“Make a nice shot, though,” Honey said, and beamed a dazzling smile at him.
Meyer raised his eyebrows.
“Thanks, no,” Carella said again.
“Think it over,” she said, and turned away and walked back toward her camera crew, flirty little skirt fluttering about her elegant long legs. Ollie watched her go. So did Meyer. Carella walked over to where Levine was still on the phone with the DI.
“We’re going to have to get on that island soon,” Levine was saying. “ Before the Five o ’ Clock News tells everybody we let wild animals eat ’ em for Christmas. ” He listened, and then said, “ You think so? ” He listened again. “ I ’ m not sure the CEO here is gonna buy that. ” He listened, nodded, said, “ Okay, Boss, whatever you say, ” and put the phone back on its bracket in the truck ’ s cab. He turned to Carella and said, “ Quote: ‘ If a dangerous animal is threatening human life, destroy it. ’ Period. Unquote. ”
“So what does he want?”
“A team of sharpshooters.”
“Mr. Hardy won’t like that.”
“Just what I told the DI.”
“Let me go talk to him. You call SWAT, tell them we need enough sharpshooters to take care of five healthy lions.”
Meyer walked over to the truck.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“Shooting the lions,” Carella said.
“I’LL HAVE THEM OFF THAT ISLAND before your sharpshooters get here,” Hardy said. “What’s the sense in killing them? The woman is already dead. Besides, it isn’t as if they escaped confinement and wentlooking for prey. The woman found her own way onto the island somehow. These are wild animals. Carnivores. It was in theirnatureto attack her and devour her.”
“Sir, I’m merely telling you what we plan to do,” Carella said. He looked at his watch. “A SWAT team should be here in ten, twelve minutes. They’ll dispose of the animals at that time.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll have them off the island. You have your plan, I have mine.”
“What’syour plan, Mr. Hardy?”
“I’ll have my vets anesthetize the animals and carry them back here to the holding cages.”
“Back here” was a bunker-like building connected to the island by a ramp and a tunnel that ran under the moat. By now, a considerable number of zoo people had gathered here in the holding area. In addition to zookeepers of various grade levels, there were people from the Curation Department, and two animal behaviorists, and the three veterinarians who would be handling the anesthetizing of the animals out there.
The way Hardy explained it to Carella and Meyer—and to Ollie, who had now joined them—the forthcoming operation was really a simple one. The vets would use either dart guns or blowpipes to administer the anesthetic. The holding cages inside the bunker were flanked by keeper walkways. Guillotine doors opened from squeeze cages on the walkways into the larger holding cages. A five foot high concrete wall formed the back of each cage. The front of each cage was constructed of steel wire mesh. The keeper work area ran down the center of the building. There were access doors to the cages on either side of the work area. The anesthetized animals would be carried from the island to the ramp to the walkways and into the holding cages.
Considering that Carella had told Hardy the shooters would be here in ten to twelve minutes, he took his time debating with his staff the procedures they would use in safely anesthetizing and transporting the lions from the island to the holding area. Should they use an explosive projectile dart or a blowdart? Should they use a dissociative anesthetic, a tranquilizer, a non-narcotic sedative, or a narcotic drug?
“Even smaller cats than the ones out there are dangerous to handle without anesthesia,” Hardy explained. “The young lion who carried off that woman’s leg must weigh at least four hundred pounds. I’d say he measures ten feet long including his tail and stands at least three feet at the shoulders. You try to put a net on a wild animal that size, you’re asking for trouble.”
The drug they debated using was ketamine hydrochloride, a dissociative anesthetic most commonly delivered intramuscularly in doses of 100 to 200 mg/ml. For a dose sufficient enough to provide a rapid effect, a larger dart and more powerful delivery force was required. One of the keepers argued that this heightened the possibility of injury to the animal. Another argued that ketamine HCl was a painful injection. One of the vets argued that the drug induced a tendency for the animal to convulse. With three minutes to spare, they agreed to use the drug, after all, and decided that instead of using a blowdart, which had a higher probability of successful injection, they would use an explosive projectile dart, which had a traumatic impact but which was necessary because the drug was ketamine HCl.
At seven minutes to nine, just as Carella thought he heard the approaching siren of the van bearing the SWAT team, Hardy’s own team went through the steel guillotine doors, out onto the run, down the ramp, and into the tunnel that led to a second pair of guillotine doors that opened discreetly onto the jungle-like environment where the young lion was gnawing on the woman’s severed leg. If the lion heard the guillotine doors opening, he gave no sign of it. He was still busy with the bone—which was what the woman’s leg had now become—when the first of the darts hit him in the forehead. The vets were going for the frontal or dissociative cortex of the brain. But as often happened with explosive projectile darts, the impact was insufficient to detonate the charge. Freddie, which was the lion’s name, lifted his head from the bone, spotted the three vets crouched behind one of the habitat bushes—
“Easy now, Freddie,” one of vets whispered.
—crouched for just an instant, and then charged them.
They ran for the guillotine doors, the lion behind them, ran into the tunnel under the moat, and up the ramp, into the run behind the holding cages, startling Hardy, who realized too late that a lion was loose. He stabbed at the button that began closing the guillotine doors behind the three vets—but the lion was inside as well. The doors clanged shut. Everyone was suddenly in a long narrow holding cage with a lion who’d just had his first taste of human flesh.
The access door to the work area was at the far end of the cage. Between that door and the lion were four zookeepers, three veterinarians, two animal behaviorists, two curators, an assistant director, a director, three detectives, and a partridge in a pear tree.
One of the detectives was Steve Carella.
The lion went directly for him.
Maybe it was his smile.
But Carella wasn’t smiling. In fact, he was terrified, his eyes bulging, his mouth falling wide open as the lion leaped into the air at him. He brought his hands up defensively. Four hundred and some odd pounds of animal force knocked him flat on his back to the concrete floor of the cage. Pinned by enormous paws, Carella looked up at a head the size of a beach ball, all tawny fur and yellow eyes and open jaws and teeth. The lion’s roar resounded through every nerve in Carella’s body. He twisted his head away just as the animal lunged for his face.
A shot rang out.
It took the lion clean between the eyes.
He collapsed onto Carella like a huge smelly rug in somebody’s den.