“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.
Fat Ollie Weeks waddled over, grinning, a nine-millimeter Glock in his hand.
He flipped back his jacket, holstered the gun, and said, “You owe me one, Steve-a-rino.”
OVER ALFRED HARDY’S VIOLENT OBJECTIONS , the SWAT team disposed of the remaining four lions in short order. Honey Blair got some nice shots of the sharpshooters doing their job, aiming down their rifle barrels and all, the lions happily munching away on the lady out there, whoever she was, unaware that in minutes they would be merely trophies. Hardy refused to let Honey take any pictures of the carcasses on the island, animal or human, and ordered her off the premises. She went over to where a pair of paramedics were searching Carella for any cuts or bruises caused by what they insisted was a “mauling.”
“I wasnot mauled,” Carella told them over and over again. “I was almosteaten,but I was not mauled.”
“Sounds like a good idea either way,” Honey said, and smiled. “Here’s my card. You ever feel like discussing police work or television reportage, give me a ring. Or even just a cappuccino, mm?” she said, and smiled again.“Ciao, bambino.”
Carella watched her walking off.
He looked at the card.
And tossed it into the trash bin near the railing where he sat.
The paramedics thought the lion mauling him had damaged his brain.
THE THING THAT BOTHERED CARELLA MOST about the dead woman—or what was left of her, which wasn’t very much—was that she was naked.
“Woman wandering around the zoo without any clothes on, dead of winter,” Carella said.
“Which does seem peculiar,” Meyer agreed.
“Almost makes it seem as if she didn’twant to be identified.”
He was thinking that this was the worst time of the year for suicides. Girl loses her man, her job, her mind, her gold watch—she wasn’t wearing a watch, he noticed, unless one of the lions ate it—she decides to end it all. Ashamed of the act she’s about to commit, she strips herself naked, goes for a bare-assed walk in the zoo, straight into the lion’s den.
Another thing that bothered him was the fact that Ollie Weeks had saved his life. Once upon a time, Bert Kling had saved a Puerto Rican courier from a near-fatal baseball-bat beating. The man’s name was Jose Herrera,
