She walked over to the display and thought about how much her brother would have loved the intricate model.
“Hey bro, look at this!” she whispered as she admired the three foot tall replica of one of French Admiral de Grasse’s ships at the Battle of the Saintes. When she and Mikey first started sailing, their father had introduced them to the Hornblower books, then O’Brian, then Bernard Cornwall. Mikey had read them all, while she had soon tired of the exploits of the all male cast. But her brother would have loved this place.
“Awesome, eh?” she said in a low voice. From a placard in front of a huge model of the battle with dozens of tiny ships on a painted blue sea, she read about the French defeat. They didn’t have any large models of Admiral Rodney’s ships there in spite of the fact it had been his victory.
There it was again. That feeling, like someone was breathing on the back of her neck, watching her. She whirled around and saw a flash of red as the man ducked out of the doorway that led to the costume room. Okay, she thought. Enough. Time to have a little talk with Mr. Ponytail.
The exhibition hall was the old fort’s former barracks. Essentially a long barn-like structure with walls dividing the space into different rooms, it had doors in the center of each wall that formed a corridor down the center of the structure. Riley crept forward on the wood floor so as not to make a sound. As she moved, her view into the next room panned across half the space, but she saw no sign of Ponytail. She imagined he was hiding farther from the door, outside her line of vision, but off to her left.
“Hey,” she said in her loudest “giving orders” voice. “You want to talk to me? Here I am. Let’s talk.”
When she stepped into the room facing her left, she realized she had guessed wrong when a mannequin crashed against her back, knocking her to the floor. She struggled in the folds of velvet fabric as the sound of Ponytail’s retreat pounded across the floor. By the time she got to her feet, he was entering the next room, with only a hundred feet between him and the museum’s entrance, going as fast as his Crocs would let him.
From MSG School at Quantico, to all the years at the different posts, Riley had trained to take down intruders in a secure building and to protect embassy employees. She didn’t make a conscious decision to go after the man; she simply reacted.
She was on her feet and running flat out within seconds. As the man entered the last room, a large woman with a sign at the top of a long stick entered the museum and behind her flowed a crowd of Japanese tourists. Half the group had already entered the building when Ponytail plowed into them, sending them scattering in and out of the museum. When he made the door, he glanced over his shoulder and his eyes widened. Riley was right behind him. The tourists had slowed him down enough and cleared an open passage for her. He made it only about a dozen steps outside the building when she hit him from behind, and the two of them went sprawling in the dirt.
Riley landed on top of the man’s back. His body broke her fall, but he outweighed her by at least thirty pounds, and she hadn’t even knocked the wind out of him. Ponytail managed to roll out from under her, scramble to his feet and take one step when she grabbed one of his shoes. She lifted and twisted it almost a hundred and eighty degrees, and he fell to the ground again with a cry.
Riley got to her knees still holding the shoe, but he squirmed his foot out of the plastic clog and rolled away again. She threw the shoe, aiming for his head, but it only bounced off his ear. He let out a grunt and grabbed at the side of his head. It slowed him again for a second or two, long enough for Riley to get back on her feet. Then she lunged for him and slid her fingers into his shorts back pocket. She was about to pull him down again, when he kicked back with the foot that was still wearing a clog. The fabric ripped free from his shorts when his blind kick connected with her bad shoulder.
Riley cried out at the explosion of pain and fell into the dirt.
Ponytail struggled to his feet, scooped up his other shoe, and took off running through the gate.
The blow had knocked Riley onto her side where she curled into a fetal position and squeezed her eyes shut to block out the throbbing agony.
“Mademoiselle?” The man standing over her was the museum guard. His belly hung so far over his belt that the belt disappeared — even when viewing it from the ground. “Mademoiselle?” He reached down and shook her shoulder hard. She hissed between clenched teeth, batted his hand away, and rolled up to a sitting position. Off in the distance she could already hear the two-toned pitch of the Gendarme’s siren.
The guard grabbed her by her upper arm and lifted her to her feet. One knee was skinned and bleeding and the once crisp white polo shirt she had put on that morning was covered with dirt and grass stains. The guard was explaining something about filing charges for disturbing the peace.
“The other man,” she asked him in French. “What happened to the other man?”
“Il a disparu,” he said.
Right, she thought. Disappeared. I can just see you running after him.
A crowd of people had formed a circle around them. The guard yelled at them to step back as he led her through the gate and toward the bridge over the moat. It was difficult to think through the pain. She looked down at her right arm and realized her hand remained fisted. With her good hand, she uncurled the fingers that still grasped the scrap of fabric that had once been Ponytail’s back pocket. She lifted the fabric and beneath it saw a scrap of folded paper. From outside the fort walls, Riley heard the siren stop and the sound of car doors slamming shut. She looked up and saw the light blue shirts and dark pants of two Gendarmes hurrying toward her. Looking back down at the paper in her hand, she unfolded it and saw a photo printed on regular white typing paper. The photo was of a gold coin, and it was the exact same gold coin Bob had been wearing around his neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Bourges des Saintes
March 26, 2008
5:20 p.m.
Spyder Brewster sat on the side of the hill thinking that the bitch was pretty dumb if she thought she could kick his ass. Hell, he’d been in more fights in bars and on boats than she’d had pairs of shoes. But all the while he’d sat hiding in the bushes along the side of the road outside the fort, waiting for the cops to cart her off to jail, he’d been thinking hard about what that dude had said in the bar the night before.
Keep an eye on her. Covertly. Report every morning and night to his cell number, and so this morning he had called him, but only after Pinky woke him up to tell him the chick’s sailboat was gone. They’d upped anchor and hauled ass out of the town anchorage in time to see a small white sail on the horizon. That was when he called the dude. Told the man she was headed for the islands called the Saintes. The man said to stick to her and they had. Though when they got here to the islands, they’d just watched for a while and then Pinky had stayed on the boat on account of his condition, and he don’t do too good out in the noontime sun.
That Bertram was a great old boat but she sucked fuel like a thirsty bitch, and they didn’t have the bucks to refuel her. It had been easy enough to steal the boat in St. John’s, Antigua. Him and Pinky had just gone in and chartered her for a day. They put half down, told the guy they’d give him the other half after they got back with fish. Said they wanted to give him an incentive. They caught a mahi and when the captain was leaning over the transom to gaff the fish, Spyder nailed him in the back of the head with the fish billy.
The mate was the captain’s seventeen-year-old kid, and he jumped in after they pushed the old man overboard. Saved them the trouble. Seeing as they were about ten miles offshore and the old man’s head was bleeding, Spyder figured there weren’t any witnesses left to worry about.
Him and Pinky found an anchorage off a place called Great Bird Island. They tore off the tuna tower and slapped some epoxy over the holes where all that tubing had been bolted to the bridge deck. They beached her, changed the color of the boot stripe and repainted the name: Fish n’ Chicks. He’d seen ano
ther boat with that name and thought is sounded pretty good.
Whilst he was sitting there remembering how cool it felt to have his own sportsfish, he almost missed the cop car. They didn’t have the siren going like they did on the way up. After they passed, he stood up and stuck his neck out as the little car slowed to make the last switchback. Yup, that was her in the back seat. The little cop car entered the main drag along the beach and speeded up in the straightaway. Spyder stretched, brushed the dirt off his shorts and felt where the pocket had been ripped off.
“Bitch,” he said. “I liked these fuckin’ shorts.”
After they had repainted and renamed the boat, they’d explored all the lockers, and he’d found that he was almost the same size as the kid who’d jumped overboard. He’d been wearing the kid’s clothes, even his shoes, ever since.
He stepped onto the road and started down the last hill. He limped because his knee hurt where she’d twisted his leg, and he felt a blister forming on the big toe. He’d been able to grab his shoes before he ran out of the fort, but his bare feet in the kid’s Crocs didn’t do so good at running.
She’d anchored her sailboat around noon and gone ashore in her dinghy right away, and that was the first time him and his brother had got a look at this chick they’d been sent to follow. He was surprised to find she was a hottie, and he wondered why in hell a woman who looked like that couldn’t find a man to sail with her. He wouldn’t mind getting a little piece of that, and he hoped it would come to that before this business was over.
Shit. He was sweating like a stuck pig and people was starting to look at him funny as he passed the fancy restaurants and tourist shops. He stopped to look at his reflection in a shop window. His shirt was covered with dirt. He slowed his pace and started pulling the tank top away from his sweat-slick chest, fanning it like to try to let some air in there. The damn shirt was already soaked through. His feet were sliding around on the soles of the plastic shoes and every once in a while the raw skin on the top of his toe would make contact with something hard.
Okay, bitch, this ain’t funny no more. Spyder stopped in the shade of a bright blue awning with French words on it. He looked both ways on the street and he didn’t see anyone who resembled the woman. Maybe they really were gonna put her in jail. Just for fightin’? He doubted it. She looked like money anyway. People like that never went to jail. Leastwise, he’d never seen any when he was on the inside.
He never done this kind of work before. Covert work. Back home in Buxton, he’d done just about every job a man of his many talents could do from fishing, shrimping, running dope or working in town at stuff like construction or selling shit to tourists on the streets. But this kind of detective thing was a new one for him. He’d been having fun earlier up at the fort sneaking around watching the bitch, but now he was hot, tired and his feet hurt.
Well, shit, she got to come back to her boat sometime. Spyder turned and headed back to the dinghy dock.
Pinky was sitting in front of a laptop computer at the table in the Bertram’s main salon, headphones on his head, the generator running and the AC cranking the temperature down to sixty-five degrees. He looked up when Spyder slid the aft door open.
“So?” Pinky said sliding the big headphones down and hooking them around his neck.
Spyder stepped into the cabin and crossed the carpet concentrating so he wouldn’t limp. He turned his face away so his brother couldn’t see him mimic his whiny-ass voice saying the word “So?” like he was his old lady. “Bitch walked all over the fuckin’ fort. Didn’t meet with anybody or do nothing special. I got tired of playing tourist with her. What you doing?”
“Checking her out. I got on a local wi-fi network and checked the Coast Guard documentation database for her boat name. She’s Marguerite Riley, from Washington, DC. Found some stories about her and her family. Her old man’s some kind of big cheese with the government, like a ambassador or something, or leastwise, he was. Nothing recent on him.”
“I don’t give a fuck who she is. She’s nothin’.” Spyder walked over to the coffee table in front of the couch and stared at the little black and stainless gun sitting there. When they’d first searched the boat, they found the little Ruger 22 in the owner’s cabin along with a couple of magazines of ammo. He’d hid it in a towel drawer in the forward head so it would be easy to get at without being seen. “What you get that out for?”
“Just lookin’ at it.”
“You don’t know shit about guns.”
“Like you do?”
“More’n you, dumbass. Enough to know we don’t want anybody seeing we got a gun.” He lifted the gun up and pointed it out the back window of the yacht. He sighted down the barrel, imagining he was pointing it at the bitch on her sailboat. He made a soft “Pkew” noise and bounced his hand up in recoil from the imagined shot. The day would come when he would show her. With a curt nod, he bent down and scooped up the ammunition and returned it and the gun to the bottom of the towel drawer in the head. Then, he went into the kid’s cabin and grabbed some clean clothes before his brother had a chance to notice the torn shorts and dirty shirt.
“There’s something here, Spyder,” Pinky hollered so his brother could hear him down in the master cabin. “Something bigger’n just getting paid a few extra bucks to follow this chick. First, they pay us to go for the doc, a guy we know from back home is after some kind of treasure. They want some gold coin. Then they change and it’s this woman. There is something here, brother. This one might be the jackpot. We do not want to mess this one up.”
Spyder stepped back into the salon zipping up the new clean shorts. “What ch’you talking about. We ain’t gonna mess up nothing.”
Pinky stared at him without blinking, looking at the clean shorts and shirt. Spyder had to turn away. He didn’t want to look at that ugly face. His brother knew he could always win in a stare down. The little fucker looked like a tarpon his underbite was so bad and with all those pink patches on his brown skin and the clumps of frizzy white hair — sometimes Spyder just wanted to smash his fist into his brother’s face.
“I’m just saying,” Pinky continued, “that sometimes you don’t listen to me and when you go off and try to do things your way, it don’t always turn out so good. Like back in Oriental.”
“Fuck that shit, you little freak. You’re always making out like I’m the stupid one. Like I’m the fuck up. You just wish you was me, that you wasn’t some raggedy-ass, patchy-lookin’ nigger. You just lookin’ up that shit on that woman ‘cuz you seen her and you want to fuck her. Shit. You never touched a woman in your life, ‘cept maybe Crazy Matilda back home and she don’t count.” Spyder crossed to the galley, grabbed a beer and stole a quick glance at his brother to see if his words were having any effect. As usual, Pinky was ignoring him which pissed him off even more.
The little freak lived in his own world with that computer and his headphones. Spyder collapsed onto the couch. Fact was, he knew his brother was a whole lot smarter than him, but he’d never admit it out loud. Though they looked nothing alike, Spyder was barely a year older than his half-brother, and growing up with that crack-head they called Mama, they’d learned to depend on each other for survival.
Spyder chugged his beer and then squashed the can in his fist and threw it behind the settee. “I ain’t no dummy. I figure, why walk all over town? She’ll be back to her boat soon.” Spyder leaned forward and examined his blistered toes. He wasn’t about to tell his brother that the bitch had jumped him, and he’d had to bolt before she kicked his ass.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Îles des Saintes
March 26, 2008
6:25 p.m.
After more than an hour in a hot, airless room, the Gendarmes finally came in to talk to her. Turned out she was a “person of interest” thanks to the still-missing Bob. Seemed they’d decided Bob was the fellow she had been rolling in the dirt with. After repeating the same questions over and over hoping for different answers, they c
ut her loose with a fifty euro fine for disturbing the peace. She stomped her way through the streets of the quaint village headed toward the quay, muttering half sentences to her brother.
“French flics are even worse than in New Haven. Mikey, you know.”
When she’d enlisted, before heading off to boot camp at Parris Island, she’d spent a couple of weeks in New Haven talking to the cops about what really happened to Yale student Michael Riley. The way the local and campus police stonewalled her made her certain they helped cover up the whole thing due to prestigious old family names (some of which were on campus buildings). One piece of evidence had pointed toward another on-campus organization, but every time she tried to get someone to talk, her inquiries were blocked. Riley hadn’t had a high opinion of cops ever since.
Now, she was worried about her boat. When she’d left it around noon, thinking that she would be in view of the anchorage most of the day, she hadn’t bothered to lock it. She also had left no anchor light on, nor did she have a flashlight in her dinghy. It was late enough that several shops were closed, but the restaurants she passed were full of talking, laughing people, and their waterfront patios were strung with colored lights and vibrating with music. Along the main street, couples strolled arm in arm reading the menus posted in the front windows of all the restaurants. God, the food smelled good. She hadn’t even stopped for the lunch she’d dreamed of while sailing over here.
The sky was still a pale, whitish blue when she arrived at the waterfront, but the boats in the anchorage were mere dark silhouettes against the lighter sky. She searched the fleet for the familiar outline of her Bonefish, and she almost looked right past it because something wasn’t right. She looked back at the cutter rig with two roller furling headsails. She had been searching for an empty boat, but there was a dark shadow moving under the bimini in that cockpit. Someone was on her boat.
Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller Page 13