Bronx Noir

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?”

Yes: what he’d expected.

The word had gotten around about Kushner over the years. How he’d accidentally shot and killed a porter on safari in Namibia, and then another in northern Kenya. Garbled rumors of yet another death, maybe in the Peruvian Amazon, maybe in Thailand.

Or maybe both. The world was full of potential victims, places where a rich American could get away with murder.