CHAPTER 11

Thomas missed the city. As a younger man he had spent a lot of time there, but with home and work keeping him to the tamer environs of Evanston he came downtown rarely now. He liked Chicago’s erratic, gray vastness, its bare trees and the wind rippling in over the lake. He headed down to the shore, thinking about Ed and wondering what he would do with his life when all this blew over. He was at Lincoln Park Zoo before he realized it, and since the place looked quiet and was still—amazingly—free, he went in as he had done so many times with Ed when they were boys.

It wasn’t so much quiet as deserted. It was late afternoon and very cold, but he found strolling around by himself, considering the animals hardy enough to venture out, strangely satisfying. He was usually conflicted about zoos, drawn to the beauty and magnificence of the animals while still feeling something like pity for the creatures themselves, however much he told himself that such places served all manner of positive functions. Today he felt only a kind of peace and the fleeting ghosts of memory.

He saw just one family, a thin-faced man and his wife who drummed on the glass of the gorilla house to the delight of their screaming kids. Thomas nearly objected, but he didn’t have the energy, and the gorillas just watched blankly, waiting for the humans to leave.

He walked through the Kovler big-cat house, watching the snow leopards stalking back and forth, and then went back outside into the cold where the lions lounged on snow-patched rocks, separated from him by a low fence and a steep, empty moat. They had always finished up here as kids, he and Ed, going from enclosure to enclosure and arguing amiably which was cooler, the lynx or the serval, in the same way that they had debated outfielders or wide receivers. The lions looked as lions always seem to look, casually haughty and indifferent, lazily tolerating people like him who came to gape at them, secure in the knowledge that they were the lords of their turf, however limited it might be. Even enclosed like this, even in the Chicago winter with the gray towers of the city on one side and the grayer waters of Lake Michigan on the other, they brought a little piece of the savannah with them and ruled it.

You have to respect that, thought Thomas, suddenly feeling the absence of his brother as he had not done all day.

He was watching one of the lionesses snoring and scratching herself absently, and didn’t sense the presence of the man until he was standing right beside him. He was dressed in a heavy thermal jacket, gloves, and a knitted hat that covered most of his face.

Thomas instinctively started to move away. The man was too close, too conveniently bundled up against the cold, and suddenly he had an arm against Thomas’s back, bracing him against the fence.

Thomas tried to shrug it off, but the guy—he was white, but Thomas could say nothing beyond that—took his left wrist and wrenched it high up his spine, a single swift movement that was over before he could flex against it. Thomas assumed he would go for his wallet—and given the way things had gone over the last couple of days, he was content to let that go—but he made no such move. Then the guy’s knee stabbed upward into Thomas’s groin and he doubled up.

“Leave it alone,” hissed his attacker, his mouth against Thomas’s ear.

For a second the words meant nothing and Thomas, overcome by a wholly unexpected fury, came surging up out of the near-crouch he was in, and struck out with his right fist.

He caught the man squarely on the side of his head, blind-siding him. For a second or less, Thomas thought the other man might run. But the punch had only made him angry, and his head snapped back around toward Thomas with a snarl so that the eyes beneath the woolen hat flashed an icy blue, which made Thomas step back, his momentary fury turning quickly into panic. He raised both fists to protect his face from whatever onslaught was about to come, and the error almost killed him.

There was no sudden rain of blows. Instead the attacker stepped in close and grabbed Thomas under his raised arms in a sudden and unsettling bear hug. Then he was lifting and pushing, and Thomas felt his whole weight rise up the fence and wedge briefly against the rail. For a moment he saw those furious eyes and the deserted zoo spread out behind his attacker, and then he kicked and the muffled face registered first pain, then a wild determination.

Suddenly Thomas was tipping back, over the metal rail and the chain-link fence. His head and upper body teetered in space, and then he was falling backward, turning.

He clawed at the fence as he fell, but his fingers scrabbled at nothing, and then he was rolling heavily in the air, bouncing off the concrete lip and tumbling twenty feet down into the dry moat. His mind moved twice as fast as his hands so that he had time to watch them grasping at nothing, powerless to do anything about it, with time enough to sense the coming impact with terror and fury. The sky fell away and he dropped like a stone.