Читать книгу February Heat - Wilson Roberts - Страница 8

I WOKE UP with a hangover at seven the next morning, threw on a bathing suit and tee shirt and walked into the living room. Liz was sleeping sprawled on the couch, her right arm thrown over her eyes, the Hustler open on the floor beside her, the light still on. Rumble was curled up beside her, his head nestled against her hip.

I like seeing a woman asleep in my house. It feels good, even in such peculiar circumstances. And it certainly was a rare occurrence. Occasionally I’ll hit it off with a woman I meet in a restaurant, or through mutual friends, but I haven’t found someone who stirred me enough to go through the complications of risk and possible commitments.

Liz was complication itself, but I had brought her and her problems into my home. Simple loneliness wouldn’t make me do such a thing. There are deeper needs. Complex needs. Something in her laugh reminded me of Lin. The Lin of long ago, before marriage and children. Before she ran off with another woman to run a college in upstate New York. The Lin of piercing intellect and sexual mystery.

I swallowed a couple of aspirins, ran out to a small local grocery, picked up some bread and sausage, bought a dozen eggs from the farmer next door to me, snatched a lime from the tree by my door, and was back in my kitchen making Bloody Marys and breakfast while Liz was still asleep.

As the sausage sizzled, popped, curled in the pan and the bread toasted in the oven, I took Liz her Bloody Mary and woke her up.

“How do you like your eggs?”

“Eggs are an abomination. Nobody should eat eggs. Their only value is for throwing at someone’s house on Halloween.” She made a face at me and took a long sip of her drink. She choked and her eyes filled with tears.

“Pretty strong Bloody,” she croaked.

“Booze is cheaper here than the mixers.”

She put it down, pulling herself upright.

“Are you still with me?”

“Making the dope switch, you mean?” I yelled over my shoulder as I went back to the kitchen.

“As I said last night, it’s really nothing like that. I thought I satisfied your suspicions.”

“No,” I said. “All I did was agree to help you out of a jam. If this is a drug deal, I am out.”

She didn’t reply. A few minutes later she came into the kitchen and sat at the table, sunlight streaming through the arched entrance to the back patio, hitting and playing with the fiery tips of her hair.

I put a plate in front of her, watching as she stabbed her sausage with a fork, slowly cutting it into small coin shaped pieces with a stainless steel steak knife.

“Whoever meets you at the beach when you make the drop might have instructions to kill you,” I said, thinking that might smoke answers from her.

“You’ll back me up, right?” She stacked four sausage coins on her fork and stuck them in her mouth.

“Why do you need backup if this isn’t a drug deal?”

She yelled at me, flecks of sausage from her mouth flying across the table. “Bail on me now or stuff it with your drug crap. I’m not a drug dealer. I’m a scholar, a teacher and a mother. I’m a decent, upright person in a jam, and I need help.”

“I could help best if I knew the details.”

She took a sip of coffee. “Don’t ask. I can’t tell you. Just trust that I’m as honest and forthright as I look, as someone with a doctorate in medieval ballads is bound to be.”

She was trying to divert me, get me talking about what a doctorate in medieval ballads might be all about. I kept on. “What do you want me to do tonight when you pick up this package of non-drugs and deposit it at Micah’s Bay?”

“You could hide with a gun. I could tell the contact you’re there and you’ve got me covered.”

I crossed the room and stood on the verandah overlooking the water. “A gun? What in the hell are you into?”

“A mess,” she mumbled.

“Whoever you’re meeting isn’t one of the good guys.”

“There aren’t any good guys in this thing, except for me. I’m the good guy trying to keep some innocent people alive. Now, have you got a gun?”

Wishing I’d taken The Native Son instead of The Yellow Bird back from St. Thomas the day before, I watched her face as I answered. “I’ve got a gun, but don’t carry it around with me. Even the cops here don’t carry guns, unless there’s a major emergency. An unlicensed, part-time private eye who’s trying to live quietly on St. Ursula could get in a lot of trouble with a gun. This isn’t St. Thomas or the States. There hasn’t been a murder here in more than five years.”

She smiled as though she had caught me. “You said they still hanged people at Her Majesty’s Prison.”

“When they have to.” I added that there hadn’t been a hanging in at least seventeen years. I didn’t mention my feelings about her having brought a big ugly chunk of the States to the island and plopping it down right on my bluff at Smugglers Bay.

“The bad guys have guns.” Her flat voice and eyes told me more than she had with all her words of evasion.

I left her standing there, went to my bedroom and got the thirty-eight from the bottom dresser drawer, removing it from a box, unwinding the oiled diaper I kept around it. I’d had the gun for a long time. I don’t like guns, but I’m good with them. The thirty-eight had saved my life on several occasions.

“I can deal with that if I have to,” I told her as I placed it on the coffee table. “It’s my only one. Sorry I don’t have one for you.”

“Do you think I need one?” Her voice rose anxiously.

“How would I know? You haven’t told much.” I grabbed her arm. “What are you expecting?”

She pulled away, rubbing her arm as if I’d contaminated it. “I’m not expecting anything and I want to be ready for anything after what happened in my hotel room.”

I threw up my arms. “Look, lady, I don’t really know you from Eve. You come into my life laying this trip on me with no explanations and you want me to tell you what I think you need? Maybe you need a shrink. Maybe you need a private army. Maybe you don’t need me. I sure as hell don’t need you and your mysterious little games.”

“I need you.” She said it plainly. No cut smiles. No hands on my arm. “I came down here thinking I could handle this on my own. Having someone try to kill me proved I can’t. Help me, Frank.”

I looked away from her, speaking out the window. “If you need me and I need my gun, you need a gun.”

She nodded. “How does that happen?”

“I’ve got an idea,” I said.

I gave up arguing with her. I’d made a commitment to help her, whatever she was into, whatever it involved doing. It didn’t make any sense, flying in the face of my years of carefully honed St. Ursula expatriate survival skills, keeping a low profile and not getting mixed up in anything that might give the authorities an excuse to kick me off the island. The only thing it didn’t fly in the face of was my mother’s oft repeated warning about my romanticism getting me into big trouble some day.

We finished breakfast. I put the scraps in Rumble’s bowl, gave him his morning ration of milk, and scratching his ears told him he had to stay home while Liz and I went to town. He was too busy eating to care.

“You talk to him like he was a child,” Liz said.

“He’s been all the family I’ve had since I moved down here,” I said. Picking Rumble up, I cradled him in my left arm and scratched his belly. He twisted his head around and stared at his half empty food bowl on the floor. “I’ve had him a long time.”

She didn’t answer as she reached over to pat Rumble’s head.

We drove to Chaucer in the Gurgel. I’d bought it six months earlier, planning to take the canvas top off. Rain and salt spray wouldn’t harm the plastic body, and I’d be able to work on my tan as I drove around. Like most stateside people who live in the islands for more than a year or so, I had about as much tan as a Vermonter in early July. With the top off I would at least have a deep tan on my head, the part of my body I’m most vain about. I keep the top shaved clean so no ugly, straggly little wisps of hair blow about. I keep the fringe cut short, but not so closely cropped you can’t see the gray beginning to distinguish my temples. I don’t let my beard get very long either.

I drove as quickly as I could, dodging potholes and other drivers. The sun was making bright reflections in the sea, forcing me to drive with one hand as I shielded my eyes with the other, cursing my stupidity for forgetting sunglasses. I was grateful for the shadow of Wise Mountain as I drove around the west shore of Pelican Bay, toward the settlement there. Glancing up I saw the television relay station at the mountaintop, looking bloated and ominous as it waited to spin its electronic web over the island.

Turning down the west peninsula of Great Harbour I pointed Chance’s boat out to Liz.

“It doesn’t look like much,” she said.

“There’s no way of telling what keeps it afloat. Chance says he has Willis Penn bless it once a year.”

“Who’s Willis Penn?”

I explained and she agreed that if everything I said was true, he just might be responsible for Chance’s good fortune with the boat.

I parked at the roadside and we walked down to the water. Huge boulders set at the harbor’s mouth formed a breakwater, reducing the Caribbean’s waves to small tidal swells, which barely moved the seaweed and flotsam at the water’s edge. Floating against the rocks were pieces of wood and fiberglass from boats and houses torn apart in the last few hurricanes. Here and there a broken mast stuck up through the water.

I pointed out the roofs still covered with canvas tarps, two years after the last major storm. When storms devastate the Caribbean they get twenty to forty seconds mention in stateside newspapers and on the network news broadcasts. When they cross the sea and hit Miami, the gulf coast, or Wilmington, North Carolina and head up the coast toward New Jersey and New England they become Major News for days as they approach and for days after they hit and wreak their havoc. Canvas tarps don’t stay on stateside roofs for very long and pieces of boats don’t float around in stateside waters any longer.

Chance’s dinghy was tied behind his boat, nearly two hundred feet off the Great Harbour dock. I stood yelling for a few minutes. I knew he couldn’t hear me over the halyards flapping loudly on the surrounding sailboats, with the sounds of wind, water, boat engines, but I yelled anyway, hoping I might raise him, not wanting to swim out there through the filthy water. The St. Ursula Legislature has never even debated the possibility of requiring boats to have holding tanks. Sanitation minded Ursulines refer to the area as Grundge Harbor. Nobody else seems to care.

Finally admitting to myself Chance wouldn’t hear me, I reluctantly took off my flip-flops and tee shirt and waded into the water. Turning, I gave Liz the resigned wave of a doomed hero.

“If I don’t come back just erect a monument in St. Luke’s churchyard in Chaucer with the epitaph, ‘drownded by turds.’”

When I climbed up the ladder on the back of The Maybelline, I checked myself to make sure there were no pieces of toilet paper clinging to me. I washed with the deck shower and went below. Chance was lying on his back snoring loudly, still wearing the “Marx and Lennon” tee shirt, huge bare feet sticking straight up, toe rings reflecting the sunlight coming through the portholes, his right arm hanging off the side of the bunk, knuckles brushing the floor.

I put a pot of coffee on the galley stove to perk and rowed the dinghy ashore to pick up Liz.

Chance hadn’t moved when we got back.

I nudged him.

Nothing.

I nudged him again.

Groan. Snort.

A third nudge.

“Fuck off!”

A fourth nudge.

“Fuck off, asshole. Shit on you. Leave me the hell alone.” He sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Oh, hi Frank. Drop dead, will you?”

“Coffee first.” I handed him a cup and poured one each for Liz and me, motioning her to join me on the outside deck. Chance needed a few minutes to pull himself together.

Drinking our coffees, we sat on two aluminum lawn chairs he kept on the deck. The Maybelline rocked with a slight constant motion, bobbing uncomfortably whenever a sailboat under power, a motor launch, or one of the many inter-island ferries passed on way to and from Tortola, Virgin Gorda St. John and St. Thomas.

Waiting on the deck for Chance, we exchanged bits and fragments of our lives. She had gone to graduate school at Penn after her first husband died, supporting herself and her daughters by substitute teaching in the Philadelphia schools. She did a doctorate in folk literature, her dissertation examining the influence of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Provençal troubadours on the later oral folk traditions of the British Isles. With her degree completed, she took a part time job teaching remedial reading and writing and an occasional freshman composition class at the community college in Bucks County. That had been seven years ago.

“And what have you been up to since then?” I asked her.

“Teaching, raising my girls, and trying to enjoy life.” Neither her voice nor her face showed evidence of much enjoyment.

“What brought you to St. Ursula?”

“Nice try, Frank.”

“You said your first husband died. First implies second. What happened to him?”

Her lips tightened. Looking away, toward shore, she shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“He involved in whatever you’re doing here?”

“I won’t talk about the bastard.”

“That was his ring you threw off The Yellow Bird yesterday, right?”

“The son-of-a-bitch.” She nodded through clenched teeth. “It was as close as I could get to throwing him off the boat.”

“At least it was legal,” I said.

We both laughed tentatively, and I changed the topic by telling the story of my divorce. I have taken a number of vows never to tell a woman the events leading up to and surrounding the breakup of my marriage. Sometimes it’s the first thing I talk about with them.

I rambled on, pointing out boats belonging to the People magazine set, small schooners and large motor yachts anchored in the middle of the harbor where, even this early in the morning, steady motor launch traffic bore the wealthy and their hangers on back and forth to Chaucer.

Half an hour later Chance finally came out, his hair combed, his beard neatly trimmed.

“Liz, Frank, good morning. Lovely day.” In the four years we’ve been friends, I’ve never seen him give into the appearance of a hangover, nor even admit he’d had one. “How are you feeling this morning, Frank?” He was smiling.

I sneered at him.

He sat on the rail facing Liz and me, sipping coffee with his pinky extended. I briefly filled him in what had happened the night before. When I finished he grinned, picking his teeth with a thumbnail.

“You thought I’d have a gun,” he said.

“I thought you might. Is that all you have to say? Don’t you want to insist Liz tells us everything before I get you involved in any of this?”

“Frank, you’ve already plunged in, or you wouldn’t be here. If you’re in, I’m in.”

I started to speak, to head him off. He waved a hand in my face and made a shushhhing sound.

“If you’re in, I’m in, no arguing about it, understand? Whatever’s going down here, if you’re going to be a hero, then I’m going to be your sidekick.”

“Understood,” I said, relieved by his willingness to help.

“Of course, it might not work,” he added. “The pattern’s all wrong.”

“How’s that,” I asked.

“Sidekicks to heroes tend to be from different races. There’s a whole theory of literary anthropology about it. You know, Huck and Jim, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Natty Bumppo and Chingatchgook, Randall McMurphy and Chief Broom. I could throw everything off balance. Ishmael and Queequeeg, Spencer and Hawk, you know?” He grinned at me, shrugging.

“Like the Green Hornet and Cato,” I said.

“Exactly. See how it works? It’s an important concept to think about before letting me plunge in. As if you could stop me.”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I don’t need literary theory.”

He nodded. “Good. Now, as for knowing the details, I don’t want to. I’ve helped too many people out, and been helped by too many people when nobody but the principal knew the details. It’s safer that way, more comfortable for me. I don’t mind working on a need to know basis.” He looked at Liz. “I assume if we need to know something, you’ll tell us, right?”

“As long as you trust me to be the judge of what you need to know and when you need to know it.”

“Of course,” Chance said, flashing me a warning sign with his thumb and forefinger when I started to object.

She thought for a long a moment before agreeing. “If I think it’s a real need. Final judgment has to be mine.”

Chance nodded at me, crooking a finger as he went inside the cabin. “Follow me.”

He lifted the lid of a trunk-like compartment under the hinged board beneath his mattress and pointed at several guns. “My cache,” he said. “Two sawed off shotguns, a flare gun, a pre-World War II Marlin twenty-two rifle, two Smith and Wesson thirty-eight Police Specials and two Ruger twenty-two target pistols.”

I rubbed my head. “I knew you’d have something, but this is an arsenal.”

He gave me his deep chuckle. “It’s not exactly heavy duty ordinance, Frank. I used to run a little smoke and other stuff back in the days when this boat had an engine and I was a little less sensible. These things have never been fired, except for the Rugers, which I use to plink at beer cans bobbing in the waves. They’ll all need cleaning and oiling.”

I reached down and picked up the Marlin.

“What do you think we’ll need?” he asked.

“Let’s take the sawed off shotguns and the thirty-eights. Then we’ll each have one.”

He ran his finger along the barrel of his thirty-eight. “Hell, let’s take them all.

Liz shook her head, running her hands through her hair. “I’ve never shot a gun.”

“Start,” Chance said, throwing a sawed-off at her. “Great gun. You just point it at someone at close range. Bang. Poof. Badguyburger.”

“You talk pretty mean for a man who only plinks at beer cans,” I said.

“I read a lot.”

He does. Chance could offer a course in American Popular Literature. He could do a great job of teaching Comparative Light Literature. He’s equally at home with the beach novels of Europe, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada. In translation, of course. The problem is he’d clutter his students’ minds with literary theory, like the crapola about Huck and Jim and Batman and Robin.

“I suppose you’ve got ammunition,” I said.

He rooted through the gun stash, pulling out six large plastic food storage bags, each double twist tied. Four were filled with shotgun shells, one had a dozen or more fifty shot boxes of twenty- two long rifle hollow points, the other contained several dozen thirty-eight slugs.

“It’s been around a while,” he said, opening a shotgun shell. “Dry as a bone.”

We took all the guns out and put them on top of the mattress. We cleaned and oiled each one and packed the guns and ammunition in a canvas duffle bag, and took the dinghy back to the dock. We tied up and were walking toward the Gurgel when L. Arthur Parker, Prime Minister of St. Ursula, crossed the road from Central Plaza.

“Good morning Fran,” he said, dropping the k from my name as he often does to annoy me. “And Chance, my friend, how are you?” He bowed slightly to Liz, mostly in a rather obvious attempt at sizing up her body.

Although Parker and Chance were in business together some years before, back in the days when The Maybelline had a working engine, L. Arthur Parker has never known whether Chance was a first or last name. Chance has always said L. Arthur would deport him for that alone, were it not for their old business connections.

“Good morning Mr. Prime Minister.” I don’t quibble with him over his mispronunciation of my name. Chance says I don’t even get The Edge with Parker. With good reason. He could get me deported for having too much gray in my beard. Civil rights for non-citizens on St. Ursula is not one of the Government’s high priority items. Besides, he does it on purpose, demonstrainge my insignificance in his world.

The Prime Minister was wearing a pastel pink guayaberra shirt, its square cut bottom hanging over beige polyester pants. A pair of open toed sandals completed the outfit. A thick black mustache almost obscured his upper lip. Setting his attaché case on the pavement he stood more erectly than usual, trying to equal Chance’s height. He almost succeeded.

“Who is your lovely friend, Fran?”

“Forgive my rudeness,” I said. “Mr. Prime Minister. Elizabeth Ford, Ms. Ford, the Honorable L. Arthur Parker, Prime Minister of the Independent British Island of St. Ursula.”

“Charmed, Ms. Ford.” L. Arthur Parker gave her another slight bow and pressed the back of her hand to his lips, gently kissing her fingertips.

He had her. Guys like him always do. I’ll never understand it. The strongest, most independent, most autonomous woman in the world can act like a jackass for a guaranteed eight and a half seconds after having her hand kissed by someone who bows slightly at the waist. Thirteen seconds if the guy is a Prime Minister.

L. Arthur Parker happens to be a slick Prime Minister. He is slender and tall with deep brown eyes flashing with articulate intelligence. Educated in anthropology, languages and mathematics at Cambridge he has doctorates in both anthropology and medicine from Harvard. He had been working on a post-doctoral fellowship at Berkeley, studying social factors in disease, when his father died and he came home to oversee the family investments, which included extensive real estate holdings throughout the Caribbean and a small private mental hospital on St. Ursula where the emotional and addictive problems of the very wealthy are treated with extreme privacy and comfort. He ran for the Legislature after a couple of years and is now in his third term as Prime Minister.

Shortly after his return he married Vivian Bothwell. Ronald Bothwell, her father had been the British governor here in the mid-Sixties. He retired from the Foreign Service to a house he built on The Knob at East End, overlooking Deadman Beach, next to Parker’s palatial home.

L. Arthur is an operator, but he isn’t a bad Prime Minister. The roads are in good repair and, with few exceptions, all paved. The potholes I had been dodging lately were the results of unusually heavy winter rains, and already many had been filled. Garbage is picked up daily. The island has full employment, and a well managed program of social services, most of them paid for by taxes and fees collected from tourists, especially those who keep their expensive boats registered in Ursuline waters.

“I certainly hope you will allow Mrs. Parker and me to entertain you and Ms Ford at dinner in a week or so.”

“Mr. Prime Minister, we’d be honored,” I said.

“Wonderful.” He pulled an appointment calendar from his back pocket. Shaking his head, clucking his tongue, he said, “It’s distressing how busy things get. Would Tuesday the twenty-eighth be all right?”

“Perfect,” I said, shaking his hand. He kissed Liz’s fingertips for a second time, picked up his attaché case and crossed back to Central Plaza, where he had a corner suite of offices in the third floor of the gold domed Government House his administration had just completed building. It was by law the tallest structure on the island, three stories with a one story cross at the top. The Prime Minister’s personal office overlooked the entire government square and its adjacent harbor.

“I won’t be able to have dinner with him on the twenty- eighth,” Liz said.

“Maybe. Then again, this whole thing, whatever it is, could be over by then, and you’ll be down here for a relaxing vacation, lolling on the beach with me, doing all the restaurants and bars. That’s going to be my fee for all this, you know.”

“Fee? I never thought of a fee.” She laughed as she said it.

I stroked my beard. “Private investigating isn’t cheap, you know. At the least I expect you to come back down here and stay at my place while we paint the island red.”

“You’re a nice man, Frank, but I’ll pay your fee in cash, as soon as I can afford it.”

The tension in her voice, the set of her jaw prompted me to drop it. My own tension level was high enough. I didn’t like any of this, but I was growing to like who I was getting into it with. Keeping my mouth shut was the best move I could think of right then. We loaded the duffle bag in the back seat of the Gurgel with her and drove off.

Ten minutes later we pulled into my driveway. It was pouring rain. Splashing through flooded potholes, the three of us soaked to the skin, wet clothes and hair clinging to us, we bellowed out the theme song to Gilligan’s Island in three-part harmony, two madmen and a madwoman screaming musical defiance at absurdity and violence.

Halfway down the drive we stopped.

Rumble’s head was impaled on a bamboo pole stuck into a mud puddle in the lane, his tongue sticking out, his upper lip curled back in a snarl.

The body was hanging neck down from a rope tied around the rear legs, anchored to a nail above my front door, a pool of blood already caking beneath it. Flies were buzzing. Chance and Liz stood behind me. They were quiet, but I could hear their shaken breathing.

Turning away, I sat on the steps of the verandah, my head buried in my hands as I wept for the little dog I had raised from a puppy, and had fought as bitter a custody battle for as most people do over children in their divorces.

In both my Springfield apartment and on St. Ursula, Rumble had been my closest companion, running, often hopping after me on his short muscular legs as we walked through the bush. He would lie on the beach with me or hang out in bars, scamming food, wriggling, nosing, making small noises until he succeeded in needling someone into petting him or tossing a stick, a piece of broken shell or pebble for him to fetch. Chance had said on many occasions he would walk into the Tabard, the Deck, Long Johns, one or another of our favorite haunts, and someone would be sure to say, ‘Hey, where are Rumble and Frank?’

“I’m sorry, Frank.” Liz put her hands on my shoulders, kneading them as she spoke.

“Mean fucking thing,” Chance said. “Takes someone with rot shot right through his soul to do this.”

Liz said, “I’m afraid this is because of me.”

My throat tight, choking back my sobs, I didn’t say anything. Walking around the porch to the ocean side of the house, I stood in the full midday heat, the sun on my head, watching the Caribbean crash along the shore of St. Ursula. I could see the tip of the western peninsula of Great Harbor. Across Pelicans Passage, Queen Anne Island rose, quiet, unspoiled, save for the Paradise Isle complex. There is only one road there, unpaved, running for a five-mile stretch along the southern shore. The remainder of the island’s byways are for donkey and human foot traffic.

The sun was bright on the water. I shaded my eyes.

“Go inside, Frank.” Chance had come up behind me. Putting his hand around my shoulder, he spoke softly. “I’ll take care of him.”

I rubbed my eyes and shook my head. “No. He’s mine. Leave me alone. You go inside.”He hugged me as I walked by him, into the house.

The living room was dark after the sunlight, but things seemed to be in order. I had been afraid Rumble’s murderer might have trashed the house. The fact it had not happened somehow made the slaughter all the more calculated and threatening. If the inside had been vandalized it would have been easier to mark it all up to some kind of madness, even though it wouldn’t have taken away any of the pain or stopped my tears.

I pulled the bottom drawer from my dresser. Dumping the clothes on the floor, I lined it with a quilt my great grandmother had made. Taking it outside I set it on the porch and eased Rumble’s body down from the doorjamb. It was cool. His legs were already stiff. I had to forcibly bend them to place him in the drawer.

Wrapping the quilt around him, I sat next to the drawer for a few minutes, my hand under the cover petting his stomach as I wept. When the tears dried I picked up the drawer and carried it awkwardly down the drive, the quilt hiding its contents.

When I reached to the pole in the driveway I set the drawer on the ground. I stared at Rumble’s face with its dull and frozen eyes. Quickly scratching the top of his nose, I put a hand on either ear and pulled upward, gently, as though a sudden jolt might hurt him.

The head did not move. I pulled harder. The bamboo pole pulled out of the ground, the head still attached.

I howled. I roared obscenities at the air. I stamped my feet, dancing in a circle of rage, hooting, snorting, rasping incomprehensible syllables through my throat

When my raged eased I saw that I was sitting on the ground looking into Willis Penn’s brown eyes, my lips pressed against the top of Rumble’s head, Willis’ hands holding the opposite end of the bamboo. He twisted it gently, releasing the head.

Opening the quilt, I placed the head in the drawer, as close to the neck as I could, and covered him again.

“This was made to look like a West Indian warning,” Willis Penn said. “But the pole gives them away. A St. Ursulan would leave both parts of the body lying on your porch.”

“Why would anybody do something like this? I don’t understand. He was just a dog. A sweet little dog.”

“I do not know, Frank. But nobody is going to get near enough to your house to do you any more harm. The others and I, we will watch. This is a bad thing and I do not approve of bad things, you know.” He smiled and slipped into the thick bush along the drive, the green vegetation closing around him, the leaves still within seconds of his passing.

I buried Rumble in a shallow grave, piling it high with rocks covered with flowers. The style of his death may have been phony West Indian, but his burial was the real thing.

It was three o’clock when I was finished. I could have used a drink, several drinks, many drinks. I could have gone to bed, pulled the covers over my head, shut my eyes and gone away from the world for a few days. I stood over the cairn I had erected over Rumble’s grave. My breath slowed. The beating of my heart returned to normal. My raged cooled into blue ice as I thought of finding whoever had done this. Turning back toward my house where Liz and Chance stood on the gallery, watching me, I waved and walked toward them with determination. We had plans to make.