I did.
“At the count of three, I’m going to heave your jacket that way,” Mike said, pointing away from us, toward the next concrete stanchion to our right. “On three, you run as fast as you can to the left, at least two towers over.”
“And you?”
“Right with you,” he said. “I’m just drawing fire first.”
It was too still. There was no sound of police activity. I couldn’t tell if the distant noise was hoofbeats or footsteps, but there were creatures on the move.
On three, Mike pushed himself to his feet and threw my jacket with an overhand pitch worthy of a stadium opening day.
I started to run and heard two gunshots, from the edge of the woods, which were volleyed in the direction opposite my destination. Behind me, following the flight path of my jacket. Mike had been right.
He overtook me and grabbed my hand, urging me to keep up with him.
We stayed under the tracks for another fifty yards, then veered off again. We zigged and zagged behind signposts that marked exhibits—which meant we were getting closer to the zoo facilities—and then past a large white board, posted with the words DO NOT ENTER.
“Here, Coop,” Mike said, “Over here.”
I pulled my hand back. “That way must take us to a path.” I said. “That way.”
“That way puts you out in the open. Don’t do it.”
Now we were in the brush again. Our pursuers were not. Their voices carried—it sounded like two of them—as they talked excitedly in their unfamiliar dialect.
It wasn’t the place to argue. I motioned to Mike to go ahead and I followed him as closely as I could.
There was an actual trail beneath the low undergrowth. The walking was easier than I expected and we moved fast. Faster and faster.
As Mike turned a corner around a stand of trees, a small shelter—like an open-air garage—came into sight.
“What—?” I said.
There were four steel gondolas, like small versions of the ones used on ski slopes—bottoms shaped like buckets, the upper sides enclosed with mesh gratings, and rooftops also made of steel.
Mike pulled on the door of the first one and opened it. “Get in.”
“It’s not the monorail,” I said. “No.”
“Don’t argue. Get in,” he grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the sleeping machine.
“How do you—?”
“Skyfari, Coop. The most popular old ride at the zoo,” Mike said. “A great place to score with broads when I was at Fordham.”
He was trying to make light of a treacherous situation, and I was approaching the end of my emotional rope.
“Where are they?” I whispered.
“You’ll know when the next bullet whizzes by,” Mike said. “Get in.”
“Where will it take us?”
“Up and over the river, and back to civilization,” he said, holding on as I stepped into the bucket. “Just stay down, kid. Low. They can’t get to you up there.”
“Mike, no!” I said, as he shut the door and closed me into the caged tram. “Get in.”
“I have to crank it up, babe. Turn on the switch,” he said. “Then I’ll jump in.”
I unlatched the door and swung it open for him.
He disappeared for a few seconds, somewhere inside the structure that was the base of the two sets of trams. They didn’t run on tracks like the monorail. Each car was suspended from steel ropes that rose from the base, and lurched them across the treetops and river, over the heart of the zoo. I had hated this ride as a kid—the rocking cable car, the halting motion as it was propelled forward, the fear that I would fall to the earth from a broken machine into a pit of deadly beasts.
Mike had been playing with switches and gears. I heard metal boxes banging. I was sure our adversaries heard him, too.
All of a sudden there was a great noise, as though the entire tram system had come to life again.
Our car was first in line on one set of steel ropes. I watched as the lead tram on the second set of ropes rocked in place, then rolled off the starting blocks and started its ascent—out of the garage, grunting and groaning as though it were alive, climbing up toward the sky.
I clapped my hand to my mouth. Mike must have gotten in that other one and left me behind.
I put my foot in the opening. My head wasn’t clear enough to think. If his goal was to position himself to fire down on them, why had he left me alone in this godforsaken corner of the Bronx?
Shots rang out. I could hear them—three of them in a row—bouncing off the belly of the first old tram that had gone airborne across the way.
I wanted to scream Mike’s name, but I knew that would call attention to the fact that I was still here—here alone.
I heard footsteps and voices now, but going away from me—following the route of the Skyfari tram. Our assailants must have been wondering, as I was, whether Mike didn’t return fire because they had pierced the cab and shot him.
My hands were trembling so badly I couldn’t steady myself to step down from the gondola.
I saw something move on the ground, coming toward me out of the shadows. I had my hand on the pistol grip.
It was Mike.
“Thank God,” I said, letting go of the grip and stretching out my arm to try to reach him. “I thought you’d been shot up there.”
“Leave you behind? Not a prayer, Coop,” Mike said. “Dibaba’s troops are halfway to the Himalayan Highlands by now, looking to find our bodies in that bucket and feed us to the snow leopards.”
“I’m not that tasty,” I said. “Our turn to ride?”
“I’m going to pull the switch to launch this tram right now,” he said. “Get down on the floor. Keep that blond hair out of sight.”
Mike turned to run back inside to the control panels.
I sat on the floor of the bucket and waited for him to return. He fired up the tram and the car shook beneath me, ready to take off. By the time I had scrambled to my knees, Mike was on the outside of the door, slamming it shut. He put his hand to his lips and blew me a kiss as the old cab tilted forward and rolled back, and then heaved off away from him.
I put my fingers through the holes in the mesh to pull myself up and ask what he had done.
“Stay low, Coop. I’ll be there, I promise.”
I ducked down, but I was feeling sick to my stomach, kneeling on the bottom of the gondola. I took Mike’s gun from my waistband and placed it on the floor beside me.
The bucket rocked back and forth as it cleared the roof of its garage and rolled over the connecting joints on the first tower. It was taking me higher and higher, out into the open air with no way for me to see what was happening on the ground, swinging over the Bronx wilderness, as animals seemed to be roaring at me from below.
I heard another loud metallic noise coming from the tram base. I picked my head up, just to the rim of the wire enclosure, and looked back. Mike had launched a third tram on the adjacent track. He must have been in it.