Free That Thing At the Zoo - 01 by James R. Tuck Page A

used in the tree around his neck, fluffing the ponytail out from under it, then reached out, and shook my hand. His hand felt like a piece of jerky, thin and stringy, but his grip was firm and sure.
    “What’s he a specialist in? Tattoos and guns?”
    I smiled at Jimmy the zookeeper. “I’m the weird-shit specialist.”
    “He’s the weird-shit specialist,” Longyard confirmed.
    Jimmy thought about this for a second, looking me up and down. I stood still for it, sweat beading on my shaved head. I didn’t look like a cop. My guns are not cop issue and I don’t wear a uniform. With the shaved head, long goatee, tattoos, and big Desert Eagle .357 strapped under my arm, I look a lot more like a criminal than a cop. What I am is an Occult Bounty Hunter. I kill monsters for a living. The police as an organization don’t admit it, but they know. Especially Detective John Longyard. He knows best of all.
    Seeing him always makes me think of my family. My wife, my son, and my daughter. He was the homicide detective in charge of the investigation five years ago. Whenever I see him it drives the pain of their loss inside me like a punch to the gut.
    With a meat cleaver.
    I miss them always , carrying their loss in a deep hole where my heart used to be. I lock it down so I can function, keeping the pain from crippling me, but seeing Longyard makes it start to unravel and spin loose like ribbons. Razor ribbons of memory that cut me up inside.
    Enough of that. It hurts too much.
    Pain like this, you have to crush it before it crushes you. I took a deep breath, shook my head, moved on.
    The sun made me squint at Jimmy the zookeeper. “What kind of carcass is this?”
    “We had a lion go missing ’tween last night’s tuck-in and this morning’s feeding. I’d reckon this is it.”
    “How much did the lion weigh that’s missing?”
    Jimmy the zookeeper pulled his hat off as he thought and wiped one gray, grimy coverall sleeve over his forehead.
    His hair out of the constraints of the hat was the biggest freaking mullet I have ever seen. I grew up with some white trash family members. I have seen mullets. Jimmy the zookeeper’s mullet was absolutely epic.
    The top and sides slicked down dark to the sides of his small skull. The back hung in a wavy curtain of light brown, flaring out over his narrow shoulders like a skull cape. The Alabama Neckwarmer was in full effect, a sight of redneck glory to behold.
    “’Round about five, maybe six hundred pounds.”
    That fit the pile of meat at our feet. It was a lot of weight to haul twenty or so feet up a tree. I studied the trunk of the oak, looking for some kind of marks that would indicate what climbed up and dropped off the carcass. Stepping over the body I made a circle around. No claw marks, no blood trail up the bark. Coming back around I stood between the other two men, looking from the body to the spot in the tree it was knocked out of.
    Jimmy the zookeeper spoke up. “Any guess what could have done this?”
    “Pterodactyl?” I guessed as I knelt beside the body, waving flies away so I could have a clear look. Now that I had been told this was a lion, I could see it. The carcass had a very feline shape. Where it wasn’t broken it had the stretched arches that make a cat’s body whether that cat is a five-pound tabby or a five-hundred-pound lion. I was blind to it before because of the sheer size and it being completely skinned. This close, the ripe scent of spoiling meat wafted off it, combining with the litter box smell to make me regret the tuna salad sandwich that had been lunch.
    Drawing my knife out of my boot I prodded the wound areas with the silvered blade. There were two kinds of wounds. Some of them were deep fissures that looked like they had been carved in with something only remotely sharp, like a machete. The edges of those were torn and ragged. These were mostly on the throat and upper body.
    The second kind were spread all over the body and they were