4 Woof at the Door

by Leslie O'Kane

  The woman shrugged and blew cigarette smoke my direction. In a gravelly voice, she said, “She packed up a few minutes ago. Said everything was too dead to make it worth her while. She went off to see the main attraction, like everyone else.”

  “What ’main attraction?’”

  “Some lion or leopard or something.” She gestured vaguely in a direction behind us. “It’s all the way in the far corner.”

  “Thanks.” Was this one of Damian’s animals? It seemed strange that he would have brought one to such a carnival-like atmosphere. I’d gotten the impression he wouldn’t do such a thing.

  There was a huge crowd in the back corner, as delineated by chain-link fencing with barbed wire on top. I pressed my way through it and spotted a woman from the back wearing mini-skirt over silver go-go boots and a bright tie-dyed T-shirt. “Cheshire?” I called.

  She turned around. “Allida. Hi! I’m waiting in line. I’ll be a few minutes yet.”

  “What’s the line for?”

  “There’s a lion in a van up here. For fifty cents, you can pet him.”

  “Great,” I muttered. And how much would you pay for the opportunity to stick your hand in a piranha tank? I couldn’t see the van or the lion through this crowd. Keeping up a constant patter of “Excuse me, please,” I started to squeeze my way closer, cursing my lack of stature, which currently made the act of breathing in a hot crowd unpleasant and my ability to see over heads impossible.

  “Hey, lady. The line starts back here.” I turned and spotted the angry-looking woman who’d spoken. She had a little girl in her arms.

  “You’re going to let your toddler pet the lion?”

  She clicked her tongue. “Of course. They wouldn’t let all these people do this if it weren’t perfectly safe.”

  “Who is ’they’?”

  She clicked her tongue a second time. “You know. The government.”

  “Lady, this is a flea market. I’m not sure how closely the government is supervising.”

  Just then, the lion let out a roar and people started screaming.

  Up ahead, the crowd parted and fled. A huge male lion was growling and making his way through the panicked crowd, straight toward me.

  Chapter 17

  From the din of the frightened mob, a girl’s shrill voice arose. “Billy poked the lion with a stick!”

  My heart leapt to my throat as the lion neared. This could only be Leo, I thought. I froze, knowing I couldn’t outrun a lion anyway. “Leo, stay,” I cried.

  The lion hesitated, looked at me, then veered off to my right and stopped just ten yards past where I was standing.

  My line of vision restored by the rapidly thinning crowd, I spotted Janine Hesk. She was seated at a small folding table cluttered with what appeared to be plaster carvings of animals. To one side of her was an empty van, its double doors on the back wide open, Leo’s now-broken collar swinging from its tether on the van’s trailer hitch. Janine was clasping a fistful of dollar bills and staring at Leo in disbelief as she rose.

  To my horror, rather than go after Leo, Janine stuffed her bills into her fanny pack and turned around. “What happened?” she cried. “Did somebody hurt my lion?”

  A boy who looked about ten years old, his face pale, hands behind his back, was cowering between the fence and the front of the van. At Janine’s outcry, the boy took off at a dead run.

  “You jabbed my lion with a stick, didn’t you? Didn’t you!” Janine shrieked after him.

  In the meantime, Leo circled back. He was now a mere five yards or so away from me. He positioned himself between some other seller’s rack of faded clothing and a table packed with dirty old glassware. Surrounding sellers had deserted their wares, and Leo looked from side to side as if prepared to pounce on the first stranger who ventured too close. Terrified, I forced myself to slowly sidestep so that I’d no longer be directly between Leo and his owner.

  The crowd was still noisy and panicked. They continued to push their way out of the lion’s vicinity. Soon a baseball diamond’s worth of space was cleared, with only Leo, Janine Hesk, and me in the field of play.

  “Janine,” I pleaded, “you’ve got to get Leo back in the van! Now! Before someone gets hurt!”

  Just then, a host of security people approached on carts, no doubt having been alerted by the sound of Leo’s roar. My thoughts battled the sensation that this was too crazy to really be happening. It felt as though I were in some circus scene, or in Theater of the Bizarre. The guard that whizzed past me had a gun in his holster. The sight of the weapon brought home the immediacy of the problem.

  The carts were pulling up between Janine and Leo, blocking her from view. I gestured and shouted at them to move to either side of Janine. My fear was that, with the guards actively blocking his access to his owner, the lion might feel he needed to defend her—a de facto member of his pride. My efforts were ignored as four guards—all of them burly looking men—seemed to peer straight through me at the lion.

  “Stay away from my lion!” Janine was shouting. She pushed her way between two of the guards and tried to shove them back. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot him! He’s completely tame!”

  I looked around for a means to help her. A middle-aged man who looked out of place in his business suit and tie was walking past me, utterly absorbed by the conversation he was having over his cellphone. In the hand that covered his free ear, he held a burger that he’d already taken a bite out of.

  I ran up to him and grabbed his arm. “This is an emergency. I’ve got to have that burger!”

  He gaped at me as if I were insane.

  I grabbed my wallet out of my fanny pack. “Please. I’ll buy it from you. I need it for the lion.”

  “What kind of a—!” He froze as he saw the lion, who had two security men with their guns drawn and Janine trying to shield the lion with her body. He held up his hands and backed away from me. “Just take it, lady.” He pivoted and walked away with purposeful strides.

  Burger in hand, I ran over to Janine. A guard had pulled his gun and had it trained on Leo. “Don’t shoot,” I hollered. “Let the owner get him under control.”

  Janine looked up at me. Her green eyes flashed and her attractive features were tense, but her demeanor softened when she saw what I was carrying. “Oh, thank God,” she cried. I gave the burger to her. She’d disconnected the leash from the trailer hitch. “If only the buckle on Leo’s collar weren’t broken.”

  I grabbed the leash from her and stuffed the end still attached to the broken collar through the handler’s loop at the opposite end. “Just use the leash like a choke collar,” I explained as I handed it back to her.

  Five guards had formed a half circle around Leo, protecting the crowd. Their guns were drawn as they kept wary eyes on the animal.

  Maintaining his stance a short distance away, Leo was growling and pawing at the air.

  “Give her some room,” I said to the security officers. “This is the lion’s owner.”

  “Put your guns away,” Janine demanded. “You’re scaring him!”

  “Feeling’s mutual, lady,” one retorted.

  “Come on, Leo,” Janine called in babyish tones. “Here, boy. Let’s go.”

  Leo took a couple of steps toward her, then she tossed half of the burger on the pavement. As he scarfed that down in one bite, she flipped the lasso-like leash around his neck.

  “You’ll get the rest in your cage,” she said. She kept a firm grip on his leash, her hand buried in Leo’s dark mane, and he walked calmly with her to back toward her van

  “You’re going to have to pack up and take this animal out of here, ma’am,” one of the security guards told her.

  “No problem,” she said, giving her black hair a haughty toss. “I don’t like it here anyway.” She opened the back door of her van. The lion leapt into it.

  As she locked the back doors, Damian drove up. He was tailed by some angry security guards, shouting at him to stop. Apparently he’d heard
about the lion somehow and drove straight through the gates without paying.

  He charged out of his van. “Janine!” Damian shouted. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “I just brought Leo with me to generate some interest for my carvings. I didn’t know some stupid kid was going to hurt him.”

  “He’s hurt?” Damian asked, flinging Janine’s passenger door open to check for himself, through the panels that separated the lion’s cage from the front seat.

  “He got jabbed by a stick,” Janine said.

  Apparently satisfied with his lion’s physical state, Damian quickly reemerged from the van. “You should never have taken such a stupid chance, Janine!”

  The security guards near me were now conversing about what to do. One of them nodded to the others and walked toward Janine with a self-important swagger. “Ma’am, we’ve put a call in to the police. They’re going to charge you with reckless endangerment.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Leo isn’t dangerous.”

  “You didn’t get my permission to take Leo in the first place!” Damian was so angry he seemed oblivious to the public setting. “You had no right to get him out of his cage like this!”

  Around us, some of the crowd made a show of pretending to look at the used merchandise nearby while they eavesdropped. Not wanting to be guilty of the same infraction, I decided to look for Chesh.

  Before I could get out of earshot, Damian called, “Allida, wait.”

  “Leo is mine!” Janine retorted. “He always has been mine.”

  “Not according to the judge, he’s not.” Damian turned toward me. He still looked furious. “Come on, Allida. Let’s get out of here. I’ll give you a ride to your car.”

  “Damian,” Janine interrupted, “you had better learn to keep your nose out of my business. What are you doing down here anyway?” She gave me a haughty appraisal. “Are you two here together?”

  Following Damian’s lead, I said nothing. Janine grabbed my arm. “You better watch what you’re getting yourself into, girlie,” she said under her breath.

  She let go of me and tried to open her door, but Damian refused to allow Janine back into her van, saying, “You think I’m going to let you keep custody of my lion after this?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys, slapping them into Janine’s palm. “Give me the key to your van, so I can get Leo out of here.”

  “No, Damian! I’m not giving you my car keys! My artwork is in that van, too. Knowing you, you’ll just ruin the—”

  Damian grabbed two large plastic bags on the front seat and thrust them into her arms. “Here. Get your dumb carvings, and get out of here!”

  She gave me a smirk. “See what I mean, Allida?” Casting an evil eye Damian’s direction, she slowly packed up the statues that had been on the table, folded up the table and chair, tossed those into Damian’s van, then left with a pair of the security officers, her nose in the air.

  Damian, in the meantime, had his hands full with the other security officers, assuring them that he had nothing to do with this and only wanted them to move aside so he could get his lion out of here. Finally, the guards relented, amid my and other witnesses’ assurances that he arrived well after his ex-wife and the lion. He got into his Janine’s van, threw open the door on the passenger side and said, “Allida. Get in.”

  I scanned the crowd of lookee-loos, which, now that the lion was safely locked away, had enveloped us. Finally, I found Cheshire. She was regarding all of this coolly, standing with her arms crossed and a bored expression on her face. I called to her, “We’ll meet you in the parking lot. All right?”

  She held up a hand in acknowledgement, then called back, “I need ten minutes to finish packing everything up. You can follow me, okay? You’ll be able to recognize my van, right?”

  “Yes.” Unless we got it mixed up with all the other orange VW vans with gaudy, inept murals on the side. I climbed up into the seat beside Damian and shut the door. Through the thick wire-mesh panels behind my seat, I could hear Leo’s rumbling noises.

  “Is he purring?”

  Damian nodded. “He’s really gentle. Thinks of himself as a house cat.” He smacked the steering wheel with his hand. “I can’t believe she did this. What was she thinking? She snuck my lion in here and actually charged people to pet him. That’s so stupid.”

  “So apparently she has a key to the animal den after all.”

  “Apparently,” he grumbled.

  We ever-so-slowly drove through the crowd. People were jogging alongside and trying to peer through the tinted windows. Damian drove us out through the gate, then we pulled over.

  My pulse finally almost back to normal, I asked, “You’re going to have to take Leo home right away, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry. You won’t have any trouble at the warehouse with that woman, will you?”

  I smiled at the dramatic tone he’d use to describe Chesh Bellingham. “That woman?” I repeated.

  He grimaced. “I met her and Ty when they were out at my place on the tour that Hank arranged.”

  Damian’s demeanor made it clear that he didn’t care for Chesh, but that wasn’t surprising. Considering that Damian had met her while in Ty’s presence, she’d have been using her drug-head persona. “I’m sure it’ll be fine if she and I go to the warehouse by ourselves.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  I pointed it out, and he drove me over there. He stopped in an empty space at the end of the aisle. “How ‘bout I wait with you? Then I’ll follow the two of you over there, just to make sure there are no surprises when you get there.”

  I had to grin at that statement. What could possibly be more surprising than a lion on the loose at a flea market? “Thanks. I’m sure you and Leo will be able to scare off any intruders.”

  I waited a moment to see if, without my prompting, Damian would explain how Janine had access to Leo. He remained silent, however. “Damian, if Janine could get Leo, couldn’t she also gotten out Atla last Saturday?”

  He frowned. “I guess it’s possible, but….” He shook his head. “No. There’s just no way Janine would have gotten Atla out of his cage. Janine’s scared to death of wolves. You heard her on that show. She even made that bogus claim about Kaia having bitten her.”

  “But maybe she hired Larry Cunriff to handle the part about getting Atla into Ty’s house. Is it possible that she hired Larry to kill Ty, then, once he was expendable, she killed Larry?”

  “Janine? Murder someone? No way. I was married to the woman for six years. There’s no way she’d turn into a ruthless killer in the year since we got divorced.”

  He was convinced of her innocence, but what little I’d seen of her had given me no reason to think kindly of her. Plus, no one could truly know what someone else was capable of doing.

  “I noticed she knew your name,” Damian said. “You two know each other?”

  “No, I went to her office a couple of days ago to meet her.”

  Damian tensed. “Why?”

  “I wanted to ask her about Larry Cunriff. I’ve been trying to find out if he was Ty’s partner in the dog-fighting ring.”

  “Did she think he was?”

  “She said it was possible.”

  He nodded. “Thing is, though, since both Ty and Larry are dead, it’s going to be hard to prove.” He gave me a sideways glance. “Have you come across any avid dog lovers who might’ve turned into vigilantes?”

  “You think these murders might have been the result of some anti-animal cruelty crusaders?”

  “It’s a possibility, don’t you think?” he replied.

  “Sure it’s possible. If we were talking about a really off-balanced animal lover.” Perhaps, I considered silently, someone whose dog had been killed. Seth Melhuniak came to mind.

  What about Damian Hesk himself? He’d devoted his entire life to rescuing exotic animals. Could he have found out what was being done to his wolves and kil
led everyone involved?

  No, I decided immediately. I simply could not believe this man beside me was capable of murder. Then again, what if he looked at the deaths as self-defense on behalf of the animals? Furthermore, I didn’t know Damian whatsoever and had just now been skeptical of his ability to assess his ex-wife’s innocence.

  “Janine warned me to watch out a few minutes ago,” I said. “That I had ‘no idea what I was getting’ myself into.” I studied his face in profile, but he gave no reaction. “Do you have any idea what she meant by that?”

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “She must realize… I’m attracted to you. She’s still holding out this hope that we’ll get back together again. It’s never going to happen, though.”

  Chesh drove up in her hippie van, honking and waving. I got out to head to my car just as she drove up alongside Damian’s. “Hey, guys. You all set? How’s the gentle giant cat doing?”

  Damian glanced back at Leo. “Sleeping. He’s really used to riding around in here. He’ll be fine. I’m going to follow the both of you, then take off.”

  “Groovy, dude,” she said.

  The outside of the Way Cool Collectibles warehouse was unexceptional—basic brown clapboard siding, no windows. As I looked at it, I couldn’t help imagining it during fights as filled with smelly macho males, titillated at the sight of a couple of unfortunate, abused animals fighting to the death. I could almost hear the men’s shouts and smell the beer breath and cigarette smoke.

  Damian pulled up behind us into the small parking lot, which was empty except for our vehicles. He got out of his vehicle and quietly shut the door behind him. “Leo’s still zonked. I can’t imagine how he could get into any trouble if I come in with you just for a minute or two.”

  “Suit yourself, dude,” Cheshire said with a shrug. She unlocked the warehouse door and flicked a light switch, then led Damian and me inside. The place had aisles and was neater than I’d expected it to be. There were rows of boxed items all with inventory numbers on them. Then, as we went further into the room, the neatness broke down and it looked like someone’s messy attic.