In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

“You mean the poaching, Botha,” Klay had replied. “You run the poaching in Africa.”

Botha slammed a fist into the Plexiglas. “I’m not a fucking poacher. I’m a hunter. I use the resource. Those elephants are South Africa’s elephants. It’s our decision what to do with them. Not some bleeding-heart Yanks on holiday or some fucking Pommies with an orphanage. Those elephants are property. We own them. And we decide to sell their ivory . . .”

Klay pushed himself up from his airline seat, sending shock waves of pain into his brain. The plane had arrived at its gate. He retrieved his backpack from the overhead bin using his left hand. He looked down to see that his right hand was trembling. He opened and closed it, trying to steady his nerves. Without succeeding, he filed off the plane.

•   •   •

Erin Dougherty was waiting for him as he exited the secure area. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and he might have walked past her, but he couldn’t miss Erin’s big mess of curly red hair. She stood on her toes, avoiding his slinged arm, and kissed him in a way that drew attention, including his.

“You didn’t have to,” he said, looking down at her.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, picking up his duffel bag.

Klay followed her up the ramp and outside to the parking lot, noting the men turning to stare openly at her as she passed. Erin walked quickly. Her wild hair and pale skin, her athletic body in clothes that didn’t hide it, made her a constant target of male attention. He’d tried to get used to that during their time as a couple, but never had. He would glare into their wolfen faces, or pretend they didn’t exist. It never made any difference. He drove a shoulder through more than a few. That never made a difference, either. She’d laughed at him. “You think walking down a street full of leering strangers is hard? Try fighting off your parents’ friends, the college professor you looked up to,” she said. “Just about every male editor at every place I’ve worked, including The Sovereign.” He tried to imagine it, but he had nothing in his own life that offered a reference, so he went back to glaring and knocking into people.

But that had been years ago.

Erin oversaw what most people would call photo captions, but staff at The Sovereign referred to as legends. “God forbid a Sovereign photographer should touch a keyboard. And God help the journalist who thinks she can summarize a picture taken by a Sovereign priest,” she said. Her legends department wrote tiny stories, no more than forty-nine words long, about people, places, and animals they often knew little about. “I was Twitter before Twitter was cool,” she liked to say.

As they walked to her car, Erin’s perfume floated back to him, carrying memories of Sunday mornings in their house on Capitol Hill, drinking coffee while Aretha played on the stereo, reading the Washington Post, then wandering over to Eastern Market for fresh vegetables. An afternoon workout at the gym. An evening workout in their bed.

But Sundays had seldom actually been Sundays, he reminded himself. And certainly weren’t once a week. His travel schedule meant “Sunday” came at best every few weeks, and sometimes not for months. Odds were that first day back wasn’t peaceful, either. They almost always fought on his return. The redbrick townhouse was in his name, but they’d picked it out together, intending to make it their home. Six months into their first home improvement project, the place had looked worse than when they’d started. Wallpaper on the open stairwell too high for either of them to reach was left half stripped for months, exposing a wall of cracked plaster to be patched. Painting he’d promised to do remained nothing but unopened buckets and rollers stacked in the coat closet. A small roof leak he said he’d fixed had quietly returned, weakening a bathroom ceiling until it had collapsed on her while she was in the tub. She paid all of their bills not because he didn’t have the money, but because he didn’t do it, and she couldn’t bear the late fees. Duffel bags full of his clothes lined their bedroom, it being easier for him to pick one up and leave again than to refold his clothes and put them in the dresser.

It was his house, his terms, she said—Was it ever going to be theirs? He had thought so. He bought the damn house intending to fix it up for them to share. Chores weren’t the real issue, of course. Nor were bills. It came down to baggage, but baggage of a different kind, baggage he couldn’t unpack.

Even before Erin, he found the transition back to daily life in Washington difficult. He spent his first days home from the field lying on the couch, remote in hand, staring at the television to turn his mind off. Depression was always there, like a grizzly bear wandering around a campsite, alarming but not dangerous most of the time. When the bear became aggressive, he took steps to protect himself. He drank less, went to the gym more. He wrote. He searched the internet for his next story. If his depression became overwhelming, he removed the clip from the Glock he kept in his nightstand and hid it from himself.

Erin changed things for the better, but then came Jakarta, and that one terrible night no one could repair. He’d been sitting in a bar, an Indonesian cover band was playing “Hotel California.” An American woman slid up beside him. She was beautiful, with wavy black hair and green eyes, drinking Arak Attacks, pineapple juice and coconut palm liquor. She offered him a sip from her straw: “They make you go blind.” She smiled. He ordered one. But how many more? The next morning he sat alone in his hotel room, his head pounding. Something terrible had happened. He couldn’t recall