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They were just about to start working when Red received a text from Mandy, his girlfriend. She was a beautiful blonde gal, but not beautiful in a big-city selfie-taking kind of way. More in the way of a woman who turns heads when she struts into a beer joint wearing tight jeans and a low-cut top, halfway soused and looking for trouble. Red’s favorite kind of gal.
Mandy’s best feature, if you asked Red in polite company, was her gorgeous blue eyes. But if it was just the guys listening, Red would admit it was her amazing body, which was the reason he’d finally broken down and gotten an iPhone. That was because Mandy would occasionally send him a really good photo—the kind of photo you don’t share with anyone else—and his old phone, a cheap Korean knockoff, didn’t do the photos justice.
Now he walked over to his truck, where he could enjoy the photo, if she’d sent one, without Billy Don trying to peek over his shoulder.
Unfortunately, it was just a bunch of words.
Hear about the crazy stuff at that zoo south of blanco? Mandy asked.
Red used one finger to peck out a reply. Whats going on?
He could see that little bubble with three dots in it, which, according to Billy Don, meant she was typing something. A new text popped up a few seconds later.
Bunch of animals got out and were running all over the hiway, and somebody said they found a dead guy.
Red said, The animals found a dead guy?
She said, No the cops did at the zoo and the rumor is somebody killed him.
Red opened his mouth to call out to Billy Don and Garrett, but then he changed his mind. He wanted to know the full story first.
He sent a reply. How many annimals.
Sometimes he forgot proper punctuation or spelled a word wrong, which was okay, because Mandy did, too.
A lot, like a hundred or something, maybe more.
Red mulled that over for a minute. He’d driven past that zoo countless times, and he knew they had two ten-foot fences running around the entire thing. Secure as hell. There might’ve been one or two animals that could’ve jumped those fences, but why would they? They had all the food they wanted, and good shelter, and other animals of their kind to get romantic with. Sounded like a damn paradise to Red.
Any idea who it was, he asked.
Nobody knows yet. I heard its someone that works there. Who knows? Lots of gossip flying around.
Then he said, They think the killer let the animals out on purpose?
Sure looks that way, Mandy said. Someone said both gates were open.
Red thought about the conversation earlier in the truck, when Billy Don had said maybe one of the animals had gotten out, and Garrett had said, “Hope so.”
Why would he hope that? Seemed a little weird that a guy would want a wild animal running loose in traffic. There were already enough deer, feral pigs, and other critters creating driving hazards around here without some extras being thrown in from a zoo.
Let me know if you here anything else, Red replied.
K, Mandy said.
And maybe send me a picture if you feel like it, Red said, and he added one of those smiley face emoji thingies.
She replied with an emoji of ruby-red lips, which wasn’t nearly as good as the photos she normally sent, but that was okay, as long as it didn’t become a habit.
Marlin sat in his truck with his phone at the ready. He needed to contact as many nearby landowners as possible to alert them about the loose exotics. The estray law would apply in this situation, just as if the zoo animals were traditional livestock. Any landowner who shot or stole any of the animals could face a civil suit, and theft of livestock was a state jail felony.
As he dialed the first number—attempting to reach a man who owned three hundred acres just north of the zoo, on the same side of the highway—Marlin spotted a KHIL news van pulling to the shoulder on the other side of 281. Marlin was glad to see it. The media coverage would help spread the word and protect both the public and the animals.
The call he was making went to voicemail.
Hi, it’s Kent. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you real soon.
After the beep, Marlin said, “Hello, Mr. Flodin, it’s John Marlin. If you haven’t heard, a bunch of animals got loose from the zoo next door sometime early this morning. If you see one, please give me a call, will you? And spread the word, if you don’t mind. I know we have some hunters in this area, and all of those animals are off limits, legally speaking. Appreciate your help.”
Marlin dialed another number, got voicemail again, and as he was leaving the same message, he saw that Kitty Katz, the longtime reporter for KHIL, had emerged from the news van and was waving at him from across the highway. Now she was pointing at a microphone in her hand. Her question was obvious. Will you do an interview?
He signaled back through his open window. Stay there. I’ll drive over.
“Might rain later,” Red said.
Garrett glanced at the sky. “Not many clouds.”
They’d been working for about thirty minutes, and the truth was, Garrett was doing a fairly decent job with the chisel. Meanwhile, Red had been trying to think of a way to get information out of the kid. Had to be subtle. Didn’t want to make him feel like he was being questioned.
Red hadn’t mentioned the dead body at the zoo yet, but it would only be a matter of time before Billy Don heard about it on his phone and blurted it out. No way would he be able to keep something like that to himself.
“Speaking of the weather, we had a terrible drought a few years back,” Red said. “I mean, we get droughts all the time, but this one was especially bad. Remember that one, Billy Don?”
“Yep.”
“And you asked why it always rains after a drought—and you weren’t kidding.”
Garrett smiled at that one.
“Whatever,” Billy Don said.
“That drought got so bad that everybody was clearing cedar, because they suck up so much water,” Red said. “Then that woman came down from Minnesota or somewhere, upset that we were gonna harm some kind of rare bird by chopping down all the cedar trees. Turns out the bird uses the cedar bark to build nests, or some bullshit like that. Remember that, Billy Don?”
“The red-necked sapsucker,” Billy Don said.
“That’s right,” Red said. “That was a strange deal. She was a tall, good-looking, blonde lady, and she had some strange little dude with her. That guy was a major weirdo. I wouldn’t have cared why they were here, except this rich old man died and left me his brush-cutting business, which was mostly a bunch of tree-clearing machines—”
“The BrushBuster 3000,” Billy Don said. “That’s what they was called. Because that’s how much pressure the pincher cutting blades could apply—three thousand pounds per square inch.”
“You’re interrupting my story with useless trivia,” Red said. “Anyway, the weird little dude blew up all of my machines—well, all except one, and he tried to kill both of us with it.”
Red was wanting to see how Garrett would react to that kind of extreme behavior.
The hitchhiker stopped working for a second. “That’s crazy. What happened?”
“Drove it straight into the trailer on the job site. Me and Billy Don were on the front porch, and we had to dive inside.”
“So we wouldn’t be kilt,” Billy Don said.
“And still it was pretty close,” Red said.
“Broke my damn arm,” Billy Don said.
“I got a big gash on my leg,” Red said.
Garrett had a strange expression on his face, and now he was shaking his head. “Between that and your Vegas trip and the pig-hunting contest, you guys lead some interesting lives.”
“You got that right,” Billy Don said. “That ain’t even the half of it. We could tell stories all day. Like the time we trapped what was supposably a chupacabra. Or when Red shot a guy dressed in a deer suit.”
“Why was Red dressed in a deer suit?” Garrett asked.
“No, the other guy was.”
“What’s a deer suit?”
“You know—a suit that’s supposed to make you look like a deer. It was dark out, so it kinda worked.”
“I was telling a story,” Red said.
“Whatever,” Billy Don said.
“What happened to the weird little dude?” Garrett asked.
“Well,” Red said, “as he was coming at us with the tree cutter—”
“The BrushBuster 3000,” Billy Don said.
“—I fired a couple shots at him, and then he plowed into the trailer, and he ended up dead. Thought at first I’d killed him, but it turned out he’d broken his neck in the crash.”
“That has got to be the wildest shit I’ve heard in a long time,” Garrett said. “And I’ve heard a lot of wild shit.”
For some reason, Red took pride in that.
He said, “He was way out of line, huh? Getting all crazy like that.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Garrett said.
I guess? Red thought.
“He tried to kill us,” Red said. “We hadn’t done nothing, but he wanted to kill us.”
“But you owned the tree-clearing machines,” Garrett said.
“So what?”
“I’m not saying he was in the right, but maybe he wasn’t really trying to kill you.”
“Then what the hell was he doing?”
“Maybe he was just trying to do something, you know, to make a big impression and draw attention to the problem. Maybe he was even willing to die for a cause he believed in. Maybe he knew you were going to shoot at him.”
Red had never considered that possibility before. So he considered it now and promptly concluded it was bullshit.
“Maybe that’s a lot of maybes,” he said. “I’d say the guy was just plain nuts. Who wants to die for some stupid bird?”
“I bet he didn’t think it was a stupid bird,” Garrett said, “especially if he traveled all the way down here from Minnesota to protect it.”
By this point, Red was pretty sure he and Garrett would not get along on a long-term basis.
“Little son of a bitch cared more about birds than people,” Red said.
“That kind of thing—taking a stand—changes the world,” Garrett said. “Think of the guy in Tiananmen Square.”
“Where?” Red asked.
“Or the students at Kent State.”
“Never heard of it,” Red said.
“Or Nathan Hale,” Garrett said.
“The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island?”
“Or, hey, what about the men at the Alamo?”
Damn it. That was a good point.