Cry Wolf

by Charlie Adhara

  Cooper bristled at the familiarity, but the truth was he did recognize his voice. “We left, why?”

  “I need to speak with you.”

  “Is this about you and—”

  “No. Meet me back at the zoo. Just you. Can you ditch your partner?”

  Cooper looked at Park, who could clearly hear what was being said, and raised an eyebrow. “Why? I trust him—anything you need to say to me, you can say to him.”

  “And anything I say to you, you can say to him. But I’m only meeting with you. I can’t—this is important. Please.”

  That made Cooper pause. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Neil say please in his life. “Hold on,” he said, and covered the phone to speak to Park. “What do you think?”

  Park looked in the direction of the restaurant for a long moment and then back at Cooper. “You’ll be safe?”

  Cooper nodded.

  “Then you should go.”

  “Are you sure? You’re okay with that?” Cooper asked. “I’ll tell him no, if you’re not.”

  Park reached up and tucked a stray strand of Cooper’s hair into place, and stepped close enough that Neil could hear him through the phone. “I’ll pick you up that fish dish you like and meet you at the gate in thirty. If you’re not there, I will come find you.”

  Cooper nodded again, though he understood Park had said it more for Neil’s benefit. He put the phone back to his ear. “All right, I’m coming. Where? Back at Amazonia?”

  “No, there’s still crew hanging around here. Meet me at the reptile house. I’ll be waiting.”

  * * *

  Less than ten minutes later, Cooper walked into the tall brick building that housed most of the zoo’s reptilian guests. It made him think of Sophie. She and Dean would be at the gala tonight too. He’d forgotten that. He wondered if he should let them know he and Park would be there, working. That would be friendly of him, wouldn’t it?

  It was very warm in here and nearly empty. Only one young family was moving from glass window to window, the mother pushing a stroller while the father filmed their four? five? six-year-old daughter pointing out each animal and chatting in what Cooper thought was Portuguese, their voices echoing through the tall ceilings. They nodded at him, and Cooper smiled and tried to look a little less like a single man warily waiting for a covert meeting in the reptile house. He turned to examine the closest animal instead, a python.

  Really, no wonder Genevieve had been nervous. The thing was thicker than her leg and twice as long. James had been in this building the day before he died, Cooper remembered. That’s when he’d given her that ominous advice. Don’t run and you won’t be chased. Yeah, no way was he just talking about snakes.

  Cooper reached into his pocket to finger the little silver key he’d found in the hotel room. What if it hadn’t unlocked something in the bookroom after all?

  Down the large, wide hall, the young family left and the building’s noises shifted to relative silence before all the ambient noise rose up to fill the void. The buzzing thrum of the lights and the heat lamps, the clicks and rumbles of any old building. Cooper walked down the hall, listening to the taps of his feet on the tile. If Neil was making him wait because of some imagined competition with Park, Cooper was through. Park had said he’d come looking in thirty minutes; Cooper was leaving in twenty. He wasn’t interested in playing those sorts of games.

  Between a couple of the exhibits, recessed in an alcove, Cooper noticed an Employees Only door cracked open.

  “Neil?” Cooper called hesitantly. He stepped through the door into a sort of hallway running along the backs of the enclosures. There, locked doors were on one side and medical and feeding equipment were on the other. Every twenty feet or so there was another door sectioning off the hall, but they were all open and he could see straight down the length of the building.

  “Hello?” he called again, but heard nothing. Cooper ran his hand over the closest enclosure door, secured by a heavy bolt, chain lock...

  ...and a small keyhole.

  Cooper pulled the key from James’s hotel out of his pocket and held it to the lock. Correct size. Same tinny silver metal color. He tried to fit it in. No. Wrong one.

  Cooper got to work, trying the key to each enclosure lock. No, no, no... He was just beginning to reconsider—okay, so the metal key and the metal lock were both metal-colored? what a clue!—when the key slid in perfectly smoothly.

  Cooper froze, surprised. After all that, his first instinct was to flip the dead bolt, rip this shit open and ask whatever was in there if they’d seen anything suspicious. But was that what Park would consider “being safe?”

  He looked around for some indication of what kind of creature was in there and found a small plastic tag on the metal mesh that covered the door.

  Philippine Crocodile.

  Super. Thank you very much, James.

  Cooper unhooked the chain, then hesitated again. He checked the time. No messages from Neil, so he sent a quick text of his own—I’m here. Where are you?—and waited a moment, but there was no response.

  A quick peek inside wouldn’t hurt, would it? Two minutes at most.

  Cooper flipped the bolt, and very carefully cracked open the door two inches, scanning inside. He spotted the crocodile immediately. It was on the other side of the enclosed room pressed against the viewing glass directly opposite the door. Between them was a small pool with very dark water.

  Cooper meticulously studied every inch of the space just in case there was a second animal lurking in shadow or camouflaged against the mulch that surrounded the pool. The walls were painted in a vague sort of misty, jungle mural and, besides the water that took up a majority of the space, there was a large boulder directly to the left of the keeper door, a pile of enormous fallen tree stumps to the right, and a smattering of big leafy plants all over. That meant plenty of hiding places that needed checking. He was not going to have the ace in the hole maneuver pulled on him by some reptiles. He’d never live it down.

  When Cooper was absolutely positive there was nothing else in there, he opened the door wider, keeping an eye on the sole crocodile for any sign of movement, but the thing didn’t even blink.

  There seemed like only one possible reason James would keep his own personal, secret copy of the key to a crocodile enclosure. Not because he wanted somewhere to hang out, that’s for sure. Not with its terrifying guardian always within seven feet of you. Cooper doubted even the keepers would choose to linger in here. Which was, of course, the point. What better place to stash something than in a room no one went with 24/7 security that would never tell your secrets?

  Not looking away from the crocodile, Cooper cautiously took one step into the enclosure, having to duck his head and step up into the raised space. The croc’s eyes were open, but again it didn’t move.

  Cooper gave the room another scan, this time looking not for where an animal might hide itself, but for where a person might hide something valuable. Not close to the ground where the crocodile might disturb it. But not on the walls either, where any zoo patron or keeper might spot it. Werewolf or not, he doubted James would want to keep the blackmail too far from the door. Not if he wanted to be able to access it a moment’s notice.

  At least Cooper hoped not. Because if something was hidden in that pile of logs, within lunging distance of the crocodile, he just wasn’t risking it. He wanted answers, but he wanted to live too, thanks very much. That really just left the boulder to the right of the door.

  He took another careful step inside, feet near silent on the wet mulch. The air was humid in here, and there was a horrible smell he couldn’t describe. It was too unfamiliar. Unlike anything else he’d come across in his life. The closest he could think of was when he was ten or so, he’d been on the marina and a couple of kids had fished a drowned squirrel out of the water and left it to rot in the blistering summe
r sun.

  Cooper tried not to breathe through his nose and ran his hands down the back of the boulder positioned up against the enclosure wall, just by the door. He had to lean in, shoulder pressed hard against the rock, and feel blindly for anything out of place. Up and down he swept his arm, the stone wet and much colder than the temperature of the room. He was just beginning to feel ridiculous when the tips of his fingers caught on the sharp edge of something sticking out from a crevice in the rock. Something hard wrapped in plastic was taped to the underside of a jutting ledge.

  He checked that the crocodile hadn’t moved, then repositioned himself so he could reach even farther and get a grip on the thing and tug it free. A smartphone in a plastic bag.

  It was about four or five years old, by Cooper’s guess, but was in good condition and powered on. As the screen loaded, he carefully stepped down out of the enclosure and closed the door behind him. There were no apps on it, no texts, no emails, no voice mails. Then he opened the camera roll.

  There he saw Arthur Crane. A much younger, happier-looking Arthur Crane, but undeniably the same man. It was clearly a photo of a polaroid and someone had scribbled Ottawa babes!! in blue pen on the white bit.

  Cooper zoomed in for a closer look. Crane was posed with a group of six other people, most of them grinning, all of them in their twenties, wearing loose, timeless sorts of clothing. T-shirts and sweatpants that made the date hard to place. Sitting head at hip level was a large brown-and-tan-colored wolf in fur, its eyes closed and mouth open. One of the women had a toddler propped up on her hip, face hidden in her neck.

  Cooper exhaled shakily. He’d seen that woman before. She’d even saved his life once.

  Daisy Boudillion. Park’s mother.

  Cooper studied the other faces, not sure he’d know it when he found it...but he did. Park’s father looked a lot like Park’s uncle Marcus, who in turn looked a lot like an older Park. The same jawline, cheekbones, perpetually windswept, thick hair.

  There were differences too, of course there were. Park’s father, Benjamin, had a narrower build, almost no muscle, a fuller mouth, but it was his expression that really set them miles apart. Mischievous. Arrogant. A touch challenging. Like a man about to dare you to do something he already knew you couldn’t. A man who was young and unhurt in a way Park had never got the chance to be.

  Cooper flipped to the next photo. This one was some kind of document. He zoomed in again and—

  A blinding pain whited out his vision like a flare gun as something cracked against the back of his head. He gasped soundlessly in shock and stumbled forward, ears ringing.

  Some part of him realized he was tipping over, slowly and indirectly toward the cement floor, but even as he fell, the floor seemed to shrink away from him, blackness eating at the edges of his vision.

  There was a muffled, distant sound behind him and a deep survival instinct made him throw his arms over his throbbing head just as a second sharp crack came down on his wrist and the tunnel closed completely.

  Cooper slipped into darkness.

  Chapter Eight

  There was dirt in his mouth. Dirt in his mouth and his nose and his ears.

  That was the first thing Cooper noticed when he regained consciousness, and for one disorienting, terrifying moment, he thought perhaps they’d found him already, presumed him dead and buried him alive by accident. But then his eyes cracked open and the bright, piercing light was too painful to be anywhere but above ground, on this earth.

  Cooper closed his eyes again and did a mental check of his systems. He was facedown on something firm but not uncomfortable, and his head was the most cause for concern. It was throbbing so strongly he wouldn’t be surprised if other people could see it move. His wrist was vying for a strong second place, but when he tentatively stretched out his fingers, the pain barely fluctuated, so he doubted anything was broken.

  In third place of top concerns, but climbing fast up the ranks, he had a horrible taste in his mouth. Moving his tongue around, Cooper realized it was his own breath. Not just his breath, but the air itself stank. The smell so powerfully bad it seemed to sit heavy on his skin, clogging his airways, choking him. The more he paid attention to it the more overwhelmingly bad it became. Like something rotting and fetid, slimy and fishy.

  Cooper stopped breathing and his eyes shot open, again. This time he refused to close them when the light tore straight through his corneas and jumped on an expressway to the goose egg on the back of his head. Less than a second of white-hot pain later, his vision reluctantly settled into actual shapes, shadows, and finally colors. Namely the soothing blues and greens of a jungle sky mural.

  Cooper was back in the crocodile enclosure. Whoever had attacked him had dragged him back inside and closed the door behind them.

  Very, very slowly, without getting up from his belly, Cooper turned his head, letting the wet mulch brush across his face, until he was looking in the other direction, toward the viewing glass, where he’d last seen the crocodile.

  It wasn’t there.

  Cooper let out a small, unintentional sound. Pure animal fear. It was incredibly hard not to jump up screaming, but he didn’t dare. Not without knowing where the crocodile had gone first.

  Of course, gone was a wildly inapt word. The room was maybe ten by fifteen feet. It obviously hadn’t gone anywhere. Wherever it might be was still dangerously too close.

  Cooper’s eyes darted around the enclosure, moving too quickly to really find anything more subtle than a croc tap-dancing on its hind legs in a top hat. Fear is just your body protecting itself, Dr. Ripodi had said once. Just like pain exists to let you know something is wrong, fear is another message. Sometimes, though, the body gets a little too good at protecting itself, going into overdrive, shouting out the fear message in a way that drowns out everything else.

  Cooper forced himself to slow down, really examining each mulch pile, every piece of debris floating in the dark water...

  Any other time, it would be interesting how, like a switch being flicked, a broken stick in the pool suddenly transformed into the crocodile’s head. It was like Cooper’s brain had finally caught sight of some detail and hastily switched out the cue cards from innocuous inanimate object to living and immediate danger while chuckling, my bad, my bad.

  Cooper would have to have a word with Dr. Ripodi about this “too good at protecting itself” bullshit.

  The crocodile was about five feet away and almost entirely submerged in water. Only the tip of its nose and the very top part of its head, where the orbital ridges were, peeked out. But Cooper was under no illusion that it hadn’t noticed him there. One eye was fixed directly on him, unblinking. Cooper had never realized how similar to cats’ eyes they were, with the vertical slit pupil and the yellow tones. This eye was quite a bit darker than Boogie’s, though. Almost the same shade as the crocodile’s...skin? Scales?

  The way Cooper saw it, he had two options. He could lie there unmoving—and hopefully unthreatening—and wait for someone to find him. The problem with that was he had no concept of how long he had been lying there unconscious, or how easily he could be seen from outside the exhibit.

  There was also a small matter of what was or wasn’t threatening to a crocodile. If some other predator were tossed into his extremely small territory, Cooper wouldn’t ignore it just because it was having a lie-in. In fact, lack of movement would just make him brave enough to get close and investigate, and if that thing got closer, he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold still. He just wouldn’t.

  Don’t run and you won’t be chased. That’s what James had said. But James was dead, which definitely took some weight out of his argument.

  Option two it was. Cooper spread his fingers wide, palms flat against the mulch. He tensed all his muscles, not breaking eye contact with the croc. Took a steady inhale...and pushed up fast, tucking his feet up under him into a crouch a
nd springing immediately up and at the boulder by his head. He heard a splash behind him, but Cooper was standing, hunched on top of the four-foot boulder, hands up and ready to punch anything that tried to follow him.

  The crocodile was now half in and half out of the water, head in the general direction of where Cooper had been lying. It didn’t appear to be planning a counterstrike, though, and Cooper exhaled the breath he’d been holding. From on top of the rock, he reached for the keeper door, but found it locked. Not unexpected. He felt for his phone, but it was gone. That was...a bit more challenging.

  Above him, wire netting covered huge, bright lights that were giving off enormous amounts of heat. This close to them, Cooper was already starting to sweat. Plus, now that he was in a safer position, the throbbing of his injuries was returning with a vengeance. Pulsing out a furious message.

  We. Said. Some. Thing’s. Wrong. You. Stu. Pid. Fuck.

  His wrist wasn’t so bad, but when he gingerly tried to explore the back of his head, he couldn’t even get close to the scalp. One brush of blood-soaked hair was all it took to give him a dizzy spell, and Cooper didn’t try again. Considering who was waiting below to catch him, this was not the time and place to risk fainting. Instead he just had to focus on getting help.

  Cooper started banging on the walls. To his relief, the crocodile just slid backward into the water, returning to its cautious, submerged position.

  “Hello!” Cooper shouted, and kept banging. “Help! I’m in here!”

  Eventually, when his hand started hurting, he kicked the wall instead. When his throat got too sore, he stopped yelling. He wasn’t going to make lunch with Park, he thought randomly.

  Silly, strange thought, but he could see it so clearly. Park standing by the zoo entrance. Waiting for him. Giving Cooper the time he needed to speak to Neil. Checking his watch. Wondering if he should come looking for Cooper. Deciding not to. Not wanting to look jealous, overprotective, untrusting. He’d been so excited to go to lunch too. That softly pleased smile of his when he felt really good but didn’t want to draw too much attention to it.