by S. J. Rozan
A small trickle of blood ran from the hole where the bullet had entered, but most was trapped beneath her layers of blubber. To anyone outside the fence looking in, she would seem merely asleep.
The cub stood just a few feet away. Perhaps three years old, but already weighing six hundred pounds or more. Big enough to fight, to attack, to kill, but in its defiled state able only to stare down at its mother, then up at Akeley. Its body was shaking so hard that he could hear its teeth chattering.
So cold that even the polar bears are shivering.
But this one, of course, was shivering in fear.
The hunter hoisted his heavy duffel bag over his shoulder and turned away.
It was a good-sized show at the Holiday Inn Aurora, one of many hotels carved out of wrecked farmland on the outskirts of Denver International Airport. Something like two thousand tables spread across the floor of the convention center, holding endless rows of double-action safari rifles, police revolvers, shotguns, military hardware. Cartridges lined up like rows of gravestones. Knives and nunchaku and pepper spray. Signs saying things like, Laser scopes must be operated only by exhibitors.
Antiques too. A twenty-one-inch-barrel Volcanic rifle in .41 caliber, a circa-1650 Spanish epee, bear traps from the Colonial days, even a 1940s Jeep that had crossed the Sahara which the kids could climb on.
In other words, the usual. The same stuff you’d find at a hundred other gun shows on a hundred other exhibit floors in a hundred other cities.
One thing was different this time, though.
Up on the eighth floor, in the Executive Suite.
It had been a poor shot.
He could see the animal near the rear of the enclosure, leaping again and again off the floor, landing sometimes on its belly, sometimes on its back. Then getting onto its feet and flipping upwards once more, like a marionette dancing from the ends of a callous puppeteer’s strings.
A golden lion tamarin, one of the world’s smallest, rarest, and most beautiful monkeys, its spun-gold fur stained with black blood.
Akeley studied the hole in the glass front of the enclosure and saw what had happened. The glass had deflected the .22 round, just a little, but enough to prevent a clean kill.
He shifted his gaze to the wounded monkey. The others clustered above it on the vines strung across the enclosure, wide dark eyes showing the human emotions of fear and pity, the twittering of their birdlike voices coming through the glass to his ears.
The hunter sighed. He couldn’t leave it like this. Someone might notice, figure out what had happened, and stop him before he was done.
A door leading behind the scenes was located just inside the Monkey House’s entrance. Before he tested the handle, he looked around, seeing only a small group of teenagers over near the Zoo Center and a pair of nannies wheeling strollers toward the tropical warmth of the World of Birds.
No one paid him any attention. If they had, they’d likely have mistaken him for a keeper anyway. He’d dressed in khaki for this day.
He had his tools ready, but the door was unlocked, the passageway inside deserted. It smelled of rotten fruit and old urine, and the calls of captive animals came to him through the small hatches that led into each enclosure.
He found the entrance to the tamarin exhibit without trouble—he knew the layout of every building—and ducked inside. The little golden monkeys flowed away from him in alarm. They knew he was no zookeeper.
The wounded one, still leaping and falling, fully occupied with trying to escape its agony, didn’t notice him. Droplets of blood from its gut wound lay scattered across the floor.
The hunter reached for his duffel, then paused. Decided there was a better way to end this.
He squatted down and lifted the tiny monkey, insubstantial as a flake of ash in his hands. As he brought it close to his face, it stopped struggling and lay there looking at him, its gaze full of unwarranted trust. So used to humans, so tame, that it expected him to take away its pain.
So he did.
He laid the corpse behind a thick growth of plastic ferns, then straightened and looked into the eyes of the little blondhaired girl who was watching him with rapt attention through the glass.
There were five of them in the hotel room, sipping single malt and telling stories. Taking their time before getting to the matter at hand.
The Big Five, they called themselves. A joke, kind of, but also a boast. The Big Five: The most dangerous mammals in Africa. Lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo. The ones you stalked if you were a real hunter.
Among the Masai, you weren’t a man until you’d killed a lion. For European and American hunters a century and more ago, just
a lion wasn’t enough. You needed all five.
And you knew where to get them. The Serengeti. The Mara and the Selous. Amboseli, under the shadow of Kilimanjaro. You could shoot till the barrels of your bolt-action repeater melted, or till a rhino got his horn into your gut. Either way, no one cared.
Today, though? Today, all those places were preserves, and you were supposed to head to game ranches in South Africa or Zimbabwe instead. Places where all you had to do was hand over your plastic and choose from a price list of what you wanted to shoot. As if you were sitting in a restaurant and ordering off a menu.
A baboon, your basic appetizer, cost seventy-five dollars. Two hundred for a warthog, two-fifty for an impala, nine hundred for a wildebeest, all the way up to two thousand for a waterbuck and twenty-five hundred for a giraffe. Most of them so slow and stupid that you might as well have been some Texas bigwig blasting away at farm-raised quail.
The original Big Five were on the menu too, though their prices were never listed. You had to ask. But if your pockets were deep enough, you could still follow a guide out and knock down a semitame lion or sluggish buffalo on a groomed veldt that looked like something you’d see on a golf course. And then go home and brag on it to your friends.
The state of big-game hunting in the twenty-first century.
Unless you wanted more, and knew how to get it.
Standing close to the glass, the girl peered up at him. She looked to be about seven, with fair skin, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, curly blond hair emerging from a green knit hat, and eyes so large and pale blue that he thought he might be able to see through to her brain if he looked right into them.
How much had she seen? She was old enough to understand, to tell her mother, to scream. She could ruin everything.
He leaned forward, looked past her, seeing only a young woman in a black parka glancing at the squirrel monkeys across the way. No one else was in the Monkey House.
He had choices, then. There were a couple of different ways this could go.
He tried the easiest first, and smiled at her.
She smiled back.
Okay. Good. Tilting his head, he gestured at the golden lion tamarins on the branches around him. Alarmed, they leaped away toward the farthest corners of the enclosure. But the girl saw only adorable little monkeys doing tricks, and laughed. Then she pointed to her mouth and made chewing motions. Feeding time?
He gave an apologetic shake of the head and showed her his watch. Later.
Her lips turned downward in disappointment, and she shrugged. Then she glanced over her shoulder. He heard her voice dimly through the glass: “Hey, Mom—there’s a man in there!”
But by the time the woman turned to look, he was gone.
Wilson and Crede, the lawyers, had bagged a bull elephant whose crossed tusks, as pitted and yellow as mammoth ivory, weighed a combined 407 pounds. Smithfield, the bluff and hearty CEO of a company with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and New York, had shot a black-maned lion in Namibia that measured eleven feet from head to tail. Clark, the lobbyist, tall and skinny, had faced down a charging three-thousand-pound black rhino, standing his ground and firing his Brno ZKK-602 until the great beast came crashing to the ground not five feet from where he stood. And Kushner, the
tanned, nasal-voiced neurosurgeon, had discovered that the leopard he’d shot was still alive, and had finished the job by jamming his fist down its throat until it died of asphyxiation.
Or so the stories went. Who knew what the truth was? And who cared? They were good yarns, and to the Big Five the telling was almost as important as the feat itself.
Taking their time, they opened a new bottle. Soon the room was filled with a familiar camaraderie.
The only thing slightly off was the presence of the sixth man in the room, the one sitting a little back from the circle. A decade older than the others, tall and rangy, he had sun-creased skin, a mustache that had once been blond but was now white, and deep-set eyes the faded blue of sea glass. He sat slouched comfortably in one of the teak-and-gold chairs, his long, tapering fingers occasionally drumming an odd rhythm on his thighs. His piercing gaze moved from one to another, and though he smiled at their loud jokes, he spoke only rarely himself. His drink sat untouched on the table beside his chair.
The others would have liked it if he’d joined in, maybe shared some of his own stories. But no one even considered asking.
They all knew his reputation. He was the one who sometimes disappeared for months at a time, going where no satellite could find him, living off the game instead of just bringing it home to show off. The one who people said could read a landscape with cheetah’s skill, follow the herds as relentlessly as a hunting dog, stalk his prey as silently as a leopard. The one whose obsession for the kill had once made his guns seem like extensions of his body. The one who had seen everything, shot everything, lived a life the rest of them could only dream of.
He was the one they all wanted to be.
Which was why they’d come to the Executive Suite.
A red-tailed hawk was circling over the thatched roofs of the zoo’s fake African village, peering down from the steel-gray sky at the shaggy baboons milling about on their pitiful, barren hillside.
Akeley had seen ospreys here, peregrines, once even an eagle that had wandered over from the Hudson. Predators all, their brains always processing the information their eyes transmitted. He wondered what they thought when they looked down on the apes, tigers, and wolves below.
Probably something like: Man, if I could kill that, I wouldn’t have to hunt again for weeks.
“Sir?”
Shit. He’d been drifting, something he did a lot more frequently these days than he once had.
Drifting could get you killed.
“Sir, I need to talk to you.”
A deep voice, Spanish accent. Slowly the hunter swung his gaze down from the sky and focused on the man dressed in white shirt and blue slacks, an inadequate navy-blue jacket zipped up in a hopeless attempt to block out the icy wind. A walkie-talkie swinging from his belt. The name on his white laminated badge read, F. Cabrera.
A zoo security guard, with chapped cheeks and watering eyes. Unhappy to be outside in this weather, but staying polite for now, probably because of Akeley’s age.
Still, the hunter could see that F. Cabrera was young and self-confident. A smile and a few conciliatory words wouldn’t stop him. And his politeness wouldn’t last long if he didn’t get the answers he was looking for.
Too bad.
“Sir, I had a report of a man fitting your description exiting an authorized-personnel door of the Monkey House.”
Akeley didn’t reply, just turned away and started walking, heading south and east, his strides eating up ground.
“Hey!” Cabrera sounded shocked by this display of insubordination. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”
Akeley kept going.
The guard got in front of him again. Now his face was stony, and he showed some teeth when he talked. His hand hovered over the walkie-talkie.
“Papi, you really think it’s a good idea to make trouble?” he said.
Akeley took stock. Down the path toward the African Plains he saw a family—Mom, Dad, ten-year-old, toddler, swaddled baby in a stroller. They were out of earshot, and even if they hadn’t been, they would merely have seen two zoo employees talking. Nothing worth giving a second thought to.
Cabrera cut a glance at Akeley’s duffel. “What you got in there?”
“Books.”
“Huh.” Imbuing the single word with scornful disbelief. “Why don’t you open it and show me?”
The hunter shook his head and started off again, moving faster this time. He felt a hand on his arm, shrugged it off, then felt it grab him again, hard, and half-spin him around.
“You come with me.” Cabrera spat out each word. “Now.”
“Okay,” Akeley said, “I won’t fight you.”
“Good.” But Akeley thought that the guard looked a little disappointed.
They walked together, Cabrera still holding his arm. Up ahead loomed the dark, squat stone walls of the World of Darkness. Akeley waited until they’d gone ten more steps, fifteen, and then broke free and headed up the path toward the building’s front doors.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Cabrera said, and came after him.
They went through the turnstile, the door slamming open once, and then again, and into the permanent near-blackness designed to encourage nocturnal animals—bats, skunks, snakes, wildcats—to put on a better show. The hunter could see perfectly in the darkness, an ability he’d possessed for as long as he could remember. But the people inside, hearing the sound of the slamming door, turned dim, clouded eyes in his direction.
Behind him Cabrera, blind, fumbling, tried to put him in a bearhug. Akeley turned and hit him three times, hard, twice in the gut and once in the jaw.
The guard made a small, despairing sound in his throat and slid to the floor. The hunter spoke into his ear, a whisper that no one else could hear over the squeaking of bats and the rustle of porcupine quills.
“You don’t stop me,” he said, “before I’m done.”
One corner of the exhibit was roped off for construction. Quickly Akeley carried the unconscious man past the barricade and dropped him against the wall. No one would see him there, and he would stay quiet for a while. For long enough.
Akeley headed back toward the door, past a pair of teenagers staring at the fruit bats and a small figure bent over the glass scorpion case: the little blond girl from the Monkey House, turning to look at him as he went by. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and she recognized him as well.
“It’s you,” she said in a half-whisper.
“Yes.”
“Look at this.” She pressed a button, and instantly a black light came on. Under the glass, a pair of large scorpions fluoresced, a brilliant glowing blue. “Aren’t they cool?”
“They sure are.”
As he went out the door he heard her say, “Hey, Mom, look—”
He stood for a moment outside, the north wind in his face. The sun, heading for the horizon, had at last pulled free of the low clouds, and cast weak shadows behind the spindly trees and litter-snagged bushes.
The hunter drew the cold air deep into his lungs and started heading west, toward the setting sun.
Wondering if he’d already lost too much time.
Was “Akeley” even his real name?
No one asked. Even where he came from, where he’d been born, was a mystery. Some said Germany, others England, still others swore he was the son of a ranching family that had lived in Rhodesia for generations. His quiet voice, with its gruff edge, seemed to carry a slight accent, but gave no firm clue to its origins. Nor did anyone know how he had gotten the scar that began beneath his jawline and ran along the side of his neck before disappearing under the collar of the long-sleeved safari shirts he always wore.
A man out of time, people said. Stories told at gun shows, in gentlemen’s club lounges, and in the field, creating only this blurry portrait, all the more compelling for being so incomplete. If he chose to call himself Akeley, that had to be good enough for them.
Even Smithfield, the CEO, had seemed awed when the
y first met. “Were you the one—” he had started to say, before something in Akeley’s expression made it clear that he shouldn’t finish. Smithfield didn’t usually care what other people wanted—why bother when you could fire anyone who disagreed with you?—but he’d stopped short, cleared his throat, and finished, lamely, by saying, “Glad to know you,” in an unexpectedly hoarse voice.
But he’d recovered by the time they got down to business. “Fifty thousand each?” he said. “Why not make it a hundred?”
Getting some pleasure watching the others wriggle a bit. Then seeing Kushner, the guy who drilled into your skull and fucked with your brain, frowning as he put an end to that. “Fifty,” he said. “As we discussed.”
Everyone else nodding.
But Kushner’s eyes were on Akeley. “And you’ll match it.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Make it five hundred thousand?”
“What it adds up to,” Akeley agreed.
That had been the deal from the start, but still, there was something about hearing it out loud. Smithfield laughed, a sound like a zebra’s bray.
But Kushner wasn’t smiling. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you raising the stakes?”
The hunter stretched like a cat in his chair. “Added incentive,” he said.
Though, really, this group hardly needed any.
The zoo would be closing soon.
Not that it mattered much, not usually. In preparation, the hunter had spent a week living here, on the grounds, and no one had ever gotten a hint of his presence. You couldn’t “close” something so big and sprawling and overgrown, you could just tell people it was time to leave and assume they’d listen.
And because people were sheep, they usually did.
Cawing flocks of crows flew overhead, blown by the wind like flakes of soot as they headed toward their nighttime roosts. Below the heedless black birds, the last few zoo visitors, scattered groups of two or three, hurried toward the parking lots near the Bronx River Parkway and Fordham Road.
But the hunter had someplace else he needed to be.
