Rundown by Michael Cadnum

collars.
    Mr. DaGama, the owner, spoke English with a Cuban accent and could soothe even the most high-strung whippet with a touch. Marta had found me the job, three or four half days a week during the summer, tending the boarded animals in the back room.
    The aviaries behind the main shop were a wonderful secret, zebra finches, lovebirds, conures, cockatiels, parakeets, and at one end of the room the royalty of the kingdom, macaws and cockatoos, all of them prized by their traveling owners and left with us because the animals thrived here.
    Cass says “Animal Heaven” sounds like a pet cemetery. Cass used to skip up and down the sidewalk, killing ants. Dad always said we traveled too much to take care of a dog, and Mom said cats could not be trusted.
    I loved the pet store. Droopy, eighty-year-old Amazons perked up under our heat lamps, and egg-bound canary hens laid their eggs after all, singing their happily tuneless female-finch song.
    I slung my leather purse/backpack into a corner. I felt light-headed, and colors were garish, the display of dog dishes, unbreakable, gleaming, primary colors, made me feel like throwing up.
    Mr. DaGama followed me into the back room, a newspaper folded in his hand. “You’re okay,” he said, a tone of surprise.
    Marta, or Marta’s mom, must have called him. I asked how Byron was doing.
    â€œByron lives,” he said. Sometimes he ladled out his accent, not trying to speak normal English. Bee-roan leaves . He shook open the Tribune. Suspect New Attack in Serial Terror . I sat down on a big paper bag of sunflower seeds as I scanned the column for my name. I couldn’t find it.
    â€œMarta’s coming in soon,” said Mr. DaGama.
    â€œThe African gray is saying something,” I said, to change the subject.
    The gray parrot hadn’t been a talker when his new owners left him here five days before, heading for a camping trip, hiking Molokai to the historical leper colony. The new parrot words did not sound like much, but they had the shape and intonation of human speech.
    â€œJennifer,” Mr. DaGama was saying, “this country is too gentle with wicked people.” The way he said my name made it sound exotic, the J given just a curl of his tongue. “A man like this should be horsewhipped in the town square.”
    A headache started up, a thrum as steady and ugly as a motor inside my brain. “I can take care of myself.” This was new for me, a flickering aluminum flame at the edge of my vision.
    â€œI bet you anything this criminal just got out of prison. I expect he is at liberty not one or two weeks. And he begins his old ways.”
    â€œNo harm was done,” I said. Something about Mr. DaGama’s careful, correct English made me speak similar sentences.
    â€œJennifer, I think that harm was done,” he said.
    Byron was a sulfur-crested cockatoo with the chalky, gnarled beak of a very old bird. He sat in his food dish, and as I approached, the crest fanned upward on his head, erect in greeting. Byron’s owner was a professor, away in England lecturing on how planets are born. Byron had started sneezing late last week, bubbles of snot crusting his nostrils, and, as I watched, Mr. DaGama put a heavy dose of avian antibiotic into his water dish.
    Marta flings herself into a room, but she never knocks so much as a chew toy off the display table, or slips on a wet floor.
    Mr. DaGama was cleaning up after an elderly teacup pug had peed a tiny bit, excited at his new rubber chew-bone, “flavored with real beef.” Marta hurried into the back room. If she had theme music it would be drums and cymbals.
    â€œI called Quinn,” said Marta, first thing, before she bothered with “good morning.”
    This startled me. “You didn’t.”
    â€œI called him and talked to his dad, and then I talked to him in person.” Marta is mouse-blond, but the sun bleaches her gold. Like me, she’s got