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escape. Most of the animals were recaptured by zoo personnel within the first few days after New Madrid, although quite a few wild birds had taken wing, and a handful of coyotes and bobcats had been wily enough get out of the inner city and into the county’s wooded west side. Some of the zoo specimens, unfortunately, didn’t make it back to their cages; two weeks after the quake, a rare Tibetan white leopard was shot by a redneck National Guardsman after it was cornered foraging through garbage cans in the University City neighborhood. When zoo officials arrived at the scene, they found the leopard’s decapitated carcass lying in the alley; the weekend warrior who had shot the leopard had carved its head off and taken it back to his place in Fenton as a trophy.
    But the apes that had survived the collapse of the monkey house had done much better. Only a handful of apes had been recaptured, mostly gorillas and orangutans; most of the chimpanzees and baboons had taken to the trees and had survived the short, relatively mild winter that followed the earthquake summer. Indeed, they had been fruitful and multiplied, adding to their numbers as the months wore on. Now monkey packs roamed the park like street gangs, raiding tents and terrorizing squatters.
    Even the ERA troopers were frightened of them; there had been one rumored account that a chimpanzee pack had fallen upon a parked Hummer and chased its crew into the woods. If the story was true, then good for the chimps; I had more sympathy for runamok apes than for runamok goon squads.
    There was no sign of apes, either human or simian, so I found a vacant spot beside one of the Doric columns holding up the awning. After looking around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I unzipped my leather bomber jacket and reached into the liner pocket to pull out my PT’s earphone.
    “Joker, can you hear me?” I said, switching on the PT and holding the earphone against my ear.
    “ I hear you, Gerry.” Joker’s voice was an androgynous murmur in my ear: HAL-9000 with a flat midwestern accent. It was picking up my voice from a small mike clipped to the underside of my jacket collar.
    “Good deal,” I replied. “Okay, open a file, slug it … um, ‘park,’ suffix numeral one … and get ready for dictation.”
    I usually typed my notes one-handed on Joker’s miniature keyboard. Like many writers, I intuitively prefer to see my words on a screen, but there was no way I was going to fish out my palmtop and open it up in plain view, thereby revealing myself to be a reporter. During the December riots, too many of my colleagues had been attacked by rioters who had seen them as being authority figures, and a Post-Dispatch photographer had been killed by crossfire during the torching of the federal armory in Pine Lawn. Even if some of these people didn’t necessarily see the press as their enemy, there was always the chance someone might try to mug me in order to grab Joker. A stolen PT was probably worth a few cans of tuna on the black market.
    But somebody in the crowd knew there was a reporter among them.
    “Gerry?”
    “Yes, Joker?”
    “There’s an IM for you. I would have signaled you earlier, but you told me not to call you.”
    Indeed I had; Joker’s annunciator would have tipped off anyone nearby that I was carrying a PT. “This is a little strange. Although the IM was sent directly to me, it’s addressed to John Tiernan. I was not informed that we would be taking John’s messages.”
    I frowned as I heard this. John was another reporter for the Big Muddy Inquirer. Although he was my best friend, we normally stayed out of each other’s work. Someone trying to send an instant message to John should have reached his own PT, Dingbat, not Joker; nor could we access each other’s palmtops without entering special passwords.
    But there was no sense in asking Joker if it was mistaken; my little Toshiba didn’t make errors like that. “Okay, Joker,” I said,