Tailed

Chapter One Driving into Chicago at five o'clock on a Wednesday is like entering a circle in hell--possibly one sandwiched between the Pit of a Hundred Thousand Root Canals and the Fiery Baths of Microwaved Cheese. It was a crisp blue June afternoon, and there the Lincoln and I were stuck in hell's Canyon of Interminable Cross Merges. New York is no treat at that time of day, either, but it's merely a stroll through bunny-soft purgatory by comparison, believe you me. My course was set to see a bear. A Chicago Bear, to be precise. Sprunty G. Fulmore was a running back in the midst of a gazillion-dollar contract with the venerable ursine NFL franchise. He could also afford to be a big-game trophy hunter in the off-season. It's an expensive undertaking to bag the sport's most coveted trophies, especially Africa's big five: lion, leopard, elephant, cape buffalo, and rhinoceros. It requires special permits, top guides at top lodges, prep and export fees, and a whole gamut of red tape that only the rich can untangle with a few snips from cash's giant green scissors. But the expenses don't stop there--it's also none too cheap to have an elephant's head mounted. And, of course, you have to have the kind of palatial abode with space enough to hang one of those suckers and not make it look like it's crashing through the wall. But the inventory of Mr. Fulmore's trophies that I carried in my briefcase included a lot more than those five animals. He had an appallingly large collection of dead stuff for a man in his early thirties. Yes, Garth Carson carrying a briefcase. My taxidermy rental days weren't entirely behind me, but I'd more or less handed over the day-to-day reins of the operation to my Russian assistant, Otto. To anybody who knows the little goofball, that may have seemed a rash move on my part, but despite his goofiness Otto's not dumb and he knows my stock of taxidermy intimately. He took the promotion quite solemnly, too, and started wearing one of his boxy, belted Soviet-era suits to the apartment every day. So Carson's Critters had become a sideline for me. My new job involved appraising taxidermy collections for Wilberforce/Peete, a large specialty insurance company that caters to everything from the rich and famous's taste for collecting dead animals to aerospace company missile projects. How did I land this peachy gig? For once, my brother, Nicholas, had brought sunshine to my life rather than forbidding black clouds. He's an insurance investigator and had used his connections to hook me up. Before the insurance work, with my taxidermy rental business, I'd been more or less just holding my own, my nose pressed against the glass ceiling. I'd no idea insurance companies needed people with my expertise. Or how well they paid. Because of this surge in profits, Angie and I now owned our apartment. At forty-six, my midlife-crisis days were well behind me. Every time I looked at that briefcase, a big smile spread across my face. My Danger Days were behind me, too. There had been a period when I just couldn't seem to stay out of trouble--with the criminal element or with the law. It had been two blissful years since anybody had tried to kill me. And by the looks of things, I was free and clear. Okay, so maybe not so free and clear, since I was now fighting my way across six lanes of the Indy 500 trying to make the Wacker Drive exit. But I'm a New Yorker. I simply bullied my way across the interstate, leaned on my horn, and cut everybody off. Tires screeched and legions of irate Chicagoans flipped me the bird, their lips pantomiming expletives. The scariest part was that a disproportionate number of them actually looked like their patron saint, Mike Ditka. I'd never been to Chicago before. Downtown seemed much like parts of midtown Manhattan but with more named instead of numbered streets. It's just that there was a river cutting through part of the city, and I hWiprud, Brian M. is the author of 'Tailed ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780440243144 and ISBN 0440243149.