He found one on the next block. It was set back from the street and had a wide veranda where people were smoking and enjoying their drinks. From inside he could hear loud music. He went inside.
The place reminded him a little of Lana’s bar in Belize, where there was always a mix of local people and tourists of all different skin colors speaking all kinds of strange languages. Carlos loved all the colors as long as she was clean.
Inside, he passed through a crowd of young men and women all dressed the same. They had to be the crew of one of the big yachts out in the harbor. All of them wore the same starched blue short-sleeve shirts with white shorts and white socks that came up to their knees. The name of their boat was stitched over the breast pockets of their shirts along with what looked like little basketballs.
There was a long wooden bar with a mirror behind it along one wall, but it was packed with people. The rest of the room was taken up by small pine tables and chairs, all of them filled. Ceiling fans stirred the air above them, carrying away the cigarette smoke.
Through the open glass doors at the back of the room, Carlos saw another section of the bar that extended outside. It had a thatched chikee hut and a lot of tables around it. He went outside and found the last remaining stool by the chikee hut.
“You be make a Goombay Smash?” he asked.
“Mon, we invented the goddamn things,” said the old black bartender.
“I try one.”
It tasted as good as any that Lana had mixed for him. It tasted as good as anything he had ever drunk. He cupped his big hand around the glass. It felt just right, frosty cold and smelling like the citrus grove behind his shack in Dangria.
He ordered another one and drank it down as quickly as the first. Opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, he lit one and exhaled the smoke. As it spiraled up into the darkness, he wondered how Lana was doing back in Dangria. And that new girl at the air charter service with the melonlike breasts.
He could hear a small band tuning up for another set after their break. When he turned around to look at the musicians, a girl was there standing behind him. She was maybe twenty-five with skin the color of butterscotch and a nice tight body.
She smiled up at him and said, “My name is Timaria. You buy me a drink?”
She was wearing a peach-colored dress that was fastened around her narrow waist with a white silk sash. Her black hair was tied with a red ribbon and her hair smelled of soap.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, grinning down at her.
She ordered tequila and Carlos told the bartender to put it on his tab. She took one of the cigarettes from his pack and he lit it for her.
“Where you stayin’?” she asked with the Bahamian lilt of a local girl.
“On one of the boats out there,” he said, pointing to the harbor.
“Big boat?”
“Not so big,” he said, starting his third Goombay Smash. “We fish.”
After the fourth one, he knew he wasn’t speaking as clearly as usual. The words sort of ran together. He had been with far prettier girls. Her black eyes were a little too small and her face was too rounded, but she had a sweet smile and she was clean.
“I be celebrating,” he said.
“Celebrating what?”
“I save my friend today. . . . We diving.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said the girl, holding up her glass of tequila. “Here’s to . . . What’s his name?”
“She be Steef.”
“That’s a funny name for a girl.”
“She a guy . . . a great guy,” said Carlos.
The girl was looking at him as if she didn’t know whether to believe him. Carlos thought she might be lacking in the brains department. He found himself telling her about his life in Belize and then Steve.
“He sounds like quite a guy,” said the girl.
“Steef be a general,” said Carlos.
“A general?” she said. “Like in the army?”
“The air army,” said Carlos. “Steef a pilot.”
“I have to go to the loo,” she said, putting down her glass.
He lit another cigarette and thought of everything that had happened that afternoon. He had done good. The band began to play music he had never heard before, some kind of Caribbean hip-hop combined with calypso and reggae. He thought about dancing with the girl when she came back.
She didn’t come back. Through the open glass doors that led into the other part of the bar, he saw her sitting at one of the tables, talking to an older man with scars on both of his cheeks. He was nodding as she talked into his face. Then she stopped talking to the man, got up from the table, and walked back to the chikee hut.
“I live very close,” she said. “You want to come with me?”
Carlos checked his watch. It was almost two o’clock. Mike McGandy would be coming back to the boat soon to take over from Chris. He might see that the dinghy was missing. Somehow the girl didn’t look as clean as she had seemed when he first met her.
“I be go,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow night.”
He staggered a little when he got up from the bar stool, but held himself steady as he walked through the rest of the bar. The crew people in their blue-and-white sailor suits with the basketballs on them were gone. The place was almost empty.
He walked through the veranda doors and out into the dark, cool night. He headed up the street that led back to the dock. At one point, his left sneaker got caught in a cleft in the sidewalk and he stumbled and fell. Laughing, he got back on his feet again. He could see the wharf in the cone of the dock lights.
Something slammed into the back of his head. He was on his hands and knees and tasted blood between his teeth. Two men grabbed his arms and hauled him to his feet. He opened his mouth to call out for help and felt the side of his head explode. He fell from the light.
TWENTY-FIVE
29 May
Aboard Trader’s Bluff
Dunmore Town
North Eleuthera
Bahamas
“Well, we found the Prins Willem,” said Barnaby to Ira Dusenberry on the boat’s encrypted satellite phone, “and the Peking Man crate is no longer aboard. It may have been scattered across the seabed when the ship broke up after it was torpedoed. If so, it’ll require a major recovery effort and we will need the cooperation of the Bahamian government.”
“There are new complications,” said Dusenberry. “Apparently, the new prime minister shares certain offshore banking interests with one of the Mexican drug cartels. He may need to be spanked before we can deal with him on this.”
“I don’t care if you give him twenty lashes with a sjambok,” said Barnaby. “Just don’t leave us hanging here without support.”
“It’s not as simple as you think,” said Dusenberry. “There are important diplomatic issues involved.”
Dusenberry had just attended a meeting with the president in the Oval Office and had stayed behind for a few moments to savor the majesty of the setting when the call came through. It always gave him a rush to sit down in the throne chair. Glancing at the president’s schedule, he decided to take the risk.
“I’m not asking you to invade Iraq again, Ira,” said Barnaby calmly, “but you’ve put us at risk down here and one of our people is missing. We’re probably going to need assistance very soon.”
“All right . . . I’ll activate a covert ops team to be on standby at Homestead Air Force Base,” said Dusenberry, swiveling the chair around to enjoy the view of the Washington Monument. “They’ll be ready if you need them and can deploy in less than an hour. In the meantime, just try to hold the fort.”
“Do you save up all these clichés just for me?” asked Barnaby.
Dusenberry could hear the voice of the president’s secretary saying he was on his way back.
“Just suck it up, goddammit, an
d lie low for a day or two,” he growled before hanging up.
Barnaby passed the phone back to Chris Kimball and turned to the others in the dining salon.
“Well, you heard my end of it, said Barnaby. “He’s putting a covert team on standby at Homestead, pending further developments.”
“They’ve got Carlos,” said Macaulay.
“Steve, he could just be sleeping off a drunk somewhere in town,” added Kimball. “If he found a girl, there are plenty of places he could have spent the night with her.”
Macaulay shook his head and said, “Carlos would have come back. I know him. He might have gone over there to have a few drinks and to check out the girls, but he never would have stayed over even if he picked one up. Somebody took him.”
“We don’t know anything for sure at this point,” said Barnaby. “I asked Mike to do some quiet surveillance without alerting the local police.”
They heard the sound of an outboard motor slowly approaching the boat. Chris Kimball stepped to the salon windows.
“Mike’s coming back in the runabout,” he said. “He’s towing our dinghy behind him.”
McGandy looked drawn and tired as he came into the salon and sat down.
“As you know, this is a small island. My wife is a doctor’s assistant, so she has a pretty big network of friends. I had her make some calls this morning to ask if anything unusual happened last night. One of her friends lives across from the entrance to Brugg’s compound. She said there was a disturbance at around two in the morning that woke her up. Someone was yelling blue murder.”
“That might have been anyone,” said Barnaby.
“She said that at night the compound is as quiet as a graveyard,” said McGandy, “and the voice was in Spanish. She went to her bedroom window and saw two members of Brugg’s palace guard dragging someone in through the gates.”
“I’m going after him,” said Macaulay. “Do you know anything about the layout inside the walls?”
“I’ve never been inside,” said McGandy. “Under ordinary circumstances I would say that trying to get in there would be suicide, but here is one piece of luck. There’s a charity event taking place tonight that is always hosted by one of the great houses on the island. This year it’s at Brugg’s mansion. My wife said the duke of Lancaster and his wife are supposed to be there with a lot of other dignitaries.”
“That would give us a chance to find out if they might be holding him,” said Lexy.
“And where,” added Kimball.
“Is the public invited to these events?” asked Barnaby.
“It’s invitation only to the money crowd,” said McGandy. “No chance of getting a ticket, and security will be tight.”
“Well, that complicates it,” said Barnaby.
“Maybe not,” added McGandy. “The caterer who is supplying all the food is one of my partners in the dive business. He’s always looking for more help at these events.”
• • •
Carlos awoke to feel the sickness inside his head. When he tried to turn over to vomit, he couldn’t move his shoulders and the bile gushed out the side of his mouth. He was stretched out naked on his back on a long, thick slab of butcher block. His wrists were shackled above him at the head of the slab and his ankles at the foot of it.
The stone-walled room was dark and cavelike with no windows and a low stone ceiling. There was a rancid smell in the damp air. The only illumination came from a single lightbulb hanging over the slab.
The figure of a huge black woman loomed over him. She removed a sponge from the bucket of cold water she was carrying and mopped his face clean.
“It looks to me like you haven’t been taking good care of yourself, querido,” said Black Mamba.
He remained silent as she pried open his mouth with her enormous fingers and probed around his teeth and gums.
“You’re a heavy smoker, aren’t you?” she said. “And your teeth show the sad results of your sugar craving. You should turn your life around before it is too late, querido.”
He heard a hollow gagging noise from across the chamber. Carlos twisted his head to the left and looked into the gloom. Another man was sitting in what looked like one of the old wooden electric chairs he had seen in gangster movies. His wrists and ankles were shackled to the armrests and legs.
The other man was naked too. Maybe sixty, he had a pink beefy face and close-cropped iron-gray hair. A roll of flab hung at his midsection, and his glazed eyes were bulging. Someone had duct-taped his private parts to a basketball.
“Who be you?” called out Carlos.
The man looked back at him with his glassy eyes but didn’t say anything.
“That is Mr. Dolan,” said Black Mamba. “He is here to sell his sports team to my son.”
Mr. Dolan began nodding his head up and down.
“And what is your name, querido?” she asked Carlos with a matronly smile.
When he didn’t answer, she went across the room to what looked like a tool chest on the table next to the wall. She came back with a pair of needle-nose pliers, the type Carlos had used almost every day working on the plane engines at the charter service.
“I only ask once,” she said, gripping the fingers of his left hand. He felt the scrunch of the pliers on the nail of his index finger.
When he looked up at her, she was gazing down at him like a mother looking into her child’s eyes. Several seconds went by and he felt her hand release his fingers. A moment later she ripped the nail of his index finger out by the roots. It sounded like the tearing of a sheet of paper. The pain was excruciating, but he gritted his teeth as she tore the rest of his nails out one by one.
“I’ll ask you again when I come back,” she said.
He watched as she headed up the stone steps at the end of the chamber.
“I be Bruce Willis, you fuckin’ bitch,” he shouted to her retreating back.
• • •
Juwan watched as Varna’s academy students began clearing the Naugahyde couches out of the great hall of the mansion to make room for dancing. He grimaced at the thought of some of the reactions he might have to deal with during the inaugural dance that the annual hosts always conducted to lead off the festivities. Varna had begged to be part of it.
Emile Bardot approached him and saluted.
“The man hasn’t said anything since we brought him in,” said Bardot. “He’s very tough, but Mamba says she will soon have him singing like Engelbert Humperdinck.”
“What do we know at this point?” asked Juwan.
“He told the girl in the bar that he had saved the life of his friend while diving on a wreck off the backbone,” said Bardot, “and that his friend was a general. We will soon learn which yacht he came from.”
“Have Sir Henry notify the Chinese,” said Juwan, “and request that the bounty should be paid in U.S. dollars.”
“I’ll call Sir Henry immediately.”
“One more thing,” said Juwan.
“Yes, sir?”
“Slow them down.”
TWENTY-SIX
29 May
Aboard Trader’s Bluff
Dunmore Town
North Eleuthera
Bahamas
Chris Kimball stood on the foredeck of the Hatteras and pretended to be enjoying the view of the harbor as Mike McGandy’s runabout headed toward the public wharf with Barnaby, Lexy, and Macaulay aboard.
Picking up his binoculars, Kimball slowly scanned the activity in the harbor. It looked just as it should, just as it usually did, with skiffs going back and forth between the yachts and the town, fishing boats heading out toward the backbone, and the ferry from the airport bringing new guests to Dunmore Town. If there was any indication that the Trader’s Bluff was under surveillance, he couldn’t find it.
He turned to do another sweep i
n the opposite direction and watched as two small local boys in a patched wooden skiff pulled up at the gangway of one of the superyachts anchored across the harbor. The stern section of their skiff was loaded with coconuts and low in the water.
They had become a familiar sight to Kimball over the previous few days. For a Bahamian dollar, they would majestically lop off the top of a coconut with a machete and serve the coconut milk with a straw to children and crewmen at the foot of a yacht’s gangway.
Mike McGandy tied up his runabout at the finger pier of his dive club and led the others to his venerable Range Rover. The uninterrupted days of brilliant sun and blue sky had been replaced with a low leaden sky that portended rain.
McGandy drove them to his small cottage overlooking the ocean side of Dunmore Town. There, he introduced them to his friend and dive partner, Bob Littlefrost, who was catering the charity event at Brugg’s mansion, and to Mike’s Bahamian wife, Cora, a college-trained physician’s assistant who managed a local medical clinic. To Lexy, she looked to be about six months pregnant.
Littlefrost was tall and blond with a hawkish nose, a sun-weathered face, and St. Bernard eyes. McGandy had assured Macaulay he could be trusted. In truth, they were running out of options. With Dusenberry putting any help on hold, he had to take the risk.
“Brugg’s henchmen have tried to peddle drugs to some of my daughter’s middle school classmates,” said Littlefrost, shaking Macaulay’s hand. “I’ll help you in any way I can as long as it doesn’t endanger my family.”
“Our friend was forcibly taken into his compound last night,” said Macaulay. “Is there any way to narrow down the possibilities of where they might have him?”
“I’ve been in there several times over the years,” said Littlefrost. “The likeliest possibility is the cellar of the mansion. It was blasted out of the underlying coquina rock when they built the house. Local gossip has it that he keeps something incredible down there. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a torture chamber.”
Lexy paled at the thought of Carlos subjected to terrible cruelty.
The Bone Hunters Page 21