Six orang.
Allison stared at the bill of lading: 240,000 Singapore dollars. Seeing now what she would not let herself see before. A faint period in the middle of the four zeros. Twelve hundred dollars.
"I'd invite you to my daughter's wedding, Allison," he said, the cameras rolling, the Fish and Wildlife agents glaring at her, "but I think you'll probably be otherwise occupied."
***
Allison's fiasco took up the first minute of the local six o'clock news. Animal rights activist goes ape over songbirds. Joshua Bond was interviewed. Smiling, speaking familiarly with the newswoman. Oh, no, Michelle, it was a simple error on Mrs. Farleigh's part. He held no grudge against her, gracious, no. The woman was grief stricken over her daughter's recent death. Though he had to admit, he couldn't quite understand Mrs. Farleigh's fanatical resolve to tarnish his good reputation. He guessed it was possible the woman's grief was distorting her judgment, causing her to flail about.
Harry and Allison watched the news together in their living room. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and didn't speak. Harry's impassive eyes were trained on the set. When the segment was done the other local news beginning, Allison rose from her seat.
"Congratulations," Harry said quietly. "You shot your complete and absolute wad on this one, Allison. Nobody in their right mind is ever going to believe you again. You're done. Way to go, Allison; way to go, babe. This finishes it. You're going to have to find yourself a whole new hobby."
Allison went up to her bedroom, lay down. She watched the room darken. Watched a warm breeze stir the curtains into a ghostly dance. She felt a corset tighten around her middle, her breath coming hard and shallow. She watched the curtains move, and she wept.
CHAPTER 10
Just past eleven that night Allison used her key to open the steel gate on the west corner of Parrot Jungle. She stepped inside one of the narrow compartments and swung the big gate into motion. It squeaked, as it always did, and for a moment she was trapped inside its grid of bars until it rotated halfway around and she could step out freely into the park. A dozen years ago, when she used to bring her daughters to Parrot Jungle, they'd loved that heavy revolving gate. They'd played jail there, one the inmate, the other the jailkeeper. The jailer taunting the prisoner, the prisoner rattling the bars helplessly. Playing their game until another patron came along, ticket in hand, and forced them to go inside.
Parrot Jungle had been a tourist attraction for over fifty years; a bird show, smallish zoo, lush tropical gardens, pink flamingos, coral rock buildings. When it was built, Miami was a small town and Parrot Jungle was at its outer fringe. Now the park was surrounded by half-million-dollar homes, tennis clubs, churches, and busy roads. An oasis of wildness lingering at the city's core. The fifteen acres was covered by a complex network of twisty paths, hills and gardens, and artificial ponds that had been there so long they were no longer artificial. The shows had changed little in fifty years. Parrots riding miniature bicycles across tightropes, a petting zoo, jungle theater, alligator pond. The kind of quaint, no-tech place that had once seemed incredibly hokey to Allison but now resonated with a nostalgic authenticity. A last shred of old Florida still hanging on.
Allison walked toward Bronson's guard shack, guided by the radio noise. A talk show, Bronson's favorite, some manic female jabber. He was always making Allison stop and listen, have a taste of the radio queen's trashy jokes.
She ducked her head into the open doorway. Bronson looked up, took his feet off his desk. Smiled and pointed at the radio. She listened for a moment to the woman's raunchy lecture about PMS. The headaches, the cramps, the swollen breasts. Mocking men for their frailty. You don't get it, what we have to go through every month. You just don't get it. You'll never get it. You can't get it, because we got it and we're not giving it to you.
"Hell," Bronson said. "We don't want it."
Allison gave him a wave and started off. She was halfway down the stone path to the cages when Bronson hailed her. She waited for him, lifting her eyes to watch a small plane flying low overhead, lights blinking through the calm night. A parrot screeched, a macaw replied. With a flashlight lighting his way, Bronson hobbled down the stairs and joined her. He, in his usual overalls and white T-shirt; Allison wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt, white shorts, Keds.
"Meant to tell you, Miz Farleigh, Broom had another one of his bad days."
"What'd he do now?"
"Same as last week. Hid some food under his straw, then about two, three o'clock in the afternoon, he saw somebody in the crowd he didn't like, some kid making faces, and he slung two handfuls of tomatoes at him. Like to've started a stampede, people screaming, running off, falling all over each other. That damn Broom, he's been in a snit the last two weeks."
"Because I was away," she said. "I deserted him."
"Yes, um, that's how it seems. If it ain't the food, it's his own manure. Got to keep the crowds back another ten feet to keep them from getting dirtied up."
"Well, I'm back now," she said. "He'll calm down."
"I hope so. I'm afraid he's getting so he enjoys it. Attached to it now, throwing stuff at the people."
"It's just a tantrum," she said. "It'll stop. But you know, Broom has to learn to adjust. I won't be around forever."
"Well, Miz Farleigh, maybe I should go along, stand around, make sure you're safe."
"Broom's not going to hurt me, Bronson. Don't worry."
Bronson shone the light on the path for Allison, kept it a step ahead of her till she'd rounded the tall flagstone wall. She found her way by moonlight to the orangutan cage. A thirty-foot-high, fifty-foot-square construction. Far enough to give Broom a chance to swing, climb, pace a square mile if he felt like it.
The orangutan was eight years old, weighed nearly two hundred pounds. He'd be lighter in the jungle, more fit, more agile. Despite his careful diet at the park, he was gaining weight. But better fat than a lot of other fates.
Allison found him seven years ago, her first year as a wildlife vigilante. Out of nowhere Thorn had phoned her, describing a shabby roadside zoo he'd seen operating on Lower Matecumbe Key. Heard she was in the wildlife protection business and thought she should come take a look, it just might interest her. What she found was a rickety tilt-a-whirl and merry-go-round, and inside a small tent a menagerie that included several alligators, a black bear, a mangy deer, and the star of the show, a baby orangutan, looking like a human toddler with drifts of flyaway red hair.
She and Thorn bought tickets for the show, watched with a carload of tourists from Mississippi. The owner was a tall, gaunt man with a perpetual cigarette stuck to his lip. He wore an orange clown nose and carried a broom handle that he waved like a baton throughout the show, and used as a prod or bat when the animals resisted his cues. The ape was emaciated, had weeping sores on its back and arms that looked a great deal like cigarette burns.
After that day in the Keys, it took Allison three months of arduous fund-raising, and four more visits to the roadside attraction, before she haggled the ape away from the man. Nine thousand dollars cash.
When the orangutan was safely strapped in Thorn's car, she went back into the carnival tent and asked the man if he would be willing to throw his broom handle into the bargain. With a flourish and a bow he presented it to her, and Allison drew it back and hammered the man's right arm, then hammered it again and again. Thorn had to separate the two of them, the man screaming that he would sue.
She named him Broom and erected a cage for him in back of her Coral Gables home, hidden from her neighbors and the code inspectors. During the day the orangutan had the run of the house, and even slept in her bed at night. When Harry was home on weekends, it stayed mostly in the outdoor cage.
She fed him vegetables and fruit and gradually nursed him back to a healthy weight. For two years Broom and Allison were together almost every hour of the day. She took him along on fund-raising speeches to women's clubs, Civitan, the chamber of commerce, held his hand w
hile they walked up the front steps of the Fish and Wildlife office. Those were the days when the wildlife agents smiled when she came into the office, listened to her worries and complaints, indulged her, explaining the legal complexities that faced them in bringing animal smugglers to justice.
She bought Broom stuffed animals and balls and ropes and bells and windup toys. Gave him cherry Popsicles. He was her companion and friend. Her adopted child and her confidant. He listened to her, played games with her hands and fingers, studied her eyes, touched her hair, plucked off her reading glasses or her earrings to examine them more carefully. He wore a diaper in the house, and let her know with grunts and peeps when he was ready to be changed. He found her furniture and clothes endlessly absorbing.
But by the time he turned three, he had grown so powerful that the games they'd played just a year before were potentially lethal. In a moment of exuberance, he could easily snap Allison's forearm in half with one hand. She had seen Broom, with an almost casual gesture, tear a bedroom door off its hinges, smash a coffee table in two. In a fit of bad temper, he'd once picked up an ornamental ceramic pot filled with a hundred pounds of dirt and a ten-foot palm, and hurled it across the living room.
The thing had to be done. And though she could see the day coming from months away, it cost her more emotional pain than she'd known since her father died. She donated Broom to her friend, Dr. Sam Tremble, the owner of Parrot Jungle. And for months afterward, each day when she woke to the empty house her chest ached and she had to fight off another surge of tears.
Now she visited Broom only twice a week, and though the bond was not as powerful as it had once been, and though many orangutans and a host of other animals had passed through her life since she'd first found him, there was none she cherished like Broom.
Tonight, as she hauled up the canvas curtain covering the front of his cage, Broom sat up sleepily in his nest. It was perched atop a cross-hatching of pine logs, which was raised ten feet off the floor of the cage. It was like a huge four-legged table, on top of which Broom built his nightly nest from palm fronds and straw. Tomorrow morning one of the attendants would dismantle the nest so that Broom would have to reconstruct it tomorrow evening. They tried to mirror as closely as possible what his behavior would be in the wild.
She used her key to open the padlock on the cage. She shut and relocked the door, stood looking up at him. He would not meet her gaze. In the moonlight she could see he had clutched a green coconut in his hands, a projectile too large to make it through the bars of his cage. As she watched, Broom broke the coconut in half. His hands were so strong that with a nonchalant gesture he could accomplish what a normal man would require a hammer and chisel and a half hour of sweat to do.
Allison walked to a corner of the cage and sat on one of the quilted packing blankets thrown about the cage floor. She propped her back against the bars and watched Broom tear the meat from the coconut. He was pretending to ignore her.
She could smell his rich funk, the rank meaty odor of his flesh. She listened to him gobble the fruit, gurgling with pleasure over his midnight snack.
At first, after she'd gotten him from the carnival show, Allison had tried to return Broom to the wild. It was her first contact with Sidra Tindusiri, who ran the most famous of the rehabilitation programs m Borneo and Sumatra. Sidra worked with young apes, helping them relearn their forgotten survival skills with the hope of eventually releasing them into the jungle.
But the required blood tests showed that Broom was the offspring of mixed parentage. Father from Borneo, mother from Sumatra. Bred in captivity. Because the international zoo association was determined to keep the orangutan bloodline pure, Broom's mixed background made him unacceptable as either an official zoo animal or rehab material. So he had become Allison's.
As Broom finished the coconut he dropped the shells to the floor, then stretched his hairy arms out wide and chittered softly, drawing his gums back, showing his teeth to the moon.
Grunting, he took a grip on one of the logs and swung down, hanging by one long arm, his broad back to her. He released the log, dropped into the straw. Stood for a moment looking out into the dark patio, where in a few hours the tourists would gather again to snap their photographs.
Finally he turned around and faced Allison. She didn't move, made no sound. She watched him as he reached out with both hands and grabbed one of the four legs of his log perch and shook it fiercely. Allison had supervised the construction of his perch. She'd helped bolt each juncture with stainless steel hardware, was certain it could withstand the ferocity of a dozen angry men.
Broom grunted and shook the structure, rattling it. One minute passed, then two, the noise growing louder, until finally the leg Broom was holding cracked, gave way, broke free in his hands like some Tinkertoy stick. The entire framework tipped over and crashed.
Broom tossed the ten-foot log against the bars, brushed it aside as it bounced back at him.
"Hey! Hey, you okay, Miz Farleigh? I heard the commotion."
Panting hard, Bronson stood out in the dark viewing area, shining his flashlight into Broom's eyes.
"It's okay, Bronson. I'm fine. I'll handle this."
"I don't know, Miz Farleigh. He's mighty worked up tonight. The full moon and all."
"It's okay, Bronson. It's okay."
Broom hooted at the man as he turned to go. Hooted and gurgled until he was gone.
Allison hadn't moved. Back against the bars, the blanket scratchy against her bare legs, she watched the orangutan turn to her, settle his eyes on hers. He looked thinner now, less fierce; his face had a haggard expression, the anger all burned away.
He shuffled over to the corner where she sat, loomed between her and the moon, put her in the broad shadow of his body. She had never been frightened of Broom and was not now. If he wanted to kill her, he could accomplish it easily, leave her a bloodless corpse in thirty seconds.
He sat down in the straw across from her, looked into her eyes for a long moment, then extended his hand.
She took it in hers.
The ape's eyes calmed, a watery softness. With his big, cool hand gripping hers, Broom scooted through the heap of blankets till he was beside her.
He let go of her hand, then lifted his arm and lay it over her shoulders. He drew her to him, arm circling her, bringing Allison's head to rest against his chest, Broom's cheek settling onto the top of her head.
He shifted his body, correcting their alignment. Then he sighed. Allison sighed as well. And as it so often happened, she was no longer sure which of them was comforting the other.
***
It was a single bang with no echo. Could have been someone popping a paper sack, or a sewing needle touched to a party balloon. Allison sat straight up, felt the muscles in her back aching.
The explosion woke Broom as well. The moon had moved west. It was well after midnight, the night much darker.
Parrot Jungle was quiet. A few hundred yards to the east, Red Road was quiet as well. For a moment she thought she'd dreamed the noise, but then she saw the flashlights bobbing down the pathway, waves of light skittering through the foliage. Then she heard the voices of men coming near. Voices she recognized.
Allison wriggled across the floor of the cage, flattened herself against the log Broom had broken free from his perch. She hauled a blanket over her body, tucked it around her.
Broom watched her curiously, then shuffled over beside her. Squatted near her head. He made a noise in his throat that she'd never heard from him before, a husky groan. Sensing her fear, perhaps, or feeling the danger himself, those strange voices at an unaccustomed hour, the beams of their flashlights. Broom continued his low warning growl.
She heard the rasp of the men's shoes on the pavement near the cage. Heard them whispering. Felt Broom shift his weight, tensing. She could hear her own breath inside the blanket, fast and staggered.
"Hey, Allison? Your friend out front said we could find you with the orangutan. Not that
that's any big surprise. You in there?"
It was one of the voices from the jungle.
"All-iii-son. Come on out, honey dumpling." The other voice was deeper, mocking. "We watched you on TV tonight, honey. Going after old Josh Bond. You looked real cute. Real delectable."
"That lump," the tenor voice said. "Behind the ape. Is that you, Allison? You hiding in there?"
"Why don't you go in and find out," the smartass voice said.
"Yeah, sure. I'm going in there with that hairy bastard."
"So shoot the ape, then go in and find out."
"I'm not shooting that thing, it's in a cage, for chrissake."
"Jesus, man. There's that liposuction thing again. Soft, soft, soft. Give me that goddamn gun, I'll do it."
Allison could hear the scuffle of their shoes moving around the perimeter of the cage. Feel Broom swiveling slowly to watch them, his quiet growl deepening.
She fought the urge to draw back the blanket, take a long look at their faces. At least to know in her last seconds who her killers were. But instead she pressed her stomach hard against the log, head tucked down. She listened but heard nothing for a while. Even Broom was quiet.
Minutes passed. From a few hundred yards away one of the peacocks cried mournfully, a long echoing call. She felt the muscles unknotting in her belly. She drew an easier breath. But still she waited.
Another few minutes and Broom shifted his bulk away from her, silently prowled the cage as if he was staring out into the dark to make certain the men had gone.
She heard the rumble of a heavy truck out on Red Road. Heard the chatter of palm fronds in a surge of breeze. And then she thought, by God, she'd had enough of cowering. Lying just as she had while Winslow was being murdered.
She flung off the blanket and scrambled to her feet. In the same instant she heard the harsh double clack of a weapon being cocked. Broom roared and threw himself at the bars of his cage, let go an air splitting bellow.
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 10