“You grade on a curve. I’ll take it.”
When we climbed into my truck, Benji examined the cab with the open curiosity of a person cataloguing details. The dashboard was immaculate, and the emergency veterinary kit behind the seat sat packed and prepared. There was a small photo clipped to the visor that he leaned forward to look at and thenleaned back from without comment, because Benji understood which things to ask about and which things to let exist.
“Can I at least get a hint?” he asked as I pulled onto Bayshore.
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“A cardinal direction. Give me a cardinal direction.”
“North.”
“North. That eliminates the beach, the Keys, and Cuba. We’re in the northern hemisphere of possibilities. Are we going to Canada? That’s a long drive. I should’ve packed at least one change of clothes if we’re going to Canada. Maybe a jacket, too.”
“That’s not how cardinal directions work, and no, we’re not leaving Florida.”
“It’s how my cardinal directions work. North means adventure.”
“We’re here.”
I turned into the parking lot, but instead of pulling into the public entrance, I drove past it to a service road on the east side of the property. I badged through a gate with an access card Bill had messengered to the clinic the previous afternoon and parked in the staff lot beside the veterinary building.
Benji looked at the staff lot.
He looked at the unmarked building.
Then he looked at the service road.
Finally, he looked at me.
“Peter. Where are we?”
“The back end of ZooTampa.”
“The back end . . . as in, not the front end . . . as in, not where the public goes.”
“I know the head of veterinary services. We’ve worked together on complex cases for the past four years. He’s giving us backstage access this morning so we can have some private time with the animals before public hours start.”
“You have a guy at the zoo.”
“I have a professional colleague at the zoo, yes.”
“You have a guy. You called your zoo guy and arranged a private backstage pass. Peter, my dear Peter—”
“I’ve assisted on surgeries here, mostly on giraffes or big cats. Bill and I have a professional relationship. It made sense to leverage it.”
“You leveraged a professional relationship to take me on a private zoo date.”
“Is that a problem?”
He undid his seat belt, leaned across the center console, and kissed me. It was quick, firm, and tasted like the caramel creamer he’d used in his coffee that morning. When he pulled back, his face was doing the thing where every emotion was visible at once,layered on top of each other. It was averyBenji emotional statement.
“That is the opposite of a problem,” he said. “Let’s go see some animals.”
Bill met us at the veterinary building’s staff entrance wearing scrubs and the expression of a man who had been looking forward to this meeting with an enthusiasm he was doing a poor job of concealing.
He was tall, mid-fifties, with silver-streaked hair and the lean, weathered build of someone who had spent thirty years working with animals that outweighed him by several thousand pounds. He shook Benji’s hand with the evaluative attention of a clinician meeting a patient for the first time.
“So you’re the one who got Peter to call me about something other than a clouded leopard?” Bill said.
