Friday's Harbor: A Novel

by Diane Hammond

  She visited Bladenham one day after having just attended a professional meeting in Portland. Neva offered to introduce her to Friday, leading her to Friday’s office window first so she could meet him eye to eye. This was always a big hit, but the clerk simply smiled at him when, predictably, he appeared at the glass, nodding in a mild greeting. She watched him for several minutes and then turned to Neva: shall we go? Neva was surprised. No one besides his staff had ever before left Friday before he left them. She asked the clerk if she was sure. Yes, she was sure.

  Neva led her upstairs to the pool top, and the clerk looked around her calmly, thoroughly, asking several questions about the toys scattered around, about the tires stacked on the concrete deck. They made small talk about Bladenham and the zoo, about the clerk’s home town in Minnesota. During the conversation the clerk glanced at Friday only occasionally. When they’d exhausted these two subjects, she indicated that she’d seen enough; she would go. Her visit had lasted exactly thirty-five minutes. For this, she’d driven a total of four-and-a-half hours.

  A week later, they received her usual check for twenty-five dollars.

  IN BOGOTÁ FRIDAY’S lungs had been compromised for years, by either the air quality or a fungal infection or both. Gabriel had been monitoring his breathing closely ever since the whale arrived, asking Sam to record his respirations at rest, after a high-energy exercise session, and during breath-holds. Upon arrival his best breath-hold was three minutes.

  At the end of February, Gabriel asked Friday to roll over on his back, submerging his blowhole, and cued Sam to start a stopwatch. Five minutes went by, then ten. The whale lay comfortably on the surface, upside down, receiving a herring from Neva between his teeth from time to time.

  At eleven minutes Friday began to fidget, shifting his tail flukes restlessly. Neva clapped to signal her encouragement: hold it just a little longer.

  Phwweeeeet! Gabriel blew his whistle, releasing Friday at last. Sam consulted his stopwatch. Friday had held his breath for over thirteen minutes.

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK one morning in March, a middle-aged woman approached the Biedelman Zoo’s perimeter on foot, dressed in black clothing and carrying a thermal picnic cooler. She climbed over the fence—no mean feat since she was somewhat bottom-heavy and hadn’t climbed a fence since she was in grade school—and with the stride of a Valkyrie arrived at Friday’s pool without being seen. Her excitement grew as she reached the steel staircase to the pool top, which she’d seen so many times on the evening news. A motion sensor suddenly triggered lights on the outside of the building, but she froze for several minutes in the ragged edges of the darkness and no one responded to the security breach.

  As soon as the lights timed out she hurried up the stairs, gripping the cooler handle tightly. Once on the dark pool top she heard Friday before she saw him. His breathing thrilled her—it was as though this magnificent animal were beckoning to her, as though he knew of and agreed with her plan. She wore rubber boots, knowing from the extensive TV coverage that in order to get close enough to him she’d be standing in water. Indeed, Friday was waiting for her at the poolside, mouth wide open. He knew; he must.

  She set her cooler down on the dry concrete apron, removing a huge Ziploc plastic bag full of pellets and six lovely young salmon she’d bought yesterday at Pike Street Market in Seattle. It took only a minute to stuff each fish with the pellets; she’d waited to do this until the last possible moment in case contact with the fish broke down their chemical composition. She’d worried that he might sense something, but he swallowed them one after the other without hesitation—more proof that his captivity had ruined him, turned him into a broken animal doomed to live for the rest of his life in a silent, lifeless place. But after all, that was why she was here—a warrior come to deliver him.

  She resisted the strong desire to lay her hands on him in benediction. Instead, before she slipped away, she whispered, “It’s going to be all right now. This hell is over. You’re going home.”

  Chapter 13

  MUSIC BLARED FROM the food prep area downstairs at Friday’s pool. It was five o’clock in the morning and Gabriel was taking his turn doing fish house. When he was done, he hoisted a bucket from the Gorilla Rack and trudged up to the pool top.

  The first sign of trouble was that Friday wasn’t in his customary place at the slide-out area, mouth open and ready for breakfast—normally his favorite meal since it meant he had both food and company again after a long night alone. Instead, the killer whale huddled in a far corner of the pool, his nose just inches from a blind concrete wall. His blue ball was beside him and he had gathered his other toys nearby.

  When he exhaled, his breath was pink.

  Gabriel walked to him and said softly, “Hey, buddy. What’s the deal here?”

  Friday didn’t respond, just breathed in quick, shallow breaths. Gabriel’s heart sank. When he signaled the whale to open his mouth, Gabriel was shocked to see his palate and gums peppered with small hemorrhages. When Gabriel scratched the whale’s head, the skin tore and wept blood. Friday pressed farther into the corner, his blue ball bobbing gently by his head.

  Something was very, very wrong.

  Gabriel went downstairs and watched the killer whale from underwater, but after fifteen minutes Friday hadn’t moved, so he pulled on his wet suit, grabbed the rest of his scuba gear, and was in the pool within five minutes, ignoring his own rule that no one should ever get in the pool alone. Neva wouldn’t arrive for another hour, but he suspected they didn’t have any time to lose. Even up close, Gabriel couldn’t find any sign of injury. Then, on a terrible hunch, he put his hand inside the killer whale’s genital slit, opened it several inches—and released a dense cloud of blood.

  He surfaced, grabbed his first-aid pack, and from underwater took a blood sample from the underside of Friday’s flukes. Normally when he drew blood he was a stickler for alcohol swabs and antibacterial protocols, but this wasn’t anything normal. He drew several vials, and when he withdrew the hypodermic needle, a thin stream of blood continued to wind through the water.

  Downstairs, he labeled the vials and called Truman at home. “We have a problem,” he said, quickly describing what he’d observed. “I don’t have any idea what we’re dealing with, so I need Neva to run some blood samples to the hospital and convince their lab to treat it as a rush.”

  He heard Truman relaying the information to Neva in the background; when he got back on the line he said, “She’s leaving now—she says to meet her at the loading dock. She’ll call ahead to the lab on her way. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Just for the hell of it, would you check with your security guys and see if they’ve seen anything unusual during their rounds over here in the last week or two?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I just want to cover all our bases. Look, I need to get back upstairs. I’ll update you when either I know what we’re dealing with or the whale dies, whichever comes first.” Gabriel hung up, but instead of going upstairs, he lifted the receiver again and dialed Monty Jergensen’s phone number. “Hey, doc,” he said when the vet picked up the line, “We’ve got a sick whale up here.” He described Friday’s symptoms, including their rapid onset. “Does that sound like anything you’ve come across?”

  “Well, whatever it is, it’s hemorrhagic.”

  “Yep.”

  “How’s his breathing?”

  “Bad. Shallow.”

  “And you haven’t changed the fish you’re feeding him—gotten a new delivery recently or anything like that?”

  “No—same fish, same vendor.”

  “And it came on pretty quickly?”

  “He seemed fine yesterday.”

  Marty paused, then said, “How’s security up there—pretty good?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. It’s probably adequate, but it’s a small zoo with a small staff.”

  “So if someone wanted to, they could get their hands on the whale.”

&nbs
p; “Yes. I had the same thought.”

  “I’ve never seen this in marine mammals, but in my old small-animal practice I’d see an animal every once in a while that had ingested brodifacoum.”

  “Bro—what?”

  “Rat poison.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were. Someone would put out pellets or bait and their dog or cat would eat it and a few days would go by and they’d begin to bleed out. It doesn’t show up right away—it takes up to two weeks to present symptoms, and there’s a lot of internal bleeding before it reaches the stage you’re describing. The endgame is massive bleeding into the chest—constricts the lungs—and they die. When you take the blood samples in, tell them to look at his vitamin K levels, and for the presence of prothrombin, proconvertin, and Stuart factor. If something’s blocking his ability to produce vitamin K, his capillaries and blood vessels are all leaking.”

  “And if you’re right?”

  “Start him on vitamin K one right away—oral. If we’ve gotten to him in time, he may pull through. My guess is today’s the tipping point. He’s either going to turn the corner or he’s going to die. We’ll know one way or the other within the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Gabriel.

  “Look, I’m e-mailing you a script right now for the vitamin K, phytonadione—there, you should have it. Hopefully your local hospital has a lot on hand. E-mail me the lab results as soon as you get them, and make sure you tell Margie to find me.”

  “Okay, doc, thanks.”

  As soon as Neva pushed open the office door, Gabriel handed her the prescription and told her to turn around and fly.

  AFTER SPEAKING WITH Gabriel, Truman called first Ivy and then Sam, briefly describing the situation and asking them to come to the zoo. By the time Neva came back with the medication and Gabriel gave Friday his first dose of phytonadione, the others had assembled, grim-faced, in the killer whale office. Across the pool Friday huddled, motionless, in his far corner with his blue ball beside him. His urine was red; his stool was red; his breath was pink. Even Gabriel’s usual calm was shaken.

  “For god’s sake, close the gallery,” Gabriel said. The zoo was set to open in fifteen minutes.

  “Already done,” said Truman, knowing it would mean yet another media onslaught.

  “The security logs don’t show anything at all?” Gabriel asked. “It could have been as long ago as two weeks.”

  “Nothing. Toby and Janice have been swing shift and graveyard the last couple of weeks, and I’ve already talked to them. There was nothing.”

  “Crap,” Neva muttered.

  “Rat poison, though?” said Ivy. “Doesn’t that sound just a little far-fetched? Couldn’t it be some obscure Colombian virus—whale ebola or something?”

  Gabriel said, “Friday has essentially been in quarantine since he got here. Even if he brought something up here with him, it’s way too late to develop symptoms. If we were using real seawater, I guess it would be possible for something to come in despite the filtration, but we’re not.”

  “Could the Instant Ocean have been tampered with?” Neva asked. “Did you ask life support?”

  “I will,” said Gabriel. “But if I wanted to poison him, feeding him something would be a whole lot simpler and quicker than messing with the water quality.”

  They subsided.

  “Crap,” Neva said quietly.

  “I don’t know what kind of person would go after an animal like that,” Sam said. “Must be some kind of monster.”

  “Where’s Libertine?” asked Neva. “She’s not here.”

  Truman ran his hand over his face. “I didn’t call her.”

  “No!” said Ivy. “Absolutely not.”

  “I’m sorry, but I think we need to consider it,” said Neva. “Given her ties to the animal rights community. Even if she just enabled someone else—it wouldn’t even have to have been deliberate. Maybe she described the layout of the pool and access from the outside. Or left a key out. Or talked about his diet. It might have been enough for them to make a plan.”

  “She’d never do any of those things,” Ivy said hotly. “Never. She loves that animal as much as any of us, if not more. For god’s sake, you don’t try and kill something you love.”

  “The animal rights people would tell you that’s exactly what you would do, if the animal’s captive,” said Neva.

  “She’s right,” said Gabriel.

  “All right, look,” said Truman. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. I gather this is her regular day off, right? I’d appreciate it if none of you talk with her about this just yet, at least not until we know whether he was poisoned in the first place.”

  “The lab said they’d have results for us by noon,” said Neva.

  “All right,” said Gabriel. “So in the meantime we’ll take care of him like always. Though—and I can’t believe I’m going to say this—prayer wouldn’t be a bad idea, if anyone feels so inclined. If the blood work confirms he was poisoned, he’s been bleeding internally for at least a day and probably two. If he’s still alive by tonight, he’s got a fighting chance.”

  “Crap,” said Neva. “So do we go into the pool with him?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Gabriel. “He’s got his blue ball, and one of us will be sitting with him all the time, but in case he starts acting erratically, no one gets in the water—no one. I also want someone observing from the gallery.”

  “Are you going to let the media know what’s going on?” Neva asked.

  Truman sighed. “In light of our recent fiasco, yes. Starting, god help us, with Martin Choi. Happily, the News-Tribune’s not due out for another three days, so at least by then we’ll know the cause and the outcome. Anyway, let me worry about all that. You’ve got your hands full. If media calls start coming in here, just refer them all to me. Ivy, I could use your help. Would you mind working the phones with me?”

  “By all means, put me to work. I don’t think I can stand just waiting.”

  “Crap,” said Neva. “Crap crap crap!”

  “Look, this is going to be a very tough day,” Truman said. “So let’s take it one step at a time, all right? Gabriel, I’d appreciate an update every hour—sooner if anything changes. And let me know as soon as the lab work comes back. Good luck.”

  The meeting broke up in silence. What was there to say that could possibly make a difference?

  ACROSS TOWN LIBERTINE was doing laundry when she had a sudden premonition that something was terribly wrong. She dropped her laundry basket and ran. At the pool she flew up the stairs two at a time. “Something’s happened,” she cried to Gabriel, who was sitting in one of the lawn chairs on the side of the pool beside the killer whale.

  “How do you know?” he said guardedly.

  “I don’t know, I just do,” she said. “Oh my god, he’s so sick. How could he have gotten this sick?”

  “What do you know?” he’d gotten out of his chair and moved toward Libertine as though he meant to prevent her from reaching Friday.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said, taking a step back. “I just felt him. I think he might be dying.”

  “We think he was poisoned,” Gabriel said bluntly.

  The radio at his hip crackled. “Neva to Gabriel.”

  “Go for Gabriel. Switch to channel two.” Libertine knew that channel two was secure and couldn’t be picked up by any but specifically designated radios. She watched, feeling increasingly uneasy, as Gabriel switched channels and said again, “Go for Gabriel.”

  “He just had a bowel movement. It was mostly blood. A lot of blood.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s also posturing.”

  “How?”

  “He’s sort of doubling up, like he has stomach cramps.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel said grimly. “You’re keeping a log, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Sam came up to the pool top and caught Gabriel’s eye, then indicated
Libertine by the slightest inclination of his head. “You want us to go into town?” he suggested. “We could pick up a donut or two. Sometimes sugar’s just the ticket at a time like this.”

  “No,” Gabriel said. “Thank you, but she’s all right.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” said Gabriel. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll be back downstairs, then.” Sam looked again at Libertine before saying to Gabriel, “You just let me know if you need anything.”

  Libertine got it. “You can’t possibly think it was me!” she cried to Gabriel in disbelief. “How could it be me? I work with him every day like you do. I love him as much as you do.”

  “We’re just trying to be prudent,” said Gabriel quietly. “Until we know more. We don’t even know yet what’s wrong with him.”

  Libertine marshaled all her composure and said very quietly, “May I stay?”

  “I think it would be best for you and for us if you didn’t, at least not for now. We should hear from the lab by noon, and then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

  Libertine stared at him for a long beat, and then, too devastated to speak, she turned and walked away.

  IT WAS QUIET at the Oat Maiden. The only table that was occupied when Libertine got there was the celestial table, where a couple of white-haired women were laughing over a packet of snapshots. Johnson Johnson was in the run-up to lunch: Libertine could smell cookies and rising pizza dough. She went into the kitchen, where he had his back to the swinging double doors, and put a hand gently on his shoulder so she wouldn’t scare him, but he was startled anyway. She’d been trying to get him to put a mirror on that wall, so he could see who was coming, but so far he hadn’t done it.

  “Put me to work,” she said simply. “There are a couple of tables I can bus and wipe down. After that, I’ll ask you for something else to do, so please find it.”