Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Page 3

  Her bottomless brown eyes fixate on Reiner, then Ray. She gives nothing away.

  “We’ll be taking statements,” Reiner says.

  Irena collects a steno pad and pen from the credenza and sits sidesaddle at the end of the table, crossing her long bare legs. In a different venue, Ray would willingly tell her his life story; drop to his knees and perform cunnilingus.

  Instead he throws himself into a chair at the table. Marge sits next to him. He pours them both a glass of water. She seems to be shaking. Small tremors every few seconds make her seem out of focus.

  Reiner sits opposite them, with a clear view of Irena.

  “Now then, Mrs. Elrood… ,” Lieutenant Reiner begins.

  “What are they doing to that boy?” Marge demands in a rush. “You’ve got to let him go!” She bursts into tears.

  Ray gives Reiner an apologetic eyebrow roll. He touches Marge’s shoulders. She shakes his hands away and starts digging in her carpetbag-sized purse, looking for a Kleenex.

  At that moment Sergeant Gomez slips like a ghost into the room. He moves quickly to the Lieutenant, bends down and whispers.

  The tip of Irena’s tongue slithers between her lips. Her body twists and grinds as she seeks a comfortable position in the military-issue straight-back chair.

  Suddenly, Marge screams; slumps sideways in her chair.

  Is she having a stroke? Ray wonders.

  Reiner throws a glass of water in her face. Marge shudders, uses the tail of her blouse to wipe her face and sits up. One side of her white silk blouse is soaking wet and you can see the nipple like an aroused prune. When she removes her hand from her purse, she’s holding the missing Canon digital. She places it on the polished surface of the table. All eyes stare at the camera as if it holds the meaning of life and death.

  “It was in my bag all along,” Marge offers apologetically. “I totally forgot I put it there. You can let the boy go. I was mistaken.”

  “Even about the fact he undressed you with his eyes?” Reiner asks.

  “I’ve got a very vivid imagination,” she replies.

  Ray nods in support of this admission.

  “Please. Just let the boy go,” Marge says.

  Reiner: “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Es muerto.”

  In an excess of emotion, Ray grabs the camera and with all his strength throws it against the wall. It splinters into jagged bits of shrapnel.

  Marge is sniffling softly, her teeth worrying her lower lip.

  Ray looks at Irena, who is staring down at her boots as though they belong to someone else. Lieutenant Diablo Reiner’s voice interrupts: “But there is the matter of reparations…and justice for the family.”

  The room turns ice cold. Looking at Reiner, Ray imagines black membranous wings unfolding.

  Ray feels his nads shrivel.

  Bad Juju

  I flew into Saint Hippolytus in an aging single-engine turboprop. As we made our final approach, the tarmac came up fast. Black and swollen as a dead dog’s tongue remembered from childhood. Jungly foliage covered the landscape on either side. At the end were some mangroves and then the ocean.

  I’d just read a three-paragraph story in the Financial Times about the Cessna Caravan being voluntarily grounded for landing-gear failures. In the next instant there was the twang of breaking metal components. As the front and one rear wheel scorched down onto the runway, the other side of the plane, missing the second rear wheel, fell sideways like a terminal drunk. When the fuselage hit the tarmac, the plane began to spin, propeller blade splintering, pieces flying wild-assed through the air.

  Just before all this happened, I had glanced up from the Times article and read the words Cessna Caravan engraved on a cheap plaque screwed to the instrument panel. My seat was in the row directly behind the pilot.

  Next thing we were spinning out of control, veering off the runway into the high grass. I could hear the howling of fire equipment. We pivoted one last time and lurched to a spine-jarring halt in three inches of water left by an earlier thunderstorm. When I pressed my face against the passenger window, I saw that the luggage compartment had split open, leaving a ragged line of suitcases strewn behind us. The captain kicked open the forward door. We bailed and ran.

  When it was my turn, I judiciously kicked off my high heels before jumping into the pilot’s arms. Smoke billowed from the engine that had scraped and sparked across the ground. Amazingly the other wheels hadn’t given way. Running barefoot, I was quickly outdistanced in the dash for safety.

  A sharp wind blew off the ocean. I tripped once, scrambled back to my feet and loped onward toward the terminal, my lizard clutch lost in the weeds. As I ran from the soggy grass onto the tarmac, I saw my Samsonite suitcase lying ahead, its shell cracked open like a blue crab on a crab-shack table on a hot Caribbean night. Caught by the wind, the money inside the suitcase, all US$4 million of it, spiraled upward and green-parrot-like swooped into the jungle.

  I pulled up short and watched the final gust of greenbacks flap over the line of palmettos and coco palms twenty yards south of the runway. Then I blanked out for an instant.

  Of course, this was all planned. I had twelve guys in the fallow rice paddy on the other side of the palm and palmetto windbreak scooping the greenbacks out of the air with butterfly nets. Estimated loss: maybe a hundred thou.

  The only unplanned event happened when I walked into the airport terminal.

  Inside, a crowd of on-lookers chaffed at the bit, held back by five or six barely eighteen-year-old camouflage-fatigued troopers hefting machineguns. Lieutenant Ariel Limon, fat, tanned and ghastly, stood in the forefront. Five years before half his face had been blown off by an IED allegedly planted by some shadowy Marxist cell. More likely by a disgruntled client who felt he’d not received good value for his payoffs. Now that side of his face was a white snarl of eyeless scar tissue.

  As Ariel stepped toward me, he jerked a blue-steel military issue .45 from his flapped leather holster. The room suddenly became breathless. The ratcheting sound of the pistol being armed echoed like twin ball bearings dropped on a terrazzo floor.

  “Anne Muldoon?” he demanded, knowing full well who I was. We’d met occasionally at government functions in years past.

  I looked up from massaging a bruised ankle and flashed Ariel a fake smile. Bent over and wearing a low-cut camisole as I was, he had a great view of my tits. Big deal.

  “Hi, Lieutenant. Hell of a close call. Guess I’m lucky to be alive.”

  He ignored my attempt at social repartee, his sole eye as scrunched and rugged as a hardscrabble field carved out of the jungle by some dirtbag campesino.

  “Anne Muldoon. I’m arresting you for the murder of Tony Sanchez.”

  “You must be kidding,” I said.

  He wasn’t. At a nod of Ariel’s buzz-cut skull, two of his foot soldiers jumped forward and grasped my arms. They were so inept, I might have grabbed one of the machine guns and mowed the lot of them down.

  I didn’t.

  My mind was already sorting back through the index cards of memory to the previous evening in Malibu Caye, when I’d last seen Tony “the Microbe” Sanchez. Then, he’d been very much alive.

  Point of clarification: Tony’s nickname wasn’t a reference to the size of his dick, which was pretty average. It referred instead to his unwavering penchant to micromanage every frigging detail of his mostly shady businesses.

  It started out as just another simple insurance scam. Tony would put in a claim for the lost money. The money that got blown out to sea. Meanwhile the missing money would go quietly into some privately owned businesses. Double your pleasure, double your fun. Tony agreed to pay me 25 percent of the missing money to set it up. I got 5 percent up front to cover expenses.

  Now it had morphed into a murder rap.

  As I hissed at Ariel, I realized the US$4 million was long gone. Slipped into someone else’s pocket.

/>   I needed to get Ariel to tell me whose.

  “Let’s get a drink. You can tell me all about Tony Sanchez’s murder.”

  “You know the details better than I do.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  Ariel’s jaundiced eye coasted over the clusters of gawkers. His own toy soldiers watching his every move.

  “This is no place to talk,” he said.

  He ordered his sergeant to clear out the upstairs lounge and secure the stairway.

  In the upstairs bar, we took seats by the bank of windows looking out onto the tarmac. On the far side, smoke still wafted from the wreck of the Cessna.

  A Mayan beauty, with skin the color of weathered cedar, brought a bottle of rum and two glasses. Then she went away; and we were on our own.

  The first perfect sip of 1 Barrel took me by surprise. It always tasted smoother and more consoling than I remembered.

  “Tell me about Tony,” I said.

  “A small caliber bullet through the forehead. Brain freeze.”

  Ariel tossed back two fingers of rum.

  “Oh, yeah. And both eyeballs were slit with a razor. Some kind of juju trick. If the dead man can’t see his killer, he can’t say his name.”

  I wondered whether Tony’s eyes had been razored before or after lights out. One way was a lot easier to take than the other.

  Ariel reached his fingers into the flap pocket of his camouflage shirt, withdrew a shiny Zippo and set it on the table between us.

  “You left your lighter at the crime scene.”

  It was certainly mine. Chrome plated with the initials A.M. engraved in Celtic script with a rising sun behind. Except I’d lost it more than two years ago about the same time I quit smoking.

  “Is that all you have?”

  “We’ve got your DNA all over his cock.”

  “No way. It takes at least two weeks to get DNA test results back from London.”

  He shrugged.

  “So you were sleeping with him.”

  “Who’s framing me?” I asked.

  Ariel’s hand caressed my leg.

  Chances were all he wanted was to watch me make it with one or two of his crack Alpha Squad recruits. The video would get some laughs floating around the Caribbean rim.

  And I’d never find work again. Except maybe as a hooker.

  In the end, we settled on just a handjob, with my breasts showing. By then the bottle of 1 Barrel was two-thirds empty and I had no idea what I’d agreed to.

  Ariel stood up and pulled at my arm. I looked around at the pool table. The multi-colored vinyl curtains separating the bar from the restaurant. The smoking remains of the Cessna across the runway. It was like an acid flashback.

  I followed Ariel behind the bar.

  His pistol belt was already hanging from one hand. He started to unbutton his pants. I could see he was rampant.

  “Hey, pal. Give me the name first or it’s no sweet patooti for you.”

  I put my hand over his eye and my tongue in his ear.

  I heard him groan. As though I were torturing him. Cutting off his foreskin with a dull paring knife.

  “Give me the name.”

  “Leroy Poe,” he mumbled.

  The lawyer.

  My other hand pulled Ariel’s handgun from the dangling holster. The rum had vaporized my synapses. I was running wildly out of control. Uncovering Ariel’s single eye, I jammed the barrel of the weapon against it and pulled the trigger.

  CLICK!

  No ammo. I should have known.

  As Ariel’s hands grabbed my throat, I kneed him in the jewels as hard as I could. The next instant he was writhing on the floor like a dying insect.

  Tucking the empty .45 in the top of my jeans, I catapulted over the bar; then dashed down the room, out the smudged glass doors and across the observation deck. A drainpipe descended at one end. I made for it, and hoisting myself over the railing, eased down the galvanized pipe to the ground.

  There was still plenty of chaos out on the tarmac. Emergency vehicles parked at odd angles. Firemen, medics and security milling about.

  Unobserved, I trotted in the direction of the garages for the emergency response vehicles, just beyond the terminal to the east. As luck would have it, a new silver-gray Mitsubishi Shogun was parked beside the garages, the driver’s door open, its motor idling.

  Moments later I drove the off-road vehicle hell-bent for leather through the airport exit and turned onto the main highway into Saint Hippolytus. No one was following.

  I needed to find a hiding place as quiet as a grave to hole up in and figure out what the hell was going on.

  Abraham Swallow was a second cousin twice removed on my mother’s side. His job was caretaker of Death Shall Have No Dominion Cemetery, the original cemetery in Saint Hippolytus.

  Nowadays most dead people in Saint Hippolytus were buried in the new cemetery called Happy Rest. This was because Death Shall Have No Dominion was just about full up. But somebody still had to mow the grass, whack down the weeds and pour poison on the fire ant mounds.

  That’s where Abraham Swallow came into the picture.

  He lived in a puce-colored cement-block bungalow in a back corner of the cemetery beneath the electric-orange blooms of a Royal Poinciana. Since it was after one p.m., he’d already sucked down a couple of Belikin lagers with his rice and beans and fried plantains, and was thinking about a nap.

  That was when I drove the SUV up the red-dirt road that meandered through the gaudy mausoleums and rococo tombs housing more than two centuries of the dead. With the recent summer rains, it was like driving with square tires on a carrot grater.

  Swallow, sitting on the edge of the front stoop, watched my approach with wide-eyed dismay. I could have been the messiah or the devil’s altar girl. In either case, I was trouble.

  “Hey, Swallow,” I said.

  “Ain’t seen you, cousin, since Uncle Luther died.”

  He stood up and scratched the back of his neck. He was decked out in a shapeless olive-drab T-shirt and the gray striped pants from an old suit.

  “Bin a while,” I said.

  We drifted into the local patois. He asked after my mother, who’d been dead for the past seven years. As I stepped out of the Shogun, I pulled a pint of 1 Barrel from a plastic sack. A cheap trick.

  We passed the bottle back and forth once or twice. Swallow excused himself and went in the house. He returned with a port-soaked cigarillo. I watched him make a scalpel-straight incision with his fingernail down one side, dump out the tobacco and roll a fat custom blunt from a scraggly handful of local herb. He lit it and took a deep toke.

  “What chew want?”

  “I need a new identity for the truck and a place to crash.”

  “I don’ know, cousin. I’m not much for the heat.”

  He passed the blunt. I took some and held my nose. The acrid blue smoke burst out of my lungs. After the second puff, I began to mellow out.

  “What’s not to know? I need a place for tonight, a little time to clear my head. Then I’m outa here.”

  “You sure?”

  “Just one night. Least you can do for family.”

  This last appeal put me over the top. We hid the Mitsubishi in an empty mausoleum. Then Swallow made me a plate of rice and beans doused with Marie Sharp’s pepper sauce. We finished the pint of 1 Barrel and talked some more about family.

  I asked Swallow if he knew where I could get some .45 shells.

  “Might be I could help you out,” he said. “Cost you two hundred dollars for a box.”

  All I had was a fifty, folded up in a gold locket dangling between my breasts. The locket also contained a tiny oval photograph of Tony.

  Okay. Okay. So we’d been intimate for about six months.

  I hated sleeping by myself. Scary dreams. Monsters under the bed. All that shit.

  But that didn’t make me a murderer. Or did it? Did a brown recluse kill her mate?

  Swallow showed me a cot in a
little room off the kitchen. He gave me a towel and a bar of soap. The shower was on an open cement pad out behind the house.

  I knew he was watching while I soaped up, then let the water wash over me like a drug. After I came back to life, I hand-washed my clothes.

  The rest of the afternoon I sat around naked, making lists. Seven capitals starting with the letter B. The last seven books I’d read. My last seven orgasms.

  Swallow spent most of the afternoon changing the color of the Mitsubishi from silver gray to navy. It also got new plates and a cracked windshield. I gave Swallow the fifty bucks for the redo.

  Dinner was canned tomato soup and some old fry jacks. I went to bed at dusk, still naked under a wonderful cotton sheet so old and soft it was like my own skin.

  Tony kept getting in the way of sleep. He wasn’t a half bad guy when he took his mind off his rackets. He liked to fish for amber jack and mackerel along the smaller cayes. Sometimes we’d tuck up on a moonlit sandy beach with a bottle of hooch, Tony playing old Bob Marley songs on a sway-backed guitar. Then fuck till dawn. Now all that seemed a long time ago.

  Before I fell asleep on Swallow’s cot, I hummed a few bars of “No Woman, No Cry” as my farewell to Tony. Maybe one day, there’d be payback. Right now I had to look out for my own ass.

  I woke up with a plan on the tip of my tongue and tear tracks on my cheeks. The tearstains were easily washed away.

  The plan was this: Get the drop on Leroy Poe. Apply enough violence to his person that he believed I would kill him unless he gave me my 25 percent of the missing money. With which in hand, I would split the scene.

  Leroy Poe was your typical slimy organized crime lawyer slash businessman. He also happened to be the brother of the Attorney General.

  When Poe, wearing mold-green micro-suede trousers and a scotch plaid silk golf shirt, face as round and red as a tomato with curly hair, came down the three front steps of his house in beautiful downtown Saint Hippolytus, I was waiting for him. The passenger-side windows of the Shogun rolled wide open.

  His shiny black Daewoo was around the corner where I’d parked it, with two unconscious bodyguards slumped like lovers in the front passenger seat.