Cryptozoica

by Mark Ellis

  Jarlai the barman, a small Malay wearing an immaculate white jacket, sat quietly upon a stool in a corner, watching Mouzi dab at the abrasion on the cheek of a sniffling girl. Kavanaugh knew the man didn’t like his job, but he needed it and it was far better work than anything else available on Tamtung. His duties were relatively simple, so he could endure watching a little homicide.

  Mouzi glanced toward Kavanaugh, not reacting to the appearance of the tall, scarred and dark-haired man wearing a drab T-shirt with the legend Horizons Ultd Tours emblazoned in peeling letters across the chest.

  Mouzi’s own Horizons Ultd T-shirt showed blood spattered in an artless pattern, but Kavanaugh assumed the dead Papuan had supplied the medium. She wore her jet-black hair in long ponytails sprouting from both sides of her head. Although he knew next to nothing about current tonsorial trends, he guessed the girl was still trying to appear current, regardless of her distance from the fashion centers of the world.

  Mouzi’s mocha complexion was flawless, except for the Maori spirals blue-tattooed below her eyes. Small and slender, with piquant features, her eyes were the color of obsidian and just as fathomless.

  Kavanaugh didn’t know the name of the girl whom Mouzi tended, but he knew she was a mixture of Achenese and East Indian, a refugee from a homeland devastated by the tsunami. A bruise spread over her broad left cheek, surrounding a raw scrape he guessed had been made by the Papuan’s silver ring. She wore a torn sari of translucent blue silk. The imprints of fingers showed dark on her bare shoulders and around the slender column of her throat.

  Kavanaugh glanced at Cranio, busy slopping water around on the floor with a mop, smearing a red stain, diluting it, not necessarily absorbing it. Gesturing to the noise-vomiting jukebox, he asked loudly, “Can you turn that thing down?”

  Without otherwise moving, the Samoan used the mop to hammer at the top of the machine. CoCo Lee’s song was interrupted by an electronic belch, and then it fell silent. Kavanaugh nodded. “Thanks.”

  Cranio grunted in response, but said nothing, returning his attention to widening the scope of the red smear on the floor. Amber-skinned, he was at least six feet, three inches tall and over half of that wide. His hair grew tightly against the scalp of his big head, like a coarse-curled black helmet.

  Kavanaugh stepped up beside Mouzi. “What happened here?”

  Mouzi’s eyes flicked toward him. “What does it look like?” Her sharp voice held a broad New Zealand brogue.

  “It looks like you killed a deckhand with your knives and if you don’t have an iron-clad reason why, you and I will have to talk to his captain.”

  “Why?”

  “So he can file a report and charges, if he sees the need.”

  Mouzi snorted. “As if. Sanu, tell him what happened.”

  In a halting, soft voice, the girl in the blue sarong said, “Dai Chinnah was very drunk, even before he came in. He wanted me to go with him to my room. I refused.”

  Kavanaugh arched a questioning eyebrow. “Why? Because he was drunk?”

  “That and—” Sanu paused as she gingerly fingered her swollen lip. “He has been here before. He hurt me then. Bai Suzhen told him never to come back or he would die.”

  “He came back,” stated Mouzi flatly. “And so he died. All there is to it.”

  “As if.” Kavanaugh looked over at Cranio. “Did you tell this man Chinnah to leave?”

  Still mopping, Cranio inclined his head in a short nod.

  “The bastard knew Bai wasn’t here,” Mouzi said. “That’s the only reason he came back.”

  “What were you doing here?”

  Mouzi gestured toward the back. “I was fixing the air conditioner.”

  “It broken,” offered Jarlai.

  Kavanaugh wiped at the film of sweat on his forehead. “No shit.”

  “I heard the ruckus,” Mouzi went on, “and came out and saw the bastard beating up on Sanu. He’d gone raw prawn.”

  Kavanaugh fixed his gaze on Cranio. “Why didn’t you throw him out, then?”

  “He had a gun,” explained Mouzi. “Show him, Cranio.”

  The bouncer dug into a voluminous pocket of his khaki pants. His right hand pulled out a .38 caliber revolver. It looked like a toy in his big, dusky paw.

  “He didn’t see me,” Mouzi continued, reaching into the back pockets of her denim shorts with both hands. “I came up behind him. And—”

  She whipped her hands in front of her, the blades of the butterfly knives dancing over her fingertips. Red stains dulled the sheen of the steel.

  Kavanaugh looked at Jarlai. “Did you see any of this?”

  The barman nodded. “All of it. Happen ‘xactly like Mouzi say, Cap’n K.”

  Kavanaugh gusted out a sigh. “I don’t know how the man’s commander will take it, but at least we have witnesses and a weapon to support your story.”

  He paused, ran a hand along his unshaven jawline and wearily asked Mouzi, “Did you really have to kill him?”

  She shrugged. With a flick of her wrists, she returned the knives to her back pockets. “Guess we’ll never know.”

  Kavanaugh turned toward the bar, putting his elbows atop it. “A gin and tonic. Light on the tonic, heavy on the ice.”

  As Jarlai mixed the drink, Kavanaugh’s eyes passed over the half-dozen flyspecked photographs framed on the rear wall. One of the largest had been taken a couple of years before. It was of himself and Howard Flitcroft. Howard still had a full head of wheat-white hair and a toothy grin split his bland, boyish face. He held a cashier’s check from Maxiterm Pharmaceuticals made out to Cryptozoica Enterprises for the sum of fifty million dollars.

  The frame beside it held not a photograph but a front page from the Weekly World News. The red-ink headline read: “When the Rich Feel Poor, Billionaire Vows Ancient Drug Will Restore Youth!”

  Dominating the rear wall above the liquor shelves was a lurid, yet bizarrely fascinating black-velvet portrait. Enclosed within an ornately scroll-worked frame, the image rendered in garish hues of gold, green, red and Pepto-Bismol pink depicted a Siamese dancer.

  She wore the traditional conical headpiece of a temple dancer that rose to a high, ball-tipped spire. The hat, gilded and gem-bedecked, had an almost three-dimensional quality. Beneath it, the dancer’s face was a fixed white mask of heavy green eye shadow and lips painted in blazing scarlet. Black hair cascaded down almost to her hips. A dozen gold hoops encircled the slender column of her throat.

  Although she wore white panungs—baggy Siamese bloomers—the dancer was nude from the waist up. Her arms, held at stiff angles, barely concealed her bosom. Emblazoned on her torso was the sinuously looping body of a python that stretched up from her waistband and twisted between her breasts, extending over her left shoulder and along her arm. The scales of the serpent were edged in white.

  No matter how many times Kavanaugh looked at the portrait, he always experienced a disquieting combination of sexual arousal and intestinal distress.

  Jarlai placed the glass down on the bar before him just as Kavanaugh heard the door open. He turned around to see Augustus Crowe striding in. The big man loomed well over six feet tall and like Mouzi and Kavanaugh, he wore a Horizons Ultd T-shirt.

  The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds. The stub of an unlit cigar jutted from between his teeth and a black Greek fisherman’s cap was perched at a rakish angle on his head.

  “What’s this about another throat-cutting?” he demanded.

  Still dabbing at Sanu’s abrasion with a cotton ball, Mouzi said cheerfully, “For such an underpopulated shit-hole, word sure gets around fast in this place.”

  Crowe grunted and sat down on a stool beside Kavanaugh. “Especially if it’s about hookers, sex and murder.”

  “It wasn’t murder,” Mouzi protested. “Not in the first degree, anyhow. And it never g
ot around to sex.”

  “Cutting somebody’s throat has that effect on horniness, I guess,” Kavanaugh commented dryly.

  Jarlai placed an open brown bottle of Guinness before Crowe.

  “What did you do with the body?” Crowe asked, removing the cigar from his mouth and lifting the bottle to his lips.

  Kavanaugh took sip of his gin. “Are you asking me or Slingblade Sally here?”

  Crowe swallowed a mouthful of the dark beer and answered, “You.”

  “I pushed him into the canal, just in case.”

  “Just in case what? Her story didn’t add up?” Crowe reached across the bar and took a book of matches from a glass jar. The cover showed stylized illustrations of criss-crossed palm trees superimposed over the bright yellow Cryptozoica logo.

  “That’s basically it,” Kavanaugh replied.

  Crowe put the cigar back in his mouth and tore off a match. “Well, as interesting as it is, I’m not here to find out about you two conspiring to cover up yet another capital crime.”

  “No?”

  “No. I just got a satphone call. Howie Flitcroft is on his way here. I was told we should expect him early tomorrow morning.”

  Kavanaugh felt his stomach slip sideways, but not in reaction to the liquor. “Howie hasn’t been here since…” His words trailed off.

  “Since those investors of his were eaten?” Mouzi supplied helpfully.

  Kavanaugh scowled at her, and then shifted his gaze toward the two men who pushed open the door. They were both wiry Moros, wearing a kind of uniform consisting of white turbans, dark slacks, shirts, and black sneakers. Each man had a small automatic pistol holstered at his belt. The letters EAC were hand-stitched in gold thread on their breast pockets. Kavanaugh didn’t need the reminder that the East Asiatic Company owned Mindanao’s Folly.

  At first, the pair of men seemed startled by the diverse collection of people in the big barroom, then they tried to slip on stolid masks of officialdom.

  “We’ve been sent by Captain Lars Hellstrom,” said the tallest of the pair in passably good English. “We are looking for Seaman Dai Chinnah. Does anyone here know him?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “You’re not jackos,” Mouzi said, back-stepping away from Sanu. She moved with smooth grace, her high-cut white shorts snug on her hips. Casually, she put her hands behind her back and kept them there, hooking her thumbs into her pockets. Sanu slid off the stool and moved to the far corner of the bar.

  The eyes of the two men flicked to and fro cautiously. The taller man said, “No, we are not policemen. We are EAC security officers, assigned to Mindanao's Folly. May I have your names?”

  “You go first,” suggested Kavanaugh.

  The man’s face registered irritation, but he said smoothly, “I am Lieutenant Azahan. This is officer Ruipender.”

  Crowe tried to strike a match but due to the humidity, the sulfur only fizzled, sending up a pungent stench. “Neither of you have any authority here, you know.”

  Azahan stiffened. “There is no authority here at all, not even a provost marshal. That is why the Captain sent us, Mr. Crowe.”

  “If you knew our names, why’d you ask us for them?”

  “Mindanao’s Folly has put into port here before. The crew knows all about you here on Little Tamtung.”

  A contemptuous smile touched Azahan’s lips. “Especially about you and Tombstone Jack Kavanaugh.”

  Kavanaugh raised the glass to his lips, feigning disinterest. “Is that a fact.”

  Ruipender spoke for the first time. “It is a fact that all of you here are liars and thieves. Tricksters. You defrauded many powerful, wealthy people and some of those people died. You stay here because you are afraid of their retribution if you go back to your own country. They will have you killed or imprisoned.”

  Angrily, Mouzi said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We know enough,” snapped Azahan. “We know you fear coming under the hand of United Bamboo.”

  “Bai Suzhen, Madame White Snake herself, owns this place,” Mouzi declared defiantly, pointing to the garish portrait of the Siamese dancer behind the bar. “She won’t be happy when she find out you came here to harass her friends.”

  “The United Bamboo Society controls a hell of a lot of ports in this part of the world,” Crowe said casually, still trying to strike a match. “You piss her off, you piss them off. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.”

  Azahan’s eyes narrowed for an instant, but he drew himself up haughtily. “We are looking for a member of Captain Hellstrom’s crew, that is all. We were informed about a disturbance here that might have involved him.”

  He gestured to the dark pink stain on the floor, then to Sanu and finally to the specks of blood on Mouzi’s shirt. “Do you deny there was a disturbance?”

  Mouzi didn’t answer. With a weary sigh of exasperation, Kavanaugh pushed himself away from the bar. “We don’t deny anything. Dai Chinnah was the cause of the disturbance.”

  Quickly, Ruipender drew his pistol but he didn’t aim it at anyone in particular. “You will come with us to the ship.”

  Kavanaugh walked toward Azahan, seeming to ignore the gun in Ruipender’s hand. “There’s no need for that. We can give you a report right now. We have witnesses.”

  Then he lashed out with his right hand, his fingers closing around the gun in Ruipender’s fist. He squeezed, grinding the smaller man’s delicate metacarpals into the unyielding steel frame of the pistol. Instinctively, Ruipender tried to jerk away but Kavanaugh turned with him, locking the man’s right wrist under his arm and heaving up on it with all of his upper body strength. The pain was so overwhelming, Ruipender couldn’t even scream.

  As the pistol dropped from his nerve-numbed fingers, Kavanaugh maintained pressure on the captured arm. He forced the man down to the floor.

  At the same time, Crowe came up off the bar stool. He hurled his half-full Guinness bottle in an overhand arc toward Azahan, the heavy base striking the man directly in the throat, a quarter of an inch to the left of his larynx. The bottle didn’t break, but Azahan reeled away, clutching at his neck. He clawed for his pistol.

  It had barely cleared the holster when Cranio used his wet mop like a bludgeon, slapping the water-soaked strands across Azahan’s face to send him staggering into Crowe’s arms. He easily wrested the gun out of the smaller man’s grip and swept his legs out from under him with a swift kick.

  He sat down hard on the barroom floor.

  Lips writhing over his teeth, Ruipender fumbled to draw a knife from his pocket with his left hand. Kavanaugh drove his foot into his diaphragm and the man’s features squeezed together like an accordion. His legs drew up in the fetal position.

  Releasing the man's arm, Kavanaugh removed the folded butterfly knife from Ruipender’s pocket and tossed it to Mouzi. “Add this one to your collection.”

  Wisely, Mouzi had kept her own blades in their scabbards during the brief struggle. Kavanaugh briefly inspected the Guardian .32 ACP automatics and snorted. They were ridiculous little things with ivory grips and two inch barrels. He figured the only reason Azahan and Ruipender carried them was because slingshots hadn’t been available in the ship’s armory.

  Cranio lumbered over to the pair of men and hauled them to their feet by the collars of their shirts, twisting the fabric so it constricted their throats like choke leashes. Azahan uttered gagging sounds, but he appeared to be in less pain than the whimpering Ruipender, so Kavanaugh addressed him.

  “Tell Captain Hellstrom that Dai Chinnah was here but we don’t know where he is now. He roughed up Sanu and was asked to leave. You might want to check the canal. He could have had an accident. Little Tamtung is as dangerous a place as Big Tamtung, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Crowe said. “Good thing we’re here to walk you back to your boat, isn’t it?”

  Cranio marched the two men to the door and shoved them out on the veranda. He refrained from delivering departing kick
s to their rear ends. Kavanaugh, Crowe and Mouzi walked out with them.

  The sun had fallen completely beneath the horizon, giving the ocean a coppery sheen. Although purple bougainvillea and pink hibiscus flowers turned the road into a surreal kaleidoscope of color, no amount of perfumed flora could disguise the fact that Little Tamtung was scarcely more than a frontier outpost. The houses were all prefabricated structures set upon stilts, rising up out the kunai grass. Painted on the window of a Chinese trade store they passed was the notice: American Cash Only, No Cheques, No Plastic.

  Kavanaugh, Crowe and Mouzi walked behind the EAC officers until they reached the quayside. Azahan and Ruipender marched to the end of a rickety dock and to a small motor launch tied to a piling.

  Rubbing his bruised neck, Azahan turned to face them. “You have our guns.”

  Kavanaugh nodded. “That’s right.”

  “We would like to have them back. Captain Hellstrom told us he would make us pay for new ones if we lost them.”

  “Technically,” said Crowe, “you didn’t lose them. Just tell him you know exactly where they are.”

  Azahan gathered a little courage and squared his shoulders. “Hellstrom will be very angry when we report what happened tonight. He will be even angrier when we tell him how you stole company property.”

  “Yeah,” taunted Mouzi. “But he’ll be a lot angrier at you.”

  “He will take it out on you people, the protection of Madame White Snake notwithstanding. He does not like Tombstone Jack.”

  “Not many do,” drawled Kavanaugh. “So?”

  Azahan held out a hand. “Our guns. Please.”

  Kavanaugh stared at the two men and shook his head in disbelief. He popped the magazines out of the pistols, put them in his pocket and tossed the empty Guardians to Azahan and Ruipender, who caught his left-handed. “There’re your guns. Now get back to your ship.”

  Azahan didn’t move. “If you could leave the ammunition on the dock so I could come back for it later—”

  Kavanaugh drew his Bren Ten and shouted angrily, “Get the hell out of here!”