Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

Oh yes, Africa has changed me, too.

I hold my breath as Johnny’s silhouette pauses outside our tent. Then he moves past and his shadow glides away. When I fall asleep, it’s not Richard I dream about, but Johnny, standing tall and straight in the grass. Johnny, who makes me feel safe.

Until the next morning, when I wake up to the news that Isao Matsunaga has vanished.

KEIKO KNEELS IN THE GRASS, SOBBING SOFTLY AS SHE ROCKS BACK and forth like a metronome ticking off a rhythm of despair. We’ve found the rifle, lying just beyond the bell-strung perimeter, but we have not yet found her husband. She knows what that means. We all know.

I stand over Keiko, uselessly stroking her shoulder because I don’t know what else to do. I’ve never been good at comforting people. After my father died, and my mother sat weeping in his hospital room, all I could do was rub her arm, rub, rub, rub, until she finally cried out: “Stop it, Millie! That’s so annoying!” I think Keiko is too distraught to even notice that I’m touching her. Looking down at her bowed head, I see white roots peeking through her black hair. With her pale, smooth skin, she seemed so much younger than her husband, but now I realize she’s not young at all. That a few months out here will reveal her true age as her black hair turns to silver, as her skin darkens and wrinkles in the sun. Already she seems to be shriveling before my eyes.

“I’m going to search by the river,” says Johnny, and he picks up the rifle. “All of you, stay here. Better yet, wait in the truck.”

“The truck ?” Richard says. “You mean that piece of junk you can’t even start?”

“If you stay in the truck, nothing will hurt you. I can’t search for Isao and protect you at the same time.”

“Wait. Johnny,” I speak up. “Should you be out there by yourself?”

“He’s got the fucking gun, Millie,” Richard says. “We’ve got nothing.”

“While he’s hunting for tracks, someone needs to watch his back,” I point out.

Johnny gives a curt nod. “Okay, you’re my spotter, Millie. Stay close.”

As I step over the perimeter wire, my boot bumps the strand and the bells tinkle. Such a sweet ringing, like a wind chime on the breeze, but out here it means the enemy has invaded and my heart gives a reflexive kick of alarm at the sound. I take a deep breath and follow Johnny into the grass.

I was right to come with him. His attention is fixed on the ground as he searches for clues, and he could very well miss seeing the flick of a lion’s tail off in the underbrush. As we move forward I am constantly scanning behind us, all around us. The grass is tall, up to my hips, and I think of puff adders and how you might step on one and not know it until fangs sink into your leg.

“Here,” Johnny says quietly.

I look where the grass has been flattened and see a bare patch of soil and a scrape mark left by something being dragged across it. Johnny’s already moving again, following the trail of flattened grass.

“Did the hyenas take him?”

“Not hyenas. Not this time.”

“How do you know?”

He doesn’t answer, but keeps moving toward a grove of trees, which I’m now able to recognize as sycamore figs and jackal berries. Though I cannot see the river, I hear it rushing somewhere close by, and I think of crocodiles. Everywhere you look in this place, in the trees, in the river, in the grass, teeth are waiting to bite, and Johnny relies on me to spot them. Fear sharpens my senses and I’m aware of details I’ve never noticed before. The kiss of river-chilled wind against my cheek. The way freshly trampled grass smells like onions. I am looking, listening, smelling. We are a team, Johnny and I, and I won’t fail him.

Suddenly I sense the change in him. His soft intake of breath, his abrupt stillness. He is no longer focused on the ground, but has straightened to his full height, shoulders squared.

At first I do not see her. Then I follow the direction of his gaze, to the tree that looms before us. It is a towering sycamore fig, a majestic specimen with wide-spreading branches and dense foliage, the kind of tree where you’d build a Swiss Family Robinson house.

“There you are,” whispers Johnny. “Such a pretty girl.”

Only then do I spot her, draped over a high branch. The leopard is almost invisible, so well does she blend into the leaf-dappled shade. All along she’s been observing us, waiting patiently as we drew near, and now she watches with keen intelligence, weighing her next move, just as Johnny weighs his. Lazily she flicks her tail, but Johnny stays perfectly motionless. He is doing exactly what he advised us to do. Let the cat see your face. Show it that your eyes are forward-facing, that you, too, are a predator .

A moment passes, a moment when I have never felt so afraid or so alive. A moment when each heartbeat sends a sharp thrust of blood up my neck, whistling through my ears like wind. The leopard’s gaze stays on Johnny. He is still gripping the rifle in front of him. Why doesn’t he lift it to his shoulder? Why doesn’t he fire?

“Back away,” he whispers. “There’s nothing we can do for Isao.”

“You think the leopard killed him?”

“I know she did.” He lifts his head, a subtle gesture that I almost miss. “Upper branch. To the left.”

It has been hanging there the whole time, but I didn’t notice it. Just as I didn’t at first notice the leopard. The arm dangles free like the strange fruit of a sausage tree, the hand gnawed down to a fingerless knob. Foliage masks the rest of Isao’s body, but through the leaves I make out the shape of his torso, wedged in the crook of a branch, as if he’d dropped from the sky and landed like a broken doll in that tree.

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “How are we going to get him—”

“Don’t. Move.”

The leopard has risen to a crouch, haunches tensed to spring. It’s me she’s staring at, her eyes fixed on mine. In an instant Johnny’s rifle is up and ready to fire, but he doesn’t pull the trigger.

“What are you waiting for?” I whisper.

“Back away. Together.”

We take a step back. Another. The leopard settles back onto her branch, tail flicking.

“She’s only protecting her kill,” he says. “That’s what leopards do, store their prey in a tree, where other scavengers can’t get it. Look at the muscles in her shoulders. In her neck. That’s real power for you. The power to drag a dead animal that outweighs her, all the way up to that high branch.”

“For God’s sake, Johnny. We need to get him down.”

“He’s already dead.”

“We can’t leave him up there.”

“We get any closer, she’ll spring on us. And I won’t kill a leopard just to retrieve a corpse.”

I remember what he once told us: that he would never kill a big cat. That he considered them sacred animals, too rare to sacrifice for any reason, not even to save his own life. Now he stands behind those words, even as Isao’s corpse dangles above us, and the leopard guards her meal. Johnny suddenly seems as strange a beast as any I’ve yet encountered in this wild place, a man whose respect for this land runs as deep as the roots of these trees. I think of Richard, with his metallic-blue BMW and his black leather jacket and aviator glasses, things that made him seem masculine to me when we first met. But they were only trappings, to adorn a mannequin. That’s what the word means, isn’t it? A model of the human body, not real. Until now, it seems that I have known only mannequins who look like men, pretend to be men, but are merely plastic. I will never find another man like Johnny, not in London, not anywhere, and that is a heartbreaking thing to realize. That I will search for the rest of my life, and will always look back to this moment, when I knew exactly which man I wanted.