Bestiary (6 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
Greer wearily reached out and turned the papers around to see them better. Under the picture there was a blueprint, with several points circled in red.
“I have to do any cutting?”
“No, I can give you the codes, if you want ’em.”
“Isn’t that going to be a little obvious?”
“There’s one entrance, in back, that’s not wired yet. It’s part of an addition that was just put on. You can’t see it in the picture.”
Greer studied the papers. For over a year now, he and Sadowski had had a nice little business going on the side. Sadowski would hand over information about Silver Bear clients whose homes were going to be left unattended—clients were instructed to tell the firm whenever they were going to be away for more than twenty-four hours—and Greer would burglarize them. Sadowski received a 25 percent finder’s fee, based on whatever the value of the fenced goods turned out to be.
“Any idea what’s inside?” Greer asked, washing down a couple of Vicodin. He liked to know what he was looking for, and what he might expect to find. He worked alone, and he was not about to start carting out big-screen TVs and desktop computers; he was strictly interested in the small and the portable. Cash, jewelry, maybe a laptop if it presented itself.
“The guy’s a doctor,” Sadowski said, unhelpfully. “They like to wear Rolexes.”
“Then he’ll probably have it on, wherever else he is.”
Sadowski pondered this, then brightened. “But these guys always have more than one watch.”
Greer sighed, folded up the papers and slipped them into his jacket. “He married?”
“No.”
So there might not be much jewelry. Unless . . . “He gay?”
“Don’t know. Want me to ask around?”
“Christ, no, I don’t want you to ask around.”
Sadowski looked stumped, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. “So you gonna do it or not?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Because he’s only going to be—”
“I said I’ll think about it,” Greer repeated, leaning in close. Then he slipped out of the booth before Sadowski could invite him to a meeting of the Minutemen, or the Friends of the White Race, or whatever the hell it was he kept stockpiling his ammo for.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE WERE ABOUT twenty-five kids in the group, all sixth graders from a local school, and the docent was having a bad first day. She’d been carefully trained by the museum, given a lengthy test to make sure she knew her stuff, but she’d never actually been in charge of a group, all by herself, and peppered with quite so many questions.
“Where are the dinosaurs?”
That was an easy one. “There aren’t any. The fossils from the tar pits date from the Ice Age, when the dinosaurs were already extinct.”
“What about saber-toothed tigers?”
“Actually, they’re not tigers at all; we call them saber-toothed cats, and yes, we’ve found many of those.”
“How big were they? Were they as big as dinosaurs?”
“No, they were about the same size as a modern-day lion.” She knew she had to move the group along, but there were always stragglers who didn’t want to leave the life-sized re-creation of the giant sloth, or the glass dome covering the plungers immersed in tar. “If you’ll just come this way,” she said, looking in vain for their teacher—wasn’t she supposed to be there, too, for the entire tour?—“we’re coming to an exhibit of one of the most—”
“Could you talk louder? I can’t hear you.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, raising her voice and detecting a surprising quaver. “We’ll see an exhibit of one of the most successful predators in this region.”
“A predator like in the movie?’”
For a second, she didn’t even know what that meant. Then she remembered her boyfriend talking about a movie called
Predator
versus something else bad. Alien?
Predator
versus something else bad. Alien?
“Probably not. By predator, I simply mean a creature that hunted and killed other animals, for its own survival. A carnivore.”
“A what?”
“A meat-eater. Like all of you.”
“Not me; my mom’s a vegetarian, and so am I.”
“That’s very laudable,” she said, still trying to shepherd them to one of the Page Museum’s most startling displays—a wall where 404 skulls of a creature called the dire wolf were mounted and displayed against a glowing golden light. As the kids approached, some fell silent, and some muttered things that sounded like approval. The questions were just starting to come—“Are those from a dog?” “Why are there so many?” “Did you dig those up around here?”—when she spotted her salvation walking by, in a hurry, toward the main exit.
“Dr. Cox?” she called out, and then, when he didn’t seem to hear her, “Dr. Cox? Over here.” She actually waved one arm feebly over the heads of the kids. “Would you like to tell these students something about the dire wolf?” To the students, she confided, “Dr. Cox has dug up several of these himself. He’s a very famous paleontologist.”
Carter had been on his way out to Pit 91—his crew would be assembling there in a few minutes—but he could never resist a chance to talk to students, especially when it looked like a new docent was drowning.
“Sure, the dire wolf is a good friend of mine,” he said, striding to the front of the group, “and at one time he roamed in packs all around here. Up and down Wilshire Boulevard, all over the Farmers’ Market, in Hancock Park and Koreatown and Century City.” He knew from experience that it always helped to place these extinct creatures in the modern context at first—not only to get your listeners’ attention, but to bring the experience closer, to make it clear that the animals didn’t live somewhere else, as if on a movie set, but on the very spot where, today, everyone was walking and talking and, like the kids all the way in back, goofing around. His comments already seemed to be having the desired effect.
“Why’s he called a dryer wolf?”
Carter wanted to laugh, but he didn’t want to risk embarrassing the questioner. “Actually,” he said, keeping a straight face, “he’s called a
dire
wolf; the word ‘dire’ means dreaded, frightening. And these wolves were.”
dire
wolf; the word ‘dire’ means dreaded, frightening. And these wolves were.”
Carter stood in front of the prehistoric skulls—starkly black against the yellow light, displayed in four massive panels sixteen shelves high—and explained how these wolves differed from the wolf we know today. More heavily built, with a deeper chest, wider hips, shorter legs. Originally from South America, but scattered all over Central and North America by 130,000 years ago. The dominant carnivore in the New World by the Late Pleistocene.
“The late what?” one of the kids asked, and Carter had to remind himself that he wasn’t talking to NYU students anymore.
“The Pleistocene is what we call the period of time from about two million years ago to ten thousand years ago.” And then to make sure he had their attention again, “The dire wolf may have had a smaller brain than any wolf today, but he also had much bigger and more deadly teeth. The jaws of the dire wolf were so powerful he could jump on and bring down a much bigger animal than he was—a bison, say, or a camel—and crush its bones with his teeth.”
There was a moment of silence.
“And now I have to leave you so I can go and try to dig up one more!” He turned to the grateful docent and said, “They’re all yours.”
THE PIT, LOCATED
on the museum grounds, was a two-minute walk away, and by the time he got there the afternoon crew was already at work. Claude, the retired engineer, was toiling in one corner, Rosalie in another, and Miranda had her arms up to the wrist in the goo.
on the museum grounds, was a two-minute walk away, and by the time he got there the afternoon crew was already at work. Claude, the retired engineer, was toiling in one corner, Rosalie in another, and Miranda had her arms up to the wrist in the goo.
“You’re late,” she said, teasingly. “I’m telling.”
“Who are you going to tell?”
“Oh yeah, you’re the big cheese.”
“A quick lesson in life,” Carter said. “There is always a bigger cheese.”
Claude snorted as he slopped another handful of tar into his bucket. “You can say that again.”
Rosalie mopped her brow with the back of one chubby arm and said, “I think I can feel a lot of stuff over here.”
“Me, too,” Claude said.
“Me three,” Miranda chimed in. Today, she was wearing a pink tube top and a necklace of little silver beads. Not exactly what Carter would have recommended for fieldwork.
Carter glanced around; they were all working in different quadrants, carefully marked off pieces of the grid, and they were all at almost exactly the same depth.
“It’s like I told you last time,” Miranda said. “I can still feel something really strange down here.”
Carter began to suspect they’d hit a lateral “pipe”—a section of the pit where a particularly dense concentration of fossils had accumulated. Sometimes this could happen. A large beast, perhaps a giant ground sloth or a long-horned bison, had ventured too far into the tar—which might have been concealed beneath a layer of brush and leaves, deposited by a running stream—and become trapped; just a few inches of the tar could do the trick. The youngest and strongest animals might have been able to extricate themselves, but the older ones, or the infirm, or the ones that exhausted themselves bellowing in fear and frustration, would not. Their cries would hasten their doom, in fact, drawing predators from far and wide. Packs of wolves, or saber-toothed cats, or American lions—who, unlike their African counterparts, traveled in pairs not prides—would have leapt on the trapped beast and tried to kill and devour it.
And many of them would have been trapped in turn.
Carter had seen evidence of such mad scrambles before, piles of broken bones and fangs and claws, but glancing over the wide expanse of the pit, nothing quite so broad and focused as this. What was at the bottom of it? What had attracted so many creatures to the kill, and dragged so many to their own death?
“What have you got over there, do you think?” he called to Claude.
“Can’t say for sure,” Claude replied, “but it feels like a neck or collarbone. I can show you right where it is.”
The surface of the pit was crisscrossed with narrow wooden walkways, perched just inches above the tar; Carter walked carefully to Claude’s corner, then knelt down beside him. He was wearing shorts today, and the wooden boards were sharp and hard on his knees.
“It’s a few inches down,” Claude said, pointing to a spot right between them.
Carter leaned forward and put one hand into the glistening black muck. It was warm and viscous, as always, and gave him a slight shiver as he plunged his hand deeper into it. His fingertips grazed something hard and angular, exactly where Claude had indicated.
“You feel it?”
“I do.” But it was still so immersed in the tar, and out of sight, that he could only guess what it was. “Right now, I’d say it’s a machairodont of some kind.”
“A what?” Rosalie said.
“Miranda,” Carter threw out, “can you answer that?”
Miranda bit her lower lip. “I’m not sure they covered that at UCLA.”
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