Bronx Noir

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.