Dead Fast

by A. J. Stewart

  I smiled and hung up the call, and looked once more to the mountains behind me, green turning to black in the shadow of the clouds. Perhaps Ron was right. Perhaps I could get Markus away from his problems, away from a fate like that of his father. The question was, could he really run as fast as he needed to?

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE MEN AT the athletics track were gathered under their canvas pop-up shade, but unlike the previous morning it was actually earning its keep. We met Markus at the school gate and walked with him to the track, where he was warming up with his teammates. I watched the men under the shade, assessing the boys like thoroughbreds, and I couldn’t help but think of what Mrs. Swan had told us about her husband, being pushed to throw cricket matches.

  The boys did some laps around the long grass, their coaches barking in the patois that I couldn’t decipher. When they came to line up again to run some sprints, the men in the shade stood, the timekeeper with the stopwatch took his place and Danielle grabbed my phone and flicked it on to video the run. I stood by the guy keeping time, using my watch to keep time of my own. Markus was jogging up and down on his toes, sending small plumes of dust into the air.

  The head coach wandered down to the finish line with his air horn, called the boys to be ready and held the canister in the air. Markus bent down, looking like he was in motion just by the way he held himself, and waited for the blast. The coach pressed his button, and the sound of a foghorn pierced the afternoon sunshine. All eyes were on the boys, a mishmash of colored singlets and dark flailing limbs. Markus started as he had the last time, slow out of the blocks, but by the time he was fully upright he was a quarter way done and level with the fastest starter. By three-quarter length he had the thing won. He hit the line in a blur, and I punched my stopwatch and looked at it, and then looked up at the other timing guy, who was looking at me.

  “Ten thirty-five?” I said.

  The other guy smiled wide and glanced at his own watch. “Yah, mon,” he said, nodding and turning to the men under the shade. I looked at Danielle.

  “You get that?” I said.

  She nodded. “Yep. He’s quick.”

  “Dead fast,” I said, taking my phone and looking up a number. Danielle turned her attention to Markus, who was laughing with some friends. I saw him look our way, and Danielle nodded. Markus grinned and nodded back.

  I placed my call and wandered away from the fence, looking around as I watched for any appearance of Cornelius Winston.

  “University of Miami Athletic Department,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Aaron Katz’s office, please.” I waited as the call was transferred, and I repeated my request to Katz’s assistant.

  “May I ask who is calling?”

  “Tell him it’s Miami Jones.”

  Again I waited, and the airhorn blew again and startled me. I turned to see another group of boys charging down the dry running track.

  “Jones?”

  “Hey, Aaron,” I said, distractedly, watching the race finish. From the look of the timekeeper, it wasn’t anything special.

  “Sorry, Aaron. How are things?”

  “Busy, as always. What can I do you for?”

  “Do you guys do athletic scholarships?”

  Katz laughed. “You been drinking? What do you think paid your way through college?”

  “No, I don’t mean football. I mean athletics, as in track. Running, specifically.”

  “Sure we do. Why, your beach runs improving?”

  “They are as it happens, smart guy. But no, I’m talking about a kid. In Jamaica.”

  “Okay. Sure, we’ve had a few study here. They produce more than their share of fast runners.”

  “They do. I’m in Jamaica now, and I’ve met a kid who is quick. Seriously quick from what I can tell.”

  “How quick is quick?”

  “Couple minutes ago he ran a hundred in ten thirty-five, on a dirt and grass track with no spikes.”

  “Decent. Our scholarship consideration standard is ten fifty.”

  “I’ve got video. You want to see it?”

  “Sure, send it through. I make no promises, but I’ll share it with the track coach and see what he says.”

  “It’s coming your way.”

  “Right on. I gotta another call. I’ll catch you.”

  I hung up the call, and Danielle came over and helped me fire the video off in an email to Katz. Markus didn’t run again, and the coach sent him and couple other boys to practice their starts. Danielle and I leaned on the wire fence and watched. A practice session of cricket started up in the middle of the field. The bats were familiar, the game not so much. One big guy wandered away from the middle with a red ball in his hand, and then he turned and sprinted back. When he got about the length of the pitcher’s mound from home plate he swung his arm high over his head and flung the ball at the batter, who was wearing some kind of padding on his legs, but no helmet. The ball bounced halfway to the batter, cutting viciously up at the batter’s face, where he simply rocked back and hit the ball to the side, perpendicular to the stretch of hard-packed dirt between the batter and the pitcher. It was like smashing a foul ball on purpose, except that it seemed to be totally within the rules, as he took off running toward the pitcher.

  “You like cricket?”

  I turned to see Garfield, Markus’s cousin, join us against the fence.

  “That guy just pitched one that bounced at the batter’s head.”

  “He no pitcha, he da bowler.”

  “Bowler, whatever. You guys don’t wear helmets?”

  “Only for da fast bowling.”

  It looked plenty quick to me, so I turned from the imminent bloodshed to Garfield. “You play, Garfield?”

  “Sure, I play.”

  “That’s right, you said you were named after a cricket player.”

  “No a cricketer, de cricketer. De best ever, Suh Garfield Sobers.”

  “He was good?”

  Garfield made a pfft sound that suggested my question was redundant. We heard another crack off the bat, and a fielder ran away, chasing the ball along the grass.

  “Do you know what happened to Markus’s dad?” I said, not bothering with a time-wasting segue.

  Garfield frowned and shuffled his feet.

  “You best talk to Mama Swan ‘bout dot.”

  “I did. She told me. I want to know if you know.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “So that’s why he’s not with Winston.”

  “Dot’s why, yes, suh.”

  “What do you think she would say if there was a chance he could get into a US college, fully paid for?”

  “I tink she’d give you her arms to get Markus outta dis,” he said, looking around at the patchy grass field.

  “What about you?” said Danielle.

  “Me?” Garfield smiled, ruefully. “I don get into no trouble, an’ I no atlete, so nobody cause me no problem. I do my work, I live in paradise, mon.” He nodded. “You tink he can get into university?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m making some inquiries. But there’s one other thing. I need to know who the guys were, the ones that attacked Markus?”

  “You saw dem.”

  “We did, but two guys and a girl isn’t a very helpful description. I think he knows exactly who they were.”

  “Dare was a girl?”

  “Yeah, a mean piece of work. She had tattoos on her chest.”

  “What tattoos?”

  “Stars, I guess, maybe five or six, right here.” I pointed to my chest, just below my Adam’s apple.

  Garfield nodded, and glanced toward the field.

  “Dis won hurt Markus?”

  “No, Garfield. It will help him. And anyone else who is getting hurt by these thugs.”

  “Oh, dey no tugs, Mista Miami. Dey Rastas who lost dare way. Dey do work fo’ Mr. Winston all right, on da side.”

  “On the side of what?” said Danielle.


  “Mostly dey just grow ganja.”

  “They grow marijuana?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How much?”

  “A bit.”

  “Where?”

  Garfield turned his gaze to the mountains behind us, thick with foliage, tall and dripping with moisture from the daily gathering of white clouds.

  “We need names, Garfield,” I said.

  He looked at me and lost his genial face, like the skin had tightened on his bones.

  “I give you names, suh. But dis come back to hurt my cousin, you can no get off dis island fast enough. You got dot?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE NEXT MORNING we escorted Markus to school. He seemed to be getting used to our company, and although it wasn’t necessarily the beginning of a beautiful friendship, it wasn’t openly hostile either, and that I could live with. We left him at the gate and wandered back into town to visit the garage where we had bought the motorcycle. The guy who owned the shop smiled wide and handed us the same helmets, which I hoped were not damaged from our previous accident. The bike sat in the corner of the workshop, a little scratched but otherwise showing no ill effects from landing in the channel.

  “She’ll run okay?”

  “Yah, mon. You jus’ keep on da road dis time, okay?” He laughed at his own hilarity, gave us a wave and returned to his work. I started the bike and Danielle got on behind.

  “You okay with this?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Say, didn’t you have a motorcycle at home at one point? What happened to it?”

  “It’s like this one. It prefers the company at the workshop.”

  “Well, there aren’t so many grassy landing spots on I-95. I think you should get rid of it.”

  “I think it got rid of me, but I couldn’t agree more.”

  We puttered our way back to the resort, where we went for a swim and then had coffee by the pool. It was another monotonously glorious morning. Our server recommended the ackee and salt fish, but I declined and stuck with coffee. We were biding time. We knew that Markus’s benefactor in the US, Desmond Richmond, was coming in tonight from Lauderdale, and at that point our engagement with Markus would officially be over. I felt uneasy about that for reasons I couldn’t pin down, other than there being a lot of loose ends left hanging. I got the sense Danielle felt the same, from the way she kept shifting in her seat, like she just couldn’t get comfortable.

  We took a walk along the beach, and came upon a woman selling wood carvings off a blue plastic tarp. She gave us a beaming smile and welcome, and we chatted with her for a while about the knickknacks she was selling. I’m not much one for souvenirs, useless garbage that people would never buy at home but feel compelled to purchase on vacation, so they can take it home and fill up their garages with anything other than their car. But the woman was warm and friendly and not in the slightest bit pushy, and Danielle took a liking to a wood carving of a green bird with a long thin tail twice the length of its body. It looked like a hummingbird with streamers coming out its backside, and the woman told us it was called the Doctor Bird, and it was Jamaica’s national bird. I jogged back to our room to grab my wallet, and then back to pay the woman. She sent us on our way with another smile and a wave. We wandered back along the beach, biding time.

  “You know we haven’t been for a run since we got here,” she said.

  “It was a run that got us here, remember.”

  “Not my fault. You lost the bet.”

  “I did. But I should also point out, we have been in two fights, so it’s not like we’ve done no exercise.”

  “That’s true,” she said, looking away across the azure water. “You want to get some lunch?”

  It seemed that eating was the major event at the resort, and we were being sucked into it. We dropped the Doctor Bird in our room before heading down to the buffet lunch. As Danielle set the bird in her suitcase I glanced at my phone. There was a message on it, so I picked it up. It was Corporal Lucia Tellis, calling to tell me that she had looked into the names I had gotten from Garfield, and she had tracked them down to a location on the outskirts of MoBay. She added that they were known to have a decent marijuana plantation up the hill, and that she’d call back when she had more news.

  Apparently it was IHOP day at the lunch buffet, because lunch consisted of pancakes, sausages and burgers. I took a rum and coke and a plate of fries and played with my food as we took in the view. Danielle got a Bloody Mary, which was food as far she was concerned. We sat in silence again for a while. It wasn’t just Markus on my mind. I looked over at Danielle, using her celery like a hockey stick on the ice in her drink. We had come to Jamaica on the back of a bet, but we both knew there was more to it than that. We had dated for a few years now, but only recently had she moved into my house, after she had been shot by a drug dealer. Although the injuries weren’t life-threatening they hurt deep, and brought up thoughts about mortality and the future in the both of us. At the time the silence between us had grown uncomfortable, and I had resolved to communicate better. For a while I had. Now the silence was back, and it wasn’t just walking away from Markus that was echoing in the void.

  “You okay?” I asked. It wasn’t the greatest icebreaker, but I never claimed to be Shakespeare.

  Danielle shrugged. “Yeah, you?”

  “You don’t look like you’re enjoying your vacation.”

  She looked me in the eyes. “Are you?”

  “I’m happy to be here with you,” I said.

  “That’s not an answer,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure how the tables had turned, but now she was asking the questions. “I’m worried about what happens to Markus when Richmond arrives and the job is done.”

  Danielle dropped the celery into her drink. “Me too. What do you normally do if a job ends but the case isn’t resolved?”

  “You know what I do.”

  “You stick your nose in where it isn’t wanted anymore.”

  “I do. But I’m not so sure that’s what you want me to do.”

  She frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  “The law of unintended consequences.”

  Danielle nodded, leaned forward and reached for my hands. I gave them to her and felt her soft grip.

  “I told you, MJ, I trust you. I know you don’t always take the conventional route, and although I’d rather not think about it, probably not the legal route at times. But I also know you’ll do what you think is right. And despite what many people think, I know your moral compass points in the right direction.” She took a deep breath and looked away at the line of people waiting patiently for recently frozen patties on a bun. I got the sense that Danielle had more to say, so I held my tongue. She turned back to me and gave me the half smile that always sent an irregular rhythm through my heart.

  “MJ, life is the law of unintended consequences. When I left Eric, I didn’t expect to wind up on a case that would lead me to you, and I sure didn’t expect to lose my heart to a scruffy beach bum. I didn’t expect to get shot, and I didn’t expect that to lead to us living together. It’s all unintended. It’s not about avoiding the unexpected—it’s about how you react to the events that life throws at you.”

  I smiled. “How did I get so lucky?”

  Danielle let my hands go and leaned back in her chair. “Don’t get too comfortable, buddy.” She smiled, this time the whole way.

  “So you’re not bored?”

  “With you?” she asked.

  “No—here, on vacation. Why, are you bored with me?”

  “You, no. Here, out of my mind.”

  “You wanted to come here,” I said. “You won the bet, remember.”

  “I wanted to come to Jamaica, yes. But this?” She glanced around the room. I did the same. It was filled with people who clearly worked hard, saved up their precious money and their even more precious vacation time, and took a week to step out of their lives to live as the other half lived. I couldn’t b
lame them. Life could be a grind if you let it get you down. But I discovered that a long time ago. It was why I had never returned to the Northeast. In Florida I had found what I was looking for. Not utopia, not by a long stretch. There was corruption, murder and mayhem as much in South Florida as anywhere. Maybe more. But there was also brightness, the sun washing care from my back, watching people fly into Palm Beach International to get a week of what I got every day. I worked hard, I played hard enough and I was surrounded by the best people I’d ever met in the world. I suddenly wondered why I had even left, and I looked back to Danielle.

  “I don’t need a break from my life, MJ,” said Danielle. “I just need to live it.”

  “Maybe next time we should go skiing in Tahoe. Mix it up.”

  Danielle shrugged. “I’ve never skied.”

  “All the more reason. But that doesn’t do us much good now. We’re in Jamaica. And we’re not doing her justice.”

  “In any way, shape or form. So what do you think?”

  “I think we should do what we do best. Stick our noses in where they are no longer welcome.”

  “So, what shall we do until we pick up Markus?” she said, chomping on celery.

  “Well, Lucia said she’d get back to us, so I guess we wait until she finds something. Otherwise, I don’t know. Another swim?”

  Danielle looked at me with a face that reminded me of a black panther I saw as a kid in Connecticut. We went on a school field trip to an awful zoo, and I remembered standing in front of the hurricane wire cage that looked like it was the playground of an elementary school in a bad area, more than any attempt at a wildlife environment. The panther just walked from one side of the cage to another, back and forth, like a prisoner of war who had been in solitary way too long. The big cat gave a constant guttural growl, as if its confinement were slowly, inevitably, driving it insane. That was what Danielle looked like now.

  “Ron suggested we try the US consulate. Maybe we should visit.”

  Danielle dropped the celery back in her glass and smiled.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Seventeen