were even now under assault. “I try to protect myself. The monkey throws another apple, then a third, and it’s shrieking hard enough to crack crystal if there were any around.”
“Are you saying it knew what was in that drawer?”
Lowering her arms from the defensive posture, she said, “It had some intuitive sense what was in there, yeah.”
“And you didn’t try for the knife again?”
She shook her head. “The monkey moved like lightning. Seemed like it could be off that table and all over me even as I was pulling the drawer open, biting my hand before I could get a good grip on the handle of a knife. I didn’t want to be bitten.”
“Even if it wasn’t foaming at the mouth, it might have been rabid,” I agreed.
“Worse,” she said cryptically, rolling up the cuffs of the cardigan sleeves again.
“Worse than rabies?” I asked.
“So I’m standing at the refrigerator, bleeding from the lip, scared, trying to figure what to do next, and Rod comes home from work, comes through the back door there, whistling, and walks right into the middle of this weirdness. But he doesn’t do anything you might expect. He’s surprised—but not surprised. He’s surprised to see the monkey here, yeah, but not surprised by the monkey itself. Seeing it here, that’s what rattles him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“Rod—damn him—he knows this monkey. He doesn’t say, A monkey? He doesn’t say, Where the hell did a monkey come from? He says, Oh, Jesus. Just, Oh, Jesus. It’s cool that night, there’s a threat of rain, he’s wearing a trench coat, and he takes a pistol out of one of his coat pockets—as if he was expecting something like this. I mean, yeah, he’s coming home from work, and he’s in uniform, but he doesn’t wear a sidearm at the office. This is peacetime. He’s not in a war zone, for God’s sake. He’s stationed right outside Moonlight Bay, at a desk job, pushing papers and claiming he’s bored, just putting on weight and waiting for retirement, but suddenly he’s got this pistol on him that I don’t even know he’s been carrying until I see it now.”
Colonel Roderick Ferryman, an officer in the United States Army, had been stationed at Fort Wyvern, which had long been one of the big economic engines that powered the entire county. The base had been closed eighteen months ago and now stood abandoned, one of the many military facilities that, deemed superfluous, had been decommissioned following the end of the Cold War.
Although I had known Angela—and to a far lesser extent, her husband—since childhood, I had never known what, exactly, Colonel Ferryman did in the Army.
Maybe Angela hadn’t really known, either. Until he came home that Christmas Eve.
“Rod—he’s holding the gun in his right hand, arm out straight and stiff, the muzzle trained square on the monkey, and he looks more scared than I am. He looks grim. Lips tight. All the color is gone from his face, just gone, he looks like bone. He glances at me, sees my lip starting to swell and blood all over my chin, and he doesn’t even ask about that, looks right back at the monkey, afraid to take his eyes off it. The monkey’s holding the last piece of tangerine but not eating now. It’s staring very hard at the gun. Rod says, Angie, go to the phone. I’m going to give you a number to call.”
“Do you remember the number?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s not in service these days. I recognized the exchange, ’cause it was the same first three digits as his office number on the base.”
“He had you call Fort Wyvern.”
“Yes. But the guy who answers—he doesn’t identify himself or say which office he’s in. He just says hello, and I tell him Colonel Ferryman is calling. Then Rod reaches for the phone with his left hand, the pistol still in his right. He tells the guy, I just found the rhesus here at my house, in my kitchen. He listens, keeping his eyes on the monkey, and then he says, Hell if I know, but it’s here, all right, and I need help to bag it.”
“And the monkey’s just watching all this?”
“When Rod hangs up the phone, the monkey raises its ugly little eyes from the gun, looks straight at him, a challenging and angry look, and then coughs out that damn sound, that awful little laugh that makes your skin crawl. Then it seems