The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Read Online Free PDF

back to the door. We will signal you on the
radio
when you need to do it.” Lance reached over and turned Art’s radio on before patting him on the shoulder. Then he repeated, “Let’s go.”
    Trudy stood inside, holding the sticky back door almost shut so we wouldn’t have to either leave it wide open or fight the frame and knob if we had to beat a fast retreat.
    Lance and I circled around one side of the barn while Art went the other way. We moved quickly. The primate noise down below us had reached cacophonous levels. The chimps in particular were screaming warnings to everyone in their vocal radius. We didn’t think silence on our part was either necessary or particularly prudent. Olivia sounded terrified. She needed rescue, and she needed it quickly. As soon as we split off from Art, Lance and I started running. He was polite enough to slow his feet to a trot so I could keep up, but we still moved fast.
    We could smell the orangutan long before we came around to see it. That rotting fecal odor was unmistakable. By the time we arrived, it had foiled the truck’s simple padlock (via the expeditious method of ripping the padlock off) and let itself into the back to have at the fruit. It was still distracted, all right, but now it was a much harder target to reach, and a mobile one to boot. Its hindquarters, which should have been conveniently facing us, were disappearing into the truck’s open bay as we arrived.
    My cell phone rang right then, the noise falling into a momentary silence in the ruckus. I answered without looking away from the truck. Olivia whispered, “It’s in the back now. I heard the door go up.”
    “Yes,” I said. “It is. You should be able to see us, too.” And I hung up on her. Lance waved.
    At the sound of my ringtone, the orangutan stuck its head back out the door. Apparently, cell phones meant something to it. It was easy to imagine that the animal’s head was a giant pancake as it glowered at me, thanks to those cheek pads. But my pancakes had never looked at me like
I
might be on the menu. It squinted as it stared, and I held my gun behind me. I thought now I might be able to hit a shoulder.
    “Art,” Lance had his radio. “Watermelon.”
    The ape jerked, now looking at Lance.
    “Oh! Right! Hang on there,” Art crackled back.
    Two things happened simultaneously. Art popped around the other side of the building, the melon held aloft in both hands. I could see him in the distance, but I tried not to lose my focus. At the same time, the orangutan brought out one of its massive hands from the back of the truck. It held a melon of its own, this one a cantaloupe.
    “Hey, big guy!” Art shouted. “Dinner’s on me!”
    Art and the ape threw at the same time. Art hurled the melon as far as he could make it go, then took off rapidly in the other direction, exactly as Lance had instructed. But I had already been unnerved by the way the animal was looking at me. Long before it threw the cantaloupe, I had to let it see my dart gun, pulling it up to make a rapid shot. The gun jerked as I squeezed the trigger, and I missed my shot entirely. The cantaloupe sailed over and smacked the ground right at my feet, knocked only slightly off course by my dart, which met it halfway to its destination. I groaned.
    Art’s champion hurling days, if he had ever had any, were clearly several years in his past. The watermelon only went a few feet before it splatted on the pavement. But it was a sufficient distraction that the ape jumped down and shambled off to investigate the fruit, the fetid aroma increasing as it presented us with its dreadlocked back.
    Beside me, Lance’s rifle popped softly, and the second dart took wing. “Damn, I should have waited,” he said. The dart made contact somewhere around the animal’s buttocks and bounced off its fecally-armored dreadlocks. If the orangutan even noticed, it didn’t show. It pursued the watermelon exclusively, having reached accessible food at