James Patterson: Zoo

“Jungle love?” I asked, untying the 99-cent purchase, which had somehow become tangled over my left shoulder. I brushed back some broken glass from a picture frame that had fallen off the wall. It was a photo of her dad, a Connecticut equities trader. Girl had some blue blood in her. I turned it over and scooted it under the bed.

“Equatorial rain forest love,” Natalie said, rolling on top of me. She licked my earlobe. “I mean, doing it standing on a couch?”

“Well, if you recall, I was the only one standing,” I said. In the corner of my eye, the winking red light of my iPhone let me know I had a message.

“How could I forget?” she said, thumbing sweat out of her eyes. “That wasn’t biology. That was geology. You know, seismology, tectonics.”

“It’s like Archimedes and I always say,” I said. “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.”

I waited until Nat headed for the shower before I retrieved my phone. My message was a text from Abraham Bindix, my lion man.

OZ, UNBELIEVABLE. IT’S NOT JUST L.A. IT’S HAPPENING HERE, 2!

I called him immediately.

“Oz, you are not so crazy after all,” Abe said in his Afrikaans accent, with his slightly rolled r ’s and chopping-block consonants. “You were right. Lion behavior is wrong, absolutely wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

“I just got back from a curtailed hunt, up north, near Zimbabwe. We came upon a village—an entire village—emptied out. From one end to the other was lion spoor and blood. I’ve never seen or even heard of such a thing.”

There was a note of panic in Abe’s voice. Which was odd, coming from this burly Afrikaner who looked like a retired strongman from the circus.

“In fact, I’m here dealing with the military, so I cannot exactly talk about it. But when I saw on the news about the lion attack at the L.A. zoo, I knew I had to call you. You have to come here to Botswana, man. And bring cameras. You and the rest of the world have to see this to believe it.”

“Say no more,” I said. My iPhone pinched under my jaw, I snatched up a pen and looked around Nat’s bedroom for something to write on. “I’m packing a bag and catching the next flight. Where can you meet me? At the airport in Maun, is it?”

“Right, man. Maun. Let me know which flight you’ll be on as soon as you can. This is incredible, terrible, incredible.”

“I’ll call you when the first flight changes over,” I said as Nat came in, wearing a towel.

“Right, man,” said Abe, and hung up.

“Um, flight? You’re going somewhere?” she said. I was scribbling notes on the receipt for the panties.

“On a, uh…a trip,” I said.

“I gathered that much. Where?”

“Botswana,” I cough-said.

“What?”

“Botswana.”

“Botswana. Africa?! Are you nuts?” She flicked her wet hair over her shoulder. “No, of course you are. Silly question. But you can’t do that. People can’t do that. You can’t get a phone call, and then, like, call a taxi out to JFK and go to Botswana! Especially if you’re unemployed!”

“You’re right,” I said. “What the hell do I do with Attila? Can you watch him for me?”

“SO NOW I have to babysit a monkey?”

“An ape,” I said.

Nat was beginning to get actually pissed at me now, not just play-pissed.

“The answer’s no, Oz. You know how creeped out I get. Besides, I have class.”

“Relax. My super’s mother has it mostly covered. You just have to check in on him once a day and give him his meds. Please. You could polish up your bedside manner.”

“On a monkey?” she shrieked.

“An ape!” I said. “Besides, this trip is the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for. If I get some tape of abnormal lion behavior in Africa and couple it with the L.A. zoo breakout, people might listen, and we can start trying to figure this thing out for real. Humanity is in jeopardy. We can—”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t give me the HAC spiel again. Just don’t. I really can’t believe you, Oz. First, you drop out of the PhD when you’re practically ABD—”

“I was bored.”

“Then for over a year—I don’t know, for a hobby?—you decide to randomly disrupt classes at New York’s finest institutions of higher learning. You were lucky NYU didn’t press charges for the chemistry thing.”

“I was trying to get people to use their goddamn heads.”

“I like you, Oz,” Natalie said. “I know you’re brilliant, but this HAC thing is really starting to get between us. With my class schedule, there’s barely enough time for us to even see each other. I mean, I can’t even remember the last time you took me out to a real restaurant. Now you’re leaving for Africa.”

I looked at my girlfriend, perched on the edge of the bed. She was gorgeous. And she liked beer and Chris Farley movies. She played Modern Warfare 2 with me—and was good at it. We watched basketball together. She was a Celtics fan, but that was one of her only flaws.

That’s when I shocked her—and myself.

“How about this?” I said. “I go to Africa. If it’s another dud, I pack up my End-Is-Nigh sandwich boards, hand in my white–Harlem Globetrotter ID card, and get a job where I have to wear pants. Agreed?”

“If you come back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Is it a deal?”

She rolled her bottle-green eyes.

“Fine, Tarzan. I’ll watch King Kong while you go into the jungle, even if it means for the last time. But concerning Attila, don’t think this is some sort of mommy tryout. I told you I don’t want kids. Not with you. Not with Leonardo DiCaprio. No one.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Relax. I just have a chimp who needs to eat. Have you seen my boxers anywhere?”

She finally smiled.

“Try the couch cushions in the living room.”

I LEFT NATALIE’S apartment, a little uncertain of what I’d just gotten myself into. What if Botswana was a bust? Sometimes I wish I could put my mouth in a cage. It’s always pushing me into corners. I’d rather picture myself in a coffin than in a cubicle.

But by the time I unlocked my bike, I decided that I actually needed my own ultimatum. This was it. It really was time for me to put up or shut up concerning HAC. If a pride of maniacal lions didn’t open the world’s eyes to what was coming down the pike, then nothing would.

Back at the apartment, after I relieved and paid Mrs. Abreu, I took out Attila’s folding cage from the closet and assembled it. Attila whimpered when he saw me putting it together, knowing what it meant when I had to bust the thing out. I hated to delegate the poor guy to six-by-four-foot solitary for the time I’d be away, but there wasn’t much else I could do. I wrote a quick note for Nat to double his Zoloft and increase his vitamin D supplements, since he wouldn’t be able to exercise out on the terrace.

After I got the cage put together, I let Attila in from the terrace and set him up in his beanbag chair for a special treat. I gave him his lunch as I played his favorite Beatrix Potter DVD, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and Mrs. Tittlemouse .

As he sat contentedly watching, I ran downstairs to get my bags from the storage bin. When I came back less than five minutes later, I couldn’t believe what was going on.

Attila wasn’t in front of his DVD player anymore; he was in the shop. He’d already hurled two of my TVs into the wall and was standing on the table, banging a laptop against the corner.

“Attila!” I shouted. “Stop it! Get down this instant! What the hell are you doing?”

Attila turned, screeching.

For a moment—just a brief, brief moment—I saw something in his eyes, a coldness, a meanness, that I’d never seen before. I actually thought he would swing the laptop at me.