Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (4 page)

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.

“
Laissez le bon temps rouler
,” I said, pointing Ariel’s ammunition-less .45 at him. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Get in the fucking car!”

Poe complied, unhappily.

“Don’t I know you?”

“We’ve met. When most recently, I can’t remember.”

I patted him down and took a nasty little Saturday night special from his pants pocket. In his briefcase he had a retractable stiletto, some cigars and a vial of coke.

As I said, your typical sleazy lawyer.

Next I backhanded him with the barrel of the .45.

There was a spray of blood but no scream. Poe fell sideways, retching. A tooth dropped into the plastic cup holder between the seats. When he recovered, he scrunched backward into the far corner, his face layered with fear and pain. Vampire-red saliva dripped from his mouth. The cheek was already turning black. It always amazed me what evil we did to each other.

“I want my million dollars,” I said. “In the next 20 minutes.”

“My office … ,” mumbled bruised lips.

“If this fucks up, you’re a dead man.” I shook the .45 at him. “Pow!”