Bronx Noir

And the zoo was even emptier than usual today. Akeley had known it would be. Known that even the keepers would be hidden safely inside, except when the feeding or cleaning schedule forced them to venture out into the deep freeze.

Almost as empty as the Arctic itself, where great white bears might live out their entire lives without seeing a human being. Carnivores so wild, so untamed, that they didn’t recognize the danger in a rifle, didn’t understand what a large-bore cartridge could do, didn’t realize they were supposed to go down, and so instead kept on coming at you, as if they were above death.

But you had nothing to fear from these zoo bears. They had lost their freedom, their wildness, their purpose. You could see it in the way they got fat, the way they smelled, rank, like something inside them was rotting away. You could see it by the toys the zookeepers had given them. A pink ball, a split plastic barrel, a metal garbage can.

Akeley had often seen them tossing their toys into the pond, then belly-flopping after them, making enormous splashes as the spectators laughed and cheered. It was like watching a kitten cuffing a catnip-stuffed toy mouse, safe and easy and cute, and these defiled bears seemed to respond to human approval just the way kittens did.

Only…not today.

The big one, the sow, lay at his feet. She had sunk down onto her belly and laid her head on her paws. Her eyes were on his, eyes normally sharp as obsidian, but growing rapidly duller, more distant, as the seconds passed. Akeley watched until the last glimmer of light drained out of them.

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.