Urge to Kill

She accepted the narrow white box from the man, told him to wait a minute, and then dug a few dollars from her purse to tip him.

When he was gone, she carried the box to the coffee table and sat down before it on the sofa. Her ear began to ring louder, and her headache was pulsing. When she was finished here she’d take two Aleves with a glass of water, see if that helped.

She leaned forward in the quiet apartment and opened the box.

It was full of pink and red roses. There was a small white card affixed with a delicate pink ribbon to one of the stems. Lavern opened the card so she could read the blue-ink scrawling inside it and recognized the handwriting.

The roses were from Hobbs. The writing on the card proclaimed that he loved her.

The sad part about it, Lavern thought, was that he really did.

Martin Hawk sat back, sipped his espresso, and idly watched the pigeons scratching out their brief existence on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where he’d just enjoyed a delicious breakfast. He mused on how his life had changed for the better. Had it been luck? Fate? He preferred to credit it to design, but he was a realist.

At sixteen his intelligence had been obvious, especially in his knowledge of the outdoors and in the scores he accumulated on various tests meant to measure scholarly potential. Yet he’d been a hopeless student. His father had become concerned, and when Alma’s widowed and childless sister, Adriella, offered to take the boy into her home in Little Rock and see that he was enrolled in a better school and tutored, Carl thanked her for her generosity and told Marty it was time for him to become a scholar. Education was important, and he’d be a neglectful father if he didn’t see that Marty obtained some.

Marty didn’t like leaving Black Lake, but to disobey his father was unthinkable. So he lived with Adriella and struggled along in Little Rock, not exactly a top scholar, but getting by.

Three weeks before his high school graduation, fate intervened. Adriella, who was much more attractive and personable than her late sister, met and married Lloyd Barkweather.

Barkweather was a large, bluff man with shrewd gray eyes. He was moderately wealthy. And he was British. He’d been spending a month in Little Rock to consider Arkansas as a contending state in a search for the site of a new Rolls-Royce jet engine plant. Barkweather had said no to Arkansas, and a love-struck Adriella had said yes to Barkweather.

An ardent big game hunter, Barkweather had soon taken a shine to Marty. When he and Adriella moved, Marty went with them to London, where he continued his education, doing only marginally better as a scholar.

But he did marvelously well as an outdoorsman, going with Barkweather on hunting expeditions in faraway countries whose names Marty could barely pronounce.

When Barkweather and Adriella were killed in a motorcar pileup on the M23, Marty was surprised to find himself the sole heir to a modest investment portfolio.

Still without his degree, Marty left school at the age of twenty-one. He placed the portfolio in the stewardship of the investment department of Barclays Bank and traveled to Africa, where he went to work as a guide for a British company offering safaris. Mostly they were photography safaris, but Marty did hunt on his own with a rifle that had been a gift from Barkweather.

His reputation as a hunter grew, as did his reputation with women. The first had been the lonely wife of a Canadian client. Then local wives and daughters of civil servants fell one after another as victims of his charm.

Marty found courting and bedding women much like stalking and bagging game.

But not quite. There was some trouble about an unwanted pregnancy that became a miscarriage, then a suicide, and he left Africa to hunt in India.

He thought less and less about the disconsolate African woman who’d leaped to her death from a bridge out of love and remorse.

When a tiger in the Sunderbans became a man-eater, it was Marty who was hired to track and kill it. Within the week the tiger was dead, and Martin Hawk was something of a hero.

After that kill, he returned to Africa.

A month later he was sitting in a camp chair outside his tent when he noticed a slow whirl of vultures circling a distant creature almost dead. Martin Hawk raised his binoculars and saw that the doomed animal was a male lion that had perhaps been fatally injured in a fight for dominance of the pride.

He leaned back in his chair, still with the binoculars pressed to his eyes, and became fascinated not by the lion, but by the huge birds gliding and soaring on the warm air currents off the veldt, patiently waiting for the lion to die.

It was then, for a reason he didn’t understand or try to analyze, that he felt the need to return to his home country and his father.

The time Martin Hawk had chosen to return was fortunate. His modest portfolio in euros had, due to the rate of exchange, become considerably more valuable in dollars.