The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Danny!” Trey called to a similarly clad young man lying on the beach in front of him. Danny had dozed off, his long, pencil-thin dreadlocks trailing in the golden sand. The hair was almost as light as the sand itself, in contrast to the owner of the hair who was midnight black. Danny jerked up, only to subside nearly immediately. “Danny,” Trey said on an intake, “you want some of this, man?” He extended the joint and held in the smoke to better absorb the THC into his lungs. Danny stretched out his hand and took the cigarette without opening his eyes. He put it to his lips and drew deep. It was his turn to hold in the smoke. As they sucked in the heady marijuana, passing the joint back and forth, the sea roared in the background. “Good stuff,” Trey murmured, his eyes reddening and narrowing as the weed took effect.

  “Yeah, I get it from a partner in the village. Not the usual suspect,” Danny replied. He sat up and looped his waist-length dreadlocks with one hand, tucking them into a knot. He looked over at his cousin, his eyes as red as Trey’s. “This man have it sick, horse. Only quality weed he supplying. No compress, only fresh.” He took another hit. “I trying to get him to sell me some more but he brakesing. Say the man who he getting it from gone away for a week.”

  The waves continued to roll up on the sand. Trey’s orange surfboard, leaning on the fisherman’s shed next to him, cast a long shadow across his deeply tanned face. His olive skin was freckled across the bridge of his nose, complemented by his short, nappy Afro, the color of brown sugar. Full lips curved into a slight smile as he contemplated the surf. His hand reached out to lightly caress the board, which was rough with a thick coat of wax. “You going and hit that again before it reach cigarette?” he asked Danny, who shook his head and passed it back to him. Trey nursed the joint until the weed was burned off and passed the rest of the funk back to Danny. “I ent feeling for no cigarette right now.” They were quiet for a few minutes. “Thinking of going back.” Danny said nothing. “Two months in the jungle is enough, man.” Danny smoked without comment. The murmur of the waves continued. “I go have to call them men to pick back up a little end in work.”

  “Is so you is a work jumbie, boy?” Danny finally replied. “Two months of surf, weed, and country food, and you ready to go back in the rat race?” He shook his head again. “Me, I wouldn’t rush back to go and work in no factory assembly line.”

  “Is not no assembly line,” Trey snapped. “I tell you, I is a technician. Is skilled work, man. And the two months was good, partner, but is time I go back. I have things to do.”

  “Like what? Tack back by that slut?” Danny rolled onto his knees and to his feet.

  “Don’t talk about she so.”

  “But she’s a slut, Trey. She leave you for your partner. How she go play you like that?”

  Trey’s golden eyes, about the color of his skin, gave him a ghostly appearance. Right now they were cloudy with weed and budding rage. “She make a mistake, all right? That don’t make she a slut.”

  Danny sucked his teeth in disgust and grabbed his own board from the sand. “I heading up the road. Later.” He flicked the butt of the cigarette into the blue ocean. “Tasha real chain you up, boy,” he muttered as he walked up the track leading to the main road. “If I was you, I would have shoot both of them.”

  Trey scowled and lit another cigarette from a pack in his pocket. “Is not Tash, is Garvin. That man is the one who is to blame,” he told his cousin’s broad back. Danny wasn’t listening, focused instead on scaling the rocky path without dropping or dinging his board on the huge stones on either side of the track. “Is Garvin who pull she in!” Trey swiftly sucked on the cigarette. “Is he, not she. Is he fault.”

  Danny’s blond locks disappeared over the top of the steep path. Trey was left alone with the rocks and the waves, the sand and the fisherman’s hut.

  Beyond the road, the Sans Souci forest towered, dim and green and forbidding. In two months, Trey had only been in the forest twice, both times with his cousin. They had gone to find a certain spring which Danny swore had the sweetest water in the world, but they had become lost in the undergrowth and never found it. They made do with the chlorinated water piped in by the public utility, but Trey craved the fresh, untreated water of the spring. He stubbed the cigarette out in the sand and rose, grabbing his board and heading toward the forest in bounding strides.

  Bareback and barefoot, his lean, muscular body quickly maneuvered the path. His calloused feet barely registered the bumpy pitch of the Toco Road before he was in the cool mulch of the forest. It was rainy season, but the ground wasn’t sodden, only damp and spongy with fallen leaves and topsoil. He had no idea where he was going, but with a quick glance around for a landmark, Trey moved into the woods. He passed a giant immortelle tree, a clump of stunted cocoa trees, a dead one stretched across what could have been a track. The gloom deepened as he walked, the trees becoming larger and taller, the ground softer and cooler despite the mid-afternoon heat.

  The light changed. It was somehow brighter, more airy. A sloped clearing appeared full of lime-green, leafy shrubs about a head taller than his six feet. “To ras!” he breathed, breaking into the space gingerly and leaving his surfboard behind.

  The weed was planted in even rows, smelling pungent, sweet, musky. As far as he could see, marijuana trees were coming into bloom, their small orange flowers just starting to show – plants ripe for the picking. Making his way through the rows, Trey tenderly brushed the leaves and stems. He almost missed the hut in the center of the field, stumbling when he noticed the galvanized steel sheeting that made up its walls and roof. The double gate, also corrugated sheets of steel, bore a heavy iron padlock threaded through a thick steel chain looped into a pair of holes in the gates. The message was clear: Keep out. To Trey that was as good as an invitation.

  He walked the entire field until his feet were sore and covered in mud. There wasn’t a soul in sight. He picked his way back to the galvanized shed and peered through the holes in the gate. It was dark inside and he couldn’t see much, just large hanging shapes. The smell, however, was unmistakable – it was exactly the same weed he had just been cleaning. Trey turned and ran for the road, leaving his surfboard behind as a bright orange marker to light his way back to paradise.

  Jimmy the maxi-taxi driver was cagey, driving extra slowly on the winding country road. Though a large banner on the back windscreen proclaimed it Jah Bus, the real owner was a Christian who wanted no part of Rastafari. A keen businessman, he recognized that popular culture glorified all that was Rasta, from dreadlocks to Bob Marley and marijuana use, so he latched onto the trend to make his business popular. He warned his drivers, the men he hired to work the vehicle on a twenty-four-hour rotation, that he wasn’t going to allow weed smoking on the job. What they did in their own time was their affair, but behind the wheel of Jah Bus they were to be clean and sober.

  It was close to ten and Jimmy, an occasional Rasta, had finished his last trip with only $100 in pocket after oil, gas, and the $300 child maintenance he had to pay his ex-girlfriend every two weeks for their three sons. When Trey and Danny flagged him down and put their unusual proposition to him, Jimmy had been of two minds, thinking about the maxi’s owner and the prospect of being out of a job. But the offer of a bonus payment was irresistible. It wasn’t every day that someone offered to rent your maxi for five pounds of weed. Though he doubted the resurrection of Haile Selassie I, the late Ethiopian emperor whom Rastas acknowledge as the descendant of Christ, he certainly agreed that smoking weed was an ideal part of livity. Five pounds of it – a whole black bin liner full of the stuff – would keep him high for quite some time.

  Trey and Danny directed the driver to a small house on a hill off the main road. It was where Danny lived and where Trey had been hiding out from the world for two months. The house was like most of the others around it, a humble concrete dwelling with a small front porch, a neat garden behind a chain-link fence, and three pot hounds skulking around the yard. “Rambo!” Danny shoute
d affectionately at the first brown mongrel to reach his feet as he pushed open the rusty gate. Hiding behind a lush ixora was a black bitch, marked like a Doberman pinscher but with none of the grace of the breed, and lounging on the front steps, just below the porch, was a dog that resembled both its parents, half-brown and half-black. Trey shot a warning look at the one behind the bush. Sarah was prone to snapping at strangers and Jimmy was already nervous enough. “Come nah, Princess,” Danny was urging the dog on the step, nudging her aside with his foot. “Move and let people pass. You feel this is your house, eh, girl?” Trey stayed in the yard between Jimmy and the growling bitch.

  “That is you, Danny?” a woman’s voice called from the house. Aunty Zora leaned over the bottom half of the Dutch door leading to the kitchen. Her arms were covered in flour up to the elbows. Jimmy eyed her long salt-and-pepper dread-locks with admiration. “Full some water and bring it for me, nah. This pipe giving trouble again.” Trey’s maternal aunt glanced at Jimmy with little curiosity. The boys were always bringing friends home. “Good evening,” she said mildly before disappearing back into the kitchen.

  Danny changed direction, going around the house instead of through the front door. “Give me a minute, man,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed to the kitchen, reemerging in a moment with a plastic pail in each hand. As he filled the buckets at the standpipe outside the kitchen, Jimmy edged closer to Trey.

  “So, where the thing?” Jimmy asked, lighting a cigarette and peering around the yard.

  “Cool yourself, nah,” Trey muttered. “We go handle it. Let the man see about he queen first.”

  “Scene,” Jimmy agreed, swiping his brow with one finger and flicking the stream of sweat off to the side. “What she making?” he asked Trey, sniffing the fragrant air that smelled of vanilla.

  “Sweetbread.”

  “So much’a sweetbread? Is all up by she elbow I see flour. Allyuh have a bakery or what?”

  Trey was growing testy. “She does make and sell. Sweetbread, cake, drops. All of that.”

  “Which part she does sell it?” Jimmy was a talker. Trey was tired of it already.

  “In the village there. In the shop.”

  “Scene,” Jimmy nodded. The loaves of sweet coconut bread, full of raisins and cherries, were very popular. Aunty Zora was quite the businesswoman and had placed her products on shelves all up the Toco Road, a string of communities that curved in a rough semicircle around the northeastern tip of Trinidad from Valencia to Matelot. Danny, when he wasn’t surfing, delivered the goods in their old beat-up Land Rover.

  After their visit to Aunty Zora’s, they stopped by the fisherman’s hut on the beach to load the maxi to the roof with stuffed black garbage bags. Then they drove off to town in Jah Bus.

  Trey lay on his back in his dusty bedroom surrounded by bulging black garbage bags. His bloodshot eyes and slack expression told his mother the story when she opened the door. That, plus the unique aroma of twenty pounds of fresh weed.

  “So, is so you come home and ent offer nobody nothing?” His mother sized him up. “Didn’t see your mother two months and you haven’t said a word. Smoking inside here by yourself.” She crossed her arms over her slender chest, tossing aside long dreadlocks with an angry flick.

  Wordlessly, Trey reached into an open bag and grabbed a handful of weed. “Here, Mammy. Smoke. Have a time.” When she saw the quality of the herb, she smiled.

  “Where allyuh get this? Danny farming now?”

  Trey shook his head. “The less you know about this ganja, the better. Trust me.”

  His mother hesitated, her smile slipping slightly. “Is tief you tief the weed, Tracy?” Trey took a pinch of herb from the same bag and started building a spliff. He didn’t answer. “So when they come looking for you, what we go do?” Her voice grew shrill.

  “Let me study that. Besides,” he flicked aside a seed, “that ent go happen. The place was deserted and we didn’t tell nobody nothing. Is one man know and he ent go say nothing. That is the maxi man. And we pay he off good.” She looked skeptical.

  “I hope you know what you doing.” She paused, watching him lick the spliff and light it. “And what you going to do with all this weed?” There were five or six bags, each two feet high and two feet wide.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Trey said through a cloud of smoke.

  From the time Trey let it be known, through a hint dropped at the corner shop, that he had product to sell, the calls started coming. Man, hook me up with some of that was what he heard every ten minutes on the phone. Then there were the customers, mostly men, who drove or walked up to the house at all hours asking for a ten-piece or a five-piece, conveniently measured buds rolled into tinfoil fingers, just enough for a spliff or two. His neighbors were smokers themselves, so there was little chance they would turn him in to the police. As long as he kept things quiet, he would be fine.

  The talk of Trey’s new hustle had to come back to Garvin, a man whose appetite for weed was exceeded only by his appetite for luxury. Lying in bed next to Tasha, Garvin inhaled the smoke from his fat, short joint. He passed her the channa pack, a marijuana cigarette resembling the paper cones vendors used to wrap channa in years before, when boiled chickpeas were a popular snack. Tasha took the cone and drew deep. The room was silent. The fifty-two-inch plasma TV was muted, showing images of gyrating bodies, rappers, and singers. Silk sheets slid noiselessly from her naked body as Tasha rose and padded across the plush white carpeting to the bathroom.

  She surveyed herself in the mirror as she washed her hands after using the toilet. Same full breasts Trey loved. Same high, round butt. Same long, jet-black legs. Better makeup, definitely a better weave. Garvin wasn’t pretty but he was generous to a fault. And that fault was stupidity.

  Sliding back into bed next to him, she asked, “So what now?” Garvin frowned, shrugged. He smoked some more. “Antonio coming back in five days,” she said pointedly. “He going to want to know where the weed is.” Again, Garvin shrugged. “What you going to tell him?” She didn’t wait for him to shrug again. “You going to tell him you lost five pounds of weed? Just so? Like magic?” Garvin looked genuinely troubled. His pale brow wrinkled, his thin lips folded into a scowl, even his nearly transparent ears looked upset, blushing bright red. “You forget how he get on the last time—”

  “How I go forget?” Garvin snapped. “Is my ass he shoot!” Reflexively he grabbed for his flat behind, finger dipping into the round scar of the bullet wound. It was still pink and raw, a fresh reminder that he shouldn’t tamper with his big brother’s stock. But was it enough to stop him from “redistributing” over two Ks of compressed, high-grade Vincy weed while Antonio was on a buying trip to St Vincent? Nope. Garvin frowned again, wiggling yellowish toes until their joints popped, a habit Tasha loathed.

  She thought of Garvin’s pale body against hers and shuddered. No doubt Trey, that honey-dipped lover of her past, was twice the man in all respects. Trey was smarter and more complex too. But he was also poor. He lived with his mother, he worked in a factory, and his only ambition was to surf, smoke, and “reason” with the other Rastas on the corner, talking religion and livity late into the night and leaving her home alone. Flicking a glance at her $200 pedicure as she kicked off the covers impatiently, she knew that Trey’s was the wrong family for her.

  Garvin’s, on the other hand, was perfect. Behind the modest façade of their house was an upscale, even posh home, equipped with every modern convenience and luxury, all paid for by Antonio’s job as a marijuana agent. He imported and wholesaled the stuff, keeping a relatively small amount for recreation, bribes, and retail sales. The boys lived on the proceeds of Antonio’s part in the lucrative marijuana trade, sharing everything except women.

  Living around the corner from them, and buying weed from Garvin, who handled the retail trade for Antonio, she had gotten to know the brothers well. It wasn’t hard to see that they liked the chase, both of them, so she teased them into wanti
ng to steal her away from her undeserving man. Though it was Garvin who took the bait first, it was Antonio she really wanted. As rich as he was, he would be able to afford a lifetime supply of the Baby Phat jeans, Timberland boots, and Gucci bags that Tasha craved. If she never wore another knockoff it would be too soon.

  Sitting at the edge of the bed, she sucked her teeth in disgust. Antonio had balls. He was no Trey, who had too much damned integrity, but Antonio was a strong man who knew his responsibilities. Antonio would never have grabbed and sold his brother’s weed to take her on a shopping spree. Idiot, she thought, tossing an annoyed look at Garvin.

  “You think I want him to shoot me again? I can’t take that pain. Besides, he might kill me this time.” He wasn’t joking. Antonio had a wicked temper, hence the bullet wound, an emblem earned a few weeks before when Garvin had accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to give him a bag of cash. Antonio had come looking for him with a grim look and a gun. When Garvin lied, Antonio hit him in the buttocks to remind him who was in charge. Although the wound was still healing, the lesson had already been lost. Garvin imagined he could take Antonio in a fight. The poor fool.

  “So what you going to do about it?” she repeated. Garvin thought for a minute, sucking on the joint.

  “I go have to replace it.”

  “With what? You feel weed does grow on trees?”

  Garvin grinned. “Well, yes. Besides, you ent hear your exman have a new sideline?”

  She was slow to respond. When it hit her, she did a double take. “Trey selling now?”

  Garvin nodded. “And I hear is some real high-grade.” Tasha’s eyes lit up.

  Danny called Trey with bad news. “The man come back. He asking questions.”

  Trey wasn’t sweating. “Jimmy irie, right? We ent have nothing to worry about, brethren. Is cool. Nobody ent see we and nobody don’t know nothing.”