Wayward Sons

by Wayne Stinnett

  Somewhere behind her a woman giggled, then moaned.

  “You’re younger than most of the people who come to a place like this.” His eyes were hidden under shadows, but his crow’s feet bunched up. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She shrugged. “Ain’t the first time I found myself in a club like this one.”

  “My girlfriend is about your age.”

  ’Course this man has a wife and a girlfriend, she thought, and he’s still out here, chasing tail.

  Overstepped.

  “Oh, so you got a girlfriend now, too?” Amalis grinned at him, teasing.

  “A man has needs. Neither she nor I are deluding ourselves. What exists in our partnership is not love. She looks good on my arm when I want to make an impression, but she’s not free.”

  “Why didn’t you bring her tonight?”

  “Eager to meet her?”

  Amalis laughed and could tell Jacob was letting the vibe get into him. Kept stepping closer.

  “She never wants to come to places like this. She’s young, still has hang-ups.” He scratched the side of his face, then brought his other leg onto the bed, bending his knee with his hands, now facing her. “That’s what I like about you, Amalis. When I saw you at the bar, I wondered what kind of woman I was looking at—were you lost, or were you here because you wanted to be? I quickly found you were more beautiful, strong, and confident than I could have ever imagined.”

  When her cheeks flushed, she thanked God they were in the dark. Man had charm, wasn’t no denying that.

  “You got some tricks, don’t you?” She tugged the short sleeves of his shirt, like she was looking for a wand and said, “Are you like this with all the girls you meet?”

  “Only the ones I like.”

  She patted his shirt’s pocket. Felt something small in there, like pebbles. She dipped her fingers in and before she pulled out a tiny plastic baggie, she knew she’d find pills.

  “This your Viagra?”

  “No, my sweet girl, that’s something called 2C-B. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “Not a catchy name.” She couldn’t see them, only feel they were small and round, not diamond-shaped.

  “True. Some people call it Nexus, but I personally find that name to be trite. Tries too hard.” He took the baggie from her, opened it up, then, against the stars behind him, she saw his palm tap his open mouth. He chased the pill with a swig of his rum. “It’s a hell of a lot more fun than the name makes it sound, believe me.”

  “That right?”

  “If you sit quietly and enjoy the trip, you’ll experience beauty like you never thought possible. All the people on the beach, all the fish on the water, the stars in the sky—you’ll see the whole world exhaling.”

  Now that was something Amalis ain’t ever seen. Her adult life was spent breathing in, and in, always looking for more air, feeding the tightness beneath her ribs, holding her breath while her feet stepped back and forth across the line.

  “All right. You got me.” She put out her palm. “How long this stuff supposed to last?”

  “That’s the best part,” he said, as the bag crinkled. “Only an hour or two. Then you’re back on your way.”

  He pressed the pill onto the tip of her finger. A little thing. Smaller than it felt through the fabric of his shirt. She popped it, let it rest on her tongue. It tasted like nothing. She chased it down with her drink.

  Nothing happened. Not yet. Probably took a minute to kick in.

  Amalis flopped on her back and watched the stars poke through the tattered palm fronds at the edge of the cabana’s roof.

  “Where you find this stuff, anyhow?”

  “Kingston,” he answered. “My girlfriend and I attended a club her friend told her about. It was the best kind of place—steamy in the night, full of people, the drinks hard enough to singe your nose hairs. I saw these kids on the dance floor doing that dance they do. You know, where the fella picks up the girl and spins her around like he’s trying to knock the walls down with her head while he has sex with her.”

  “Daggerin’.”

  “Yes, that.” He chuckled to himself. “People doing that cleared the dance floor. Except for one group of kids, standing near a corner, dancing with each other like they didn’t have a care in the world. Reminded me of my younger days. I knew they were on something.

  “Anyway, I went to the bathroom, and I found out what it was.” He flicked the baggie. “That was a year ago, and 2C-B has been my drug of choice since then. I nearly broke my knee dancing at that club.”

  “So, this stuff make you hyper?”

  “Not at all. It enhances your perceptions. You’ll feel some euphoria, as well. It’s a bit like a mixture of a low dose of LSD and Ecstasy. You’ll feel the effects most acutely in an hour. We could go back to the bar while we wait for it to kick in?”

  Amalis lifted her head and looked behind her, toward the bar. That woman with the basketball titties was laid across it, her naked man, and two new guys, doing body shots off her.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’m glad you said that.” He raised himself up, his back hooked, and reached a hand to Amalis. She sat up and took it.

  “Nothing matches the experience of feeling the water on your feet when the 2C-B takes effect.”

  He waddled her to the water’s edge, where they sat in the wet sand, and the cold slapped her on the ass. She would’ve walked most times, but she’d lose a night’s work if she cut bait now. She let him snake his arm around her back and plant his hand near her butt.

  “Don’t be getting any closer,” Amalis said.

  “You should know I’m a perfect gentleman.”

  She raised her eyebrows, giving him a doubtful look. Not too many perfect gentlemen popped pills with girls less than half their age.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “The drugs don’t disqualify me.”

  They talked for a while after that. He told her all about his personal business. His wife, his girlfriend, how he made money as a banker, buying businesses in trouble, then cleaning them out for all they was worth.

  He had money. All she had to do was keep jiggling her lure, make him think he charmed her—which wasn’t hard to fake. Being on Zoni Beach in Culebra helped. The white sands, the warm night breeze, coqui chirping in the brush—even a talking pile of garbage couldn’t mess this up.

  Best of all was the night sky. Up there, Amalis saw her baby boy’s eyes, lit up with light and love while he blew out the candles at his fifth birthday. The stars were clearer than she’d ever seen them, full of whites, blues, pinks, greens—things she didn’t know existed out there in the vastness of God’s eternity.

  “You’re feeling new sensations,” Jacob said.

  She looked at him, not scared, but surprised. Feeling like he’d walked past her cracked bedroom door and stopped to marvel at her beauty. She wasn’t ashamed.

  “You have tears in your eyes, darling.” He reached up and wiped them away. The ends of his fingers were alight with joy, and when she looked into his face, she forgot about angling and overstepping and all that mess she’d come here to smear on him.

  He was beautiful. This moment was beautiful. The closer his face came to hers, the more she wanted him to come closer still. His lips met hers, and she fell back onto the sand, each granule tingling her skin, rolling her into endless joy and love.

  He started working at the knot of bikini string behind her head. Without breaking her mouth from his, she moved his fingers aside, then pulled the knot loose. His hands slid up her body, leaving pleasure in their wake.

  The water caressed her feet. The tightness in Amalis had been chased out by lightness. She no longer saw a line to overstep. Here, on Zoni Beach, all those things she cared about and fought for left with the tide, out to sea.

  A hand brushed her ankle. She didn’t open her eyes but pulled her mouth from Jacob’s.

  “Tell your friend I don’t get down like that,” she said, as he
kissed her neck.

  “What?”

  She sat up on her elbows, opening her eyes, seeing the rainbows swirling around the stars, the water, the beach, and Jacob, alone.

  The waves came in again, and she felt the hand on the bottom of her foot. Then it flopped up onto her thigh. Her skin said it was both warm and chilly cold.

  “What the hell?” She sat up fully. A billowy white thing played in the surf at her feet. A plastic bag, or… “Tell me that ain’t your shirt.”

  No, he still had it on. She squinted and saw a man’s hand, limp, and dancing in the water. A dead man.

  She didn’t hear herself scream.

  A man is most dangerous when he’s desperate. As a cop, I’d learned that lesson through blood and bruises and dead co-workers. I kept it in mind as we marched into Robert Beck’s office.

  When I was a kid, I thought I knew what desperation was—from hearing my dad’s stories about businessmen and bankers coming to him with moths in their pockets, begging him to keep their doors open, or to snap up a property dragging down their books.

  I didn’t know a thing.

  My early years were spent growing up in SoCal with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth. My grandfather had gotten into real estate when the counties around L.A. were cheap, and Dad carried the business forward. I was next up, but by the time I hit high school, I wanted nothing more than to get away from private schools, travel soccer teams, and month-long chalet rentals in Aspen.

  I enlisted in the Air Force, thinking that might clue Mom and Dad in to how I really felt. When I finished my service overseas, Dad asked me when I was going to take over Snyder & Burkhart Holdings. I gave him his answer when I became a cop.

  Now, I’m married, in my mid-thirties, and out of law enforcement—officially, at least. This new life that lay ahead of me took me to a place I’d never expected—somewhere far away from my family’s hometown, Newport Beach.

  I’d moved to St. Thomas and started work as an investigator for the Armstrong organization, which brought me to where I was now: facing down a desperate, dangerous man.

  My partner, DJ, and I might have had Robert Beck penned into his big, leather chair, behind an even bigger walnut desk, and he might’ve worn a disarmingly bewildered smile, but above those charming fangs, the slick bastard had the venomous eyes of a cornered rattlesnake.

  A lot of people had Beck pegged as an okay guy, but DJ and I knew better. It was our job to know better.

  Beck was the director of The Cruz Bay Villages—a retirement community that came close to having more yachts than residents. He treated white-haired ladies to steak and Maine lobster dinners—not cheap in the Virgin Islands. How many grams of meth bought a filet mignon on St. John? Because Beck’s salary as director wasn’t paying for it. He made his real money slinging dope. DJ and I had figured out his small part in one of the biggest meth-smuggling operations I’d ever heard of.

  My partner and I came at things from different angles, but we’d both known Beck was dirty. DJ was a former Army Ranger and approached obstacles with a “strike fast and hit hard” attitude, no easy task for a man missing a leg. Being a pararescueman and former police detective, I preferred to use methodical, legal means to an end.

  Nobody could say that DJ Martin and Jerry Snyder didn’t get things done. This was our second assignment together and pretty soon we’d have a 2-0 record.

  “Wipe that smile off your face, Beck,” I said. “You thought you’d never see our happy asses again.”

  Beck blinked at me, then looked over at DJ. “Mr. Snyder, Mr. Martin—good morning to the both of you. What brings you back to my office?”

  “You already know. And you could at least do DJ and me the courtesy of not pretending we’re busting up Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood.”

  The man’s eyes hardened, his focus sharpening. The gee-golly-shucks-church-bingo smile didn’t leave his face, but it did little to dull his eyes.

  “All your talk of being a family at Cruz Bay, of caring about your residents, telling their kids how good their folks have it here. That was the biggest pile of bull I ever witnessed,” I said. “But stepping on old ladies to make your money? That is truly something else—and I’ve seen a lot.”

  “Yeah,” DJ added, “Jerry was a cop, so he knows a thing or two about stepping on the little guy.”

  Beck chuckled.

  I cut DJ an unamused look. No verbal snipes. Not now.

  “Gentlemen,” Beck began. “I’m not sure what to make of all this. Are you suggesting I’m involved in something… unscrupulous?”

  “Just tell us who’s supplying the meth,” I said.

  “Mr. Snyder—” Beck twisted his chair, as if he meant to stand up. I stepped to the left of the desk, and clapped my hand to his shoulder, keeping him planted. He got the message.

  “I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re talking about,” he said. “If you think I’m some kind of drug kingpin, I can assure you I’m quite busy keeping all of my residents active—it’s a full-time job and then some, as either of my assistants will tell you. If I had extra time, I assure you it would be used toward leisure, not wasted on running some kind of drug empire.”

  “At least we agree in part.” I bent down; my face was level with Beck’s. I wanted to see that hardened edge in his eyes shatter—I wanted to take that moment in and commit it to memory. “You’re not the top dog in your outfit—he wouldn’t have made the mistake you did.”

  I looked him up and down; nice suit, gold pinky ring with seven inlaid diamonds, creased trousers, and leather loafers. I grinned. “You tried to buy yourself into the position, though. But we both know you’re not all that important.”

  A tinge of indignation dragged the corners of Beck’s lips downward, but his eyes kept their cutting gaze. “Maybe not in your estimation,” he said. “But I am an important man to the people here. And I don’t appreciate having my time wasted by you gentlemen.”

  I stood up straight, looking down my nose at him. I wanted Beck to feel small—even smaller than he was. “Maybe you are, Mr. Beck—we couldn’t care less about how popular your shuffleboard nights are. But you’re only a couple of kilos above a street dealer in the dope game. That’s my read, anyway—because in the busts I’ve seen and the gangs I’ve staked out, the guys that have all those fancy cars and gold jewelry and caviar dinners aren’t the guys at the top.” I winked at DJ. “No, I think Mister-Mercedes-and-Italian-Loafers here”—I kicked the bottom of his shoe “—he knows he isn’t important. That’s why he’s gotta try so damned hard to make others think he is.”

  I stepped back and looked him over again. Summing up my thoughts, I concluded with an air of finality, “You handle logistics. You’re a delivery man—UPS for meth wholesalers in Haiti, Cuba, the BVI—all across the Northern Caribbean. Your link in the chain moves the drugs in small amounts from here to your distribution partners over in San Juan, and you charge bottom dollar to do it.”

  “Kinda sad when you put it that way,” DJ chimed in, smirking.

  “You aren’t wrong there, partner,” I said. “Taking down this maggot was barely worth getting out of bed.”

  “I haven’t done any of the things you’re accusing me of,” Beck said, but the flop sweat on his forehead and his fluttering eyelids seemed to say otherwise.

  DJ laughed and Beck’s eyes sliced in his direction for a moment, then back to me.

  “Let’s see how long you hold out when the police arrive. With lies sounding that flimsy, Beck’s gonna have dinner at the jail on St. Croix,” I said to DJ.

  “This is getting sadder, man,” DJ responded, shaking his head.

  Beck didn’t flinch. I didn’t imagine he would. Not yet, anyway. Even the worst of them clutched their lies tight as a rosary while they pleaded silently for God to bring his mighty finger down and smush the law like gnats.

  When he realized that wasn’t going to happen, he’d crack—whether it was here, inside a jail cell, or in an interrogation ro
om with the macho DEA guys going chest-to-chest with him. Most of the people I’d apprehended over the years didn’t admit to anything until they had their freedom taken from them, even if it was just a temporary holding cell. Especially men like Beck, who couldn’t handle confinement, even for just a few days. They rolled over and cut a deal to save their own asses.

  “You don’t want the police thinking you’ve lied to them. That’ll only piss them off. The best way to have this out is to tell me and DJ everything you’ve ever done.”

  Beck bristled at the idea. He was too proud to take the lifeline I threw.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to talk to us?” I asked.

  “What is there to talk about? I haven’t done a thing.”

  “Hey, Dep?” DJ jerked his head to his left. His long goatee, stiff with sea-salt, moved with his head. He wanted a chat with me, and I already knew what about.

  On the boat ride over, DJ had voiced some dissent about my arrest strategy. I waved him off, assuring him everything would go smoothly, so long as we appeared united. I hoped he’d listen to me, and forget whatever idea percolated in his head.

  Now wasn’t a great time for a debate.

  My partner had no law-enforcement experience, and it showed. You didn’t hash things out when you were the only two guys in the room with a dope smuggler. You detained the perp first and talked out a change in strategy after.

  In private.

  DJ cleared his throat again. He wouldn’t let it go. He never let anything go. If I brushed him off now, I’d pay for it later.

  I pointed at Beck. “You can stay still for me, can’t you Mr. Beck?”

  He didn’t move, just glared. He was as petulant as a third grader.

  “There you go,” I said with a big smile. “Just like that.”

  I stepped three paces sideways, away from his desk. Close enough that if he were armed, my long legs could eliminate the gap and get the gun away from him before he fired. Far enough that he couldn’t hear me and DJ whispering.