Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“Did you and Mr. Gott talk when you were there on Sunday?” Jane asked Dolan.

“Hardly. He was on the phone with someone. I waited around for a few minutes, but he just waved me away. So I took the carcass and left.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know. He said something about wanting more photos of Elliot in Africa. ‘Everything you’ve got,’ he said.”

“Elliot?” Jane looked at O’Brien.

“That was his dead son,” said O’Brien. “Like I said, he’d been talking about Elliot a lot lately. It happened six years ago, but I think the guilt was finally getting to him.”

“Why would Leon feel guilty?”

“Because he had almost nothing to do with him after the divorce. His ex-wife raised the boy, turned him into a girlie-man , according to Leon. The kid hooked up with some wacko PETA girlfriend, probably just to piss off his old man. Leon tried to make contact, but his son wasn’t too keen on staying in touch. So when Elliot died, it really hit Leon hard. All he had left of his son was a photo. Had it hanging in his house, one of the last pictures ever taken of Elliot.”

“How did Elliot die? You said it happened six years ago.”

“Yeah, the kid got it in his fool head to go to Africa. He wanted to see the animals before they got wiped out by hunters like me. Interpol says he met a couple of girls in Cape Town, and the three of them flew off to Botswana for a safari.”

“And what happened?”

O’Brien drained his whiskey glass and looked at her. “They were never seen again.”

BOTSWANA

JOHNNY PRESSES THE TIP OF HIS KNIFE AGAINST THE IMPALA’S ABDOMEN and slices through hide and fat, to the greasy caul that drapes the organs beneath. Only moments ago he brought down the beast with a single gunshot, and as he guts it I watch the impala’s eye cloud over, as if Death has breathed a cold mist across it, glazing it with frost. Johnny works with the swift efficiency of a hunter who’s done this many times before. With one hand he slits open the belly; with his other he pushes the entrails away from the blade to avoid puncturing organs and contaminating the meat. The work is gruesome yet delicate. Mrs. Matsunaga turns away in disgust, but the rest of us cannot stop watching. This is what we have come to Africa to witness: life and death in the bush. Tonight we’ll feast on impala roasted over the fire, and the price of our meal is the death of this animal, now being gutted and butchered. The smell of blood rises from the warm carcass, a scent so powerful that all around us, scavengers are stirring. I think I can hear them now, rustling closer in the grass.

Above us, the ever-present vultures are circling.

“The gut’s full of bacteria, so I remove this to keep the meat from spoiling,” Johnny explains as he slices. “It also lightens the load, makes it easier to carry. Nothing will go to waste, nothing goes uneaten. Scavengers will clean up whatever we leave behind. Better to do it out here, so we don’t attract them back to camp.” He reaches into the thorax to tug on the heart and lungs. With a few strokes of the knife, he severs the windpipe and great vessels and the chest organs slide out like a newborn, slimy with blood.

“Oh God,” groans Vivian.

Johnny looks up. “You eat meat, don’t you?”

“After watching this? I don’t know if I can.”

“I think we all need to watch this,” says Richard. “We need to know where our meal comes from.”

Johnny nods. “Exactly right. It’s our duty, as carnivores, to know what’s involved in getting that steak to your plate. The stalking, the killing. The gutting and butchering. Humans are hunters, and this is what we’ve done since the beginning.” He reaches into the pelvis to strip out the bladder and uterus, then grasps handfuls of intestines and tosses them onto the grass. “Modern men have lost touch with what it means to survive. They go into the supermarket and open their wallet to pay for a steak. That’s not the meaning of meat.” He stands up, bare arms streaked with blood, and looks down at the gutted impala. “ This is.”

We stand in a circle around the kill as the last blood drains from the open cavity. Already the discarded organs are drying out in the sun and the vultures grow thicker overhead, anxious to rip into this ripening mound of carrion.

“The meaning of meat,” Elliot says. “I never thought of it that way.”

“The bush makes you see your real place in the world,” says Johnny. “Here, you’re reminded of what you really are.”

“Animals,” Elliot murmurs.

Johnny nods. “Animals.”

AND THAT’S WHAT I see when I look around the campfire that night. A circle of feeding animals, teeth ripping into chunks of roasted impala meat. Just one day after being stranded in the wild, we have devolved into savage versions of ourselves, eating with our bare hands as juices drip down our chins, our faces streaked with black from charred fat. At least we do not worry about starving out here in the bush, which teems with meat on the hoof and on the wing. With his rifle and skinning knife, Johnny will keep us well fed.

He sits in the shadows just outside our circle, watching us gorge. I wish I could read his face, but it’s closed to me tonight. Does he look at us with contempt, these clueless clients, helpless as baby birds, who need him to put food in our mouths? Does he blame us somehow for Clarence’s death? He picks up the empty bottle of whiskey that Sylvia has just tossed aside and deposits it in the burlap sack where we store our rubbish, which he insists we must haul out. Leave no trace , he says; that is how we respect the land . Already the rubbish bag clinks with glass empties, but there is no danger we’ll run out of booze anytime soon. Mrs. Matsunaga is allergic to alcohol, Elliot drinks only sparingly, and Johnny seems determined to stay stone-cold sober until we are rescued.

He returns to the fire and, to my surprise, he sits down beside me.

I look at him, but his eyes stay on the flames as he says quietly: “You’re handling the situation well.”

“Am I? I didn’t think so. Not particularly.”

“I appreciated your help today. Skinning the impala, breaking down the carcass. You’re a natural in the bush.”

That makes me laugh. “I’m the one who didn’t want to be here. The one who insists on hot showers and proper toilets. This trip was about me being a good sport.”

“To please Richard.”

“Who else?”

“I hope he’s impressed.”

I glance sideways at Richard, who is not looking at me. He’s too busy chatting up Vivian, whose formfitting T-shirt leaves no doubt that she’s braless. I focus, once again, on the fire. “Being a good sport only gets you so far in life.”

“I hear from Richard that you’re a bookseller.”

“Yes, I manage a bookshop in London. In the real world.”

“This isn’t the real world?”

I glance around at the shadows surrounding our campfire. “This is a fantasy, Johnny. Something out of a Hemingway novel. I guarantee, it’s going to show up in one of Richard’s thrillers someday.” I laugh. “Don’t be surprised if he makes you the villain.”

“What part do you play in his novels?”

I study the fire. And say, wistfully: “I used to be the love interest.”

“No longer?”

“Nothing stays the same, does it?” No, now I’m the millstone. The inconvenient girlfriend who’ll have to be dispatched by the villain, so the hero can pursue some new romantic interest. Oh, I know all about how things work in men’s thrillers because I sell those novels to countless pale, flabby men who are all, in their minds, James Bond.