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 they 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.
Moving faster, staying in the lengthening shadows, he kept to his course.
West.
Toward the African Plains.
“We all decide who wins,” Smithfield said.
Everyone nodded. It was the only fair way.
Wilson said, “We get together afterwards and vote.”
More nods.
“And fill each other in.” Smithfield’s lips turned upward. “Every last detail.”
Their favorite part from the beginning.
“We decide where yet?” Kushner asked.
“Great Western Gun Show,” Akeley said.
“Salt Lake City, that is?” Kushner asked.
Akeley nodded.
“Listen, though,” Wilson said. “If we can’t, like, agree, who gets the tie-breaking vote?”
Everyone looked at him, but no one spoke. They all knew the answer to that one.
There.
The prey. As unaware, as self-deluding as the monkey had been, and the bear. Another degraded animal that had convinced itself it was wild, free, unfettered.
The hunter felt himself relax. He was in time.
Just.
It was standing half-hidden behind a screen of bare forsythia. Leaning forward, head hunched low, fierce dark eyes focused on something the hunter couldn’t see. Then, almost imperceptibly, it shifted its weight, muscles tensing as it assumed a predator’s classic pre-attack posture.
Time to put an end to this.
Moving as fast and silently as a shadow, the hunter came up behind it. “Don’t do that,” he said.
His prey jumped, swung its head around, and stared at him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” it asked.
They drew lots. Each got a different zoo, a different part of the country. Minnesota, Miami, San Diego, Washington, the Bronx. The targets: the zoos’ biggest and fiercest animals, or their rarest, or their most difficult to approach.
“I think they’ve got the whole Big Five at my zoo,” said Crede, who’d drawn San Diego.
“Yeah, but I’ve got pandas,” said Smithfield, who was headed to Washington.
Only Wilson seemed to have some reservations, now that their plan was becoming a reality. “Yeah, but—” he said. “I mean, aren’t all these things going to be, like, too easy to kill?”
His words drawing scornful looks from the rest, as if they’d all long since considered that possibility, and discarded it.
Akeley said, “Sure. But who said it was about the kill?”
“Well—” Wilson fumbled for words. “Then… then what is it about?”
Akeley stared at him. “It’s about the hunt,” he said. “The plan. The approach. The wait. The moment — the one moment. And the aftermath.”
Just like it used to be.
He looked into Kushner’s sickly yellow eyes.
The neurosurgeon. Back in the Executive Suite he’d worn some fancy cologne, but now he smelled like powder and heated steel and sweat.
And something more. Something… undone. Unfulfilled.
The hunter let his gaze follow the direction that Kushner had been pointing his Browning autoloader. There, walking along the path that bordered the gray and barren African Plains — nothing like the golden expanse of the real thing — were the surgeon’s final targets.
The little blond girl and her mother. Heading obliviously toward the Asia Gate, walking fast in the gathering darkness, but not faster than a .338 cartridge could fly.
Kushner looked down at the girl, then back at Akeley. The lust for the kill was still strong in him.
“Please,” he said. “Please… let me finish.”
Kushner hesitated in the hallway outside the suite as the others took the elevator down to the exhibition floor. Then he stepped back inside the room. His deeply tanned face was underlain by a reddish flush.
“I have a question,” he said. Akeley waited.
“The kills—” The words were cautious, but the surgeon’s eyes gleamed.
Akeley guessed what was coming next. “What about them?”
“Do they have to be—” A deep breath. The gleam brighter. “To be — animals?”