That Thing At the Zoo - 01 Read Online Free

five o’clock shadow. His nose was crooked, broken more times than could be counted on two hands. A Kool-brand cigarette hung from his lip, curling menthol-laden smoke up and under heavy eyelids. He blew a stream of gray out of his nostrils and leaned into the camera.
    “How is it going there, son? They treating you well?”
    I shrugged. “As well as I expected.” Father Mulcahy was the only person who had been there for me since my family had been killed. He had pulled me from the edge of losing my mind and helped me now to maintain an even keel. I don’t know what his life was before becoming a Catholic priest, but he can shoot like a sniper and knife fight like a convict. He has my back anytime I need it, whether that means tending the bar at Polecats or two steps behind me, shotgun in hand.
    The priest lifted scar tissue masquerading as an eyebrow while he lit another cancer stick. His Zippo clicked open with a metallic chime, flared a one-inch spout of orange flame, then clacked closed. He worked the smoke around in his mouth like a pipe-smoker, tasting it, enjoying the flavor. When he was done he looked directly at me through the webcam. “Do you think you packed enough ordinance to handle what ever is going on?”
    “I didn’t know what kind of party this was going to be, so I brought a little bit of everything.” The Comet’s trunk was full of weapons and different things I might find useful in a hunt. My car was built in 1966, so the trunk is a four-body trunk. You can fit four bodies in there and still close the lid.
    Not that I would ever need that. No, not me.
    Alright, keep moving. The point is the trunk holds a lot of weapons and I had options.
    Kat bumped Father Mulcahy to the side. A map of the zoo popped up in the left-hand corner of the screen, the habitats and the walking paths clearly labeled as they squiggled across the picture.
    “Okay, if you look at the map, you will see X ’s where the attacks took place.” Kat did something on her end and, sure enough, red silhouettes of the animals attacked appeared in their outlined areas. Their areas were pretty close to each other, which meant nothing because the map was not to scale. The zoo covered forty acres of real estate and the areas given to the main exhibits like the lions and the gorillas were huge. If this were a television show instead of real life I would marvel that the silhouettes formed a triangle. Oooooh, a triangle. Very suspicious.
    Put three things anywhere on a map and they form a triangle. It’s not that impressive.
    What it did show me was that the monster was keeping to a fairly confined area. Somewhere in there was its daytime resting place. I didn’t know if it was harmed by the sun or just preferred the nighttime. I leaned into the camera.
    “How do the crime reports line up for the night before the attacks?”
    Kat’s fingers clicked and clacked off-screen. “Fairly standard. Again, it’s a sketchy part of town. Low-income residents mixing with high-income speculators and a tourist attraction, high unemployment rate in that area mixed with high crime.” She squinted at the screen for a second. I bit my tongue. Kat gets mad when you tell her to put on her glasses. “Assault, assault, domestic disturbance, assault, rape, a two-victim hit-and-run, a list of assaults, three carjackings, two counts of breaking and entering, and four counts of vandalism.”
    That sounded like a weekend night in Grant Park. One thing niggled in my mind, trying to get my attention. “Detail me on that hit-and-run.”
    Clickety-clack and Kat had it. Her voice switched to a fast, monotone clip to read it off, looking away from the camera at another screen. “At approximately 1:30 A.M . a Grant Park resident struck a man with his 1998 Honda Civic. The victim is described as a possible African American male over six feet tall and wearing a leather jacket. The victim was assaulting a young Georgia Tech student in the center of Cherokee Avenue