That Thing At the Zoo - 01

  THAT THING AT THE ZOO

  THAT THING AT THE ZOO

  JAMES R. TUCK

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Dedicated to the Missus

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  1

  “Tell me what it is I’m looking at.”

  I was squinting up into the branches of a giant oak tree. A breeze kicked up. My nostrils started burning from the rank ammonia smell of a cat box sorely in need of emptying. Lion Habitat at the Atlanta zoo, what a stench-fest.

  Litter boxes are one of the reasons why I hate cats.

  I moved my hand from over my eyes, for shade, to over my nose for survival. The sun was directly overhead, making it hard to see, but a figure in coveralls was high in the branches. The figure was taking pictures of something wedged into forked limbs, flash going off like a strobe light in a nightclub.

  “I don’t know. The zookeeper’s ass?” Homicide detective John Longyard stood beside me. He was dressed like he always dressed, expensive dark suit with matching tie and polished shoes, not caring that he was wading through Savannah grass and dirt. Sweat beaded at the edge of his fifty-dollar haircut, threatening to make a break for it and run down his face. Tiny droplets glistened in his light brown mustache, making a wet spot on the cigarette underneath it. He was the one who called me out to stand in the Lion Habitat in the dead heat of summer. Between the temperature and the humidity the heat index was hovering somewhere right around Satan’s ballsack.

  I was about to return his smartass comment when the zookeeper in question yelled out “Fire in the hole!” and gave the thing stuck in the tree a giant shove. It tumbled off the branches, striking limb after limb, bouncing back and forth between them like a crazy pinball. Thudding in front of us, it kicked up a short mushroom cloud of dust that billowed up and made a run at our feet.

  The thing now lying on the ground was a big chunk of meat and bone. My brain tried to make sense of it, categorize it and figure out what it was, but it was so gnarled that I couldn’t. I was pretty sure that it was not human and never had been. The shapes were all wrong, angles too far off. I knelt to get a closer look. The litter box smell thickened like curdled milk the closer to the ground I got.

  Sweat pooled under my shoulder holster, held against my skin by its leather straps. Flies dropped by the hundreds onto the meat, crawling over it with tiny, segmented bodies. Eyes, rainbow-shiny like miniscule, multifaceted oil slicks, moved around, hopping up and down as the flies swarmed, pushing and shoving at each other to just get to the meat. Getting closer, I knew for a fact this wasn’t a human kill. It was too big. Too much meat for a human. I am six foot four, top the scales around three hundred, and I wouldn’t make that much meat.

  The bones were not the right size or shape. My eyes found a backward-jointed knee and a thighbone about the size of an average man’s spine. It looked weird. Something was trying to worm its way into my mind. Something about the way it looked. Something not right. Something off.

  There was no blood.

  No dried blood, no wet blood, no blood at all.

  A body that torn apart should have been painted in the stuff. Hell, it should look like a nacho chip drowning in that orange yellow shit they call nacho cheese…. but with blood.

  I stood up as the zookeeper swung down from a low branch and dropped to the ground a few feet away. Dusting his hands off on dark gray coveralls, he ambled toward us. Long skinny arms and legs rattled around in the coveralls that looked borrowed from his older brother. Mouse-brown hair was pulled through the back of his Atlanta Zoo cap and hung slightly greasy down his back. His spindly goatee cracked open in a grin that had more warmth than it had tobacco stains.

  It was a lot of warmth.

  He squinted up at me and then looked sideways at Longyard. “Who’s the new guy? He a cop too?”

  “He’s a specialist I called. Deacon Chalk, meet Jimmy the zookeeper.”

  I stuck out my hand, holding it towards him. He looked at it for a moment, still through his squinted eye. He hung the camera he had used in the tree around his neck, fluffing the ponytail out from under it, then reached out, and shook my hand. His hand felt like a piece of jerky, thin and stringy, but his grip was firm and sure.

  “What’s he a specialist in? Tattoos and guns?”

  I smiled at Jimmy the zookeeper. “I’m the weird-shit specialist.”

  “He’s the weird-shit specialist,” Longyard confirmed.

  Jimmy thought about this for a second, looking me up and down. I stood still for it, sweat beading on my shaved head. I didn’t look like a cop. My guns are not cop issue and I don’t wear a uniform. With the shaved head, long goatee, tattoos, and big Desert Eagle .357 strapped under my arm, I look a lot more like a criminal than a cop. What I am is an Occult Bounty Hunter. I kill monsters for a living. The police as an organization don’t admit it, but they know. Especially Detective John Longyard. He knows best of all.

  Seeing him always makes me think of my family. My wife, my son, and my daughter. He was the homicide detective in charge of the investigation five years ago. Whenever I see him it drives the pain of their loss inside me like a punch to the gut.

  With a meat cleaver.

  I miss them always, carrying their loss in a deep hole where my heart used to be. I lock it down so I can function, keeping the pain from crippling me, but seeing Longyard makes it start to unravel and spin loose like ribbons. Razor ribbons of memory that cut me up inside.

  Enough of that. It hurts too much.

  Pain like this, you have to crush it before it crushes you. I took a deep breath, shook my head, moved on.

  The sun made me squint at Jimmy the zookeeper. “What kind of carcass is this?”

  “We had a lion go missing ’tween last night’s tuck-in and this morning’s feeding. I’d reckon this is it.”

  “How much did the lion weigh that’s missing?”

  Jimmy the zookeeper pulled his hat off as he thought and wiped one gray, grimy coverall sleeve over his forehead.

  His hair out of the constraints of the hat was the biggest freaking mullet I have ever seen. I grew up with some white trash family members. I have seen mullets. Jimmy the zookeeper’s mullet was absolutely epic.

  The top and sides slicked down dark to the sides of his small skull. The back hung in a wavy curtain of light brown, flaring out over his narrow shoulders like a skull cape. The Alabama Neckwarmer was in full effect, a sight of redneck glory to behold.

  “’Round about five, maybe six hundred pounds.”

  That fit the pile of meat at our feet. It was a lot of weight to haul twenty or so feet up a tree. I studied the trunk of the oak, looking for some kind of marks that would indicate what climbed up and dropped off the carcass. Stepping over the body I made a circle around. No claw marks, no blood trail up the bark. Coming back around I stood between the other two men, looking from the body to the spot in the tree it was knocked out of.

  Jimmy the zookeeper spoke up. “Any guess what could have done this?”

  “Pterodactyl?” I guessed as I knelt beside the body, waving flies away so I could have a clear look. Now that I had been told this was a lion, I could see it. The carcass had a very feline shape. Where it wasn’t broken it had the stretched arches that make a cat’s body whether that cat is a five-pound tabby or a five-hundred-pound lion. I was blind to it before because of the sheer size and it being co
mpletely skinned. This close, the ripe scent of spoiling meat wafted off it, combining with the litter box smell to make me regret the tuna salad sandwich that had been lunch.

  Drawing my knife out of my boot I prodded the wound areas with the silvered blade. There were two kinds of wounds. Some of them were deep fissures that looked like they had been carved in with something only remotely sharp, like a machete. The edges of those were torn and ragged. These were mostly on the throat and upper body.

  The second kind were spread all over the body and they were unlike anything I had seen before. The flesh had been torn, ripped asunder by what looked like tiny, sharp teeth. Like piranha. The edges were ragged like a hole in an old pair of denim jeans. Strings of flesh flapped over the gaps, tangling and touching.

  The strangest thing of all was that there was no evidence it had been killed there. Yes, I was looking at a dead lion. Yes, some would say that was evidence. But there was no other sign of how it was killed or how it got there. If the murder had happened where the body was, then the ground should have been torn up. Signs should have been left. Blood should have been everywhere. Weird. No blood, no skin, quarter-ton carcass deposited high in a tree, with no sign of how, and chunks removed by tiny, murderous mouthfuls. Wiping my knife off on the grass I put it away and stood up.

  Longyard looked at me. “You have a better guess than an extinct winged dinosaur?”

  “Not yet. I am going to need to poke around and see what’s what.”

  “You gonna hunt it down?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Need my help?”

  I looked at him. I knew he was handy with his gun, but I kept Longyard and his fellow police officers away from all of this as much as possible. One of the things that keep the majority of humans safe is that the monsters know, no matter how strong they are, that they are outnumbered. That’s why they stick to the shadows and the edges of the night. None of them want the full attention of the human race turned on them. Humans can use silver. Humans can walk in daylight. Humans can touch iron. Whatever weakness a monster has, humans do not. The other side of that coin is if they ever thought they were about to be outed, they would strike first. Blood would be shed, people would die.

  A lot of people.

  So I work the edges too. Hunting monsters, killing the ones who are dangerous to humans. Being a monster to the monsters, but always trying to keep it from public knowledge. Longyard helps me with that when what I do gets too bloody and too big. He provides cover stories and helps keep his fellow officers out of my way.

  My hand fell on his shoulder. “I won’t know until I figure out what this is. If so, I’ll call you. Until then I have Jimmy the zookeeper. We’ll handle this.”

  The detective pulled a long drag off his cigarette, held it, and blew the smoke out in twin streams from his nostrils. “You’re in good hands, Jimmy, so I will leave you boys to it.”

  Jimmy the zookeeper looked shocked. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yep. You two figure this out and give me a call. I am going back to some air-conditioning.” He flicked the butt of his cigarette away.

  Jimmy the zookeeper piped up. “Hey! The animals live here. You can’t trash up their habitat.”

  Longyard didn’t look back as he walked away, voice carrying over his shoulder. “Call a cop.”

  2

  Dr. Critter was the program director at the zoo as well as a certified zoologist specializing in exotic animals. He was also a local sensation on the children’s educational television circuit. Standing in his office I could tell why. He was almost as tall as I am, topping around six foot two inches and had a head of golden hair to match his golden tan. Pale sea-green eyes moved as quick as his camera-worthy grin. He was the original Smilin’ Jack and all around good-time guy. Children across the country looked up to him like he could wrestle alligators and tame lions.

  Which he could, and had, on their TVs every morning.

  My son used to watch him on public broadcast TV. We would sit side-by-side in the mornings eating breakfast and watching Critter’s Corner on public broadcast TV. My wife and daughter would join us sometimes, but usually it was just him and me.

  That was before.

  Before he was taken.

  Before he was killed senselessly …

  STOP!

  I clenched my hand to stop it from trembling, breath rushing in and out, heart pounding. I derailed that memory before it got ugly. Before it took over. Before it pushed me over the edge into a dark, nasty place.

  Opening my eyes, I found Dr. Critter watching me. He had been talking a moment ago, before my head went ugly inside. I had lost a minute or two. It happens more than I would like. That’s the way the pain of losing your whole world works. You go along, doing fine, minding your own business, and it crashes into you sideways like a drunk driver on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a sharp shock to your soft side and it knocks you for a loop.

  I turned away to focus my eyes. To focus my mind. My hands unclenched slowly, the thumb on my left one moving to rub across the underside of the wedding band I still wore. I was facing one of the shelves that lined the office, the wood dark and polished. Books crammed each level, split apart by small displays of animal skulls and bones. I assumed they were real. They were something to focus on as I pulled my shit together. As my breathing evened out I turned back to face Dr. Critter.

  On TV he dressed like he was Indiana Jones on a safari, complete with a fedora and a bullwhip, but in his office he was wearing a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt just like I was. Of course, the outfit made him look like a movie star; on me, it looked like I was the bodyguard. Maybe it was the guns.

  He cleared his throat. Most people ask if I am okay when I go out like that. He didn’t. “As I was saying, the lion is the third animal killed in four nights.” Good, we were back to the conversation.

  “What else was killed?”

  “A zebra and one of the smaller gorillas. The zebra was dead on Monday when we arrived, the gorilla on Tuesday.”

  “And today is Thursday. So no dead animal on Wednesday.” I turned to him to confirm my statement. He shook his head. A lock of golden hair fell over his eyes and he blew it back. “Did you do a headcount to make sure all the other animals were accounted for?” He gave me a look usually reserved for idiots. I pointed a finger at him. “Hey, you’d be surprised at what people forget to do when things go weird.”

  His expression hardened. “I can assure you, Mr. Chalk, that we are fully capable of handling this event.”

  I came around and sat in one of the leather chairs opposite his desk. I didn’t put my feet up, but I wanted to. Instead I stretched out, sliding down until my legs were a long line in front of me and my hands were clasped behind my head. I looked him in the eye. “Did you clean up the scenes from the first two kills? Sweep it up and make it look like nothing happened?”

  He faltered. Sat back in his chair. Made distance between us. His mouth opened and closed a few times before he actually came out with words. “We have patrons to think about. It would be irresponsible to allow public access to something so gruesome.”

  “So you destroyed the evidence at the scene.” I didn’t wait for him to answer, just kept on going. “Do you still have the bodies of the zebra or the gorilla so I can examine them?”

  That same lock of hair fell as Dr. Critter shook his head side to side.

  “Then it sounds to me like all you’re capable of is screwing me over and making my job harder than it has to be.”

  Anger flashed over Dr. Critter’s face, crawling from one side, under those ice-blue eyes and across those sculpted cheekbones. It was a good angry face, one that would play well on camera and truly drive home that this was a man not to be trifled with.

  I was under-impressed. I know about anger. I’ve got anger to last for days.

  His face washed clean of expression as he looked up over my head. The air pressure in the office changed and I felt someone stalk in behind me. M
y palm itched to go for my gun so I wiped it against my thigh. It was a human behind me. A plain, off-the-rack, run-of-the-mill human. Dr. Critter looked like he knew him, my sense of the supernatural was dead silent, and I could smell jalapenos, beans, and cerveza.

  Someone had spicy Mexican for lunch.

  “Why is the lion display closed?” The voice was deep and fluid, sounding like it came from behind a closed door. It was the voice of a man who would tell you anything you wanted to hear to get his way. A snake oil huckster, a used-car salesman, a tent revival evangelist with a methamphetamine addiction. The man who came around me to stand by Dr. Critter’s desk was not a disappointment to my expectations.

  He was portly. A short, rotund man whose belt split him in the middle. The seersucker material of his suit bunched at the bends, dividing him into rounded sections of arm and leg like sausages. His shirt collar was damp from sweat despite the hardworking air conditioning. Overall, he had the rumpled appearance of a note someone had wadded up, thrown away, then dug from the trash to smooth out and read again.

  Dr. Critter smoothed his hair back with a push of his hand. He looked up at the man by his desk and then over at me. “Mr. Beauregard, this is Mr. Chalk. He is working with the police to investigate the animal deaths.”

  I watched Beauregard. He froze, just for a second, not moving other than to sweat. Slowly he turned, pasting a smile across his jowly face. He wasn’t a ugly man, but the hard, conniving look in his eyes made him appear mean. He stuck his hand out; it was damp as I shook it. “Mr. Chalk”—he gave a slight nod—“you don’t look like a police officer.”

  I pulled my hand away, wiping it on my jeans. “Deacon. And I’m not.”

  “Not?”

  “Not a cop.”