Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

“I spent three months in the Kibale Forest. The nightmares stopped. I was getting immersed in my work. Then a female came into estrus. Chimps… they were all… All I could see was Moll… with Gounaris… with all of them… And I knew I had to come back, keep going until all the men who had killed her were dead.”

“Why Moll’s father?”

“Not me-I’d say it was Ucelli acting under orders from Otto Kreiger. But when I heard about it, on the same day I killed Kreiger, I just used that Hardy quote about pairings…”

“How’d you know about Ucelli? He wouldn’t have been on this disk.”

“You told me-remember?”

Dante remembered. Right here in this room. He could see it all now. How Dalton had worked it. Once everyone believed he was in East Africa, nobody would look in his direction again.

How he had done it, yes. But that he’d been able to do it… Such a sustained rage, such a…

He remembered his secret contempt for Will when he’d heard the man was going to run off to Africa, leave his wife’s death unresolved. Remembered his own blustering thoughts about what he would do if someone did to Rosie what they had done to Moll…

Would he have done any different?

“If we weren’t here, if you hadn’t told me about this…”

“I’d go back to Uganda.” His eyes had, for a moment, an almost peaceful look. “Eventually, publish my findings. Keep looking for answers about us…” He met Dante’s gaze directly. “It’s important. After all of this”-he waved an arm-“I know just how important. How could I do it? Yet I’d do it again. Knowing it was wrong, knowing we have to find other ways to react to loss and pain and rage if we are to survive as a species, knowing all that I’d still do it all again. Because whatever has been driving me is in all of us. We have to understand it or we’re doomed.”

Dante thought of the Raptor messages. The lecture he had heard that night. The impossibility of getting evidentiary proof of any of the slayings Raptor had committed-he still couldn’t think of the assassin as Will Dalton. The Raptor tapes meant nothing, even those that could be shown by voiceprints to be in Dalton’s voice-just a man reading quotes from literature…

Will burst out, “Don’t you see it, Stagnaro? Young primates in the ghettos, forming bonds like chimpanzees on the veldt… Pockets of nationalism or race festering until they split open and spew violence… Spouses beating spouses, stepparents killing children… Me murdering the men who murdered Moll…

“We can’t escape our animal nature, it’s like cholesterol in the blood-in times of stress it’s going to come out. But still we ignore the myths that told us who we were, where we came from. We try to live the myth of man, shiny and new, apex of life, different in kind, not degree. It doesn’t work. Our only hope is to recognize who and what we are, hope that we’re still evolving, that we still have time-just barely-to save ourselves and the world. Otherwise…”

He stopped, rubbed his eyes wearily. Dante took his hand from the phone, where it had been all of that time, crossed to the coffee table, picked up the disk. Dalton hadn’t been asking for absolution; just understanding. And not for himself. Just for… us…

Will Dalton spoke softly, almost indifferently.

“So what happens now?”

Dante wasn’t God. Just a cop. A cop who’d have a hell of a time proving anything he’d heard here tonight in a court of law. He hadn’t even read Dalton his Miranda rights. And for the moment, all his own enemies were dead. He put the disk in his pocket. He’d erase the message on his answering machine.

“What happens now? Atlas Entertainment goes in the toilet, my organized crime squad looks like champs. The Mafia’ll probably have a big war over who grabs Vegas now that you’ve taken Prince out, and the Feebies’ll think they’re gonna save the world. You’ll have to learn to live with what you’ve done-I, God help me, will have to learn to live with what I’m doing.”

He knew he’d tell Rosie. Eventually. And he knew she’d approve. Eventually. He’d never tell Tim; he wouldn’t approve. Or maybe he would. Dante wasn’t so sure about anybody any more.

“Not with a bang but a whimper,” said Will Dalton softly.

“Whatever the hell that means,” said Dante.

Neither man offered to shake hands. As he shut the door behind him, Dante heard Will Dalton, for the third time in his adult life, start to cry. Moll was still dead, and Raptor was gone. Will Dalton was truly alone.

But he had avenged his dead wife, and could begin to grieve for her. After all the hatred and spilled blood, wasn’t that a human achievement of sorts?