Down the large, wide hall, the young family left and the building’s noises shifted to relative silence before all the ambient noise rose up to fill the void. The buzzing thrum of the lights and the heat lamps, the clicks and rumbles of any old building. Cooper walked down the hall, listening to the taps of his feet on the tile. If Neil was making him wait because of some imagined competition with Park, Cooper was through. Park had said he’d come looking in thirty minutes; Cooper was leaving in twenty. He wasn’t interested in playing those sorts of games.

Between a couple of the exhibits, recessed in an alcove, Cooper noticed an Employees Only door cracked open.

“Neil?” Cooper called hesitantly. He stepped through the door into a sort of hallway running along the backs of the enclosures. There, locked doors were on one side and medical and feeding equipment were on the other. Every twenty feet or so there was another door sectioning off the hall, but they were all open and he could see straight down the length of the building.

“Hello?” he called again, but heard nothing. Cooper ran his hand over the closest enclosure door, secured by a heavy bolt, chain lock...

...and a small keyhole.

Cooper pulled the key from James’s hotel out of his pocket and held it to the lock. Correct size. Same tinny silver metal color. He tried to fit it in. No. Wrong one.

Cooper got to work, trying the key to each enclosure lock. No, no, no... He was just beginning to reconsider—okay, so the metal key and the metal lock were both metal-colored? what a clue!—when the key slid in perfectly smoothly.

Cooper froze, surprised. After all that, his first instinct was to flip the dead bolt, rip this shit open and ask whatever was in there if they’d seen anything suspicious. But was that what Park would consider “being safe?”

He looked around for some indication of what kind of creature was in there and found a small plastic tag on the metal mesh that covered the door.

Philippine Crocodile.

Super. Thank you very much, James.

Cooper unhooked the chain, then hesitated again. He checked the time. No messages from Neil, so he sent a quick text of his own—I’m here. Where are you?—and waited a moment, but there was no response.

A quick peek inside wouldn’t hurt, would it? Two minutes at most.

Cooper flipped the bolt, and very carefully cracked open the door two inches, scanning inside. He spotted the crocodile immediately. It was on the other side of the enclosed room pressed against the viewing glass directly opposite the door. Between them was a small pool with very dark water.