“Everything cool, mon. Mr. Whitehall come back yesterday. Not go nowhere since,” said Otee.
“What about Ali and Alan? Everything OK?”
Otee nodded.
“Dey all dem sleeping now. Got four fresh guards just arrived for a new shift.”
Otee was eyeing Boggy with a wariness that I hadn’t seen in him before. I introduced them.
“Otee’s the one I told you about, the one who put the salt and tobacco seeds on the cottage porch to keep the duppies away,” I said.
Boggy gave him a nod. Otee gave him one back, but he edged away, keeping a distance.
Boggy said, “I am sure it has worked well, the salt and the tobacco. It is powerful medicine to frighten away the spirits.” He turned to me. “Zachary, have you seen the duppy of your friend, Mr. Monk DeVane?”
I was already feeling pretty punchy from the day I’d put in, so Boggy’s question only added to my sense of disconnectedness. Last thing I needed was to stand there and listen to ghost stories. Still, over the years I have learned to put a lid on my skepticism and respect Boggy’s Tainocentric view of the cosmos, a view in which the spirits seem always close at hand.
“Nope, no duppies,” I said. “My life has been amazingly duppy-free.”
Boggy looked at Otee.
“If you do not mind, please come back with us to the cottage.”
“What you want, mon?” said Otee.
“I will show you when we get there,” said Boggy. “Also, a container for the salt and the tobacco seeds. Do you have something special that you keep such things in?”
“Yah, mon. I got my special pouches,” said Otee, patting a pants pocket. “Keep dem with me always.”
“Good,” said Boggy. “Let us go. Now.”
57
“You want me to do what, mon?”
“Please, remove the salt and the tobacco seeds from around the cottage,” said Boggy.
We were standing on the cottage porch. I was dead on my feet. And I was pretty much in Otee’s camp on this one. If Boggy wanted that stuff gone, he oughta just get rid of it himself.
Otee said, “Why you want me do that?”
Boggy took a moment to answer, as if he were picking the right words.
“You and me, we have different ways with the spirits. In Hispaniola, where I come from, we seek answers from the dead, we do not wish to drive them away.”
“So you invite duppy to come visit you?”
Boggy nodded.
“If they wish, yes,” he said.
“Dat foolishness, mon. Duppy nothin’ but trouble.”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But I need you to take away the salt and the tobacco.”
Otee bristled, jabbed a finger at Boggy.
“Cho, mon, why you not just sweep it away yourself? I look like ya house niggah?”
But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than Otee jumped back and slammed against the porch railing, almost as if Boggy had shoved him. His eyes went wide, his mouth dropped. I don’t know if it was possible for Otee to ever truly look scared, but this was close to it.
When Boggy spoke, he spoke softly.
“You have your medicine, I have my mine,” he said. “For my medicine to do its work you must remove yours. That is the way.”
Otee looked at me and said: “You got broom in da cottage?”
I found a broom in the kitchen closet and brought it to him. Otee started in with a vengeance on the salt and tobacco seeds, sweeping it across the porch and toward some bushes, but Boggy reached out and stopped him.
“No, no, not like that. Go slow. Think about why you placed it here, how it did its job, and why now you are taking it away,” he said. “You must carefully sweep each into a pile and put it in your pouch and remove it from here.”
Otee did as he was told. Boggy stepped solemnly aside, watching silently as Otee began to sweep with deliberate purpose, and the whole process, which had seemed at first little more than housecleaning, began to take on the air of ritual.
A few minutes later the salt sat in one pile, the tobacco seeds in another. Otee swept each pile into a dustpan then dumped them carefully into separate leather pouches, making sure not to leave so much as a single particle behind on the porch. He pulled the drawstrings tight on the pouches and held them up for Boggy to see.
“Where I take this now?” Otee said.
“Salt to sea, seed to field,” said Boggy.
“OK den, I do dat.”
Boggy offered a slight bow, then turned and stepped inside the cottage.
“Look,” I told Otee, “I apologize for Boggy. He gets a little carried away sometimes.”
“S’alright, mon. Him know what him know. Him throw da heat on me.”
“He did what?”
“You saw it wit your own eyes. Him throw da heat on me. Dat’s why I jump back from him like dat.”
“What do you mean he threw heat?”
“I mean it shot outta him, mon, like a bolt. Something smack me right here.” He rubbed his chest. “Him got heat and him know how to throw it. Him a man you not cross.”
Boggy returned to the porch carrying a cloth sack. He reached into the sack and pulled out a mat of woven palmetto, rolled it out on the deck, and sat down on it. He pulled other things from the bag and placed them in front of him on the mat: a stone mortar and pestle; a small tray, carved from burnished hardwood, with the head of a dog and the tail of an alligator; a six-inch-long piece of bone, hollow and skinnier than a soda straw; and a half dozen small pouches of his own. The pouches were woven from bright threads, like the kind you see in Mexican blankets, and adorned with feathers and beads.
Boggy opened the pouches. He took a pinch of something from each of them—seeds, dried leaves, pieces of bark—put it in the mortar, and ground it until it became a fine powder. Then he put the powder on the small wooden tray.
“What you call dat?” asked Otee.
“It is the cohoba,” said Boggy.
“It a sacrament, like ganja?”
“Yes, like that.”
“Dat what make the duppy come?”
Boggy nodded. He picked up the hollow piece of bone and held it between the palms of his hands, rolling it back and forth. He closed his eyes and his lips began to move, but we could not make out the words.
I turned to Otee.
“I’ve seen him do this before. He’s been getting ready all day, purging his body, cleansing himself,” I said. “This is when he likes to be left alone.”
Otee looked around. The night seemed to have grown darker, the air still. It was quiet as quiet could be.
“Yah, I tink now a good time to go, mon,” said Otee.
He backed off the porch and hurried away.
Boggy stopped rolling the piece of bone, his eyes still shut, his lips still moving. I headed across the porch to the cottage door, turning just before I stepped inside to see him hold one end of the bone to his nose and bend down toward the powder on the small wooden tray.
58
I couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour when the gunfire erupted—a volley of shots shattering the night. It came from somewhere near the resort entrance.
By the time I threw on clothes and rushed onto the porch, the shooting had stopped. Boggy sat on the mat, hands folded in his lap, eyes closed. If the gunshots hadn’t roused him, then no good me trying.
I raced down a path to the main guardhouse. A commotion was coming from the other side of the wall, out by the highway. The gates were open, and I ran past them to see half a dozen guards standing in a circle about a hundred yards away, between the resort wall and the road.
When I reached them I saw the two men on the ground. One wasn’t moving. The other was moaning, a leg covered in blood.
Glenroy Wilkes, the chief security guard, knelt beside them, attending to the wound in the man’s leg. The man screamed, beating his fists on the damp grass.
“Gonna be alright,” Wilkes said, trying to ca
lm the man down. “We get you to the hospital.”
A Libido van rumbled up alongside us. Wilkes and the guards loaded the two men into the van and it sped away, in the direction of Mo Bay.
I hung back as Wilkes spent a few minutes speaking with the other guards. When he was done, he came over to talk to me.
“Bucket of bad fish this is, mon,” he said. “That one, he’ll be alright. But that other one, he ain’t gonna make it. He got a wife and two daughtas. This no good at all.”
“What happened?”
“The two of them, they were walking the perimeter, and they were back there by the entrance, when they saw this fella with a paint can, writing on the wall, way down this end. They hollered at him, but he keep at it, so they start out after him and just when they get close, the fella he take off running across the road to a truck parked right over there behind the trees.” Wilkes pointed to a stand of cedars on the other side of the road. “Then this other fella raise up out the back of the truck and start shooting.”
“So he was sitting there waiting for them?”
“Yeah, mon, dey ambush ’em. Tomkins—he the one got it in the leg—he fell right off. But Tully, he the other one, he got off some shots until they got him, too. Then the truck, it took off.”
“Anyone get a good look at the truck?”
“Other guards, they come out, saw it, too, said it was a gray truck. No more than that.”
“The other day, on the way back from Benton Town, when they tried to grab Alan, the guy who drove off, he was in a gray truck. A Toyota.”
“Yah, I know,” Wilkes said. “Probably only about five thousand gray trucks on this island. Gonna make it real easy to find.”
“If it was the same guy.”
“That, too,” said Wilkes.
“You check out the other side of the road yet, where the truck was parked?”
Wilkes shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said. “Let’s go see.”
We crossed the road and padded around in the tamped-down grass. Other than tire tracks and a scattering of gravel where the truck had spun out onto the road, there wasn’t anything to see. Then Wilkes spotted something a few yards into the bushes and went after it. He came up holding a rifle. It was just like the one Otee had used when we’d been waylaid on the road from Benton Town.
“Now ain’t this something. AR-15. Same as the ones got stolen from the main guardhouse a while back.” He held it close, trying to get a better look at it. “Can’t tell if the serial numbers been ground down. Get it inside and check it under the light.”
“It a pretty common rifle?”
“Yeah, they all around,” said Wilkes. “But it’s a whole lot of rifle to leave on the side of the road.”
“Unless they didn’t want to get caught with it.”
“Even then,” Wilkes said. “It’s like throwing away money. Whole lot of money.”
We headed back across the road to the resort grounds, and it was then I saw what had been written on the wall. The graffiti from a few days earlier had been painted over, but this new one was still fresh and wet and shiny.
“NPU say no to dirty money!” it read.
59
I sometimes read stories about guys, very disciplined, hard-ass guys, who go to bed, tell themselves that they will wake up at 5:14 A.M. or something and then at precisely that time their eyes pop open and they leap out of bed, ready to get on with their hard-ass days. After going with Wilkes to the guardhouse—the serial number on the AR-15 indeed matched one of those that had been stolen—I made my way back to the cottage. I checked on Boggy—he was still off in cohobaland—and crawled between the sheets. I set my interior clock for a 7 A.M. Zack-to-Zack wake-up call and called it a night.
I dreamed about Barbara. Details aren’t important, but it was a very fulfilling dream. Do guys who are married ever dream about making love with their wives? And at what point exactly does the woman of your dreams stop being, quite literally, the woman of your dreams? Questions that make a grown man require lots of sleep.
Anyway, somewhere around 9 A.M. my brain gave me a nudge and said: “Yo, Zack buddy, I think maybe it’s time you dragged your ass out of bed.”
A front had moved in, and it was raining, a steady drizzle that gave no sign of letting up. I went out on the porch. No Boggy. All his things were tied up in a bundle by the door. Who knew what he was up to. Whatever, I wasn’t worried about him.
It was one of those days that, under different circumstances, I would happily spend in a comfortable chair just watching the rain come down, a day perfectly suited for putting off the inevitable; the inevitable in this case being a little show-and-tell session with Darcy Whitehall. I needed to show up at his house and make him tell me what was going on.
I pulled some clothes out of my bag and put them on. The pants were a little snug, so I found another pair and put them on. No better. Maybe I’d just gotten used to wearing Monk’s too-big clothes. Yeah, that was it. I couldn’t possibly be putting on weight.
I looked at my profile in the bathroom mirror. OK, so maybe I was getting a little thick. But nothing some daily crunches and a little jogging couldn’t fix. Soon as this current mess got straightened out, I’d work on it. Immediate solution—undo the button on my pants and wear my shirt out. State of denial for the expanding man.
I tried getting through to Barbara, landed in her voice mail, and left a stupid rambling message that got cut off before I finished. I hung up, and as soon as I did I heard a phone start to ring. It was coming from my duffel bag. And then I remembered—the cell phone that Lanny Cumbaa had given me. I got it on the fifth ring.
“Yo, Zack, I was afraid you were blowing me off,” said Cumbaa. “Let’s do lunch. Only none of that sushi shit.”
It was Lanny Cumbaa, calling as promised. Or warned.
“I need to take care of some things,” I said.
“Like what kind of things?”
“We had a shooting here last night. I need to get a handle on that. Two of the guards were injured, one of them pretty bad.”
“Yeah, so bad that he’s dead,” said Cumbaa. “It’s all over the TV and the radio. You got a shitstorm brewing is what you got. We need to talk.”
“Right now, I’m on my way to see Darcy Whitehall.”
“About what?”
“About the shitstorm.”
“Well, you talk to him and then you talk to me,” said Cumbaa. “Because listen, Zack, I got a proposition for you.”
“Gee, too bad you can’t see my face right now.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I don’t look the least bit surprised.”
“You’re a real smart-ass, Chasteen.”
“You bring out the best in me.”
“Yeah, I’m good like that. I got people skills. I got much better people skills, say, than the IRS does. I know how to work toward a mutually beneficial resolution, know what I mean? The IRS, all it knows how to do is take people’s money. Or throw them in jail. Or both. You shouldn’t lose sight of that.”
“Don’t worry, I have excellent vision. Where do you want to meet?”
“You know the Bird’s Nest?”
The same place where Ali Whitehall had seen Monk meeting with Jay Skingle, the day she’d followed him.
“Yeah, I know it.”
“Be there at noon,” Cumbaa said.
60
Alan Whitehall met me in the foyer of his father’s house. “It’s not a good time now,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“We’re having a family meeting.”
Behind him I could see Darcy and Ali in the living room. Ali sat in a chair, Darcy on the ottoman beside it. He held both her hands in his. She was crying.
“This a good thing?” I said.
Alan nodded.
“Yeah, I think so. Long overdue. A lot getting said that needs to be said. Especially between the two of them.”
“OK, then, I’ll come bac
k,” I said. “Is Otee around here?”
“No, he left maybe an hour ago with your friend.”
“With Boggy?”
“Yes, short fellow with long black hair, looks Indian. He came by here this morning and introduced himself,” said Alan. “What’s his story?”
“A long one,” I said. “Another time.”
“Anyway, he said he needed to see Otee. Then the two of them headed off together.”
“They say where?”
“No, but I figured it must have something to do with what happened last night.”
“What’s your take on last night?”
Alan shook his head.
“Can’t make sense out of something like that. TV’s already calling it a revenge shooting, so that’s how it’s going to play no matter what,” he said.
“You see what they spray-painted on the wall out front, about dirty money?”
Alan nodded. “Had a shot of it on television,” he said.
“What’s that all about?”
“No idea,” he said. “No idea at all.”
“You sure about that?”
He looked hard at me, held my gaze.
“Yes, quite sure.”
“Then maybe it’s something you need to take up at your family meeting.”
Alan shot a look to the living room. Ali had gotten up from her chair and was standing by the sliding glass doors, looking across the porch to the water. The day was gray and the sea was, too. Darcy stood to join her, draping an arm around her shoulder, giving her a hug.
Alan eyed me guardedly.
“Exactly what are you saying?” he asked me.
“I’m saying maybe you need to ask your father if he knows anything about dirty money.”
Alan looked away. He didn’t say anything.
“You’re not a stupid guy,” I said. “You’ve heard things.”
I gave it a moment. Alan nodded his head slowly.
“Yeah, I’ve heard things,” he said.
He still wouldn’t look at me.
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