Page 50 of Tiger Queen

He smiled sweetly at me. “I’ll take that under consideration.”

David came walking up the path behind me. “Hey, doc. You got a minute?”

I followed him toward the visitor’s office. “Did you know about that? Moving Caesar?”

“Saw it when I got here this morning. Best thing Jake’s ever done.”

“I really need to be kept in the loop about stuff like that.”

“Good luck. I’ve been trying to get Jake to communicate better his whole damn life. Let’s go into the office. I want to talk to you about something.”

I followed him inside, then into the back office. He closed the door behind me. It made it feel like a performance review that was about to go poorly.

“What’s going on?”

He took a stack of papers off the printer and slid them across the desk, then he sat in the chair across from me. “The zoo has major financial problems.”

“You know, that’s pretty much the first thing you told me when you barged into my hotel room.”

He didn’t smile back at me. “Food expenses are much higher than I expected. Moving eight big cats helped reduce our needs, but we still have over a hundred other animals here in the zoo. A new shipment of food arrives tomorrow. It’s cash on delivery. It’s a big number.”

David tapped the printed papers in front of me. I ignored them. “Do you not have enough to pay for it?”

“We can afford tomorrow’s shipment,” he said.

I relaxed, but only for a minute.

“That food will last another week. We can afford two more deliveries. After that, the money Anthony and I pooled will be all gone.”

“So we need to move the rest of the animals in three weeks?”

He gazed at me skeptically. “We both know that’s impossible.”

“It is,” I agreed. “What other options do we have?”

“I looked into additional financing,” David said as if he was prepared for the question. “This place is already leveraged out the ass. The bank won’t approve any additional loans. ”

“And the GoFundMe?”

“It’s raised just over a hundred bucks,” he replied.

I blinked. “So that’s it? We’re out of options if we can’t move the rest of the animals in three weeks?”

David hesitated. “There’s another way.”

“Well let’s hear it!”

“We can open the zoo back up.”

I recoiled as if the idea were a venomous snake. “No.”

“We need cash flow, Rachel,” he insisted. “It doesn’t solve our problem, but it bolsters the cash we already have. It would extend our ability to feed these animals from three weeks to four, or five, or even longer.”

“No.”

“Not to mention the cost of repairing and maintaining the enclosures, and other operational costs…”

“I said no! That was one of the terms of my employment here. No reopening the zoo to tourists.”

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