Griff was not only a trained speleologist, he was a trained hunter. Kenya, Ranchipur, sharks with a spear gun in the Java sea, even a little human game — inadvertently — while red-balling supplies in the Mekong Delta. How odd, he mused, that his most significant kill would occur here, deep in a side-cave of New Mexico’s Chaco Caverns. But of all the trophies he had collected for his stalking of predators, Ivy was the most exciting.
The name echoed back through his skull, back through his memories, and he let his head down onto his crossed arms, closing his eyes, thinking about her. It would take Cory time to get close, and Griff was a trained hunter. He let his mind slip back through the events of the past week … back … back …
“I want to hunt javelina,” Cory said, chain-lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. The smell of dead tobacco was all over him. You could smell him coming half a room away. The second and third fingers of his right hand were ochre from nicotine stains. To an outdoorsman like Griff, whose senses had never been dulled by tobacco or drugs, and only occasionally by alcohol, Kenneth Cory was a perversion of nature.
Outside the cocktail lounge the Santa Fe mid-afternoon burned hot as the mouth of a volcano. Bright white light shattered against impeccably clean stucco buildings and cascaded down on asthmatics from Bayonne, New Jersey, suffering deliciously in the hammering heat under the delusion it would cure their sniffles. But in the hotel cocktail lounge it was cool with the purring of air conditioners and Griff sat across from Cory, wondering how the hell he had wound up tapped-out in Santa Fe, of all places.
“Are you listening, Mr. Griffen?” Cory asked, annoyed.
“I suppose you could call it that,” Griff said slowly. He was a big man, narrow in the waist and burned a leather tan by hundreds of suns over hundreds of landscapes. The kind of tan that was melted and fused in. His pale blue eyes looked out from under heavy brow-ridges in that dark face; totally incongruous.
“The undertaking doesn’t appeal to you?”
“ Any undertaking that will put some flesh on my wallet appeals to me, Mr. Cory. But I hope you know what you’re looking for. It’s called aggravation, and it’s spelled jablí with an accent over the i.”
Cory sat up straighter in the foam-padded lounge chair. He was bigger than he seemed, a barrel of a chest, huge hands, thick bull neck. His features were regular and well-formed, but rather than melding into handsomeness, there was something coarse and porcine omnipresent. Griff had instantly disliked the man when he’d come up to the table, asking if Griff was the guide that had been recommended by the hotel manager.
“Get this, Mr. Griffen. I’m a wealthy man. Unashamedly and filthy rich. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve done everything, and the only fear I’ve got at the moment is that I’ll run out of kinds of animals to hunt before they plant me.
“I tried the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, but the hunting’s been controlled for the past seven years. One of the game wardens said there was peccary over here in New Mexico. I want mine.”
He settled back and drained the bourbon-and-branch.
“What were you planning on using?”
Cory considered. “I’d like to try the new Remington XP-100, the pistol-rifle.”
Griff chuckled. “Single shot. I suppose you’d use a Bushnell ‘Phantom’ scope, too. Right?” Cory looked off-balance. He nodded.
“Mr. Cory, the jabalina live in caves. They run in packs. He’s got teeth that are damned near fangs, and when he runs, friend, he runs like a two-cushion bank into the hip pocket. A single-shot bolt action weapon would give you just enough time to kill one — accepting you’re a decent marksman — before the rest of the pack ripped you in half.”
Cory’s brow furrowed. “You’d suggest?”
“Something light, semi-automatic, no scope. You’d have to get up close anyway, that’s the only way to flush ‘em. A 30.06 would be enough power, but it’s too heavy. Ever hear of the ArmaLite AR-7?”
Cory nodded. “Isn’t that a bit too gadgety for big varmint?”
Griff paused a second. “Yeah, it’s mickeymouse, no question about it. But it’s light, clip-fed, eight shots, and the accuracy is good on short distances …”
He continued talking, explaining weaponry to the layman with his superficial knowledge, but his eyes were over Cory’s shoulder. A woman had entered the lounge, was looking around.
She was as tall as Griffen, with wider shoulders than he usually liked, but the shoulders were necessary to support the weight of breast the woman carried. Her hair was black, dead black and nearly invisible against the gloom of the cocktail lounge. But it was the face that had caught Griffen’s attention. She was the most carnal-looking woman he had ever seen. Instinctively he sensed her as a biter, a groaner, a woman who panted and made little animal noises in bed with a man.
Cory became aware that Griff’s attention was elsewhere, and he half-turned in the chair as the woman saw him and started in their direction. Cory turned back, and there were bits of burning coal in his dark eyes. “That’s my wife, Mr. Griffen.”
Griff’s jaw muscles jumped. “I think we can make a deal, Mr. Cory.”
Later that night, after they had joined up for dinner and more talk about the impending hunting trip, Griff carried Cory to his suite. Cory may not have had fear, but he had inabilities. One of them was holding his liquor. He had passed out around midnight, long after Griff and Ivy Cory had exchanged the glances and mouth movements that meant she was anxious to try him.
Griffen tossed Cory down on the king-sized bed and turned to see Ivy standing in the doorway, tilted onto one hip. “If you say, ‘Now we’re alone,’ Mr. Griffen, it may blow the entire romance.”
He moved toward her, and she retreated into the living room of the suite. He closed the door behind him. “I’m a man of very slim dialogue, Mrs. Cory.”
“At least call me Ivy.”
“Afterward, I’ll call you Ivy. Familiarity breeds.”
She beat him out of his clothes by a pair of socks and his undershorts.
And when it was over and they lay there, she said, very gently, “How would you like to help me kill my husband, Mr. Griffen?”
He considered calling her Ivy. But decided Mrs. Cory was better.
The sudden acrid scent of cigarettes came to Griff through his memory-fog, and he realized he had nearly fallen asleep, there in the mother-warm comfort of the underworld. Cory was nearly on him. He rolled sidewise without making a sound on the gravel. There was a tiny ledge that jutted out from the side of the main channel. In the rainy season, such as it was, every inch of this passage was underwater, and the flow had bitten a channel-ledge under which it was possible to lie supine when the water table sank in the summer months.
Cory crawled right past. Griff fitted the stock of the crossbow to his shoulder. The bowstring was iron-tight and merely waiting to be released by his finger on the trigger to send the slim powerful bolt straight through Cory’s back.
Then thoughts began to impinge. Strange thoughts that his memories of the past few minutes had dredged up.
He had accepted Ivy Cory’s suggestion: kill Kenneth on the hunting trip, make it look like an accident, and then if Griff didn’t think she was prize enough for a long, long time under some tropical sun, why then she would make a handsome settlement on him, they would kiss and bid each other fond adieu, and she would go off to Pantelleria or Papeete or Palma de Mallorca to play the grieving widow in the sort of affluent hedonism Kenneth’s hunt-fever and stinginess had never allowed.