No Doors, No Windows by Harlan Ellison

Author:Harlan Ellison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1975-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

“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.”

Grift 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.

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