The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (17 page)

Someone had deliberately put him in the lion's cage.

Though I often joked about strangling Spike, the idea of someone actually trying to harm him sent me into a cold fury.

Of course, it might not have been Spike they wanted to harm. Anyone who knew us or had been spying on us might have guessed that Eric would try to rescue Spike—and would certainly have expected me to go in after either of them.

Suddenly the day didn’t seem nearly as warm and bright, and the silence and emptiness felt ominous.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I muttered. Throwing an eight-and-a-half-pound dog into a cage was one thing. Tackling me was quite another.

I’d ask Rob later how he came to be separated from his passenger, and whether they’d seen anyone else at the zoo.

For now, I decided to retrace my steps to the car.

On my way, though, I scoped out the area near the lion's cage—the last part of the zoo I hadn’t inventoried. Apparently this was where Lanahan had kept his more dangerous guests. I found the spotted hyenas’ cage. It didn’t make me feel one bit fonder of them to know that their names were Winken, Blinken, and Allan. I found myself closing the door to the cage marked “Bobcat
(Felis rufus):
Lola.” Lola clearly wasn’t there, but it still made me nervous, seeing the door to her former lair hanging open.

Though maybe someone had opened it recently. I saw fresh scuffmarks in the dirt inside. Probably Eric, exploring. Maybe I should talk to him about risky behavior. Or, more likely, get someone else to do it—someone who hadn’t spent the afternoon leaping into a lion's den. I latched the door cage and moved on.

I stopped by the zoo office to close and lock the door again, then took the perimeter trail, hiked back to the edge of the zoo property again, and used the fallen-tree bridge to cross the fence. But just as I was unlocking my car, I heard an odd thunk-ing noise out in the woods—as if someone were hitting a tree with a hammer. But it wasn’t the steady tapping you’d hear if someone was using a hammer—just a single thunk.

I stopped, listened for a few moments.

Thunk! There it was again.coming from the other side of the road, away from the zoo.

I used my remote to lock the car again, shoved the keys in my back pocket, and went to investigate.

I tried to move quietly, though I suspect that, like Sammy, I could be heard by any real woodsman within a mile. Still, it was a pleasant walk—and not one I would have dared make during the winter, when no amount of bright orange could guarantee that a passing hunter wouldn’t mistake me for potential venison.

The thunks continued, at random intervals, and a little louder as I approached their source. I was slowing down, listening for another thunk to make sure I was heading in the right direction, when something whizzed by my head, nicking my cheek before skittering to a stop a few inches away.

I dropped to the ground, clapping a hand to my stinging check. Then I pulled my hand away and looked at it.

I was bleeding.

Chapter 28

Only a trickle, but it shook me up—especially since whatever had nicked me had missed my eye by only an inch.

I crawled back a few feet and found the weapon: a crossbow bolt.

I lay on the ground and listened. I heard two more thunks. Then something else skittered through the leaves to my right.

I got up, stuck the bolt in my back pocket, and began running to the left, trying to circle wide before approaching the source of the thunking again.

In a few minutes, I found myself peering out of the shrubbery into a clearing. A young man with the tall, lanky look of the Shiffleys was standing there with his back to me. He held a crossbow. As I watched, he lifted it and released a bolt. It flew toward a tiny target at the other side of the clearing and hit with a loud thunk!

Odds were I’d found young Charlie Shiffley, whiling away the time until hunting season in a rather dangerous manner.

I wondered why he hadn’t heard me coming until I noticed the iPod tucked into an armband on his left bicep and the cord that led to the tiny speaker buds in his ears.

I got a better look when he bent down to pick up another bolt from a pile at his feet. Unlike his body, his face was noticeably less angular than Randall's or Vern's. Either his mother's fea
tures were softer than his father's, or he hadn’t quite lost his baby fat. His face was slightly spotty—only slightly, but remembering how I’d felt about pimples at his age, I suspected he considered himself hopelessly disfigured. Actually, he wouldn’t look all that bad if he’d just shave—his upper lip had the slightly soiled look of someone who really shouldn’t bother trying to grow a mustache. Still, not bad for a teenager. He was probably quite a hit with the girls at Caerphilly High.

His face was also a lot more expressive than those of the older Shiffleys. His lips moved from time to time, though from a distance I couldn’t tell if he was mumbling the words to a song under his breath or cursing quietly. And after observing him for a few minutes, I realized that his expression didn’t vary much. Most of the time, he wore a glum look of abject misery. Occasionally he’d frown, and even more rarely, when he made a particularly good shot, a swift, triumphant smile would flicker across his features.

So was this the face of a careless but essentially well-meaning young man who’d accidentally shot an exotic animal, or the face of a cruel and deliberate poacher? More important, was it the face of a lucky young man feeling a combination of relief and guilt because Lanahan's death had had ended a persecution that threatened his future? Or a ruthless killer who’d made his own luck with the very crossbow he was holding?

I waited till he put down the bow and walked over to the target to retrieve his bolts before stepping out into the clearing.

“Practicing for anything in particular?” I asked.

How annoying that my dramatic entrance went completely unnoticed, thanks to his trusty iPod. I watched as he pulled the bolts out of the target, and then, when he turned to walk back across the clearing, he noticed me and jumped a foot.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, detaching himself from his headphones.

“You do realize that if you miss that target, you could skewer anything or anyone who happens to be passing back there?” I asked.

“It's posted no trespassing!” he said. He sounded fierce, but his face looked scared.

“Oh, and that makes it all right to shoot passersby?” I said, gesturing at the gash on my cheek.

“It's posted,” he said, but from the way he hunched his shoulders slightly I could see he was backing down.

“And I heard a suspicious noise over here and came to investigate,” I said. “What if you’d been a poacher? If I spotted a poacher on your father's land, what would you want me to do— ignore it?”

“If you spotted a poacher, smart thing to do would be run away as fast as you could,” Charlie said. “You don’t want to mess with those guys.”

“Good point,” I said. “I’ll tell your uncle Randall he should have warned me about that while he was showing me the back way into the zoo.”

The mention of his uncle seemed to reassure him a little, as I’d hoped it would. He nodded, and stood, slouched, looking as if he wished I’d go away.

“You should put a bandage on that,” he said, looking at my cheek.

“Do you have one?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I’ll probably live,” I said.

He hunched his shoulders again. I fished in my pocket and found a tissue. I used it to blot my wound while Charlie shifted from foot to foot.

“So you’re keeping in practice for the hunting season?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Just letting off steam, really,” he said. “I mean, everything's so screwed up now.” “Like what?” “Like my scholarship.”

“That's right,” I said. “Your uncle Randall told me about that. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Except with everything that's happened they’ll probably take it away.”

“What do you mean by ‘everything that's happened’?”

“You haven’t heard about Mr. Lanahan from the zoo trying to get me arrested for shooting one of his animals? I thought the whole town knew.”

“I hadn’t until yesterday, when your uncle told me something about it.”

“Yeah,” he said, kicking at a tree root. “And the people from the university weren’t too happy about the whole thing. I thought it would be okay once Chief Burke refused to charge me with anything, but then it seemed like the university still might take my scholarship away because of Mr. Lanahan suing me. That doesn’t seem fair!”

“No,” I said. “But colleges are like that—they hate bad PR. My fiance teaches at Caerphilly College, and I’m beginning to realize that anything I do to get myself in trouble could hurt his career.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So I guess when they hear I’m a suspect in a murder, that’ll kill it for sure.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Being a suspect isn’t so much a problem—we’re all suspects. Getting arrested wouldn’t be so good. Mainly it's getting convicted that would really mess up your football career.”

“It could happen,” he said gloomily. “I mean, Chief Burke's a
good cop, don’t get me wrong, but he's a city cop. Doesn’t know beans about hunting or crossbows or anything.”

“Not many people do,” I said. “Why hunt with a crossbow, anyway?”

“It's more challenging,” he said. “Just as challenging as with a bow and arrow, in spite of what all the purists say.” “Purists?”

“Lot of bow-and-arrow hunters look down on crossbows. Say there's no skill involved, which is bull. Or that it's not fair because crossbows have a longer range, which isn’t really true, either.” His voice had risen, though he sounded more upset than angry or threatening.

“How far you can shoot an arrow or a bolt in target practice doesn’t mean anything,” he continued. “They’ve both got about the same effective range when you’re hunting—maybe forty yards max. And when they talk about crossbow hunters not making clean kills, that just—”

“Chill!” I said, backing away slightly. Clearly Charlie hadn’t yet acquired the typical Shiffley imperturbability. “I’m not arguing with you. Just asking.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It's just that I get in a lot of arguments about this with the traditional bow-and-arrow guys. Like the people over at the Sherwood Archery Range. Bunch of yuppies from the college, really. No crossbows allowed.”

“Which is why you’re practicing here in your own woods.”

“Well, there's a range over in Clay County that allows crossbows, but it costs as much as the Sherwood place does for nothing more than a big field. Cheaper and easier to practice here.”

“Show me how it works.”

He looked surprised for a second, and then shrugged. “Sure.”

As he loaded the crossbow and demonstrated how to hold it, I
was astonished at the transformation. With the crossbow in his hand, Charlie was a different person. More confident, more articulate, and even slightly taller, since he stopped slouching and stood up straight when holding his weapon.

The crossbow surprised me, too. I was expecting something sturdy and wooden—a mechanical version of Robin Hood's longbow. Instead, Charlie's crossbow looked as if you’d sawed off the front foot or so of a rifle and replaced it with a small bow stuck sideways at the end of the truncated barrel. Everything was metal or some sort of composite material.

“Want to try it?” he said.

I hesitated for a moment, then took it, trying not to show how uneasy it made me.

“Don’t point it at anything you don’t want to shoot,” he said.

“Like a firearm; right,” I said. I noticed that he was keeping a careful eye on the crossbow. I’d gone to watch my cousin Horace take his annual marksmanship test once, and the range master had shown that same watchfulness around the shooters, even though they were all law enforcement officers and theoretically trained in handling firearms. A reminder, just in case I needed one, that this odd plastic-and-metal contraption was a lethal weapon, not a toy.

Charlie corrected my grip on the bow and guided my fingers to the trigger. I lifted it and looked for a sight, then realized that it had a little telescopic sight mounted on top. I peered into the sight and moved the bow a little, and the distant target appeared, startlingly distinct. I could see how many deep scars and holes the bolts had left in it.

I tried to imagine how it would look to have something alive in the scope. I couldn’t summon the image of a deer—they vanished from my mind as rapidly as they would flee through the woods if they’d spotted us. But I could call up Patrick Lanahan's face and figure easily. Too easily, in fact.

“Just pull the trigger,” Charlie said. He didn’t sound impatient. Just calm and reassuring, as if he’d talked a hundred new-bies past their fear that the crossbow would explode if they pulled the trigger.

“Okay,” I said. But I waited a few seconds until I could banish Lanahan's face from my mind and saw only the battered wooden target. Then I pulled the trigger.

The surge of power that followed surprised me—that and the loud thunk as the bolt struck the target.

“Good shot,” Charlie said. I’d hit one of the rings, the third from the center.

“Accidental, I’m sure,” I said. “And the telescopic sight makes it pretty easy.”

“Not as easy as you’d think,” he said. “That's another thing the bow-and-arrow hunters are always on about. How unfair the sights are. Still takes a good eye. You want easy—try this.”

He took the crossbow from me, set it down on the ground, and twirled a couple of screws a few turns until he could remove the telescopic sight. He placed it carefully in a nearby canvas case, pulled out another, slightly different piece of metal, and screwed it into place atop the crossbow.

“Check this out,” he said, handing the crossbow back to me.

I aimed at the target again. The new scope seemed a lot like the old—maybe with a little less magnification. Then Charlie touched something on the sight and a little red dot appeared on the target.

“Laser sight,” he said. “Aiming for idiots.”

“So you don’t use this too often?” I said. As I moved the crossbow, the little dot moved with it, darting across a tree trunk, disappearing into a tangle of shrubbery, and then reappearing on the next tree trunk.