year veteran who was promoted to his position the week before.
The radio squeals, static crunches.
“A chimpanzee,” says the bitch box.
“Come again?” says Officer Jack Murphy, at the wheel.
The growing crowd on the corner of Broadway and 123rd is spilling into the street when the police arrive on the scene. The lights paint the scene red and blue. Murphy gives a half whoop with the siren and curtly parts the crowd by climbing the cruiser onto the sidewalk.
Sergeant Perez rolls down his window and shines his Maglite at the red plastic awning of the bodega. Bright eyes flash back at him in the pale ring of light.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” says Murphy.
Okay, so dispatch isn’t on shrooms, Perez thinks. What appears to be a chimpanzee is indeed standing on top of the awning. Wearing a red hat.
Perez and Murphy step out of the car.
“Ooh, the po po’s here,” somebody says. “What’d the monkey do, Officer? He rob a bank?”
One of the kids in front of the store whacks at the bodega’s awning with a broom handle.
“C’mon, Bubbles,” the kid says in a high-pitched voice. “Quit messin’. It’s me, Michael.” He drops the impression. “Get down here ’fore I beatcha ass.”
The kids are laughing. It’s a circus atmosphere.
“Gimme that,” Perez says, snatching the broom from the kid.
Perez looks up at the chimp. Noticing what looks like blood on the animal’s face, he lightly lays his hand on the handle of his Glock.
He knows it’s not a funny situation. His brother-in-law, a New Jersey state trooper, once told him about an escaped pet chimp in West Orange who had turned some guy’s face into a Picasso. These guys can be very dangerous animals. Not to be fucked with.
Perez puts the radio to his cheek.
“We got the monkey over here on 123rd and Broadway. He’s perched on the awning over a store. We need to get animal control up here. Someone with a tranquilizer gun or something. We can keep watch in the meantime.”
“Ten four,” says the radio, and Perez clips it to his belt.
“Whatsamatter, Magilla Gorilla?” says Murphy. “You want a banana or somethin’?”
Perez can’t believe it. It looks like talking a chimp off a ledge is going to be the first test of his command.
Above the crowd, Attila cowers against the building’s bricks, paralyzed with fear and confusion. He scrambled up to escape the crowd of screaming people, and now he can’t go up or go down. Adrenaline surges in his nerves as more and more voices cackle and shout from below, and more cars with piercing colored lights arrive.
Soon a large van joins the three police cruisers parked on the street. Two men in crisp tan uniforms step out of the van.
Attila peeks out over the edge of the awning, then darts back into the corner against the brick wall. He shrinks into himself, trying to make his body as small as possible. He wants to disappear.
Scrunched against the bricks, he finds a bundle of coaxial cables strung along the corner of the six-story building. He wraps his fingers around it, then his toes.
The animal control officers—one of whom is a former horse trainer—aren’t city workers but independent contractors hired on a case-by-case basis. The one who’s a former trainer chambers a dart into his tranquilizer pistol while his partner unhooks the ladder from the van’s roof. Too late. The chimp is climbing.
“Hey, hey, yo!” One of the street kids points. “He goin’ all King Kong up in this shit.”
Sergeant Perez and the animal control guy exchange a look and a groan as the chimp scurries up a bundle of cables that runs along the side of the building. The speed with which he zips up there is pretty amazing. Dude is boogying.
“Go, monkey, go!” the kids start chanting. The ape makes it to the top of the six-story building and disappears over the ledge of the roof.
After waiting a respectful moment, Officer Murphy shrugs at his boss and joins in the chanting.
Chapter 49
CHLOE WANTED ME to go to the hospital right away. I waved her off. I’d been in enough waiting rooms lately. Still keyed up with adrenaline, I dumped half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my knee and taped wads of paper towels to it. Clutching my leg, I hobbled around the apartment surveying the rest of the wreckage.
It was as if everything I owned had been fed through a wood chipper. There was hardly an object in the apartment that Attila hadn’t found a way of smashing. To say nothing of the suffocating, nauseating stench of rotten food combined with the piss and shit spattered everywhere. I figured I shouldn’t count on getting my deposit back.
I had known that before long Attila would become unmanageable, and I’d have to find a more suitable home for him, but he was only five. Chimps generally don’t get too unruly until they’re a bit older. I couldn’t help but wonder if what I was looking at here showed rage, a personal anger toward me. What had made Attila do this? Separation anxiety? And how had he escaped from his cage?
With our bags still piled in the hallway outside the door, Chloe stepped gingerly amid the wreckage, afraid to touch anything.
“Oz, I’m so sorry,” she said.
Maybe it was Chloe’s presence that had set him off. Chimps are fiercely territorial, and have often been observed to kill over boundary disputes. Had Attila perceived Chloe as some sort of territorial threat?
On the other hand, he’d clearly taken a lot of time to do this much damage to the apartment.
I was walking past the doorway of the back bedroom when I smelled something especially foul. Even worse than the potpourri of rotten food and fecal matter that the rest of the apartment reeked of.
In the bedroom doorway I smelled something so concentratedly dense, so horrific, that I was afraid to turn on the light. But I did turn on the light.
I stood there for a moment, stock-still, breathing heavily.
“What is it, Oz?” Chloe called from behind me, in the hallway.
It wasn’t just that the room was a wreck. It wasn’t just that the stripped mattress was torn to tattered fluff and sodden with urine—though there was that.
I could feel my heartbeat hammering in my ears as my eyes scanned the room. There was blood on the walls. In thin streaks and freckles. In wide, heavy smears. Handprints.
Huge, long handprints—chimp handprints. There was one right there beside the switch plate, which also had blood on it. Four very long, thick fingers and a small stubby hook of a thumb.
I looked up. There was dried blood misted on the light fixture in the ceiling. It gave the room a slightly pinkish cast. All this blood had been there for days. It was dry and dark, the color of brown rust.
With my eyes, I followed the blood smears to the far corner of the room.
“What?” Chloe said in the hallway.
There was something on the floor in the corner of the room opposite me, between the bed and the wall. The streaks of blood led there, just as all roads led to Rome.
I could feel Chloe behind me.
“Stay there,” I said. “Don’t come in.”
I covered my face with the collar of my shirt and I stepped farther into the room. I tasted bitterness in the back of my mouth. Bile was rising in my throat.
It was a human body. Most of one, anyway. It was a decomposing—and what looked like a partially eaten— human body. I couldn’t identify it by the face, because the face was gone. As were the feet and hands. But there
