Murder Pro Bono

by Don Porter

  “You figure they have guns?”

  “Well, I picked up our impressive arsenal for $600. If I'd had six million, I could have armed a battalion.”

  Chapter 24

  The road turned to dirt, the houses to dark silhouettes against starlight. Most properties were fronted by fences, some pickets, some chicken wire, a few hedges, but no house numbers. Almost every yard had trees. Our headlights were showing us tangerines, oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes, even a few avocado and breadfruit. We had rolled down the windows for better visibility, and the smell of citrus blossoms was making my mouth water. In the tropics, trees tend to have blossoms, green fruit, and ripe fruit, all at the same time. They have to do that, because the only seasons are wet and dry, no hot or cold.

  We'd bumped our way two blocks from the highway, looking for number 307, and had yet to see any house numbers anywhere. No lights, no people, just ominous shapes in the darkness.

  “Your turn to have a bright idea.” George was driving with his head out of the window.

  “If we're in civilization, 307 is the fourth house on the left in the third block.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but this doesn't look like any civilization I've ever seen before.” A pack of wild dogs set up howls and barking a few blocks away, just to emphasize George's appraisal. Guam doesn't have wolves or coyotes, but people have made up for that by abandoning pets in the jungle. The dogs pack together and crossbreed into a horrible mish-mash. Locals call them boonie dogs, and the mutual relationship is about like a Montana rancher and wolves.

  The houses we were passing looked like single-family dwellings, most set back fifty feet or more from the road, and none looked inviting. The third block was progressively darker, but the fourth house on the left did look larger than most. Still no number, no sign, and only one car in the drive. My suggestion was based on the convention that each block starts a new hundred with odd numbers on the left when you drive out of town, but there is nothing mandatory about that. If it were mandatory, Guam would have done it differently, just to be independent.

  George parked on the grass strip beside the road. “Shall we do it? You cover the back. I'll kick down the front door.”

  “What if it's the wrong house?”

  “Plenty of precedent for that. The FBI and SWAT teams get the wrong house about half the time, and usually shoot a few preachers in the process. What's the problem?”

  George got out and shoved a bullet the size of my little finger into the Luger, so I followed him. The house we thought might be 307 had a hedge with tiny white flowers that smelled like gardenias. An iron gate led to a cobblestone walk toward the front porch. The gate didn't squeak. I followed the hedge left, then toward the back of the house, to a spot where I could see both the front and back porches. I got the .22 in my hand, hammer back.

  George stomped across the porch and leaned on the doorbell. Thirty seconds ticked by, the porch light came on, and the door opened a crack. The barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun came out and nudged George's belly. He didn't seem to notice.

  “Hi, your cousin, the taxi driver, sent us.” I couldn't hear the response, but the gun barrel was still poking into George. “We're trying to locate a couple of good friends of ours and your cousin told us they're here. These are their pictures.” George pulled the pictures out of his shirt pocket with his right hand and shoved the shotgun barrel out of his belly with his left.

  That shotgun blast sounded like Krakatoa, but George didn't flinch. “Oops, sorry about that. Your cousin said these guys were staying here at your bed-and-breakfast.”

  I moved a few steps farther toward the back. If anyone were going to run out, that shotgun blast should have done it, but the only thing that happened out back was that the crickets stopped chirping for a few seconds. The crickets cranked up again, the front door slammed and the porch light went out, so I followed the hedge back to the gate. The shotgun had blown a one-foot-diameter hole in the hedge beside the gate. George had the gate open, waiting for me, and was surveying the hole with admiration.

  “Nice choke on that shotgun. That was the thirty-six-inch barrel. Not many of those around anymore.”

  “How did he manage to miss that monstrous gut of yours?” I asked.

  “Accident, and it was a her. When I shoved the gun aside, her finger was caught in the trigger guard. Could have happened to anyone.”

  “So, the house we want is in the next block? What?”

  “Nope, right house.” We were climbing back into the car. “The taxi driver was on target, but our friends left this morning. The landlady thinks they moved to that resort on Cocos Island. Is it too late to get a drink back at the hotel?”

  It was a typical Guamanian morning, bright sunshine and eighty degrees. We turned right on East Marine Drive and followed the coast to Agaña where the highway becomes West Marine Drive. Fishermen in hip boots waded in crystalline lagoons using butterfly nets to snare octopus. Strictly speaking, we were on the Philippine Sea coast. The shortest route to Cocos Island is to cut across Guam's waist, ten miles to the Pacific.

  Agaña is the principle city on Guam and the highway across the waist starts out being the main street through town. The left side has a thrift shop, bars, and a mini mall that could be in Des Moines; Safeway store, the Gap, Radio Shack, Old Navy, whatever, but the right hand side is a park and a stone wall protecting a derelict fort and a very active church, left from the Spanish occupation.

  The Spanish showed up around 1668 with troops and muskets, but the real occupation was by the priests. Those old boys proselytized with amazing efficiency. The conversion rate was one hundred percent of those left alive. Chamorros had been living on Guam since before Christ, and petroglyphs suggest a South East Asian origin.

  Christian missionaries, the world over, have considered anything different from their home congregations to be Devil worship, and that included native languages. The Chamorros probably spoke an ancient Tagalog, but we don't know that because they weren't into writing. The Spanish priests assumed that Christ spoke Spanish, just as the Americans who invaded Hawaii later were convinced that Christ spoke English. In each case, they did their best to wipe out the native language, and the Spanish were remarkably successful on Guam.

  Don't mention this to a Chamorro because they are fiercely proud of their ancient language. Guam even has a radio station that broadcasts only in Chamorro. However, they greet their audiences with, “Señors y señiorittas” and you will recognize the ancient Chamorro numbers: uno, dos, tres, quarto, cinco …”

  We were passing stoplights and streetlights, remarkable because each had a bird nest on top. The brown tree snakes that invaded Guam are particularly fond of birds eggs and fledglings, so the few birds left prefer nesting over the racket and exhaust from traffic to the more dangerous jungle.

  The town ends at limestone cliffs, the road climbing up through a cut. During WWII, Japanese soldiers warrened those cliffs with tunnels. The tunnels are still there, now scattered with paper, plastic, beer cans, and used condoms. If you have a strong stomach, you can still see scorched places on the walls where the Americans used flame throwers to incinerate the trapped Japanese. That sounds brutal, but the Japanese preferred it to surrender. We did the coast-to-coast transfer in twenty minutes.

  The Pacific coast is a spectacular drive, up and down sea cliffs, around historic bays, through towns with three-hundred-year-old churches. Wherever a break in the ivy let us see into the jungle, there were stalks of bananas and quart-sized papayas growing wild. Several pastures had carabao grazing. Carabao are water buffalo; I think that's just the Philippine name for them. If there is a biological difference, it isn't obvious. Anyhow, it was hard to remember that we were on a life-and-death mission, possibly an hour away from getting shot. I guess we had made the same judgment that the bodyguards had, decided that our lives were worth six million dollars, but we had the added impetus of the threat to Lydia in Vegas, and her peril was our fault.

  When we went throug
h the village of Yona, the highway was parked solid with cars on both sides for several blocks. That meant that a fiesta was in progress. We passed the house where the fiesta was being held. Hundreds of people were milling around tables on a lawn, singing, shouting, and carrying paper plates. They motioned for us to join them, and it was tempting. Remembering how good that food would be, I rated it close to six million dollars, and we probably wouldn't get shot there.

  Fiestas on Guam are pretty steady because every village has one once a year, and there are at least fifty villages. They'll eat, play games, and chatter all day, and the live bands strike up at sunset. Sometimes there are as many as three bands in different yards, and people dance all night under Japanese lanterns. The only way to tell that you're on Guam instead of some movie version of a Hollywood extravaganza is that most of the recipes include lemon juice, and are positively addictive. George drove resolutely through Yona and into the mountains to go around Ylig Bay. Road dropped down to sea level and skirted a sandy beach.

  We parked beside the road at the end of a line of cars in Marizo and walked two blocks on the dirt path to the marina. We were passing stone bell towers, churches and forts left from the Spanish occupation, some so grown over with flowering bougainvillea that you couldn't make out the original shapes. The road was shaded by coconut palms, interspersed with ancient trees that had also seen the Spanish occupation. I don't know the names of those trees, or if they even have names, but they are a mutated version of baobab trees. Trunks are massive but short, looking like elephant's feet, and all of the branches sprout from the same place at the top, like a hydra.

  We had just missed a water taxi that takes tourists to the island resort, so we leaned on the railing overlooking Cocos Lagoon and sipped free coffee in Styrofoam cups for the fifteen-minute wait. The lagoon is completely surrounded by coral reef with the resort island two miles away making a low swatch of green. I was contemplating the resiliency of that island resort because every few years a typhoon reduces it to a sand spit, but a year later it's back in business and covered by palm trees again. I was trying to remember how long it had been since typhoon Omar stripped the island to bare bones, and it hasn't been very many years.

  Things grow fast on Guam, but not that fast. The replanting is done with barge loads of full-grown trees. A tractor, like a front-end loader, carries a thirty-foot tree between padded jaws. It scoops out a hole in one bite with a bucket that works like a clamshell, sticks the tree in the hole, and runs back for another.

  George was leaning against the rail, back to the lagoon, watching the traffic crawl past the parked cars, and when he grabbed my arm I nearly dropped my coffee.

  “Anything familiar about that car?” he asked.

  I saw what he meant. It wasn't the car; it was the driver and the passenger. They were still dressed Godfather I, dark suit jackets, and sunglasses. The driver was the escort who had gone to dinner with Maude and me. They couldn't stop because both sides of the road were parked solid. The traffic was creeping, but steadily, and it was going to be several blocks before they could get out of that assembly line.

  “Yeah, I know the driver. He eats shrimp like a vacuum cleaner and guzzles margaritas, but he's deserted his post. I left him guarding my car on Oahu.”

  “Just maybe it isn't the car he was interested in. Question is, do we have backup, or are we going to get shot from both sides at once?”

  “Maybe they're just observers? I have the impression that our new client doesn't trust us completely. We could duck out, run back to the car, and be going the other way before he gets parked. There'll be a whole roasted pig in Yona”

  “Could, but they saw us waiting for the water taxi. They might figure out that the bodyguards are on the island. Do we want to leave them with the six million dollars?”

  “Might not be a bad trade, if they get shot trying to collect it. We could wait here on the dock and shoot whichever pair comes back with the loot.”

  The water taxi came chuffing up to the dock. There are four of them, running in opposite directions. If they are all on schedule, there is one loading at each end, and two plying the narrow channel through the coral. The boats are reminiscent of the African Queen, about the same degree of maintenance, and a one-lung diesel. The decks are all benches, and covered with a red-and-white-striped awning. Twenty people came running from their hiding places around the marina, and swept us onto the boat. We were lucky, we got seats, and the diesel did its chug-chug backing away from the dock.

  We turned around in the only deep spot and headed for the narrow channel through the coral toward the island. The next taxi had just cleared the corridor and was wallowing toward the dock. Nature is at war in the lagoon. If left alone, the coral will fill up the edges in just a few years, geologically speaking, and the island will become attached. The war is with the typhoons that try to strip the entire lagoon away and dump it into the Marianas Trench. Typhoons are hurricanes until they pass the dateline. West of the dateline, the Southeast Asian influence takes over and they become typhoons, the name derived from the Chinese word for dragons. Same storms, different names, but it does seem like typhoons are generally more devastating.

  The water taxi was seriously overloaded, showing twelve inches of freeboard, but the waves in the lagoon were twelve inches high, so it wasn't always clear whether or not the taxi had sunk. Halfway across, in the narrow cut through the coral, we met another taxi and the two squeezed together. Scraping the other taxi was apparently preferable to scraping the coral. George was grabbing my arm again.

  “Look at those two guys on the third bench.” I didn't have to pull out the pictures to recognize Pederson and Adams. The one we'd been calling Adams held a duffle bag against his chest, and both of them were looking grim, or maybe the ride was making them seasick.

  “What do we do now?” I had jerked the .22 out of my belt, a reflex, because it was not a time to shoot, and the boats had passed each other.

  “First you put that gun away. Unless you're planning to hijack the ship? They still hang pirates, and this tub couldn't turn around in this channel anyway.”

  I stuck the pistol back in my belt, and flapped the aloha shirt over it. No one was paying attention; they were all concentrating on the coral that was scraping by and the neon fish that were close enough to touch, so I didn't cause a mutiny.

  “What do you suppose spooked them? Why leave the splendor and comfort of Cocos Island?” I asked.

  “Maybe nothing. They might just be taking a tour and coming back tonight.”

  “Oh, good. If we stay aboard and go back, maybe we can wave at them again going the other way? Did you notice the duffle bag that Adams was hugging?”

  “Hard to miss. Either he has a girlfriend in there, or there are six million bucks in that bag. The real question is, will they meet their buddies on the dock while we're marooned on the high seas?”

  Chapter 25

  I looked back, and I could see a boat loading at the dock, and the boat we had scraped past was just leaving the channel, but it was much too far to make out details. “Do they know each other?” I asked.

  “More than likely. They all worked for the same family, so they're probably blood brothers or something. My guess is that the two who are following us traveled under their real names, and the two we are following found out they were here by calling the car rental companies after the morning jet landed.”

  “Wonderful, and the two who are following us got our address at the Hilton and the license number of our car from Budget? Isn't it fun, living in the information age?”

  Suddenly a speed boat, like a cigar boat, rocketed past outside the reef. Two women were hunkered down in front. Two guys, one normal, one large economy had the middle seat. I knew the driver was O'Malley without even looking. He swung an arc, but he was going to beat the other water taxi with the six million bucks to the dock.

  “Well, there goes the six million.” George was pounding his knee with his fist.

 
“Yeah, but where? Do you think O'Malley and crew will take on the Mafia?”

  “Maybe, did you notice if Dallas had her pipe?” George stopped pounding his knees and strained to look back.

  “Probably, and Rose has a revolver or two in her bodice. Should be a fair fight, but how the heck did O'Malley get here?”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson. I didn't take a genius to figure out that if you want to leave Oahu you're going to do it at the airport. While I was doing brilliant, you might say genius, computer work and you were out debauching with Maude, with five people the O'Malley family just staked out the airport. They probably came over on the same jet with Sally and Vinney.”

  We busted out of the channel, still apparently afloat, and swung wide toward the dock while another boat was turning around to claim its right of passage. The one going back wasn't so crowded, because it was still early in the day. Toward sunset, the boats coming over will be floating and the ones going back will be swamped.

  The dock was nice new planking, of course, because everything on the island, probably including several barge loads of sand, was new since Typhoon Omar bared the reef's skeleton. We were shoved onto the dock by the eager revelers, but turned around and re-boarded the moment that the gangplank cleared.

  “Sit on the right side,” George suggested. “The left sides are going to scrape, and the bad guys just might be on the next boat.”

  A dozen tourists trooped aboard, carrying coolers, and parasols. Two young Chamorros were wrestling surfboards, banging people with whichever end they weren't watching. On our left, a ropedoff area was swarming with swimmers and windsurfers. Most of the tourists trying to windsurf were Japanese, and the sails on the boards were too heavy for them, so usually they were counted as swimmers. They all looked happy though, probably because the water is near body temperature and clear as window glass. I could make out the roof of a new log lodge through the palm trees. Our diesel chugged, and we were once again consigned to the briny.