Roo pulled into a concrete driveway next to an explosion of pink frangipani plants. Again he used momentum to make the turn into the bend in the driveway, just out of sight of the road. He slammed on the parking brake and kicked the door open.
“Stay here.”
He grabbed the flare gun, hopped out of the car, and slid down the dirt alongside the road. He loaded the flare in just as he made it to the bottom and the sports car came wobbling up the road.
They saw him and slammed on the brakes. Roo tracked it, aiming calmly and taking a breath, then fired down into the open window of the car. The gunman, in the middle of reloading his weapon, raised his hands and tried to duck as the brilliant flare flew between his legs to strike the floor by his feet.
The car filled with hissing and sputtering red smoke. The entire interior glowed, filled suddenly with hell itself, and the car wandered wildly, then pitched off the side of the road.
Roo walked across the road and looked down over the steep edge. The car rolled twice, picking up momentum as it bounced down the hill, then struck a thick mango tree. The carbon-fiber roof shattered and revealed aluminum ribs beneath it.
It lay bent around the tree’s trunk, vomiting red smoke.
Roo’s lip curled. He tossed the flare gun down the hill and walked back up to the Chinese hatchback. Kit stood at the passenger side, her door open. “Are we okay?”
“Just about fucking anything but okay,” Roo said, getting in.
“I didn’t know there were other people following us,” she said.
Apparently she didn’t know a lot of things, Roo thought. But he chose not to say it. “Get in. I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
She looked down the hill, seeing the red smoke slowly rising out from around the crooked trees downslope. And then came to a decision and got back in.
“They followed you,” Roo said, thinking out loud as he popped the parking brake and rolled backward down the hill. “To get to me. I don’t know who they are, but they weren’t professionals. Or in the trade.”
The fucking amateurs had been leaning out of windows shooting in a public area. Who the fuck was stupid enough to do that? Cheap, low-level chickenshit. Roo slammed the parking brakes on and spun the wheel in a textbook J-turn. The car whipped around to face downhill.
He released the parking brake before the car fully spun and floored it. They bounced out of the driveway onto asphalt.
At the bottom of the hill he eased them over the gutter this time, and they passed the now-flaming wreckage of the sports car as he accelerated westward.
“The first man I shot in the yard.” Roo was replaying everything in his head, hunting for details. “He had tattoos. Swastikas. All of those men were white. Like European white. Nordic. None of them seen the sun in a while.” One of them had been already starting to sunburn … he’d been in the car. He’d be well past sunburnt now, Roo thought.
“I swear, I don’t know who they are,” Kit said.
Roo rubbed his forehead in frustration.
“I shouldn’t have kept the phone,” he said out loud, more to himself than to her. But it was convenient to have someone to talk to, because he all but needed a therapist at this point. Stuff was bubbling out from deep inside him.
“What?” Kit looked over.
“Should never have kept a phone.” Should never have remained connected.
It was hard to do, though. Hard to ignore the allure of a burner. Of anonymously forwarded old mailbox numbers through some routers so that he could keep in touch with a few people from the old days.
Before he’d retired from it all. Found Delroy.
Roo hit the wheel. “Damnit.”
He should have known better.
Kit put a hand on his elbow. “Does all this have something to do with Zachariah?”
He looked over at her. Her blond hair had escaped her ponytail to fly every which way, her eyes were narrowed. Movements jittery from the adrenaline come-down and stress. He wondered when the tiny shakes would creep into his fingers as the reality of the firefight let go of him.
“Maybe,” Roo said. “Maybe…”
He still had the data on the chain around his neck. The tiny tree frog just under his shirt. Maybe he should just give it to her and let her walk away. She’d braved enough for some answers.
Best thing to do was to walk away from all this himself. He’d done his time, been in the service. Roo owed the world nothing. He’d given it enough.
“Both you and them are after me because he called me.”
“What did he want?” Kit asked, her voice suddenly sharp.
He looked over at her and she looked out of the window. In a low voice she said, “I just got shot at. And I don’t know why. And he’s dead. And I don’t understand why.”
“You think someone killed him,” Roo said.
She nodded.
Roo tapped the wheel for a moment. “Well, hard to argue with you now that people are coming and shooting for us, yeah? I think you’re right.”
“Then what the hell did he ask you to do?”
“Nothing,” Roo said.
Kit looked dubious. “Nothing?”
“He did give me something,” Roo admitted.
“What?”
“Information. Stuff he’d been working on. Had it in a lockbox in Tortola.”
Kit leaned over. “And now?”
“Now we have other problems,” Roo said, and slowed down. He pulled into the Bolongo Bay Resort, stopped just by the entrance, and looked at Kit. “Do you have cash on you?”
“I do.”
“Go in there, enjoy a rum coke. In fact: have a couple. Until you stop shaking, or wanting to shake. Then have a good meal. Then go sit on the beach, and forget this happened until the police come and ask you about it all. You tell them everything; they’ll be able to piece it together with public cameras and the vehicle logs anyway, no profit in lying. Tell them the truth and hire yourself a good lawyer. You haven’t done anything wrong. When it’s over, go back to your office job in Florida and put this all behind you. Let your brother go. Let me go. Live a good, uncomplicated life.”
She looked in the direction of the hotel’s entrance and considered his advice for a second. “Roo, I’m an insurance patterns analyst, basically. There isn’t such a thing as a good, uncomplicated life. Just life. I know that if I get out of this crappy little hatchback, I never see you again. But I’m now responsible for leading two men I hired to their deaths, because they had no idea my brother was into some serious trouble. And if I leave, I never find out what really happened to Zachariah. And that will eat at me from the inside until I’m just a hollow thing, going through the motions of life. Do you understand? I can’t get out of this car. Not after everything I’ve gone through to get here.”
“I can’t promise it won’t get worse,” Roo told her. “I have no idea what level of shit we’re deep into, understand?”
“Something is wrong here.” She clenched her jaw. “I want justice for Zachariah. I can help. I have money. If Zachariah gave you some information, I can get analysts to help us with it. No matter the cost.”
Roo nodded. So she was going to stick next to him, no matter what. “Zee,” he said, coming to a decision.
“What?”
“That’s what we called your brother,” Roo said, putting the car back in motion as a confused bellhop stared at them as they looped on by. Roo smiled. “Well, except when we were training with the SIS in England. We changed his name to Zed for half a year.”
Kit let out a deep breath she’d been holding. “Where are we going now?”
Roo pulled out the new phone he’d picked up while out shopping for groceries, a simple prepaid set, and tapped away a message to Delroy: Do not come back to the boat. Stay at school, or go to a friend’s. Let me know you received this. IMPORTANT.
He sat in thought after he looked at the time. Delroy wouldn’t be getting out for a few hours yet. He was safe at school.
&nb
sp; Roo made a decision and pulled back out into traffic, heading toward Frenchman’s Reef and into Charlotte Amalie. “It’s time for me to call in a favor,” he explained.
A single flare gun was not going to be enough. Not if people were threatening his home. Not if Delroy might be put in danger due to this whole, messed up situation.
Time to go into the lioness’s den.
10
Roo swung them past the cruise ship docks as they came down from the hill by Frenchman’s Reef Hotel and its brightly colored multistory condo-complexes. St. Thomas was fourteen miles long and a few miles wide, a little larger than Manhattan, but mountainous. Crown Mountain, at fifteen hundred feet, meant that most of the island’s roads and inhabitants were clustered near the sea or perched on a hillside. Driving was always upward, down, or around the mountain, and the few miles from the yard to Frenchman’s Reef still took twenty minutes. It was a busy day, with three mega-ships docked, looking for all the world like gleaming white starships fitted snugly into their slots. Seven stories high, they dwarfed the shopping complex they were tied next to.
The road was miserable with sunburned tourists and their sunhats, but the herds thinned out when Roo turned toward the hospital. A couple of them mistook him for a taxi and waved him down, but he continued right on past. The high-end jewelry shops, restaurants, and souvenir shops faded quickly. So did the crowds they catered to. The shopping complexes turned into plazas aimed at local needs: grocery stores and fast food. A quarter of a mile changed the air, even though a few straggling and increasingly confused tourists were still doggedly walking along the sidewalk.
Smaller Caribbean islands like St. Thomas were dense, particularly near the harbors. They looked tropical and green, houses spilling over the mountainside as you approached by a ship. But Charlotte Amalie had the density of human population of a major continental city.
Tourists filtered through alleys and roads, looking for interesting ways to spend money. But just like any city, take a few turns, move a few blocks in the wrong direction, and you weren’t in a place for snapping pictures or looking lost. Turn the wrong corner and you were likely to get mugged.
Past Pearson Gardens and the new Indonesian-manufactured high-rises and back into the area near the hospital, Charlotte Amalie had been rough for as long as Roo knew it.
A few turns, dredged up from deep in his memory, and Roo stopped down the road from a plasticated-brick apartment complex. Two Dominican teenagers in crimson windbreakers stood near the courtyard gate. Cut-off sleeves revealed elaborately inked biceps.
Well, the Dominican Reds still held up here, Roo thought. Hopefully Jacinta was still inside.
“This isn’t the sort of place they’re expecting insurance adjustors,” Roo said, looking at the two teenaged guards. He reached back, grabbed two of the larger foil-covered freezer bags full of groceries still in the back of the car that he’d never had the chance to unload, and dumped the contents on the roadside between the car and the sidewalk. “Or anyone else in a suit.”
Roo opened the car door and both guards swiveled to regard him as he stood up. “Just keep yourself cool,” Roo told Kit.
“Que deseas?” the nearest teen asked, stepping out onto the street as they approached.
“Jacinta,” Roo said, and relaxed when he saw the flicker of recognition in their eyes. “Tell her Roo’s here to call it in.”
They stood in the street, eye to eye. The teen on the right looked Roo up and down coldly. “Who the fuck you think you are? You don’t smell street to me.”
“I took a shower,” Roo said.
The guard on Roo’s right snickered. The one blocking his way sucked his teeth. He moved a hand to a holster under his left arm. He might have been young and amped up, but he wasn’t some wannabe gangster sticking a gun in a pocket or down his pants. Because, of course, Jacinta wouldn’t put idiots on her front porch. Just young and tough. “Don’t fucking—”
“Tell me,” Roo interrupted. “What’s your favorite hand?”
“My favorite hand?”
“For wiping your ass. Writing. Shit like that. What hand you use?”
He looked at Roo as if studying an idiot, then pulled the gun free. “I like this one,” he said calmly to the other guard. No bravado, no nothing. Just the realization that Roo knew what he was talking about.
Roo had gotten through. He leaned in a little. “Don’t tell her that, then.”
“Tell her what?”
“When Jacinta asks you what your favorite hand is, don’t tell her it’s that one. If you turn me away and she finds out. You know what I mean.”
The guard reholstered his weapon.
“Ain’t exactly a trade secret,” he told Roo.
“Yeah, but I’d be stupid to use it as a threat when you know what Jacinta would do to me if I’m full of shit,” Roo replied.
The guard stared at Roo, then nodded. He stepped back a few feet and used a phone from his pocket to call someone inside the house.
“What the fuck was that?” Kit asked.
“You know that kid, sitting in the corner of the room reading the big, adult book that’s a bit beyond them. They don’t mind the teasing, they’re so caught up in the place they went?” Roo looked over at Kit. “That was little Jacinta with the coke-bottle government-issued glasses, back in the Dominican Republic, reading James Clavell’s Shōgun. Before her parents were murdered. Some of the things she read inspired her vision of leadership and organizational principles.”
Of course, Jacinta had updated a few things to account for modernity. And she’d also realized some of what she’d been inspired by was just authorial bullshit as she tested it out in real world circumstances.
As far as Roo knew, she’d never convinced any of the Dominican Reds’ foot soldiers to commit suicide for screwing up, like the possibly fetishized, honor-obsessed warriors of Clavell’s fictional Japan. Lower order gang recruits were even reluctant to cut off their fingers or hands for offenses as if they were TV Yakuza.
So Jacinta did it for them.
“Follow me,” the guard said, putting the phone back in his pocket.
They walked into the green-cemented walls of the apartment complex. Two more guards, older and more grizzled, stood with submachine guns hanging from straps on their shoulders.
They pointed Roo toward a first-floor door; one of them was missing a ring finger.
Inside, another Dominican Red member politely led them through a corridor into another room. There were leather couches arranged near colorful potted plants. A half-opened Dutch door led to a small kitchen on one side. The other door looked like it belonged in a bank: thick metal and dogged tight: the entrance to a high-security vault.
A guard with carefully plaited hair stopped Kit with a raised palm. “Jacinta knows him, but I’m afraid you are new to us. This is as far as she gets.”
Kit glanced at Roo, who nodded. “Everything’s cool,” he said.
The guard smiled smoothly. More maître d’ than security, he continued in a businesslike tone. “We have beverages, and a tray of appetizers will arrive for you shortly. If you have a cocktail preference, just inform the two men at the door. They will get it for you from the bar upstairs. Mr. Jones, if you would follow me?” The giant vault door rumbled ominously open.
Roo left Kit and stepped to the other side.
The vault door started to shut slowly behind them. Roo checked his phone quickly, before the signal was killed off. Damn fool of a kid, Delroy hadn’t responded at all to him yet.
Stay at school. Do NOT go home. I’ll pick you up, Roo repeated.
The vault door sealed shut with a final thud. And the signal faded with it.
“Prudence fucking Jones,” Jacinta said from the other side of the room. Her brown eyes twinkled behind a set of glasses. Roo could see a flicker of data reflected on her eyeballs. She was as well connected as he used to be, using a highly encrypted dark cloud network piggybacked on a popular photo-sharing site to coor
dinate her empire. And she had a knack for keeping a pulse on the outside world. The better to know where her wares were needed. “Not even a phone call or e-mail ahead of time? Just in the hood, thought you’d drop by? Maybe ask to borrow some sugar?”
“Here to call it in,” Roo said.
“You sure about that?”
He held up the two grocery bags. “I’m sure.”
The vault they stood in went back several rooms. All the walls had been knocked out and the high security area built into the shell of most of the house’s first floor. The open space, lit brightly by fluorescents, featured racks and racks of weapons. From sidearms to rocket launchers. Machine guns to grenades.
The bodega, she called it once, laughing. As if it were some small mom-and-pop grocery store in Queens.
Jacinta waved an arm. “What do you want, Roo?”
He didn’t waste any time. He’d been mulling the list over in his head on the way over. Grenades. Half a bag. Two Uzis. Light, easy to aim. On TV idiots with Uzis sprayed them all over the place and didn’t hit anything, but there was a reason the Israeli Special Forces invented them.
Ammo to top that bag off.
Jacinta followed him, marking off the details of what he packed on an old ledger in a script only she could read. “There’s a new storm coming. Normally you get gallons of water and some groceries, Roo. Not guns.”
“A new storm?” Tear gas grenades, another half bag. A gas mask. Some pistols. More ammo for that. Roo thought about it a second. Then remembered the name of the next storm. “Njema, right?”
“You know American scientists are feeling it when they run out of names for hurricanes that haven’t killed anyone and start using African names,” Jacinta said. “Njema’s coming for us; they just firmed up the forecasts. You probably should lay up nice and tight and come spend some time in the vault. Catch up on old times.”
Roo finished. The two oversized freezer bags, still slicked with ice water and the muddled smell of various groceries, barely closed over the arsenal he’d quickly packed up.
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