they could do.

  “I’m having trouble locating a plane,” I said.

  Solomon looked at me. “Hang around. UC Davis is going to call. They might be able to send a plane up. We may need you to meet it at the airport.”

  I went out to the waiting room and tried to read magazines, but kept thinking about the unconscious lion desperately trying to suck oxygen into fluid-filled lungs. I thought of Spot. What was I going to do with him?

  I’d wandered into Dick’s office when the phone rang. I answered it. A woman said she was from the University of California at Davis. She asked for Doctor Solomon Reed. I ran and told the doctor.

  “You won’t have to run to the airport,” Solomon said after he hung up. “The UC Davis Veterinary Hospital is sending an air ambulance chopper up to take the lion down to their hospital. They’re coming directly to this parking lot. It’s large enough, isn’t it?”

  “I can make that easy,” I said. “I’ll call Diamond Martinez. He’ll help.”

  “Thanks,” Dick said.

  I dialed Diamond’s pager. He called back in less than a minute.

  “Diamond,” I said when I picked up the phone. “I’m in Dr. Richard Siker’s animal hospital on Kingsbury Grade. We’ve got a mountain lion here, severely wounded.”

  “It’s at the animal hospital on Kingsbury?” Diamond’s voice was filled with alarm. “I can be there in a minute. I’ll radio for help on the way. Don’t worry. We’ll take it down before anyone gets hurt.”

  “Whoa, Diamond. It’s inside the hospital on the table. Unconscious. UC Davis is sending a helicopter to pick it up. They want to land in the parking lot. I’m not sure there’s enough room here. I thought maybe you could help.”

  “Got it. I’ll call you back later.”

  This was obviously Diamond’s kind of mission as evidenced by what happened within minutes of my call.

  Kingsbury Grade was closed off. Four South Lake Tahoe police cruisers came across the state line and joined three Douglas County Sheriff vehicles to make a large circle in the middle of the street. They all trained their spotlights on the asphalt in the middle of the circle and lit up the landing zone.

  Diamond got patched through directly to the pilot and
talked him out of a cloudy sky on a fast track to this corner of town.

  The local press picked it up on their scanners and there were several reporters and photographers on the scene by the time the chopper roared above and settled down into the circle of flashing red lights.

  Dick, Solomon and I had the mountain lion wrapped back up in my Hudson Bay blanket. Dick and I carried the lion while Solomon carried the IV pole and an oxygen tank. We had the big cat out to the chopper by the time the doors opened. Solomon supervised the paramedics as they strapped the cat down.

  A photographer and a familiar face from the Herald emerged from the crowd. “Owen, my God, it’s you!”

  “Hi, Glennie.”

  “We hear they found an injured mountain lion.” She had to practically yell in my ear as the helicopter had revved up. It roared as it slowly levitated off the ground. “What did you have to do with it?” Glennie shouted.

  “Spot found it.”

  “Spot!? What happened to the lion?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Where did Spot find it?”

  “Down below my cabin.”

  Glennie’s eyes got wide. “Oh, my God, what a story!” She turned to her photographer and pointed to the helicopter which was just clearing the Jeffrey pines. “Are you getting pictures? Go on!”

  The photographer snapped away as the big machine tilted forward and then roared off into the sky.

  Glennie turned back to me. “How many stories can I do about you in one day?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I already wrote one about the burn victim. You’ll see it in tomorrow’s paper. If I hurry, I can get this one filed before the paper goes to print. You’re a one-man news machine, Owen.”

  “But this story is about a lion, not me.”

  Glennie nodded and wrote in her notebook. “So you brought it here to the animal hospital,” Glennie said. “Then UC Davis came to pick it up.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “We need to humanize this for the paper. Give me an angle, Owen. Tell me some details.”

  “I don’t know, Glennie.” I didn’t want to commercialize the story. I just wanted to go home.

  “Come on. Something. What kind of mountain lion was it?”

  “I didn’t know there were kinds. Female. Smallish. One hundred twenty-four pounds.”

  “Name?” she asked and then started laughing. “God, you’d think I was after a criminal. It’s just automatic.”

  “Pussy Cat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what Doc Siker kept calling her. Pussy Cat. Look, Glennie, I have to go. Nice seeing you.” I carried the Hudson Bay blanket back toward my Jeep.

  “Thanks, Owen,” Glennie called out to me. “Say hi to Street.”

  I drove home, feeling worse the closer I got.

  Dogs can get under your skin, and when they do something very wrong it is as upsetting as if they were children instead of pets. In some ways it is worse, because they can’t talk and tell you whatever it was that motivated them.

  I parked and walked over to Spot who was still chained to the deck railing. He crouched down, tail between his legs, eyes infinitely sad. He knew he’d done something terrible to the mountain lion and that it displeased me very much.

  I squatted down next to him and unhooked the chain. He was covered with ash and dried blood and shivering from the cold.

  He lifted his nose off the deck and looked at me, his eyes breaking my heart.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” I brought him around to the hose and, despite knowing he would temporarily freeze, I washed off the dirt. Back inside, I got a fire going in the wood stove, put out a big towel for him to lie on, then put another towel over him.

  I drank a beer while I worried over my dog. The Bierstadt book was on the end table. I flipped through it. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Solace, maybe. I didn’t find it, so I went to bed.

  THIRTEEN

  I was awakened before dawn the next morning by a phone call from Terry Drier.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes. No. Give me a minute,” I said as I fumbled with the light above my bed. “Okay. Kind of.”

  “What?”

  “Kind of awake.”

  “We got another note. You’ll want to see it.”

  “Of course,” I said, suddenly alert as adrenaline surged through me. “You at the station?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I opened the door to let Spot out, but he just hung his head and looked out the open doorway. I eventually dragged him to the Jeep and drove down the mountain through the dark as I considered the implications of a second note. Another note meant the writer wasn’t Jake unless he had intended it to be posthumous. In which case, who delivered it? Another potential fire meant Jake probably didn’t set the first, unless this note was the work of a copycat. Maybe Jake didn’t burn himself to death, accidentally or not. And the identity of the person who put the burned, stuffed animal on my doorstep was not made any clearer by another note. It was still appropriate to consider the stuffed dog a real threat.

  I got to the station just as the mountains were taking on shape against the lightening sky. I left Spot in the Jeep and walked up to the heavy firehouse door.

  The morning paper was on the door mat. The headline was as large as the day before, and the story was again under Glennie’s byline.

  It said that the gas can we’d found at the fire matched one missing from Jake Pooler’s shed and that authorities were considering the possibility that Jake had accidentally burned himself while starting the forest fire.

  Glennie’s story recapped everything else that was known about the fire and posed several of the questions I was trying to answer.

  I nodded at one of the firemen and carried the paper into Terry’s office.

  Terry picked up a mylar sleeve with the second note in it. His face was pale and his voice grave. “This was slipped through our mail slot sometime between two and four in the morning. Mike and José were on duty. Mike took his coffee break at two and walked by the basket. He is sure it was empty. José found the envelope in the basket at four and called me at home immediately.” Terry handed it to me.

  It was the same kind of paper and type as the first note, and looked just like what came out of Jake Pooler’s printer.

  The crimes of the government continue. So do the fires. The second fire will take out two houses.

  “Not much to go on,” I said.

  “No, the sick S.O.B. is toying with us. Wants to make us sweat. Well, I’m here to tell you, he’s going to fry when we catch him.” Terry was taking it personally. “You got any ideas?” he said.

  “I’m wondering why he brings the note to this fire station. There are fire stations all over.”

  “I thought about that, too,” Terry said. “Could be he lives on the opposite side of the lake and picks the farthest station. Or maybe he lives on this side and picks the most convenient one. You can read it almost any way you want. Or it might be that he likes the way our station is in a dark and uncrowded area and he can sneak up without being seen.”

  I stared at the note, then set it on Terry’s desk. “We should probably start going over maps and see if there is any obvious place in the basin where a fire would burn just two houses.”

  “You believe that?” Terry was incredulous. “It was pure luck that bastard didn’t burn houses last time. What makes you think he can set a forest fire and control where it burns this time?”

  “We have nothing else to go on, that’s all. If, for example, there are any pairs of houses with no others around, they would be possible sites to watch.”

  Terry seemed disgusted with the suggestion. “Have you found out anything yet on the last note?”

  I decided not to mention the similar font in Jake’s computer. “No. I’ve only had time to pursue the fire victim.”

  “Heard it was Jake Poole
r.”

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “Sure. Everyone did. Talk of the town up in Truckee where I used to live.”

  “How so?”

  “Just that he broke up more marriages than a Las Vegas divorce court, for one. And he was a brawler, for two. Had it coming to him, let me tell you. If we looked for people with motive to burn him, then we’ve got a couple hundred candidates just in the Tahoe/Truckee area.” Terry put the arsonist’s note in the Xerox machine. When the copy came out he handed it to me. Then he paced around the small office, frustration making his nostrils flare.

  “You call anyone else on this note, yet?” I asked.

  “No,” Terry said. “I’ll give the chief a ring first, then Diamond.

  I told Terry I’d let him know the moment I learned anything, then said goodbye.

  I thought about the note as I went out. There were many possibilities. The first was that Jake was not the firestarter. Unless, I realized, the writer of the note did not light the East Shore fire but knew that Jake was going to and decided to complicate our investigation by sending us a note in advance. Now, a second note was making us think there was going to be another fire. Maybe it would happen. Maybe not.

  Then again, the note writer might actually be intending to set a second fire, copying Jake’s first fire. Either way, the new firestarter would be hard to catch because we wouldn’t be certain about which clues from the first fire pointed to Jake and which, like the note, pointed to the second party. The possible confusion was without limits.

  Back in the Jeep, I drove south through town to Emerald Bay Road and the U.S. Forest Service.

  Linda Saronna was busy, but when I explained what I wanted they made a space for me in her schedule. Eventually, I was shown to her office which was empty. Linda rushed in a minute later.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Chicken Little was right, and I’ve got no place to hide.” She took off a light coat and tossed it on a rack in the corner of her office. “I’ve heard all about your exploits already,” she said. She removed a scarf from around her neck and shook out thick, red hair. “I’m curious. What made you look for a victim?”