Free Sector C by Phoenix Sullivan Page B

gotten — had announced anticipated receipts totaling $39.4 million. Enough to keep the genetics department and research engine running until Triple E started pulling in money from the museum, and individual scientists and board members started splitting profits from lecture circuits and book deals.
     
    It looked as though Megahunt: The Last Shot would neatly accomplish everything Walt Thurman hoped it would. With skill and a bit of luck, it would provide the transition necessary for Triple E to pull a phoenix and come out the other side of their crisis in the strong, competitive position the founders had envisioned for their fledgling venture when the first bricks and timbers had gone up nearly ten years ago.
     
    All that had to happen now was for the brewing storm to hold off just a little longer.
     
      
     
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER 15
     
     
     
    THE INVITATION WAS THE proverbial straw as far as Sylvia was concerned.
     
    First it was Charles demanding separate vacations so he could indulge in the one activity she had expressly asked him to refrain from. The flirting and the alcohol and the gambling she could — and had — turned a blind eye to. When the reward was a posh zipcode in Newport Coast, California, and the lifestyle to go with it, there was a lot she could pretend not to see. But his need to kill things was not one of them.
     
    Within a month of their hooking up, he’d asked her to fly to Alaska. She’d gone willingly, eagerly anticipating the grand vistas, the flights of eagles and the singing of whales. What she hadn’t anticipated was a helicopter ride that turned out to be an opportunity for Charles to hunt some polar bear.
     
    “We’re up here, he’s down there — just this once, sweetie,” he’d pleaded when she protested, shouting the words to be heard above the whock whock of the copter blades.  
     
    Just this once was a mantra she’d come to hate over the years. Sixteen of them, to be exact. There was never any once with Charles. If he got pleasure from it, he pursued it. That abandonment — and, frankly, that stamina — was what kept her enamored of him in the beginning. What 22-year-old wouldn’t get a thrill from a 30-year-old man who lived on the edge and picked up jewelry from Saks as often as other men picked up take-out?
     
    After awhile, though, the thrill indeed wore off, and Sylvia, to her dismay, realized her husband was one of the most superficial, not to mention selfish, people on the face of the planet. It was her involvement with the local social clubs that pointed out the degree to which her husband fell short of other affluent men in the community. When describing their lives and husbands, other women used words such as cosmopolitan, philanthropic, civic and other charitable terms Sylvia was quite sure Charles didn’t know the meaning of. 
     
    If she admitted it to herself, becoming involved in animal rights organizations was not so much a humanitarian gesture on her part, but backlash for and a way to spite Charles’ avarice for hunting.
     
    The second straw was the intern: Charlene. Twenty-three-year-old Charlene. Charlene who was in law school, boning up on business law and, apparently, boning her husband, too. Truth be known, Sylvia, now 38, had grown tired of Charles’ attentions and when the frequency of their lovemaking dropped off, she had felt relief rather than anger. Her days of wearing tiny, diaphanous, slit-down-to-there-and-up-to-here dresses around the house just so she could keep a naturally wandering husband from straying were well behind her. Not that she hadn’t dallied once or twice herself, but her affairs had all been short-lived, meaningless and, above all, discreet.
     
    “A 46-year-old married attorney should have the decency to keep his hard-on pocketed in public,” Sylvia had complained to Charlene’s mother when the two of them had gone for lunch at the Jane Austin Tea Room. It didn’t surprise her when Charlene’s mother