gang were fresh off a BA flight from Toronto. Fallows had flown private from Long Island in the Gulfstream. Fallows never bothered with public aircraft. He had an allergy to standing in line to take off his shoes, and he treated it with liberal applications of money. As they were all arriving in Windhoek at roughly the same time, the resort had sent a G-Class Mercedes to gather them up and bring them west across Namibia.
They’d been in the car for only a few moments before Immanuel Stockton realized he was the very same Tip Fallows who operated the Fallows Fund, which held a heavy position in Stockton’s own pharmaceutical firm.
“Before I was a shareholder, I was a client,” Fallows explained. “I proudly served my nation by feeding myself into the woodchipper of a war I still don’t understand. I crawled away in shreds and stayed high on your narcotic wonders for close to five years. Personal experience suggested it would be a good investment. No one knows better than I how much a person will pay to escape this shitty world for a while.”
He was trying to sound wise, but Stockton gave him an odd, bright, fascinated look and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “I understand more than you might think. When it comes to the luxury goods—cigars, furs, whatever—nothing is worth more than an escape hatch.”
By the time they spilled out of the big Mercedes, four hours later, they were all in a jolly mood, and after check-in they took the conversation to the bar. After that, Stockton and Fallows drank together almost every single night, while Peter and Christian horsed around in the pool. When the boy, Christian—he was eighteen but still a boy to Fallows—asked if they could come with him to see him bag his cat, it never even crossed his mind to say no.
“The little door?” Fallows asked now. “The hell’s that? Private game reserve?”
“Yes.” Stockton nodded sleepily. The smell of Laphroaig exuded from his pores, and his eyes were bloodshot. He’d had a lot to drink. “It’s Mr. Charn’s private game reserve. Invitation only. But also, the little door is . . . a little door.” And he laughed again—almost giggled—very softly.
“Peter says it’s expensive,” said Christian Swift.
“Ten thousand dollars to look through the door. Ten thousand more to walk on the other side. Two hundred and thirty to hunt there, and you only get the one day. You can bring a trophy back, but it stays with Mr. Charn, at the farmhouse. Those are the rules. And if you don’t have your big five, don’t even bother sending him an e-mail. Charn doesn’t have any patience for amateurs.”
“For a quarter a million dollars, you better be hunting unicorn,” Fallows said.
Stockton raised his eyebrows. “Close.”
Fallows was still staring at him when Christian touched his shoulder with the knuckles of one hand. “Mr. Fallows. Your cat is here.”
Christian was all alertness, close by the open flap, gently offering Fallows his big CZ 550. For a moment Fallows had half forgotten what he was doing there. The boy nodded at one of the night-vision monitors. The lion stared into the camera with radioactive green eyes as bright as new-minted coins.
Fallows sank to one knee. The boy crouched beside him, their shoulders touching. They peered through the open flap. In the dark the lion stood beneath the camel thorn. He had turned his great, magnificent head to look at the blind, with eyes that were intelligent and aloof and calmly forgiving. It was the gaze of a king bearing witness to an execution. His own, as the case happened to be.
Fallows had been closer to the old cat, just once, and at the time there’d been a fence between the lion and him. He had studied the grandfather through the chicken wire, staring into those serene golden eyes, and then told the game master he had chosen. Before he walked away, he made the lion a promise, which he now meant to keep.
Christian’s breath was shallow and excited, close to Fallows’s ear. “It’s like he knows. It’s like he’s ready.”
Fallows nodded, as if the boy had spoken some sacred truth, and gently squeezed the trigger.
At the rolling boom of the shot, Peter Stockton woke with a little scream, twisted in his tangle of sheets, and fell out of the cot.
Christian Tears His Shirt
Christian followed the man Fallows out of the tent. The killer crossed the ground in slow, careful steps, always planting his feet