Читать книгу February Heat - Wilson Roberts - Страница 7

LIZ SAT ON the edge of the bed wearing a green and white batik kimono. The pattern, although not the color, matched the outfit she’d been wearing on the boat. She was calm as I entered the room.

“Thanks for coming.” There was no trace of the thin frightened voice I had heard on the phone. Sitting in a chair, I leaned forward, my eyes fixed on hers. She did not look away.

“I’m here because you called me in the middle of the night, saying somebody had just tried to kill you.”

Without speaking, she stood and moved across the floor, opening the wooden jalousie window. Looking toward the sea she rubbed her forehead, sighed and turned. Folding her arms over her chest she walked back to the bed and sat drumming her fingers against her shoulders.

I studied her face. Her lips were slightly compressed, her eyes in constant motion, the sound of her fingers on her shoulders audible across the room. She was clearly tense, frightened, in spite of her calm air. Unfolding her arms, she held her palms open in front of her. She was shaking. Her eyes narrowed and she bit her lover lip. Letting her arms fall to her sides, she spoke.

“I’m not here on vacation. Tomorrow night I have to pick up a package at an airport I’ve never been to, from someone I’ve never seen and pass it on to someone else I’ve never seen who is supposed to show up in a dinghy at a place I’ve never heard of before, Micah’s Bay.”

“Drugs,” I said.

Taking a deep breath, she let it out in a loud sigh, but did not directly respond.

“Somebody did try to kill me.”

“I don’t do drug deals.”

She continued as though I had not spoken. “You know this island. I need your help getting around and I’ll hire you to protect me.”

I glared at her, furious at myself for being taken in. A package switch at a small airport in the Caribbean could only mean one thing. The interesting woman who said she needed a little help was just another part of an endless chain of island drug smugglers. There was no other explanation.

Starting toward the door, I fell into my hardass film noir act. “Forget it lady. This isn’t my style. Look, I’m no Joe Pure. I’ve done a little weed in my time, even grew some, but St. Ursula is no place for drug dealers. They lock them up in Her Majesty’s Prison for a lot of years, and let me tell you, Her Majesty’s Prison is a hell-hole where they feed you gruel and flog you for minor infractions of rules which are made up by the guards to keep themselves from dying of boredom.”

She moved quickly across the room, blocking the door. Again, our eyes met and she reached toward me, taking my hand between hers.

“I didn’t say anything about drugs.”

“You don’t have to. Picking up a package the way you’ve just described it and getting shot at spells drugs.”

“Do I look like someone who’d be involved with drugs?”

I shrugged. “I’ve known drug dealers that look like dentists, plumbers, housewives, babysitters, cops, anything but drug dealers and druggies.”

“I’m not like that; this situation isn’t like that.”

I shrugged again. “Did someone really try to kill you earlier?”

“And I asked if you think I look like a drug dealer.”

I exhaled, tense with anger. “I don’t care what you look like. I’m sure you are one.”

She smiled. “Good. I’m glad you wondered about me. I’d be in trouble with someone naive on my side.”

“I’m not on your side.”

“You will be when you hear my story.”

“I like a good story, but don’t expect me to buy it.”

Still holding my hand, she pulled me to the middle of the room. “Somebody did try to kill me.”

With a small sarcastic chuckle to let her know I wasn’t going to easily believe her, I allowed her to continue.

“Ten minutes before I called you I woke up and had to pee. I never turn the lights on when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. If I do I have a hell of a time getting back to sleep. While I was in there I heard the door to the other room open. Then there were three sounds, you know, fa-whump fa-whump fa-whump, just like the sound from silencers on guns in the movies. Then the door closed and I came out, looked at the holes in my bed and called you.”

She led me across the room to the bed, pulled back the covers and pointed to three small holes with burn marks around them. Using my Swiss Army knife I dug around in the mattress and found the lead slugs embedded in it. She was lucky it was her first night on St. Ursula and she still peed in the dark. A few more nights in the islands and she would have turned the lights on to make sure there were no scorpions or tarantulas skittering across the floor.

I dropped the covers and shook my head, the slugs lying in my hand, resting together like small, oddly shaped pebbles. Jamming them into my pocket, I breathed regularly and deeply.

“So, you say it’s not drugs. What are you into?”

“I can’t tell you, but I need help. I mean I really need your help, Frank.”

There was no trace of pleading in her voice, just a straightforward request for help. I shook my head, but I liked the way she was approaching me. I like strong women. They’re not black holes sucking all light and energy from people around them. Too many people run around yelling ‘fill me up,’ ‘make me whole,’ ‘help me, I’m a victim.’ They’re exhausting. Sometimes they’re hard to spot because they’ve managed to substitute the trappings of success for their need of light and substance from other people.

Liz was in trouble. She needed help. But she was no black hole.

I returned to the chair, collapsed in it, my arms dangling over the sides, my feet stretched out straight.

Life on St. Ursula was good. I enjoyed my house on the bluff, the sounds of the ocean mingling with those from the creatures in the surrounding bush. I had all the time I wanted to write poetry, play my guitar, and walk the beaches with Rumble. Whenever I felt like it I could drive into town, have a few beers and hang out with other ex-pats and locals. Until I came to the islands I hadn’t felt so free since I was thirteen and my father made me take a job helping an undertaker friend of his dig graves. From then on my life had been school, college, back-breaking summer jobs in the tobacco fields of western Massachusetts and Connecticut, and finally selling insurance.

The island was the perfect place for me. It was warm year round; the booze was cheap and I was surrounded by incredible natural beauty. Even better, I had no responsibilities beyond those I placed upon myself. I was free to do whatever I wanted to do, as long as I watched my investments and didn’t overspend my profits. Sometimes things got a little tight, but I never had to worry about paying the mortgage or the source of my next meal.

Still, I was bored.

Lonely.

Spending time in bars with other people, laughing, singing, and playing darts is a fine thing, but life can be off whack when that becomes central. Aside from Chance, I had no close friends, just a good group of warm acquaintances.

I looked at Liz Ford. She was lovely. There was no immediate irresistible electricity of sexual tension between us. She was just lovely. Her skin was smooth, her features clear, straight. The corners of her eyes were slightly crinkled, and those green eyes were sharp and clear, even when brimming with unshed tears.

Her demeanor attracted me the most. I liked the way she was holding herself together in the face of what had just happened. She was not in any way a black hole.

Making a pyramid with my thumbs and forefingers I raised my face to meet hers. “Tell me why I should help you.”

She shrugged. “Because I need help.”

I shook my head, making my lips narrow into straight lines. “That’s not enough.”

She frowned, sighing. “Because lives depend on it.”

I shook my head again. “Whose lives? Why do they depend on it?”

She moved toward me, sinuously, smiling, trying to look seductive. She wasn’t the type to pull it off and ended up looking like she was trying to look seductive. She was not practiced at it and she obviously didn’t enjoy trying to do it. We were both running out our versions of the hard act and neither one was fooling the other. Still, I let her continue. It was part of my hard act.

“Because I think you’re attractive, Frank.”

“Is that why you were so eager to see my etchings this afternoon?”

“Poems, Frank. You write poetry.” She was touching my arm. I drew away. She noticed the abruptness of my movement and didn’t follow through with another touch. “And I didn’t want to see them because I really did need to be alone. I’d be alone right now if this hadn’t happened.” She pointed toward the bed with its bullet torn sheets.

I put a forefinger through one of the holes. “What’s going on, Liz? What’s this pickup and drop and whose lives depend on it? If you want my help you’ll have to be straight with me.”

She looked at her fingers, then at me with a half smile that spoke a surrender of guile. Her voice was back to its unaffected straight-forwardness. “It’s private business, Frank. I need your help and I can’t tell you a thing more than I already have. And I’m sorry I tried playing games with you to get your cooperation.”

“That all you’ll tell me?”

“I need your help.”

I went to the window and stood looking into the darkness as I tried regulating my breathing. In the distance I could see lights from Queen Anne Island reflected on the dark sea. Everything was still. The wind had dropped. The sea was flat. The loudest sound was from the coquis. One legend says the tiny translucent tree frog, once a night bird, was stripped of its wings by a cruel and arbitrary fate, left only with its song. Ko-KEE. Ko-KEE. Ko-KEE.

I could see no advantage in helping her; only disadvantages. Indeed, my quiet life on St. Ursula could be in jeopardy if I involved myself in her problems. I’d be stupid to let that happen.

“There’s nothing I can do,” I said.

Her demeanor changed abruptly. “You’re already up to your nose in this.” Her voice was sharper, calmer, her face expressionless as she looked at me, studying my reaction.

I felt a rush of cold nausea, like the kind you get when you’re a kid and the teacher tells you the principal wants to see you right away, or see a state cop coming up behind you on the highway. The kind that comes from the undifferentiated guilt we all carry around with us. The guilt pool anyone can ladle from for us and we’ll drink it like stragglers lost in the desert.

“Wrong, lady. I’m not involved.” My words did nothing to warm the cold nausea.

“You brought me through Customs and Immigration. I was even carrying a bag of your stuff. St. Ursula is a small community and the officials knew you and saw me with you. We even drove off together in your friend’s Land Rover.”

“You set me up.” I met Liz’s quiet, steady look.

She shook her head. “I did not. It wasn’t a set-up. All I really wanted was for you to go through customs with me because I thought it would be easier, and they wouldn’t search my purse, notice my lack of luggage or check me over too closely as long as we seemed to be traveling together. You don’t have any idea how hard it can be when you’re a woman traveling alone. Later, when you gave me your card I was amused at the coincidence, you being a private detective and me being in this situation, but I didn’t have plans to use you.”

“It’s a good thing. Like I said, I do a little work around the islands, but I’m not like your movie private eyes, and I don’t do work for drug dealers and drug smugglers.”

Anger flashed across her face. Her quick words rasped in her throat. “I’m neither one.”

My own throat was tight; my anger spilled over into words. The hardness suddenly came easily and it was no act. “Can it, lady. You manipulated me at Customs. You called me in the middle of the night and said someone tried to kill you. For all I know you fired those shots into the bed.”

She flared. “That’s bullshit. You’re afraid and you’re grabbing any excuse you can.”

“Wait a minute, Ms Ford. You set me up, then you come on to me and when that doesn’t work you threaten me.”

She pushed her face into mine, her tight jaw slowly loosening. “I didn’t fire those shots and I didn’t come on to you. Not really. I tried, but I couldn’t. I’m no good at that kind of stuff.” She paused and walked back to the window where she stood looking out. Over her shoulder I could see the glittering lights of a cruise ship far off on the horizon, probably headed for St. Croix. She turned back, walking toward me, her face open and grave. “I really am in trouble. I need your help and I can’t tell you a thing more than I have. Help me. Please.”

There it was again. Please. I studied her lips, her eyes. More cautious and experienced men than I have been drawn into violence and murder by their galloping gonads, a lovely smile and clear eyes. Maybe there wasn’t electricity flashing through the air between us, but perhaps it could happen. I couldn’t stifle my suspicions, but if she really needed my help, if she was in trouble and if lives really were at stake, and I didn’t do something about it I’d be a lousy person, a lousy poet and a very lousy private investigator.

I sighed, nodded. “All right. We have to get you out of here. Come spend the night at my house. You can have the guest room. In the morning we’ll talk more and I’ll see what I can do for you, if anything.”

“You’ll help me?” There was genuine surprise and relief in her voice.

“You’ll have to convince me. I don’t want to climb out on a limb, but if you level with me about what’s going on and I believe you, maybe I’ll even do that. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to get involved in drug trafficking. If that’s what you’re into, I’m out and you’re on your own. I’ll probably even blow the whistle on you. I’m not taking any chances on getting sent to Her Majesty’s Prison, which, as I said, is a real hell hole. And, if I don’t end up there, I could end up back in the States. The government here has been known to kick people off the island for farting down wind.”

“Thanks,” she said, sitting in the chair next to her dresser.

Neither of us spoke for a time. Liz pulled a cigarette from a crushed pack she took from her purse.

“First cigarette I’ve had in five years. I’ve carried this damn pack with me ever since I quit, just in case I need one.”

She lit it, smoking less than a third before crushing the butt in an ashtray.

“Tastes terrible.” She made a face and went into the bathroom. I heard her running water and spitting. She was brushing her teeth as she came out.

“Tell me, what are you supposed to do?” I slapped my thighs and sucked my lips as I rose from my chair.

She mumbled around the toothbrush. “I’m supposed to rent a car, meet a plane at ten tomorrow night, pick up a package from the pilot and deliver it to the beach at Micah’s Bay. Somebody in a dinghy will meet me and take it. That’s supposed to be the end of it. I’ll be in the clear as soon as it’s done.”

I didn’t like it. It sounded like drugs, and the thought of getting mixed up in it conjured up visions of the inside of Her Majesty’s Prison with three foot thick cell walls, broken only by air holes so small not even a mongoose could crawl through them. The sanitary conditions were like something in the Moroccan prisons I’d heard of, years of the dark, years of the dank. A gallows stood in the courtyard upon which the island’s occasional murderer would be publicly reviled, then hanged.

It’s a rough place. There are no happy convicts on St. Ursula. Sometimes, walking through the downtown paying my bills, I pass Her Majesty’s Prison as I go between the phone company and the electric company offices and I can hear a flogging. Even muffled by those walls it’s a wet, unpleasant sound, and the voices of those being whipped, their moans and cries, their screams, stay with me long after I’m back at my Smugglers Bay retreat.

“I’ve got to be out of my mind.” I put a hand on each of her shoulders, looking directly into her eyes. Their green was startling. “You’d better not be running a scam on me.”

She looked one last time at the bed. “I’m in real trouble and I’m a nice person. A very nice person in a bad situation. You won’t regret helping me.” She put out her hand. “Thank you.”

I looked at it for a moment and then shook it. Her handshake was firm, her skin cool and dry.

In less than three minutes we were in the Gurgel headed back down Ocean Road toward my place. Before four o’clock I had the spare room set up for her, fresh sheets on the bed, the covers pulled back and inviting.

I was wiped, ready to collapse.

“What do you have to read?” She said when I finished fixing up the spare room and came into the living room where she sat on the couch. Rumble jumped up, appropriating her lap. “The lights,” she added when I gave her a quick look. “Middle of the night. If I turn the lights on they’ll keep me awake, even after they’re off. It happens every time. It’ll be hours before I get back to sleep.”

“There’s a bunch of detective novels, but they probably wouldn’t help much. How does the complete works of Erskine Caldwell strike you? One of the greatest American novelists of the Twentieth Century.”

“I’ve read everything he ever wrote.” She picked up a dog-eared copy of Hustler from the upended half a rum keg I use as a coffee table.

I watched as she ruffled the pages, pausing at the centerfold.

“You have lousy taste in magazines, Frank.”

“It’s not mine,” I lied. “Chance subscribes to it. Sometimes he brings a copy over here to read when he comes for dinner and forgets it. I didn’t even realize it was sitting there.”

“You probably like Charles Bukowski.”

“My favorite living poet,” I said.

“He’s a pig,” she said.

“He’s a poet,” I told her, ready to argue language and poetry if she said anything else derogatory about Bukowski, a self described dirty old man who wrote poems, short stories, novels, screenplays, and managed to write something beautiful from time to time. We should all be so lucky.

She nodded. “He is a poet, no doubt.”

“And that’s all the literary discussion I’ve got in me for tonight. I was jarred out of a deep sleep an hour or so ago, and if I don’t get back to sleep soon I’m not going to be able to do anybody any good.”

She remained on the couch, paging through the Hustler. I waved to her as I walked to my room. She called after me, “You’re a lifesaver, maybe literally.”

Minutes later, I lay in bed, hands folded behind my head. Outside the coquis still sang. My poetry was still in a folder on the dresser, safe from prying eyes. The ocean still sighed against the bluff. The moon still sparkled on the foam. The damp night smells of the warm Caribbean winter still filled the room, carried by the trade winds through the open archways of my home.

But it was different. The violence of the outside world had fallen on Smugglers Bay, St. Ursula. In the morning I was going to escort it around the island.

“Damn,” I said, rolling over on my side.

“Frank. You still awake?” Liz whispered loudly from the living room.

“Barely,” my eyes half open.

“What’s that sweet lovely smell coming from outside. Bougainvillea?”

“Bougainvillea doesn’t have any odor.”

It was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke again.

“Thanks again, Frank. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Yeah,” I said and shut my eyes.