Maroon Rising

by John H. Cunningham

“What have you found?” Stephen said.

  “I don’t know.”

  My voice must not have carried, because Nanny called up with the same question. From my breast pocket I removed a pencil and piece of paper and tried to copy the symbols as accurately as I could. I dug at the moss around them in a wide radius but uncovered nothing else.

  Satisfied I’d found everything there was to find, I reversed course and dropped below the shelf. My fingers caught the edge and I hung until my right foot caught a toehold on the edge that allowed me to reach around, grab an indentation in the wall, and swing over until I could shimmy my way down.

  Ideas ricocheted around my mind, drawing on past experiences with Mayan and other wall carvings.

  “Buck!”

  BOOM!

  Gunshot?

  My ass slipped, everything spun, my shoulder bounced off rock—sharp pain, then a branch cracked, pine needles brushed past my face, my shirt ripped—

  THUD!

  I hit the ground and saw stars through the pain.

  I lay there a moment, taking a quick inventory. Nothing felt broken, but blood flowed from multiple gashes. The sketch of the wall carving was clutched in my hand. Looking straight up at the massive pine tree I’d careened through, I saw broken branches that had softened my fall.

  “What you got there, Reilly?”

  No way!

  I turned to face the only man on Jamaica likely to be shooting at me.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” My voice sounded like I’d just reached puberty. “You shot at me again, you son of a bitch.”

  Gunner stood over me. There were two men behind him—big men—and both of them were holding shotguns.

  He laughed that hyena-pitched cackle I’d learned to loathe, his small square teeth and his blue mirrored sunglasses catching the light.

  “Not yet we haven’t.”

  “Are you following us?”

  “We’re just hunting, Reilly.” He paused, his double entendre floating in the air. “Hogs. You seen any?”

  He reached down and yanked the sketch out of my hand.

  “Hey!” I rolled onto my knee and stood up.

  “You okay, Buck?” Nanny’s voice came from behind them.

  “What the hell kind of drawing’s this?”

  “How come you’re not out in Port Royal, Gunner? You run out of brewer’s vats?”

  He ignored me, the sketch still held up to his face. Then he lowered it.

  “The question is, Reilly, what are you doing out here—with her?”

  Nanny had walked around them and now stood next to me. Her face was hard. Stephen was nowhere in sight. I focused on one of Gunner’s associates—Cuffee, the enraged Maroon from Moore Town.

  “You!” I said. “Did you beat up Colonel Stanley?”

  Gunner cackled again. “You know Cuffee? Small island, ain’t it?”

  “It’s actually a pretty big island, Gunner, so I’ll ask you again, what the hell are you doing here? What do you want?”

  Gunner was not above having us shot and leaving us here for animals to devour. Armed or not, he was too big for me to overpower alone, and with three of them?

  “We won the rights to salvage Morgan’s treasure,” he said. “Sure feels like you’re trespassing on our claim.”

  I nearly laughed. Gunner sounded like he was in an old Western.

  “You were awarded the right to dig in a specific location at Port Royal.”

  “Maybe you need to update yourself on our rights.”

  That caught me off guard. Had they somehow obtained broader rights related to Morgan? I’d never heard of anything other than a specific location being protected—

  “And what’s this little honey doing with you, anyway?” He nodded toward Nanny.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but she and Stephen are my guides. I hired them to take me up to see the sunrise from Blue Mountain, but you already know that, since you’ve obviously been following us.”

  “Sunrise, my ass.” His mouth tightened to a thin line. “Miss Nanny Adou here, Professor Nanny Adou, from the Archaeology Department at the University of West Indies, was on the review and award committee that gave me and Dodson the contract for Port Royal.”

  My breathing stopped.

  “So I’ll ask you again, what the hell are you two doing out here together?”

  My head spun toward Nanny so hard my neck cracked.

  “You were on the award committee?”

  She looked away.

  Gunner’s cackle broke the silence again.

  “Looks like she’s playing both sides against the middle, Reilly.” He laughed again. “Your luck with women ain’t too good here in Jamaica, is it? Must of been a kick in the balls, seeing your ex-wife and Dodson—”

  I flung myself at Gunner, catching him off guard and driving him hard into the bushes. We fell, me on top of him.

  He squealed, dug his hands into my ribcage—instant pain—and flung me aside.

  All the wind whooshed out of my lungs. I rolled to my right and stood up. Gunner’s goons—Cuffee and the other one—held their guns on me, but I didn’t care.

  “Son of a bitch, Reilly!” Gunner rolled over and I saw he’d landed on a large rock. He held his back and got slowly to his feet, his sunglasses knocked askew, his eyes black and livid. “You’ll pay for that!”

  “Stop it!” Nanny stepped between us. “A lot of people know we’re here, and Stephen has already informed the authorities.”

  All eyes followed the finger she pointed to where Stephen held up his phone.

  Gunner swung back to face us, his jaw trembling and his square teeth pressed together, then stepped as close as he dared to Nanny.

  “We’re not done with you, either, woman. If you’re double-crossing us, you’ll be sorry, count on it. That treasure belongs to us and the Leeward Maroons. Step back and mind your own business.”

  Gunner held my sketch up, then shoved it into his breast pocket.

  “And whatever the hell this shit drawing is, it’s no concern of yours. We got the legal rights to everything related to Morgan, Reilly. Not that I can’t handle you myself, but maybe I’ll wait until we drag your ass through court again first.”

  He walked over to where I’d scraped the moss off the rock wall and used his phone to take pictures of the other petroglyphs. Once finished, he looked from face to face.

  “Now back the fuck off. And that includes you, Professor.”

  Gunner, Cuffee, and the other large Jamaican disappeared into the woods. I turned toward Nanny, my eyes pinched.

  “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were on the selection committee?” Hurt mixed with anger made my voice sound shrill. I didn’t care.

  “Why does it matter?” Nanny said.

  Stephen had already started back up the trail. I couldn’t believe we had to climb the damn mountain all over again, but we headed off. Slowly.

  “The difference is whether I can trust you or not, and obviously I can’t.”

  “Trust me for what, exactly? Haven’t I been helping you? I could have given this information to those other men but I didn’t. Jamaica’s been the victim of plunder and abuse for hundreds of years, now we’re supposed to help one group of American treasure hunters over the other? What if Dodson’s team finds a clue that might—”

  “You called me! I’d given up and gone home—and I’ve agreed to give up 90 percent of anything we find, never mind the remaining 10 percent might cost me my life, as you just witnessed. I can’t operate on half-truths and lies, so if there’s any other surprises around the corner, you need to tell me now.”

  “I did call you, Buck, because I convinced Stanley you could help, and I was right—you connected the clue about the flash to the petroglyphs.”

  The angle of ascent had increased to the point that my breath was already coming in shorter bursts, which pretty much tabled our discussion for the time being. Clouds
enveloped the peak above us. Where had Gunner gone? Based on his direction, he could have taken one of the other three paths that led to the crossroads. Did one of them lead to the Rio Grande? Would Njoni have carried the goods through here?

  Nanny hadn’t apologized, and she hadn’t asked me what I’d found on the ledge. I couldn’t tell if she already knew or just didn’t care. But now that I’d made the connection, would they try to proceed without me? Seemed unlikely, but still …

  We stopped for a drink of water from a spring.

  “Can I see the archive again?”

  Nanny paused, then swung the backpack off her shoulder. Good thing Stephen had hidden her precious archives in the bushes back on the trail after Gunner fired that shot.

  She removed the document from the plastic case and handed it over.

  “What do you think the circles from the petroglyph could mean?” she said.

  My shoulders dropped. “So you already knew what was up there?”

  She scowled. “I saw the paper when that lunatic ripped it from your hand.”

  I stared at her for a long time, but she never flinched. Sucks when you trust someone, then find out they haven’t been straight up. From that point on you never know when to believe them. Can never really trust them again. My ex-wife came to mind. Gunner rubbed my nose in that, too, the prick.

  The faint drawings didn’t offer anything further.

  “Can I see the rest?”

  She opened up the box and handed it to me. I flipped slowly through pages in their archival sleeves, but there was nothing like the circular images from the petroglyph. Could have been totally unconnected. The Blue Mountain range was three hundred square miles—the odds of our finding anything here were infinitesimal. Yet we had found the flash at dawn, and the quartz crystal that produced it.

  I shuffled through the loose diary pages, then fanned through them. They got increasingly darker and stained toward the end, with a wine or bloodstain seeping through the last few pages—then the next page was clean. No stains, no writing, nothing.

  As if some pages were missing.

  I glanced up at Nanny, who was looking away.

  Dammit.

  “Keep it.” I dropped the notebook into the plastic container and set off up the trail at a fast clip. I soon felt Stephen’s eyes on my back as I went and could hear him and Nanny walking behind me, but nobody said a word during the rest of the two-hour hike.

  If Nanny was holding out on me, this whole search was pointless. She must be analyzing the information on her own. She was a professor of archaeology, after all—what did I expect? Just another kind of treasure hunter. And based on what she’d said about people plundering Jamaica for hundreds of years, she’d apparently heaped me in with that lot. I’d let her beauty, background, knowledge—and, dammit, her compliments—sucker me into thinking I was a valued member of their team.

  Cuffee’s statement about Morgan’s treasure belonging to the Leeward Maroons was another interesting revelation. Thanks to the peace treaties they’d individually signed with the British, both the Windward and Leeward Maroons had what amounted to sovereign territory within Jamaica. Even if I found something, if it was within those territories they could stiff me on my 10 percent.

  It took a couple of hours to crest Blue Mountain and hike back to the truck. I arrived about fifteen minutes ahead of Nanny and Stephen, and I was sitting in the truck bed when they showed up. Although it was bumpy as hell, I stayed there with my back against the cab as Stephen drove us slowly back to Moore Town, then to where we’d left the bamboo raft.

  Stephen stopped the truck but didn’t turn it off. I jumped out of the truck bed. Nanny’s window was down, but she made no move to get out.

  “I’m staying in Moore Town tonight,” she said.

  To try and piece together the drawing of the circles that nearly got me killed? Or mull over any other clues she’d withheld from me?

  “I’ll take the raft back to my Jeep.”

  “Where are you going next?” she said.

  Crap. I just remembered I’d pissed away five hundred dollars for Ray Floyd to fly down here.

  “My friend Ray’s probably already on-island. He’s meeting me back at GoldenEye. I’m not sure how long we’ll be there.”

  She turned to look out the windshield of the truck.

  “I am sorry, Buck. I didn’t think of it as lying to you.” She turned back to face me. “Have you considered that maybe I wanted them to be searching underwater, knowing nothing was there, so I could work with you to focus on a search I thought was a lot more likely?”

  I bit my lip. It was an appealing explanation, it even made sense. Or made her a creative liar. I thought back to Morgan’s loosely bound diary, to the stained pages suddenly turning clean. That felt like another half-truth. Who knew what else she was holding back?

  “See you around.”

  I walked down the steep hill toward the raft l’d beached on the riverbank, my quads burning from all the mountain climbing. I didn’t look back as I waded into the cold water and climbed up onto the raft. Now going with the current, I rounded a bend a few minutes later, and the truck, Stephen, and Nanny all disappeared.

  So much for Morgan’s treasure.

  So much for the beautiful Nanny Adou.

  It was dark by the time I made it back to GoldenEye. I wanted nothing more than to collapse on the bed in my villa and sleep for a year, but on the floor under my door was a note.

  My back hurt when I bent over to get it, sore from the ping-pong between branches when I fell off the shelf at the crossroads, not to mention poling the raft up and down rivers. I touched my ribs on the right side and winced. Gunner had dug his fingers between them like he was grabbing a twelve-pack of beer.

  With the note under my arm, I took ice from the bucket, dropped it in a glass, and doused it with some of the complimentary Blackwell Rum. I then stepped outside and dropped into the chaise longue overlooking the blue lagoon. After a slurp of rum, I peeled open the note.

  I’m in the bar.

  This place is amazing!

  Ray

  I smiled. Ray’s enthusiasm would lighten my mood. And I needed to get my mind off Nanny more than I needed sleep.

  After a quick shower and an inspection of my bruises and gashes, including one on my cheek that prevented me from shaving, I pulled on some blue linen slacks and a white linen shirt, then used my fingers to comb back my shoulder-length hair.

  The bar was crowded. I found Ray on the corner, sitting with Johnny Blake, both drinking rum punches. I hoped they weren’t putting them on my tab.

  “Buck!” Ray said. “This place is gorgeous!”

  He was dressed in cargo shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt, no different than if he’d been at the private aviation terminal in Key West. I smiled. Ray was always true to himself.

  And he always came when I called for help.

  “Wait until you see the Ian Fleming suite,” I said. “We can take a peek if it’s not rented.”

  “I can’t wait—you seen the lounge with those old pictures of Fleming and Sean Connery?”

  Johnny Blake shook his head. He could care less about Ian Fleming or any of the history surrounding GoldenEye. He was here for a purpose he would soon learn had been turned upside down. After ordering a Black and Stormy, I decided not to burst his bubble just yet. And Ray had no clue what was going on.

  “Should have brought Lenny down too, Buck. He’d get a kick out of all this.”

  Lenny Jackson, friend and former bartender at Blue Heaven, nephew of Reverend Willy Peebles, was now on the ballot for his second term on Key West’s city council. His initial success had surprised no one more than me. Not that I didn’t believe in his abilities, but his blunt approach to issues could have easily killed his political career. Fortunately for the people of Key West, it had done the opposite.

  “I know,” I said. “Knee deep in elections when he could be getting in trouble with us.”

  “Us?
You mean your trouble, my friend. I’m only here to make sure the Beast is safe, and to bail you out of jail if need be.”

  “All this happy reunion shit’s gonna make me cry,” Johnny said. “I ain’t heard from you since you went rafting with the lovely professor yesterday, mon. What’s the news?”

  Ray’s eyebrows lifted.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But first, what’s the status of our logistics?”

  Johnny drank from his rum, then smiled big.

  “All set, mon. The boats ready to go in the morning. The charter company got to have a month’s payment up-front—let your friend Greenbaum know I put that on his credit card.”

  “Harry Greenbaum is in on this?” Ray said.

  “Deeper by the minute.”

  Johnny reached into the breast pocket of his tunic-style white shirt.

  “And right here’s the permit.”

  Ray asked to see it, and he handed it over.

  “‘Permit for photographic survey of underwater portions of Port Royal?’” Ray said. “What the heck?”

  Johnny grinned. “That should distract the hell out of your boy Dodson. The coordinates are exactly an eighth of a mile to the west of their dive site—far enough so they can’t really see what we’re doing, close enough to drive them crazy.”

  Gunner’s warning from earlier today rang in my ears. Screw him.

  “Wait a minute,” Ray said. “This is for a dive site next to Dodson and that trigger-happy lunatic Gunner? Buck, no way—”

  “Relax, Ray.” I waved to the bartender and pointed to their empty glasses. “They have observers from the Jamaican National Heritage Trust on-site to monitor the restoration of everything they uncover—”

  “That guy nearly killed me—both of us—and you’re telling me to relax?”

  “You’ll be fine—”

  “What do you mean I’ll be fine?” Ray threw up his hands. “Where will you be?”

  I hesitated. Given my falling out with Nanny, I didn’t really have a plan anymore. Messing with Dodson would be fun as hell, but it wasn’t worth putting Ray in harm’s way. Still, Johnny wouldn’t stick around if there were no payday, and I might need him.