She stopped at a Publix, left Thorn sleeping, came out with two bags of groceries. On the ride back neither of them mustered any conversation. It was almost midnight when they reached the Shack again. The rain had died to a drizzle.
Thorn made it twenty yards before he was out of breath, had to drop into one of the front porch rockers. She took the other rocker. For a few moments they sat in silence, Allison staring off toward the east at the faint golden glow of the city. When she spoke again, her voice was parched.
"That's what's wrong."
"What?"
"That," she said, and waved at the shimmer of Miami. "You can almost hear the drone, the hum of voltage. Two million people trapped inside that goddamn grid of freeways, turnpikes, telephone poles, all those wires hooking everything to everything else."
Thorn groaned his agreement, his head propped against a fist.
"Cities are the problem," she said. "That's where it all begins."
"Where what begins?"
"The pet trade," Allison said. "It's cities that make it happen. City people want some reminder, some connection to the world they've lost. And the Joshua Bonds and White brothers are happy to satisfy their cravings. Dismantle the whole goddamn world on their behalf.
"You don't find country people doing it. To them animals are as common as dirt. The idea of keeping a pet, other than a decent hunting dog, going to all the expense to cage some beast, it would never occur to most of them."
Thorn made a noise that he was listening.
Allison went on, feeling the words flood from her. Things she'd never said. No one to say them to.
The way it was going, she told him, if an animal species was to survive it had to become a toy-poodle version of itself. Chimps wearing diapers and sunglasses, doing cartwheels across wall-to-wall carpets, or grinning cheek to cheek with their captors, posing for family Polaroids. Birds that talked, fish that gazed back fondly through their glass cage.
When an animal was impossible to domesticate or was deemed unlovely by current fashion, then watch out — its kind was surely doomed to extinction. These days a species' only hope was to strike some chord with the rulers of the planet. Dewy-eyed, or mesmerizingly dangerous, we spared only what amused us. Only what fit into our busy schedules. Either the damn animal will learn to eat our food, live in our sterile boxes, or to hell with them, let them disappear with the other forty thousand species this year.
Everybody trying to enliven their concrete nightmares, renew their membership in the brotherhood of the wild. Parakeets as bric-a-brac, fish as curios, chimps as cuddly solace for childless couples. Something alive, animated, primitive, a twittering speck of color with its faint drumbeat of jungle blood. Snakes, birds, primates, fish.
And as far as Allison was concerned, zoos were worse than all the hungry consumers together. Zoos wanted only the best. The more exotic the animal, the larger the crowds. If Allison had her way, all zoos would be abolished. Even the best were nothing but camouflaged warehouses, drab and voyeuristic like apartment buildings with one wall torn away.
Oh, some of them tried very hard to pretend they were homey and educational, but in fact they were merely dreary theme parks. With concrete sculptures shaped like trees for the monkeys to swing on, stagnant pools for them to drink, sparsely landscaped viewing stages where they were expected to perform, make the kiddies giggle. Perversions of the natural world where generation after generation of animals would grow obese, listless, dumbfounded, more and more deaf to the powerful messages embedded in their genes. Until they were no longer animals at all, but drowsy zombies. Extinct creatures who were not permitted to die.
And then there were the great white hunters. Those despicable men who slaughtered rhinos, chainsawed loose their horns, left the carcass to rot. All so they might grind that bone into a powder, a dust four times more valuable than cocaine. Murdering the black bear for its gall bladder, the gorilla and tiger for their testicles. Magical potions to the Chinese, the great worshipers of aphrodisiacs. It was as though a plague of impotency had infected a hundred million Oriental men at once, and vast herds of magnificent beasts had to be annihilated to keep their cocks hard.
"Man," Thorn said. "You're angry."
Allison looked away from the glow of Miami, stared at Thorn. His eyes were open now, sitting up straight. Though he seemed to be straining to keep his head balanced on his neck. She could see a small rhythmic wobble.
"I guess I am," she said. "I sound angry, don't I?"
"It happens," said Thorn. "You start off doing something for one reason, it changes into another reason as time goes on. With you it was the orangutans. You loved them, wanted to protect them. Then one day you meet the sons of bitches who exploit the things you love, and you feel an instant hate for them. Who wouldn't? But before you know it, you're making these bad guys your life's work, focused on them, you're seething all the time, running totally on anger. Your love's warped into hate."
Allison shifted in the rocker. Looked over at Thorn, then out at the emptiness. Something was moving out there just beyond the halo of the porch light. A gator, a deer.
"You should go lie down, Thorn. You can have the bed tonight."
"Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you."
She took a moment, then said, "No, you're right. You're absolutely right. I'm going to have to work on that."
He looked over at her, blinked three times, four. Rubbed hard at his eyes.
"I was just getting used to one of everything," he said. "And now there's two."
"Two of me?"
"Yeah," he said, reaching out to rest his hand atop hers. "And both of them look pretty good."
She frowned at him.
"God, Thorn, you obviously need some more Tylenol."
She helped him up, unlocked the door, turned on the overhead light, and took a hard breath.
The floor was covered with paper. Hundreds of sheets. She stood and watched as another page unscrolled from her fax machine, angled out of the overflowing chute and fluttered to the floor to join the rest. Then another page began to appear at the opening and in a moment it, too, became airborne and made the short flight to the floor.
***
After Ray let Tricia Capoletti off, he drove around aimlessly till after midnight, lost in a stupor of guilt. Trying to figure out what the hell to do. But he came to no conclusion, so finally he just drove home.
He walked in the front door and found Orlon in the living room talking on the phone. Orlon covered the mouthpiece and looked up at Ray and said, "Crotch Meriwether."
Ray took a seat on the couch and listened to Orlon saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it, Crotch, good, yeah. Great. Yeah, Ray just walked in the door. So okay, we can be there by two o'clock — no, you better make it two-thirty. It's a hell of a drive. Yeah, good. Right, right.
After Orlon set the phone down, he came over and sat next to Ray. He was wearing a white terry-cloth robe, and reeked of patchouli massage oil. Orlon smiled and rubbed his hands across his bald head like he was slicking his ducktail back into place.
"Old Crotch Meriwether is giving us Allison on a platter."
"I know, I talked to him this afternoon," Ray said.
"Well, we better get moving. He wants us out there in two hours. Ten miles west of the Shark Valley turnoff. I figure we gotta leave in the next fifteen minutes."
"That's tomorrow night," Ray said. "Friday."
"No, the plan's changed," Orlon said. "Friday night is what Allison thinks. When he was talking to you earlier today, she was there in his cabin, Allison was, standing right beside Crotch while the two of you talked on the phone. She put him up to it, that whole thing about going to her place was a trap. Old Crotch went along, then after she left he sat there and thought it through and decided he'd rather do business with the White brothers than with that bitch."
"A trap? Allison was setting a trap for us?"
"That's right. She must've seen us in Borneo after all. Couldn't get the cops
to believe her, so she's taking the law into her own hands."
Ray looked at Orlon, ready to argue, then felt a surge of sadness sweep over him, a dark riptide of melancholy. His brother was a fucking mass murderer. And Ray was a dangerous repeat felon. A couple of life terms at the very least. Caught up in it now, the churn of sad events. You always heard the experts say the best way to keep from drowning in a riptide was just to lay back and ride the current. Fighting was a sure way to tire yourself out and drown. You were supposed to swim along with it, eventually it would slacken, let you go.
Ray rose, went upstairs to change clothes, get ready. Following the experts' advice, going to ride it till it let him go. This dark sadness, this despair that he'd fucked up, let his mother down. Screwed up his own life, and worse than that, he'd let Orlon screw his up too. But for now Ray decided he'd have to ride it, this current of misery and iniquity, just hope it didn't pull him so far out to sea he lost complete sight of land.
CHAPTER 27
They gathered the pages from the floor, stacked them, went to the couch, Allison reading each one first, passing it to Thorn. Five minutes into it, Thorn looked up, rubbed his eyes, said, "I don't get it."
"I don't either," she said. "Not yet."
Allison went to her desk, found a yellow legal pad, pen, an atlas, came back to the couch, dug into the stack again.
Some of the faxes were newspaper clippings, some were dashed-off notes, a few longer letters. Messages from her membership, the network she'd spent the last seven years developing. On the legal pad she began to make lists, names of animals, locations, people killed. She consulted the atlas, put X's where each event occurred.
Two young mountain gorillas from Rwanda, one male, one female, taken from a nature preserve the month before. An armored vehicle plowed through the front gate of the preserve, two wildlife officers attacked. One died, the other survived to tell the tale. And around the same time, one of her members at his own expense shadowed a crate containing two extremely rare gray-shouldered parakeets, male and female, from Venezuela to Manila, Manila to Hong Kong, where the crate vanished in the back rooms of the customs warehouse. The young man questioned the Hong Kong customs officers to no avail. That night two men broke into his hotel room while he slept and beat him severely.
Fifteen thousand members. Most were only financial patrons, while a thousand or so were truly active. Of those thousand, it looked like a third had faxed her in the last month. That long since she'd been out here, checked her machine.
Diane Jackson-White in Santa Barbara; Millicent Obergon in Dallas; Harvey Billingsley in Sydney, Australia; Madge Follet in Singapore. Randy Beecher, a banker in Taipei; Vishta Chang, a cardiologist in London; the Donleavys in Missoula, Montana; the Blanchards in Costa Rica; Jonny Izzara from Bali. Nancy and Alex Largo of Cullowee, Georgia. Lieutenant Richard Katz, stationed in Panama. Each with another jigsaw piece.
She was reading a fax from Bettina Marsden, about the recent disappearance of two wild chimps from the island preserve she managed off the coast of Gambia, when Thorn got up, made them a pot of coffee, put the groceries away. She watched him for a moment, moving with woozy deliberation.
Libby Metzler-Davies in Ethiopia; Harrison P. Smithpatrick from Honolulu. Everyone with bits of news, whispers in the wind, pieces of hard evidence. Each caught up in the same agitation.
Thorn eased down on the couch again as she was finishing an article from Singapore's Straits Times describing a recent discovery in the rain forest two hundred miles north of the city. The bodies of two Chinese nationals were found lying near a mound of rotting Sumatran rhinos. The men had been shotgunned. Allison added the extremely rare hairy rhinos to her list, marked the location on the atlas and looked up at Thorn.
"This isn't normal, right? All these animals smuggled at once? This much activity?"
She looked to the side, listened for a moment to the night sounds, a distant screech owl, a small plane off to the north.
"No," she said, looking down at her pad. "Not normal. Animals stolen from preserves, from national Parkland, from private collectors, from the wild. So far I've got eleven people killed in the last two months, mostly wildlife agents or park rangers. Murders occurred in six countries, on three continents. No, not normal at all.
"Arabian oryx, black rhinos, Asian small-clawed otters, snow leopards, Indian pythons, Siberian tigers, Andean condors, gaurs, barasinghas, Asiatic wild horses, black-footed ferrets, ruffed lemurs, Humboldt's penguins, lion-tailed macaques. Cheetahs, gorillas, Bali mynahs, white-naped cranes, chacoan peccaries, black howler monkeys, hoolock gibbons.
"Piles of slaughtered animals found in Africa, southeast Asia, Australia, Costa Rica. Rotting carcasses of the rarest and most endangered animals on the planet. Take some, kill some. No, this is obscene. Poaching and butchery on a scale I've never heard of before."
"Has it been in the news?"
"No," she said. "It's too spread out. Too many jurisdictions, too far-flung for anyone to be aware of all of it. Nobody has that kind of global perspective."
"This couldn't be the White brothers, those two doofuses."
"I don't know, Thorn. It may just be some freakish statistical thing. A lot of unrelated incidents that have no common link."
"But you don't really think that."
"No," she said. "I don't."
Sitting beside her on the couch, Thorn studied the atlas she'd marked up. The world spread out on two pages.
"You see this?"
He held the book up. Allison peered at it.
"What?"
"Your marks," Thorn said. "They're all in the tropics. Some subtropics, but mainly tropics. A narrow band."
"That's where the majority of the animals of the world live, and the greatest number of endangered ones."
"But doesn't it seem strange? All this activity, and nothing from the temperate zones?"
"Strange, yes. All of it seems strange."
And an hour later, coming to the end of the stack, Thorn swallowed down another Tylenol with a slug of beer, Allison put aside the pages.
"Well?" He took his seat again on the couch beside her. "What do you think?"
It was after two in the morning. Outside, the Glades was croaking and hooting, the steady whoops of chase and mating, like some great fiesta in the void.
"I don't know," Allison said. "I'm just not sure."
"But you've got a theory. You're seeing something."
She took a moment, staring at the far wall, the old sepia print of Julius Ravenel, his band of hunters. Back when the Everglades was glutted with wildlife, an infinite supply. And the world beyond the Everglades too.
"There are other recurrent patterns," she said.
"What?"
"Always male and female. And the destinations seem to be similar. Despite where the animals were captured, they all seem to be headed toward the Far East. There've been dozens of sightings: Singapore, Djakarta, Taipei, Bangkok. Known animal smugglers sighted with uncustomary frequency in those airports. A surge of activity. Something major is happening in that part of the world."
She was dazed, eyes unfocused. Feeling overtaxed, her circuitry unable to bear the load.
"What is it, Allison? What're you thinking?"
With her fingertips she rubbed hard circles in her temples.
"It looks to me," she said, "like Noah's reappeared."
Thorn put his beer aside.
"He's cramming his ark," Allison said. "Only this time, what he doesn't have room to carry, he's slaughtering."
***
Ray pulled his black Volvo off the highway behind an authentic Miccosukee tourist trap. Signs out front advertised that old traditional Indian sport of alligator wrestling and genuine honest-to-God Native American snow cones. Ray pulled up alongside what looked like a silver dogcatcher's truck. Crotch Meriwether got out of the truck, came around to Ray's open window. Orlon got out, joined them.
The old man was dressed in dark shirt and pants like some
swamp-rat ninja. Frail and yellowed like he was a dozen breaths from the casket.
"Well, she's sure enough at home," Crotch said. Not hello, nice to see you again after all this time, nothing like that. "I hiked back there on foot. She's in the cabin with some guy. Two of them just sitting there reading. Bars on all the windows. I position the truck right, there'll be no way to get out the front door. They're trapped."
"What guy?" Ray said.
"Same one she was with today," Crotch said. "Name of Thorn. But you don't need to worry. I softened him up pretty good with my machete. He shouldn't put up too much of a fight."
"Thorn?" Ray said.
"I told you he wasn't any vet," said Orlon.
"Shit."
Orlon said, "So whatcha bring in the truck, Crotch?"
"Why don't you stick your nose in there, little man, and find out."
Ray got out of the car, followed Orlon over to the truck. On the truck bed there was a big camperlike thing that extended three feet off the end. Rear doors of wire mesh. Orlon edged up to the back door, peered in. Something snorted and banged the cage door, and Orlon jerked away. The truck swayed on its shocks.
"Jesus Christ. What the fuck is that thing?"
"It's two things," Crotch said. "And they don't like each other much. Just some wire mesh separating them. By the time we get down this bumpy road, they're going to like each other even less."
"What the hell are they for?" Ray stepped away from the truck. "We're just going to keep this simple. Shoot her and leave."
"Ask your brother," said Crotch. "It was his idea."
Ray stepped close to Orlon, got in his face.
"Okay, what's going on? What the hell we need these animals for?"
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 27