“At the hotel they said you’d checked out of work early, so I came up here to Bain Town. But”—he shrugged as if it were nothing—“you weren’t here either.”
He didn’t tell her. About the dread when he saw the shack dark and empty at that hour of the night. How he had slipped a metal spike into the lock to click it open and checked that her body was not lying there, a rag doll on the floor. He didn’t tell her that.
“I went to the beach.”
He wanted to shout at her. But all he said was, “You should take more care.”
She nodded.
“I was coming back down the hill into town,” he continued, “when I saw you . . .”
“Having fun with my two friends?”
There was a razor edge to her words and she rubbed her hand hard across his, chafing their skin together. “Thank you, Flynn. For your help.” Her eyes were huge as she stared at him. “You fight hard.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“I imagine so.”
“How bad is your back?”
“I’ll live.”
He reached out and his fingertips brushed her throat where even by the muted candlelight he could see a livid bruise. “Yes,” he said, “you’ll live.”
I’ll make sure you live.
“I’d be dead—or worse—by now, Flynn, if you hadn’t come.”
“I don’t think so.”
He saw her eyes flicker.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean . . .”
“Tell me.” Her hand slid up his forearm inside his sleeve, as if he were concealing the answers from her under his shirt.
“I mean”—he spared her nothing—“look at Morrell. If they wanted you dead, you’d be dead. They intended to make you suffer.”
* * *
He made her tea on an old oil stove he’d brought for her. He laid her down on her side on the mattress, careful not to touch her back. Her Arcadia dress was covered in dirt and her skin went from chill to hot, as though someone had lit a fire under it. He sat beside her on the mattress and fanned her with a palm frond to cool her and to keep the greedy mosquitoes at bay. She lay with her eyes closed but he knew she wasn’t asleep as he listened to her breath whisper in and out of her lungs, a shallow snatched version of breathing to spare her bruised ribs.
Outside, as the night hours trickled past, a wind had blown in off the sea and rattled the tin roof, a sneak thief trying to squeeze in. Flynn was growing used to the way the island seemed to shake itself loose and come to life at night, full of sounds and smells that drenched the air. Here the blackness was blacker, so black you could dive into it, and the stars brighter. A far cry from the hard gray streets of Chicago. It had unnerved him at first, set his teeth on edge, the strangeness of this island, but he was becoming accustomed to it now. He found he was even smoking less, so that he could smell its scents more.
He sat in the humid darkness, one hand clenched firmly between Dodie’s. It was how he knew she was awake. He could feel her grip on him become more persistent as the moon sauntered through the window and lay on the bed with her. Not just her grip on his hand. It was her grip on his heart that was growing tighter.
Chapter 28
Dodie
Dodie woke. Listening to strange noises in her head. She didn’t move. If she moved, everything would hurt. But she risked raising her eyelids and found Flynn there, sitting with his back against the door, barring entry. Watching her. Smiling at her. She smiled back at him and for a long moment that was all that filled the overheated space of the shack. The air felt grimy and smelled of tallow from the burned-out candle. Early-morning light filtered in, gray as a cobweb, but it brought with it the stark memory of the night before with its humiliation on the beach and its thrashing in the street.
“Feeling any better?” Flynn inquired softly.
“Much.”
A small sound escaped him that she realized was a stifled laugh.
“Good,” he said. “Ready for breakfast?”
She nodded and regretted it.
“Flynn, who were those men? They knew my name.”
His limbs lost their looseness and he moved forward. “They got away. That big bastard must own a skull of granite. I was sure he was out cold, but when I finished fixing you up, they were both gone. The white guy had a busted leg, so the big one must have carried him out of there.”
“Did anyone see where they went?” She could hear her fear inch its way into her voice.
“No, not that they were saying. Do you want me to call the cops?”
“Police? No, thank you. You can keep them.”
It came out more vehemently than she intended and she saw him wonder what Nassau’s police force had done to make her so wary of them.
“The citizens of Bain Town are a tight-lipped lot,” she pointed out. “They’ll have no interest in getting the police here. Anyway, what would be the point? The police would get nowhere and just blame me for enticing the men by wandering a beach at night and . . .” She shivered.
“Don’t, Dodie.”
“Who were those men?” she asked angrily. “What is going on? What are you doing here in Nassau? Or here in this hut? Tell me.”
But he didn’t answer her questions. Instead he drew near to the mattress where she was lying.
“It’s because of that wounded guy you helped. You know that, don’t you?”
“Morrell?”
“Yes.”
“I have a theory about him.”
Flynn sat up straighter. “What’s that?”
“I think he was blackmailing Sir Harry Oakes.”
“What?”
“It fits.” A pulse was throbbing at the base of her skull.
“Fits with what?”
“It fits with the fact that Morrell was secretive about what he was up to here and frightened that someone wanted to hurt him. And it fits with the gold coins he had in his possession.”
“He had gold coins?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see them?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Two. Apparently Sir Harry Oakes collects gold coins. I suspect he must have paid Morrell off with them.”
“Jeez, Dodie, where on earth did all this come from?”
But she had thought it through carefully.
“There’s a woman on the island called Ella Sanford. She was with Morrell and Sir Harry that night.”
“How do you know?”
“She admitted it to me. But she’s lying about what went on, I’m sure.”
“Oh, Dodie, come on, even if you’re right about her—which you may not be—that’s still one hell of a jump to assume blackmail.”
“What if they were having an affair?”
“Morrell? And this woman?”
Dodie shook her head. “No, of course not.” Her head seemed to be floating around the room. “Sir Harry and Ella Sanford. It’s possible.” Flynn’s face drifted back into focus. “Maybe Morrell found out somehow and was blackmailing them. At the end, when he knew he wasn’t going to make it, he asked me to take a gold napoleon to her. As a warning, I think. He knew Oakes had hired thugs to kill him and he was warning her to stay clear of such a man.”
Flynn was staring at her, eyes dark with disbelief. “That’s quite some story you’ve concocted there.”
“It fits.”
In the street a dog barked, startling them both. They had forgotten the world outside.
“As soon as Sir Harry knew,” she continued, “that I had nursed Morrell, he offered me a job. To shut me up. He’s a dangerous man, Flynn, this respectable knight of the realm.”
“So you think he’s the one who got those bastards to beat you up last night?”
“Yes.”
She paused, conscious of something going on in the room that her head was too fogged to reach for. “Don’t you?”
He was silent for a long time. She expected him to light a cigarette, but he didn’t. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on her.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said.
Dodie waited for more. She struggled to sit up but only made it onto one elbow.
“Johnnie Morrell was my friend.” His voice was bleak.
She felt something dark enter the room, something cold and suffocating. It took her a full minute to recognize it as grief.
“He and I came here together to fix up a business deal. I was watching his back but . . . he died.”
“Flynn,” she whispered. “Don’t.”
“I might as well have stuck the knife in him myself.”
Chapter 29
Flynn
Dodie looked all wrong. The pain was visible on her pale face and the sight of it did something bad to Flynn. Yet somehow she got herself upright and sat on the floor directly in front of him, taking both his hands in her own.
“Don’t,” she said again. “I was the one who let him die. Not you.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes.”
He drew a breath and held it a long time because he knew he was going to trust her. Knew it was his life at stake, as well as hers.
“Dodie, you’ve got it all wrong. Johnnie Morrell wasn’t blackmailing anyone. I’ll tell you what happened that night.”
Her hands gripped his firmly.
“We came in after dark,” he told her. “A boat ferried us in from the plane to the far end of the island up near Lyford Cay. It was rough water. Morrell was sick as a dog, poor guy. But we got here and went together to settle the sale of a tract of land with someone, and—”
“Are you buying land here?”
“Hell no, I don’t have that kind of dough. Morrell and I work . . .” He corrected himself. “Morrell and I worked for an organization in America that wants to invest heavily in the Bahamas.”
“Why did you come at night? Why so clandestine?”
“Everything is under wraps at the moment. No questions asked. Safer that way.”
“Oh.”
“So when the meeting was over and we’d knocked back a few whiskeys with the guy, Morrell decided he wouldn’t hang around any—”
“Who was the meeting with?”
“Shit, Dodie, you don’t want to know.”
She regarded him fiercely. “I do. If I knew who your meeting was with and what it was about, I’d have a better idea why I was beaten to a pulp and my house burned down. You owe me that much, surely?”
He turned her hands over and rubbed a thumb over her cold palms. “Sure,” he said. “I owe you that much.”
But still he hesitated. Whatever he told her could not be untold.
“It was with Sir Harry Oakes, wasn’t it?” she prompted.
He nodded. He wasn’t going to lie to her this time. “It’s not hard to guess. He’s the one with the big bucks on this island.”
“So tell me what happened.”
“After the meeting, Johnnie Morrell was too fired up and in too much of a goddamn hurry. He wouldn’t wait around any longer while Oakes and I sorted out some details. He set off to walk in the dark the few miles from Cable Beach—that’s where Oakes’s Westbourne home is—into town. He told me to catch up with him when I was all done.”
“But?”
“But this is where the whole damn plan went haywire. I finished up with Oakes and”—he shrugged uneasily—“downed a final whiskey for the road, then left. I wasn’t more than a stone’s throw behind Morrell when a dark sedan sidled past me on the empty street. I could see him up ahead in the beam of its headlamps. I saw the car stop beside him, and he ducked his head to talk to whoever was inside it.”
Flynn was back there. The car’s brake lights winking at him out of the blackness. A shout leaving his throat, his legs pumping, fear for his friend burning holes in him as he ran.
“Morrell got into the back of the car, the stupid jackass, and it drove off toward town.” Flynn tapped a spot at the center of his forehead. “What was he thinking in there? What would make him do such a dumb thing? He was too smart to accept a lift from a stranger. He was always careful, that’s why he was chosen for this job. So what the hell was going through that thick skull of his?”
She was stroking his wrist, calming him.
“Maybe,” she suggested quietly, “it was the drink. Too many whiskeys with Sir Harry blurring his judgment? Or he was too woozy to walk any further.”
Flynn gave a sharp shake of his head. “No, Johnnie knew how to handle his booze okay.”
“Maybe he knew the driver.”
“No.” He brushed aside a thick wave of her dark hair that had sprung across her cheek when she leaned forward, and he felt the chill that still clung to her skin. “Johnnie knew no one here. He told me so himself.” A spasm of sorrow spiked through him. “He’d never been here before.”
He put both hands on her shoulders to prevent her toppling forward, but her gleaming dark eyes fixed on his.
“So where did the gold coins come from?” she whispered.
Chapter 30
Dodie
“So where did the gold coins come from?” Dodie whispered.
But her voice came out so thinly that she scarcely heard it herself. “Where, Flynn? Where did Morrell get them?”
If his face had not been so close to hers she would not have seen the tightening of his pupils or the fraction of a second when the edges of his mouth froze, before he smiled at her gently and slipped one of his hands under her chin, cupping it in his palm. Until that moment she had no idea that her head was falling forward. His hand felt warm. Or was it her chin that was cold? She struggled to focus her eyes on his face but it kept shifting position. Behind his head the walls seemed to be moving.
“Dodie,” he said. The word reached her ears a slow beat after it left his lips. “Let’s put you to bed, you need sleep.”
But she put out a hand and gripped his shirtfront. “Flynn, did he show you the coins? The two napoleons.”
“Time to rest, Dodie.”
“Did he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did he say where he got them from?”
“No. He told me nothing about them.”
“Oh.” She didn’t want it to be a lie.
He wrapped both arms around her, holding her still, and only then did she realize that she was the one swaying, not the walls. He drew her against him and kissed her tangled hair. It was comforting.
“Listen, Dodie, this is all I know about the coins. You said Morrell asked you to take one to a Mrs. Sanford and you believed it was a warning to her not to trust Sir Harry Oakes. Right?”
She thought she said yes, but all that came out was a grunt. Her cheek lay against his shirt.
“Well, Dodie, I think you’ve got that wrong. I think it was a warning, yes. But to trust Oakes and to keep quiet about bumping into Morrell at Westbourne. Because whoever killed Morrell will come after her next if they find out she was there.”
Dodie felt something trembling. She tried to ignore it but it kept on, so she sat up and touched his face to see what was the matter. In the dim light she was shocked to see her hand shaking. Flynn was fading in and out of focus and she had no idea whether the tenderness of his expression was real or a figment of her imagination.
“Flynn,” she murmured, “you are a kind man.”
He let out a laugh that had no laughter in it.
“Is that so?” he said.
“But why do you turn up in my life bringing violence and destruction with you? Who are you?”
Flynn rose to his feet and lifted her into his arms before she t
oppled flat on her face. He laid her on the mattress and wrapped the sheet around her shivering body to keep her warm. He bent again and kissed her hair but she draped an arm around his neck and drew his mouth to hers. His lips were warm and tasted of the island, but they withdrew quickly. Instead he stroked her damaged throat with the back of his fingers.
“I’m your guardian angel,” he whispered. And this time when he laughed softly under his breath, his laughter wove itself into the weft of the sheet and lay in wait for her each time she turned her head.
Chapter 31
Flynn
Flynn moved through the shadows, barely causing a ripple in them. To the west of Nassau lay a silky blackness that still shone with stars, but in the east the sky was a dove gray, shot through with feathery streaks of blood.
Flynn was careful to choose the dark side of the sprawling bungalow. He slid a stiletto blade between the shutters, then under the window catch, easing the sash up just enough before slipping over the sill and into the room. It was a library of sorts, shelves of books blurred in the gloom. Flynn moved quickly to the door and opened it a crack. Silence, heavy as the gun in his pocket. Ahead lay the wide hallway. He listened. Not a quiver of sound.
This was his world, a world of stealth and violence, a place where people hurt and got hurt. He had learned to silence his breath and slow his heart, to climb fast and not to break sweat when a gun was pushed in his face. He’d learned it well. It wasn’t a world he liked but it was the one he lived in. Except now, he wanted out.
* * *
“Don’t make a sound.”
Flynn’s hand was clamped over the damp mouth of the man in the bed. In his other hand the stiletto point was puncturing a pinhole in the man’s throat. His feet spasmed briefly under the sheet and then he was still as stone, eyes wide with terror and staring up at Flynn as if he’d never seen him before.
“Mr. Spencer,” Flynn whispered, so close he could smell his breath, “time for an exchange of views. Get up.”
The Far Side of the Sun Page 17