It was the first time we had stopped to catch our breaths.
“I can see the monorail tracks ahead. That’s Wild Asia,” Mike said.
“Great,” I said, bending over with my hands on my knees. “I have a choice between a kid with a hunting rifle and scope—”
“I’ve got that gun now, Coop.”
“Or a Siberian tiger,” I said. “Did you kill Henry?”
“Two Tylenol and he can call a doc in the morning,” Mike said, putting his forefinger to his lips to quiet me. “He’s not our problem.”
We listened for voices or obvious noise coming from behind us, but there was none.
“That way,” Mike said in a whisper, directing me to keep going in the direction of the monorail tracks. “Get a little closer to one of the exhibits, and then I’ll call 911. It will be easier for the park security to find us that way.”
“Call now,” I urged frantically.
“Park security guards aren’t armed. I can’t bring them into this before real cops can get here and find our position.”
Of course Mike would have thought of that. There was no animal keeper or feeder who could take on the small army of drug dealers and smugglers.
He leaned his back against a thick tree and checked the rifle to see if it was loaded and how much ammunition he had. Then he reached under his jacket, into his shoulder holster, and handed me his service revolver—a powerful Glock 17.
“No, Mike,” I said, recoiling at the thought of taking his weapon.
I hated guns. I hated what they did when they got in the hands of people who shouldn’t ever have them. I hated how they took human lives. I hated that people used them to kill living things for sport.
He grabbed the waistband of my jeans and stuck the barrel of the gun down the front of my pants.
“You’ve been taught how to use it,” he said, holding my face between his hands. “Remember the safety, and just hang on to it if we get separated before help comes.”
I exhaled again.
Then Mike tapped my shoulder and told me to run with him. I put the flashlight—still unlit—in my left hand and kept a grip on the handle of the gun.
We were running as fast as we could go. I knew that to our right, beyond all the wooded area, was taller, thicker fencing that surrounded the entire zoological park. The Bronx River cut through the zoo—we had crossed over it on the monorail ride—so that body of water separated us from the main entrance and the office buildings, including the mini–police station house, which was not likely to have anyone on duty when the zoo was closed.
Any second now, I expected to encounter a raging beast, unhappy about the trespassers in its habitat. There weren’t supposed to be any in this area, but if criminals could break in, why couldn’t fierce animals break out?
When we reached the first clearing, Mike took out his phone, leaned the rifle against a dense bush, and dialed 911.
“Mike Chapman,” he said, giving the operator his shield number and command, but staying as calm as a pilot in heavy turbulence. “Ten-thirteen.”
He was giving the NYPD code for “officer needs assistance.”
“The zoo. Wild Asia. Somewhere on the eastern side, not far from the Bronx River Parkway.”
I was looking through the forested area for signs of anyone approaching. I was chilled and nervous and as jumpy as Henry Dibaba had been.
“I didn’t say ‘who.’ I said ‘zoo.’ The fucking Bronx Zoo,” Mike said to the operator. “Get a car here. Police, not park security. Situation involves gunshots.”
He was exasperated, and that heightened my own paranoia.
“No, lady. I didn’t code ‘animal down,’” Mike said, losing his patience. “The animals are fine. Shots fired. At people. We need cops stat, lady, before somebody’s dead.”
She was telling Mike to stay calm and remain on the phone with her.
“I can’t hold on. I’m almost out of juice and I need two hands to shoot, lady. Got it?”
He ended the call and motioned to me to keep moving.
We were finally in low grass. We were clear of the thick growth and I could run faster, not as worried about tripping over branches and rocks.
I was streaking across the open space. There were some lights up ahead—probably in one of the feeding pens—and I was running toward them.
“I think I see animals, Mike,” I said. “Antlers—maybe deer or gazelle.”
“Just go,” he said.
I knew those creatures I had seen were unlikely to harm me, and I knew they had to be separated from me by moats or twenty-foot-high glass enclosures or even electrified fences—just as they were kept apart from the Asian rhinos and the dangerous cats.
Mike had almost caught up with me. I was panting and sweating as I pulled in under the monorail tracks, resting at the edge of the lighted enclosure.
“Not there,” Mike yelled at me. “Get out of the light.”
But it was too late for that warning. I had made myself a target.
I heard a rifle shot explode and then a bullet crash into the concrete base of the monorail track that was just inches above my head.
FORTY-SEVEN
Mike had returned fire in the direction the shots came from and then pulled me under the shading of the elevated tracks.
We were crouching side by side behind a concrete tower, and Mike was rubbing my back with one hand.
“We just need to buy three or four minutes, Coop. That’s all the time it will take for a radio car to get here,” Mike said. “These kids will run at the sound of sirens.”
“Here? We just sit here in the open, because I was stupid enough to stand in the light and let them see me?”
“I want to move,” Mike said. “I’m thinking it out.”
“How?” I asked. “How do we move? How many of them are there?”
“Two. Maybe three,” he said. “Henry’s down for the count, the way I clocked him on the head. I think there’s only one gun between them. Only one round of shots fired each time.”
“All it takes is a single bullet,” I said. I was thinking of the way Paul Battaglia had pitched forward into my arms, his brains spurting everywhere.
“You okay without your jacket?” Mike asked.
I nodded. “I’m not shivering because I’m cold.”
“Take it off.”
I did.
“At the count of three, I’m going to heave your jacket that way,” Mike said, pointing away from us, toward the next concrete stanchion to our right. “On three, you run as fast as you can to the left, at least two towers over.”
“And you?”
“Right with you,” he said. “I’m just drawing fire first.”
It was too still. There was no sound of police activity. I couldn’t tell if the distant noise was hoofbeats or footsteps, but there were creatures on the move.
On three, Mike pushed himself to his feet and threw my jacket with an overhand pitch worthy of a stadium opening day.
I started to run and heard two gunshots, from the edge of the woods, which were volleyed in the direction opposite my destination. Behind me, following the flight path of my jacket. Mike had been right.
He overtook me and grabbed my hand, urging me to keep up with him.
We stayed under the tracks for another fifty yards, then veered off again. We zigged and zagged behind signposts that marked exhibits—which meant we were getting closer to the zoo facilities—and then past a large white board, posted with the words DO NOT ENTER.
“Here, Coop,” Mike said, “Over here.”
I pulled my hand back. “That way must take us to a path.” I said. “That way.”
“That way puts you out in the open. Don’t do it.”
Now we were in the brush again. Our pursuers were not. Their voices carried—it sounde
d like two of them—as they talked excitedly in their unfamiliar dialect.
It wasn’t the place to argue. I motioned to Mike to go ahead and I followed him as closely as I could.
There was an actual trail beneath the low undergrowth. The walking was easier than I expected and we moved fast. Faster and faster.
As Mike turned a corner around a stand of trees, a small shelter—like an open-air garage—came into sight.
“What—?” I said.
There were four steel gondolas, like small versions of the ones used on ski slopes—bottoms shaped like buckets, the upper sides enclosed with mesh gratings, and rooftops also made of steel.
Mike pulled on the door of the first one and opened it. “Get in.”
“It’s not the monorail,” I said. “No.”
“Don’t argue. Get in,” he grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the sleeping machine.
“How do you—?”
“Skyfari, Coop. The most popular old ride at the zoo,” Mike said. “A great place to score with broads when I was at Fordham.”
He was trying to make light of a treacherous situation, and I was approaching the end of my emotional rope.
“Where are they?” I whispered.
“You’ll know when the next bullet whizzes by,” Mike said. “Get in.”
“Where will it take us?”
“Up and over the river, and back to civilization,” he said, holding on as I stepped into the bucket. “Just stay down, kid. Low. They can’t get to you up there.”
“Mike, no!” I said, as he shut the door and closed me into the caged tram. “Get in.”
“I have to crank it up, babe. Turn on the switch,” he said. “Then I’ll jump in.”
I unlatched the door and swung it open for him.
He disappeared for a few seconds, somewhere inside the structure that was the base of the two sets of trams. They didn’t run on tracks like the monorail. Each car was suspended from steel ropes that rose from the base, and lurched them across the treetops and river, over the heart of the zoo. I had hated this ride as a kid—the rocking cable car, the halting motion as it was propelled forward, the fear that I would fall to the earth from a broken machine into a pit of deadly beasts.
Mike had been playing with switches and gears. I heard metal boxes banging. I was sure our adversaries heard him, too.
All of a sudden there was a great noise, as though the entire tram system had come to life again.
Our car was first in line on one set of steel ropes. I watched as the lead tram on the second set of ropes rocked in place, then rolled off the starting blocks and started its ascent—out of the garage, grunting and groaning as though it were alive, climbing up toward the sky.
I clapped my hand to my mouth. Mike must have gotten in that other one and left me behind.
I put my foot in the opening. My head wasn’t clear enough to think. If his goal was to position himself to fire down on them, why had he left me alone in this godforsaken corner of the Bronx?
Shots rang out. I could hear them—three of them in a row—bouncing off the belly of the first old tram that had gone airborne across the way.
I wanted to scream Mike’s name, but I knew that would call attention to the fact that I was still here—here alone.
I heard footsteps and voices now, but going away from me—following the route of the Skyfari tram. Our assailants must have been wondering, as I was, whether Mike didn’t return fire because they had pierced the cab and shot him.
My hands were trembling so badly I couldn’t steady myself to step down from the gondola.
I saw something move on the ground, coming toward me out of the shadows. I had my hand on the pistol grip.
It was Mike.
“Thank God,” I said, letting go of the grip and stretching out my arm to try to reach him. “I thought you’d been shot up there.”
“Leave you behind? Not a prayer, Coop,” Mike said. “Dibaba’s troops are halfway to the Himalayan Highlands by now, looking to find our bodies in that bucket and feed us to the snow leopards.”
“I’m not that tasty,” I said. “Our turn to ride?”
“I’m going to pull the switch to launch this tram right now,” he said. “Get down on the floor. Keep that blond hair out of sight.”
Mike turned to run back inside to the control panels.
I sat on the floor of the bucket and waited for him to return. He fired up the tram and the car shook beneath me, ready to take off. By the time I had scrambled to my knees, Mike was on the outside of the door, slamming it shut. He put his hand to his lips and blew me a kiss as the old cab tilted forward and rolled back, and then heaved off away from him.
I put my fingers through the holes in the mesh to pull myself up and ask what he had done.
“Stay low, Coop. I’ll be there, I promise.”
I ducked down, but I was feeling sick to my stomach, kneeling on the bottom of the gondola. I took Mike’s gun from my waistband and placed it on the floor beside me.
The bucket rocked back and forth as it cleared the roof of its garage and rolled over the connecting joints on the first tower. It was taking me higher and higher, out into the open air with no way for me to see what was happening on the ground, swinging over the Bronx wilderness, as animals seemed to be roaring at me from below.
I heard another loud metallic noise coming from the tram base. I picked my head up, just to the rim of the wire enclosure, and looked back. Mike had launched a third tram on the adjacent track. He must have been in it.
He had set the Skyfari in motion, like a battalion of aged tanks heading off into battle.
I heard the voices from below me, two people yelling at each other, before I heard the rifle discharge. Then instantly, there was the terrible noise made by two bullets that struck my bucket and sent it rocking forward into the darkness of the night sky.
FORTY-EIGHT
“Light, Coop!” Mike shouted. “Shine the light on the ground.”
I could tell from his voice that he was in the gondola behind me, as I expected. It must have been out in the open skyway, too, creaking its way over the forest and grassy field.
I took the flashlight from my jeans pocket, switched it on, and lifted it over my head, holding the end of it with the tips of my fingers.
Mike fired at the ground—three shots in quick succession. He didn’t hit his mark. No one screamed out as though injured.
I put the light down. It could only be another minute or two before we reached the Bronx River.
“Keep cool,” Mike shouted to me.
The water wasn’t very deep at this point in its flow from Westchester to the East River, but it was polluted and muddy—and often had a tough current, as I knew from a case at the botanical garden years earlier. Even if our pursuers could swim, it would slow them down and give us a considerable advantage, for as long as we could stay safe in our aerial cages.
The voices were below me now. I could hear two men exchanging words. They sounded agitated. I couldn’t understand them, so I was agitated, too.
“The woman,” one of them yelled, this time in English. “Get the woman!”
I had exposed myself by holding up the flashlight. That also made it obvious that I wasn’t the one with Dibaba’s gun. They must have thought I was unarmed.
“In a ball, Coop,” Mike shouted. “Go fetal.”
He had heard them too.
I scrunched up on the floor of the bucket. The first two shots—coming from a bit ahead of the direction in which I was moving—missed the target completely. The third one hit the roof of the gondola.
Mike must have stood and lined up his scope. He fired a shot and the men below made a lot of noise. Neither sounded injured, but he must have gotten close enough to force them on the run again.
I thought I heard a siren in th
e distance. I couldn’t be sure whether it was on the highway outside the zoo, or inside the park property.
“Now!” a man screamed. “Shoot now.”
There was the crack of a gun, way too close to me. The bucket staggered—like a drunk getting off a barstool and losing his legs beneath him. But this staggering motion came from above.
The marksman must have struck one of the steel cables holding the bucket onto the track. My car stopped abruptly and just swung back and forth in place. Now I was nauseous as well as cold, and terrifically frightened, too.
“Hold on, Coop,” Mike said. “You’ve got three more cables holding you up, if that’s what you’re thinking. Just stay steady.”
Before I could respond to him, he let go with three or four shots at the twosome on the ground.
I was afraid to move from my position on the floor of the bucket, afraid that by unbalancing it I would rip it free from the other cables that were holding me up, and drop to my death.
The men were laughing now, gleeful that they had crippled my carriage and had me dangling overhead. A few more well-placed shots would have me in their hands.
I sat upright, taking care not to move quickly. I needed to quell the nausea that was rising from my stomach to my throat.
“Stay still, kid. I hear sirens out there.”
Mike’s gondola, on the adjacent track, was just about even with mine by now. There was nothing he could do to stop it, and no way he could come to my assistance. He was about to cross over the river and leave me.
“Why can’t you shoot one of them, Mike?” I said, trying to suppress my tears.
“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?” he called out.
Now his voice was coming from the other side of my bucket. He had lapped me and was heading off into the park, going farther and farther away.
“Back at you, Coop,” he said, firing off several rounds from his tram, but getting only laughter in return from the men on the ground.
I tried to swallow his words. Back at you, Coop. Mike had given me his Glock and now he expected me to use it.
The attackers fired twice more at the cables, and although they missed, the bucket still swung wildly.
Deadfall Page 33
