Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection

by Lacey Carter Andersen

So for the record, rhinos are not related to dinosaurs.

  Having said that, however, I admit I’m guilty of turning to Wikipedia for most of my background information on the species. I pulled the names of some conservation experts from websites like rhinos.org and worldwildlife.org. I made notes of phrases I knew I’d find useful. I knew I’d be able to throw the phrase, “Rhinos are one of the largest remaining megafauna,” into the article somewhere. But then of course, I had to look up the other remaining megafauna and that led me down a rabbit hole of research—an occupational hazard of mine. I hadn’t been surprised to learn that elephants and hippos were also on the list but for some reason I hadn’t realized giraffes were too. But maybe I shouldn’t have been. I’d discovered in my preliminary reading about big game hunting in Africa that there was a thriving business in leading giraffe hunts for a trophy fee of around three thousand dollars per animal.

  “What kind of douche wants to shoot a giraffe for sport? And then post the picture on social media?” I said to the guy sitting across from me in a crowded Lagos expat bar.

  “Are you really outraged or just trying out a subjective point of view?” Oliver Tolliver—Olly Tolly to his friends—asked me. We were talking over drinks at the Long Bar while the crowd watched sports or—if they were drunk enough—blundered their way through an 80s anthem on the karaoke stage.

  I’d met Olly in Afghanistan when he was still on Uncle Sam’s payroll. He’d been the subject of a chapter in my book Where Empires Go to Die. I’d lost track of him after he returned to Liverpool, but I wasn’t that surprised to run across him in an expat bar four thousand miles from Afghanistan and a world away from Liverpool.

  Olly was one of those guys who was always going to be looking for the missing piece of his life’s puzzle. There’s a Hungarian word—Hiányérzet—that doesn’t really have an English equivalent. It means something like “the feeling that something is missing even though you don’t know what that ‘something’ is.” Olly suffered from Hiányérzet.

  “I come back to Liverpool and everybody wants to shake my hand but nobody wants to hire me,” Olly said, digging into a plate of pork ribs to soak up the vodka shots he’d been pounding since before I got there. “And I’m sleeping at my dad’s house because my wife thinks we need some space.” He didn’t put air quotes around the phrase but he might as well have. I’d met Darla Tolliver. She was a pretty woman who wasn’t cut out for the hard stuff. His PTSD had freaked her out and she told me she thought he’d be able to forget what he’d seen in Afghanistan if he just went to church more. “Let go and let God,” she’d said, her eyes shining with righteous conviction. I was surprised Olly still wore his wedding ring and said so.

  “Protective coloration,” he said and gave me a “boys will be boys” grin. I didn’t want to know what he meant by that—I’m not a complete asshole—and besides, I wanted him to tell me his story before he got too many more vodkas into him. As I recalled, he was a mean drunk.

  “So I landed this temp gig with a low-rent security company and I was making minimum wage as a night watchman down at the docks. And this mate of mine, Winters, calls me up one night. And he says, ‘You still got your passport?’

  “Says he knows a guy who knows a guy who works for one of those upscale safari hunting outfits that takes rich assholes to India and Africa so they can shoot big animals.

  “And he says they need two guides to babysit some customers on a trophy hunt they’re running in Zimbabwe.” And just in case I didn’t grasp the absurdity of that, he did make air quotes around the word “guides.”

  I nodded, but my attention was starting to wander to two hard-faced men who were stumbling over the words to “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” while trying to record themselves on their phones. Social media has a lot to answer for.

  “And I’m not feeling it until Winters mentions that the gig pays five thousand dollars for ten days’ work, and that’s before tips,” Olly continued. “Winters’ guy says some hunters will throw in an extra coupla thousand if they are happy with their trophy.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” I said. “And you didn’t have to have any training to be a guide?”

  “What training?” he said. “You just need to know what end of the gun to point at the animal. The trackers do all the hard stuff.”

  Olly paused to inhale another shot and signaled the pretty bartender for two more. Back in the states, she probably would have cut him off but here she just nodded and moved away to pour the drinks.

  “So I go and do an interview with the guy who runs the safari outfit and he hires me right there in the room. And he hands me a thousand dollars cash as a signing bonus.”

  “Sweet,” I said, and part of me wondered if I could get a job as a safari guide. A thousand dollars was just about all I had in my checking account and rent was going to take all but fifty dollars of that.

  “The clients were a couple guys out of Texas, oil business guys. Pasty, red-faced, beer guts, balding. It was almost comical how stereotypical they were. They didn’t even want to hunt rhino. They wanted leopard pelts but there weren’t any big cat permits at that time of year, not even if you bribed someone.”

  I interrupted him there to see if I could get any actionable intel on who exactly you’d bribe in a situation like that, but Olly was too cagey to name names.

  “Some government guy. Winters handled all of that. I was just along for window dressing. And to talk to the clients. All they wanted to talk about was guns. And how they really wanted to get a leopard.”

  “They weren’t interested in rhinos,” I said, just to clarify.

  “You can’t drape a dead rhino around your neck,” Olly said. There was this one guy—I swear his name was Billy Bob or Jimmy Joe or something. And I saw him fondling the shells. I came this close to asking him if he wanted me to ram one up his ass, but that would probably have put the kibosh on my tip, so I just smiled and pretended it wasn’t weird at all.”

  I’ve run into guys like that. I once interviewed a Mexican gun lord who had a genuine golden gun, all blinged out. Google I “narco gun bling.” It’s a thing. One guy I talked to wasn’t into guns, he liked blades. He had a whole room full of them. I think he might have had a fetish.

  “And Billy Bob starts asking me if I’ve ever killed anyone and I could tell he was about to launch into some pitch about how would I like to be part of a ‘most dangerous game’ scenario.”

  “He wanted to hunt humans?”

  “Yep.”

  My story sense perked up at that. I knew such things existed, and not just in the movies, but I’d never been able to nail down the particulars. “Did he?”

  “No, I shut that shit down,” he said. “But he wouldn’t shut up about the leopard. But he wasn’t the worst. He’d brought his daughter with him. She was a beautiful kid and a real little cunt. Entitled as fuck. She made it clear she’d be happy to fuck me or Winters or both. She said she was sixteen but her passport said fourteen so…

  “But the other guy he was with, this guy McQuaide, he jizzed all over himself when he got his rhino and that made him happy for about a minute and then he started talking about this Southern white bull rhino that’s supposed to be the largest ever.”

  “I didn’t think there were any male white rhinos left.”

  “There aren’t any more,” Olly said. “Just two females.”

  “So he was a little late to the party.”

  “Yeah, I thought he was going to cry when I told him he’d have to settle for a black rhino.

  “But see,” Olly looked around and lowered his voice, “this McQuaide guy, he wasn’t after the rhino for the trophy, he’s in it for the horn.”

  Finally. I wished I could have recorded our conversation, but “no recording devices” had been part of the ground rules. What he was telling me was for background only, so I didn’t have to remember it verbatim but it was going to be a PITA chasing down the spelling of any names he gave me.

  O
nce he got going, Olly went into spew mode. He was drunk enough he couldn’t tell his story sequentially, but kept going off on tangents and looping back to thoughts that were adjacent to his subject, but not quite coherent.

  “…and the broker was this spooky-ass Sudanese dude with yellow eyes and these large liver spots on his skin.”

  “They let you meet the broker?” I said, even though I knew it would interrupt the flow.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I know. Rookie move, right? Once I knew the broker, I could run my own game.” He slammed his vodka and signaled for two more. He looked around again to make sure no one was in earshot, then whispered, “He scared me.”

  My skin started to prickle when he said that, but it wasn’t me reacting, it was the wolf.

  “What’s his name?”

  Another furtive look around at the other customers. “Dilek.”

  “Just the one name?”

  “Yeah, like Adele.”

  Okay.

  “If someone tells you they’re going to introduce you to Dilek and it’s not someone you already know, back away. And whatever you do, don’t get in a car with them or you’ll end up like Daniel Pearl.” He drained his vodka and stood up unsteadily. “I’m serious mate. He’s as dangerous as a hyena.”

  He put drunken emphasis on the word “hyena,” but at the time I didn’t place too much significance on it. Only later would I realize should have listened to him.

  Chapter Three

  Dilek heard that Simon Arvai was sniffing around five minutes after Oliver Tolliver whispered his name in the crowded Lagos expat bar. He had planted three members of his clan among the waitstaff and they brought him useful tidbits from time to time. The American reporter’s interest in Dilek’s business presented an opportunity. While his business enterprises spanned two continents, Dilek’s ambitions were global. And going global meant diversifying. He had moved into the rhino horn market in 2016 after a high-profile trial of a gang of South African traffickers left a void. He solidified his position with equal parts cash and violence. Cash was usually easier, but he was not at all opposed to violence.

  Dilek had risen up through the ranks of the Sudanese gangs terrorizing Melbourne, had acquired a reputation for ferocity that had impressed even the Russian mafia families operating out of Sydney. For a while he’d messed about with the bone trade, procuring rare dinosaur bones from Manchuria and selling them to wealthy Americans who either didn’t know or didn’t care that there were rules governing such purchase. Dealing with dinosaur bones had earned him contacts all over China and when China came to Africa to offer their “friendship,” he was well positioned to supply them with the goods they could get nowhere else.

  Business was good, but he was growing bored with it, and tired of the humans he had to deal with in order to keep his business running. He was especially tired of Daniel Vo, his Australian broker. He’d just returned from a trip to Sydney where he’d met Vo to discuss mutual business opportunities and it had become clear to him that the other man was trying to use their business to carve out his own niche among Indonesian buyers. Vo was tall, handsome, cultured—all things that Dilek was not—and he posed an existential threat to Dilek’s continued success. Dilek knew he would have to be eliminated. He wondered if he could manipulate the American into doing that for him. He sent a text to one of his clan, a minor politician who helped expedite hunting permits, and gave her Simon’s name and instructions to contact him with “information” about the trade. He gave her permission to drop Vo’s name. Even if Vo only spoke to the reporter on “dep background,” Dilek could make sure that his name would be leaked and he’d be in custody

  Of course, Vo would babble Dilek’s name to try and make a deal, but that would do him little good. Dilek was untouchable. People were afraid of him. He’d made sure of that with carefully curated videos of the torture and murder of his enemies. Growing up he’d paid attention to the way the Russian gangs kept order through terror and intimidation. He’d also learned a lot from the Mexican narcos, whose inventive ways of cementing their power had been heavily chronicled with equal horror and fascination by the media—and not just the tabloids.

  Simon Arvai could be useful in that regard as well. While he Was no Sebastian Junger, he could enhance Dilek’s reputation as a criminal genius nonpareil. A reputation like that helped grease the wheels. Humans were so gullible. If they were told something often enough—even in the face of evidence to the contrary—they would believe it. They would even act against their own self-interests. But then humans did that all the time.

  It had been against Olly’s best interests to talk to the reporter. Dilek would make the next time he arrived at the airport his luggage would contain a few precious beads of rhino horn. That would take care of him. Customs officers had no sense of humor when it came to rhino horn smuggling.

  I’d been cooling my heels in the waiting room of a government office when I got a text from a guy named Lorcan McQuaide. He said he’d gotten my number from a friend, but didn’t elaborate. Chances were good Olly had sent him my way but they were equally good that McQuaide was not who he said he was. I’d had to fill out so much paperwork at customs than my phone number was probably for sale two minutes after I left the airport. He said there were things he could tell me about the rhino trade so I agreed to meet him at Jagzee Chow in Freedom Park. If his information turned out to be a bust, at least I would have had a decent lunch. I googled McQuaide while I waited and was not surprised by what I found. He was ex-military, and like Olly had been in Afghanistan. Originally from Boston, he now lived in the port city of Hoi An, Vietnam where he operated a small import/export company. I had a pretty good idea that his inventory included a lot more than lacquerware, seagrass baskets, and hand-woven silk.

  McQuaide turned out to be one of those small, scrappy guys with a chip on his shoulder and a grandiose sense of self. He freely admitted he dabbled in the “red market” for blood and bones and organs, and that what he mainly exported were dinosaur bones stolen from Mongolia and sold to rich Americans who wanted an Allosaurus skeleton in their living rooms.

  “How long is an Allosaurus?”

  “Around 38 feet,” he said. “And they can run up to 16 feet high.”

  “So you’d need a large living room,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’d need to be a fucking rich prick.” McQuaide didn’t seem to think much of his customers. I eventually steered the conversation around to the general topic of animal parts, specifically rhino horn.

  “Rhino horn,” he said. “Money on the hoof.”

  “How much money?” I asked.

  He gave me a shrewd look. “You mean you haven’t researched the topic? That’s sloppy Simon.”

  “I can look at Wikipedia as well as the next person,” I said. “I’m looking for someone who actually knows what he’s fucking talking about.” That made him smile. Everyone likes to think of themselves as an expert. And McQuaide was a guy who liked showing off. For the next hour he took me through the basics—how powdered rhino horn was used in traditional medicines, how a brisk trade in jewelry and other status-conferring luxury products was equally important.

  “What about rhino horn as an aphrodisiac?” I asked.

  “Pure bullshit,” he said. “Fake news. You’re better off with Staxyn.” He looked at me with a smirk. “You in the market for a performance-enhancing drug?”

  “My erectile function is just fine, thanks.” I figured that things were starting to go south and that he’d told me all he was going to when he suddenly pushed his half-eaten bowl of fried rice aside

  “The person you want to talk to is Aline Trannoy.” I knew the name but was surprised to hear it in this context.

  “Isn’t she an actor?” He smirked at my use of the gender-neutral term.

  “Used to be,” he said. “Then she married this rich Chink telecom guy and decided her mission in life was to save the poor little rhinos. So with hubby’s money she set up a rhino preserve. She’s g
ot like 80 or 90 animals up there.”

  I made a note. It sounded like I needed to talk to Aline.

  “Aline’s painted a target on her back,” McQuaide said. “And sooner or later, someone’s going to score a bulls-eye.”

  Chapter Four

  Aline was not at all what I expected. I thought she’d turn up for our meeting in some version of safari-chic, maybe looking like Bindi Irwin’s glamorous aunt, but when she welcomed me into the glass and steel modernity of her foundation’s office, she was wearing designer threads and a cool smile.

  “Thank you for seeing me Ms. Winters,” I said.

  “The pleasure is mine, Mr. Arvai,” she responded, with just a trace of a French accent.

  What is it with you and the French women, I asked myself, because I found her wildly attractive in a “woman of a certain age” kind of way.

  “Simon,” I corrected, and she smiled, but did not invite me to call her Aline.

  “Tell me three things you know about rhinos,” she said.

  A pop quiz? Really?

  “I know a group of rhinos is called a crash. I know they’re herbivores. And I know three rhinos a day are being killed for their horns.”

  “It may be more,” she said. “What is it you want to know?”

  “Tell me about Rong,” I said. I had repeatedly run across references to Rong in stories about her refuge, “New Hope.”

  Aline raised an elegantly arched eyebrow. Yes, I did my homework Ms. Winters. “Is he as enormous as ‘they’ say he is?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He is a big boy.”

  “And he’s a Southern White Rhino?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you worried he might be a target for poachers? A male of that size?”

  “He is large,” she said, “but he has been dehorned.”

  “I’ve heard that poachers will sometimes kill dehorned rhinos out of spite.”