Mammoth

And Fuzzy, of course. Harry chuckled at that idea. He closed the door, edged around the buggy, and jumped down to the ground beside Susan.

"Wagons ho!" he said. "Head 'er out!"

"Good-bye, Harry," Susan said. She got back in the cab and drove away.

NOT far down the road Susan pulled onto the shoulder, leaped from the cab, bent over, and threw up. Matt came around the front of the cab but she waved him away until she was through. After a moment, she stood up and gestured to the cab.

"You drive. I've only ever driven it from Portland once and to and from work. I hate driving this thing."

Matt thought about telling her that he didn't have all that much experience towing, himself, but knew she didn't need to hear that. And he had pulled a trailer, on the very day that his life had changed forever on his great Trout-Fishing Adventure, when Warburton came down in a helicopter and tempted him into the clutches of Howard Christian. It hadn't been that tough.

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 co

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 u

"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.