Night Kill (4 page)

Linda was there instead of Arnie, a relief. Arnie’s cheerful incompetence was more than I could possibly tolerate and it was good to be spared the urge to kill him with a shovel.

She was standing at the kitchen counter in her brown uniform, by the little scale, weighing out ground meat for each cat and putting it in pans on the rolling cart. Lately she kept her thick red hair cropped short, no longer a ponytail between square shoulders. Wide mouth, strong nose, red-brown eyebrows raised in surprise. “Iris. I didn’t expect to see you for a week. What’s up?”

“I’m back, that’s all.”

“Wallace said you were on bereavement leave. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“I’m done bereaving. I’ll start feeding.” I moved toward the food pans.

“Why don’t you make us some coffee instead?” Her hazel eyes were worried.

It was disorienting. Come to work, do the routine. That was the plan. Coffee making wasn’t for another two hours, at break time. And I directed the work, not Linda. Somehow I was at the sink, filling the kettle with water and setting it on the hot plate. I looked at it, puzzled, and then I was at the fridge, pulling out the French roast. Setting the filter in the pot and adding three scoops.

The water wouldn’t boil for several minutes. What came next? This wasn’t going the way I expected.

Linda washed her hands with the yellow gloves still on to get the meat goo off them, then pulled them off and washed her hands again. “Have a seat. I haven’t seen you since the memorial service. What’s been happening?” There was something funny about her voice, something carefully normal.

“I cried a lot. Then I got the toxicology report.” I didn’t recall pulling out a chair, but I was sitting at the battered metal table.

“And?”

“Drunk. Beyond DUI. Blitzed. Tanked. Empty bottle of scotch in the bushes by the lions, his fingerprints on it.”

“Ah.” Linda was sitting next to me. She was silent for a little bit. “What happened at the party earlier that night?”

“We talked. He promised to stop drinking. Reconciling. Like that.” My voice sounded funny, too, clipped off.

“And he went on a binge a few hours later?”

“Yeah. Promised to quit drinking beer. Didn’t say anything about scotch.” Sweet-talked himself into my pants, then celebrated.

“Iris, that’s a lot to cope with. You know, you can get grief counseling for free through the benefit plan. Jackie could get you the number. I’ll help any way a friend can, but this is a big deal. You should get some help.”

“I’m done with grief. He wasn’t who we thought he was. You know that Billie Holiday song, the one Denny played at the memorial service? It’s not true, not for me. They can take that away. The love away. Only it’s not a ‘they.’ He did it all by himself. Marrying him was a bad decision. I can’t change that, but I can move on and that’s what I’m doing.”

Linda seemed to pull into herself. She started to say something and stopped.

The water was boiling. I made coffee and we drank it, talking about the cats. The female clouded leopard was still nervous; the common leopards were spitting and snarling at each other. We didn’t mention the lions.

I got up to start feeding. Linda stood and put her hand on my arm. I kept myself from shrugging it off.

“Iris, this is a dangerous job. You’re upset. Your husband died in this building days ago. It’s maybe not such a good idea for you to come back to work so soon.”

“I’m fine. I need to get back to routine.” She had a look on her face I didn’t like. I didn’t want her taking sides against me with Wallace. “Look, we’ll work together, like always, and you’ll see. I’m fine.”

She nodded. We both pulled on rubber gloves and finished up weighing out the food.

I pushed the meat cart down to the lion den while Linda checked all the doors that should be closed and locked. Then I threw my weight on the cable that opens the door to the outside exhibit and she blew the dog whistle, two toots for Simba. The three lions shoved in through the narrow opening. They paced back and forth and in and out the cat door, a fast-moving tangle of tawny, powerful bodies and whipping tails. I waited; the lions and I had done this hundreds of times. This was the same as always, I told myself, but my hands didn’t used to tremble.

Finally, only Simba, or most of Simba, was inside at the same time the females were outside. I lowered the door quickly, but not all the way because half of Simba’s tail was still outside. The door was closed enough to block the lionesses. Simba stood there, whipping his black-tipped tail a little, and glaring at us. “Get your butt inside before I chop your tail off,” I told him. He turned to exit. When his rear came around, I let the door slam down.

Simba and I looked at each other, his yellow eyes unblinking. Nausea rooted and flowered in my guts.

Senseless to blame Simba—he was exactly what he’d always been.

Linda dropped his raw meatloaf into the feeding chute. It hit the floor with a mushy plop and he dived onto it. He crouched with the meat cuddled between his forepaws. I shook myself and we moved on to feed the cougars and common leopards while Sugar and Spice moaned outside.

Simba had finished breakfast. Linda tooted three times, let the lionesses in, and shut him out. Sugar and Spice paced around, yowling throatily. Linda took one chute and I took the other. A lioness crouched below each. We dumped out both piles of meat simultaneously. Big teeth and rough tongues made short work of the meat. I caught myself thinking that after a lifetime of ground meat, they still knew what to do with a real carcass. Linda opened the door again and shut all three inside.

I was glad to be done with lions for the moment.

The phone rang while we were down the hall feeding the new VIPs, the two clouded leopards, in their separate night enclosures. They were named for their pelts, irregular open spots—“clouds”—shaded in black, gray, and tan. The male watched us warily; Losa, the female, quickly vanished into her den. The two were out of quarantine, but still settling in and hadn’t been allowed time together yet. We had hopes for cubs, but male clouded leopards tend to have a character flaw—they kill their mates discouragingly often.

The phone kept ringing and I kept ignoring it. Linda walked down the hall to the kitchen. She came back and said it was Wallace, wanting me. Reluctantly, I walked back to the kitchen, Linda following.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Wallace asked, today’s favorite conversational gambit.

“Working.”

“Go home. You aren’t scheduled until next Monday.”

“I’m at Felines. I’m working.”

“You won’t get paid. You’re not scheduled. Go home.”

“Fix the schedule.” I hung up. Linda stared at me wide-eyed.

We went back to work.

We’d taken our break in the kitchen, so it was lunchtime before I had to deal with anyone else. Linda had a sandwich from home. I bought the tuna melt at the café and we sat down at a green plastic table inside. Two moms ordered for their indecisive preschoolers and took another table. The keepers started filtering in.

Denny had a variation on the theme: “You’re supposed to be home until next week.”

“You should get out more,” I told him. “We’ve already done that conversation.”

He stared at me—lean, blond, intense—before pulling up a plastic chair and taking out his latest form of nonconventional nutrition, a wooden bowl of brown rice and chopped kale covered with plastic wrap. Did he know about the toxicology report? I had a feeling they all did.

Hap came in and sat down cautiously with just “hello” and “welcome back.”

“So what’s up?” I asked generally. “I’m behind on the news.”

“You missed a boatload of safety lectures from Wallace and Crandall. I’ve got Reptiles since Rick’s gone,” Denny said around a mouthful of fodder.

Hap gave him a steely look, as if this were inappropriate subject matter, and took control of the conversation. “We’re short on good news. Kids broke in about a week ago, the day after…” He shied away from Rick’s death again, like a deer smelling wolf scat on the trail. “They, uh, fooled around with the water faucet at the Children’s Zoo.” He settled into the story. “What a mess. They got the wheel off, water everywhere. The drain got clogged with straw, animals wandering around loose.”

The faucet at the Children’s Zoo was controlled by a metal wheel set on the water pipe a couple feet above the ground. It was almost a tradition for new keepers to turn the wheel the wrong way when they were trying to shut it off. Turned far enough open, the wheel fell off and a spectacular jet of water shot about thirty feet up in the air. Wallace’s scathing remarks at my own initiation by geyser still stung.

“Diego was really pissed off,” Denny said.

Diego, the night keeper, was hard to rile, but this would be enough to seriously annoy anyone.

“They let the petting animals out?” I asked.

“Yup,” Hap continued. “Opened the gate and propped the faucet wheel against it to keep it open. Goats and ponies wandering all over, trampling shrubs and eating them. The gardeners don’t like herbivores anymore.”

Linda nodded. “Diego hiked over to the Admin building to the main shutoff valve so he could stop the water and get the wheel back on. Then he had to wade in to clear straw out of the drain. The goats didn’t want to go back and one of them put her head in that garbage can with the top that looks like an alligator, trying to get at the trash, and got stuck and she freaked out. He was still rounding them up when I got there.”

Normal conversation. I could feel my shoulders relax. “Where was the security guard?”

Linda rolled her eyes. “We got George that night. Diego was also teed off at George. He didn’t catch anybody and he didn’t help clean up the mess. Just sat there in his cart and watched. He said wading wasn’t in his job description.”

George was known for his unfailing good cheer and for his dedication to talk radio, which he listened to in the comfort of a little office in the Administration building. He had an electric cart with which he was supposed to patrol the grounds. It was no surprise he hadn’t seen the Children’s Zoo invaders. I wondered if he’d seen Rick the night he died.

“The kids raised hell with the hoses at Elephants,” Hap said. “They dragged one of them over to the zebras and got mud all over it.”

That seemed to exhaust the topic. We chewed in silence for a bit.

“You’re not going back to Felines, are you?” Denny asked.

“Of course I am,” I said. “How’s the new Asian exhibit coming along?”

The three did a collective glance that did not include me.

Linda picked up the thread. “No different from last week, scalped dirt with piles of trees and brush. The rain turned it into a sea of mud, and the bulldozer got stuck the day after the Children’s Zoo break-in. It’s mired halfway up the cab. They have to get another one to pull it out. Serves them right for starting a construction project this time of year.”

“Crandall was peeing in his pants to spend the bond measure money,” Denny said, getting up to go. “He hasn’t gotten a new exhibit for ten years.”

Denny was the only person I ever heard refer to the director by anything but “Mr. Crandall” and it always bothered me.

Denny stood shifting his weight restlessly from one foot to another, scowling at me, his gray eyes cloudy. “Wallace will put you in some other area if you ask him.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because one extreme accident is one too many.” He frowned a little longer before he left.

I made it through the afternoon, although it felt like running through deep, soft sand with hidden snares. Linda never let me out of her sight.

In truth, working Felines alone was always dicey. Standard safety procedures, not to mention common sense, called for two people. But Finley Memorial Zoo ran on a scant budget, and I wanted Felines to myself, to work at my own pace without straining to look unruffled. On the way home, I thought, no matter, Wallace doesn’t have enough staff to double up at Felines every day. I’d be alone tomorrow, back to normal.

The red smear had been gone from the lion exhibit. Linda must have scrubbed it away before I got there.

I reeled in my wandering mind and focused on the freeway.

The dogs started yipping when I drove up. Once inside, I stopped to give Winnie the first installment on her evening ration of affection. Range was standing nearby, wagging his tail slowly, looking at the door.

“Hey, buddy. Come on over.”

He complied and I fussed with his ears and scratched under his collar, with Winnie shoving her nose into my face. She needn’t have worried. Range nosed my hand, then lay down facing the door, head on his paws. He liked me well enough, but I wasn’t the one he was waiting for.

Winnie bolted her kibble, but Range ate only half of his and wandered back toward the front door. I rescued his leftovers from Winnie and took a good look at him.

He didn’t look sick.

He looked discouraged.

After a TV dinner, I disciplined myself out of lethargy and took them for a walk. Range cheered up and was diligent about reading the pee-mail and contributing to the correspondence. Back at home, I sat on the rug with Winnie half on my lap and stared into space. It was good to be tired. I’d been right, going back to work was best.

Range came over after a bit and lay down next to me. My hand on his head found the blue nylon collar I’d bought as a gift for Rick. The matching leash was slung over the back of the sofa. Nylon for him, chain for Winnie, who would chew through nylon in seconds. Range inched over and put his head in my lap, next to Winnie’s.

It seemed only right to tell him.

“Rick isn’t coming back, Range. Not ever. It’s me from now on.” And just like that, I was doubled over on my side, crying like I’d never stop.

When that slowed down, I tried the deep breaths Marcie recommended for crises. A coffee mug full of red wine was more effective. Maybe I was on the same slippery slope as Rick.

Pain management—what was the trick of it?

Marcie interrupted my meltdown with a phone call. Articulating my miseries was too much for me, so I kept it short. We set a dinner date. I’d no sooner hung up than Linda called, asking for advice on whether to get a guinea pig or a ferret for an apartment pet. It was completely bogus, but I was calmed down enough to recognize contact calls, the noises monkeys make in thick vegetation that mean only “I’m here and thinking about you.”