Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02 (32 page)

We lay there. We listened to each other breathe. It got hotter.

Cumbaa said, “At least it’ll be fast. No warning. It’ll just happen. Boom fucking boom.”

“That’s a comfort.”

Minutes passed. We heard nothing except each other. Monk was still in the house.

Cumbaa said, “I didn’t have a choice. He dragged me up here. But you knew what you were walking into. Why’d you do it?”

“Didn’t want you to hog all the glory.”

He said, “That’s good. Because for a minute there I thought you cared about me.”

“Well, I have grown attached to you.”

Cumbaa groaned.

He said, “That was fucking awful.”

“Best I could do.”

And then, a slight motion of the car. We went quiet, waiting.

The trunk lid popped open, rose just enough to let in a sliver of light.

We waited.

The trunk lid rose, letting in more light. I couldn’t see out; Cumbaa could.

I heard him rasp, “Who the fuck are you?”

And then a quiet voice: “I am Boggy.”

After that, we didn’t talk. Boggy’s knife made quick work of the tape, and Cumbaa scrambled out of the trunk. It was tougher for me. Every movement was pain, but I managed to roll over, onto my back, then onto my side. I hung one leg over the trunk gate, then the other, and I was out, Boggy easing me to the ground.

Otee crouched by the rear fender, the Browning in his waistband, a rifle trained on the door of the house.

Through the big window I could see Monk inside, gathering tools from the table, maybe having more trouble opening the vault than he’d imagined. Then the sound of him hammering away.

Boggy tapped Cumbaa on the shoulder and pointed to the trees: Go there.

And Cumbaa scurried off, keeping low, letting the Mercedes stay between him and the house.

Boggy came to my bad side, got one arm around me, and together we followed Cumbaa. Otee brought up the rear, backing away from the house.

I stumbled once, almost went down, but Boggy kept me steady. When we were out of earshot of the house, I said: “How’d you find us?”

“The boy, Terrance,” he said. “He drove up here once with his brothers and Cuddy Banks. They thought maybe to rob the place, but the two men were here and they turned around.”

We made it to the woods and a small clearing. There, stretched out under a gumbo limbo tree, was Ramin. He was bloody and battered, just barely conscious. Hamil was tending to him. The boy, Terrance, sat nearby.

Boggy said, “We were just turning on to the dirt road when we heard the explosion. We stopped the car and got out and came through the trees until we met the stream. The two of them had already pulled themselves out of the car. We helped them out of the gully. I think the one, he will be alright.”

I looked at Terrance.

“Thanks for your help,” I said. “Wasn’t for you we wouldn’t have gotten out of there.”

He nodded.

“I’m going to make it worth your while,” I said.

He nodded again, this time with a little more enthusiasm.

Otee moved into the clearing.

He said, “Dat man back there in da house, dat Monk?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s him.”

Otee let out air.

“Cho, mon. First ting me saw him me tink dat’s Monk’s duppy, ’cause him look like Monk but him don’t. Got dem scars on his face and what-all. Dat da way a duppy look, all torn up and put back together. Gave me a mighty chill, mon,” said Otee. “Because today, you know, it marks nine days.”

Nine days. I didn’t understand at first. And then I thought back to the evening I arrived at Libido, when Otee had come to my cottage and sprinkled the salt and tobacco seed around the porch.

After someone dies their duppy has nine days to roam. Nine days until the duppy can rest.

Cumbaa moved to where I was standing with Otee and Boggy. He said, “So what now?”

The answer came for us—a mighty explosion that shook the trees and rocked the ground.

We looked to the house—windows blown out, a gaping hole
where the door used to be. We watched as the roof collapsed onto the second floor and the walls fell in on themselves. Rubble and dust and doom.

Then silence.

Nine days since Monk had “died.” Now he could rest.

Three weeks and one arthroscopic surgery later, the knee had mended to the point where I could get in a car and go somewhere as long as it wasn’t me doing the driving.

It was the first Saturday in October and nothing short of glorious. Barbara wanted us to put down the top on Yellow Bird, her sweet little 450 SL, a 1979 that had just notched 130,000 miles. But I couldn’t stretch out my leg in it, so she drove my Wagoneer.

It was a good day to bail out of LaDonna. The place was swarming with members of the International Palm Society, all there to witness the wonder of my fruiting carossier. What had started as Karly Altman’s little gathering had grown into a weekend-long event with guest speakers and seminars and guided tours through Chasteen Palm Nursery, conducted by Karly and Boggy.

Barbara and I had hosted a Friday evening cocktail party at the house, attended by half the staff from Fairchild Botanical Gardens, along with field horticulturists who had flown in from as far away as Kew Gardens in London, and some folks who could only be described as certified palm nuts. The wind was light and the bugs off the lagoon were bad, but there was plenty to drink and, in addition to oysters roasted under a burlap bag
on the grill, I had gone all out and made a giant batch of my world-famous conch fritters. Everyone left late and left happy.

After road wins at Mississippi and Auburn, the Gators were at home again, this time against South Carolina. It was a 2
P.M.
game, and we headed out early so we’d have plenty of time to tailgate before kickoff.

Earlier in the week Ed Kilgore, from the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department, had given me a call. He’d wanted us to sit down and talk, just so he could wrap up things on his end. I wasn’t much in the mood for dropping by the sheriff’s department, so Kilgore came to me. We sat behind the Wagoneer, in the shade of the oak trees at Norman Hall. There was fried chicken, black-bean-corn-sweet-pepper salad, and Barbara’s favorite—pimento cheese and arugula sandwiches on nine-grain bread.

Barbara looked dazzling. She was wearing a creation from Ali Whitehall, part of a line that would soon grace Ali’s Place, Libido’s newest boutique. And she was in an ebullient mood. Before leaving Jamaica we’d dined twice with Darcy Whitehall. Much as I expected, he’d been smitten with Barbara, and he’d signed a two-year contract to buy the back cover of
Tropics.
It was the kind of commitment that could only bode well. Barbara felt sure that other big advertisers would soon be coming aboard as well. To hell with Aaron Hockelmann anyway.

As for Ed Kilgore, he was mostly interested in how Monk had managed to sneak the fake bomb into the skybox at Florida Field. I went through everything with him, right up to the explosion at the old house off Dunkirk Road.

“Scotty Connigan was worried that someone would break into the house and find the money that he and Skingle had extorted from the other resorts. So he’d rigged the vault to explode if anyone managed to pry it open,” I said. “It wasn’t meant for Monk, but it got him all the same.”

“Sounds like one hell of a blast.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was all that.”

“But what about the money? It get destroyed, too?”

I shook my head.

“Nah, there were two vaults. The one on top held the explosives.
The one underneath it, the money. The second one got dinged pretty good, but it held.”

“So what happened to the cash?”

I reached for a big Tupperware container in the back of the Wagoneer, and said, “How about some more fried chicken, Ed.”

We got to our seats just as the band was playing the Alma Mater. Then came “The Star Spangled Banner.” When it was over the guy sitting in front of us turned around to Barbara.

“Been looking for you,” he said. He reached below his seat and came up holding a book—
A House for Mr. Biswas.
“I grabbed it on my way out when they cleared the stadium at the Tulsa game.”

Barbara was beside herself. She squealed and gave the guy a hug. His ears went red. She has that effect on guys.

The teams lined up for the kickoff. South Carolina received and the ball came out to the twenty on a touchback.

Barbara tucked away the book and started reading a copy of
The Independent Florida Alligator,
only the best student newspaper in the world.

South Carolina tried a pass. It went incomplete.

“Oh my,” said Barbara. “There’s a story here about Alan Whitehall.”

“About him winning the seat in Parliament?”

We’d already heard the news. It had come out of Jamaica earlier in the week. Alan had gathered nearly 60 percent of the vote in Northern Trelawny. In his victory speech, he’d reached out to Kenya Oompong and Nanny’s People United, offering
Oompong a key position on a parish council for social reform. She’d turned it down, of course. Kenya Oompong was one of those pot-stirrers who works better from the outside.

“It mentions the election,” said Barbara. “But mostly it’s about his work with Homes for the People. Seems they’ve just received a major donation that will allow them to extend their work to other islands.”

She read from the paper: “The donation, in the amount of one million dollars, came from Guamikeni Enterprises, LLC, a Bermuda-based philanthropic organization.”

Barbara stopped reading. She looked at me.

“Guamikeni. Isn’t that a Taino word?”

“It is,” I said.

“And doesn’t Boggy sometimes call you that?”

“He does,” I said. “Means ‘Lord of Land and Water.’ It’s a little joke between the two of us.”

South Carolina went three-and-out and had to punt. The ball went out of bounds on the Gator thirty-seven.

Barbara folded the paper and put it under her seat.

She said, “So why Bermuda, Zack?”

“Freddie Arzghanian suggested it. He said the offshore banks that run out of Bermuda are the most reputable. They even provide top-notch accountants if the IRS starts asking questions, to prove that everything is on the up-and-up.”

“As up-and-up as it can be if you are dealing with Freddie Arzghanian.”

“Freddie’s an honorable guy, at least to those who are honorable to him. Besides, it was a one-time deal,” I said. “Call it a finder’s fee.”

“A nice one?”

“Very nice.”

“So what other charitable organizations will Guamikeni Enterprises be making donations to?”

“Oh, we’ve made several already. Sent a nice check to Annie DeVane, enough to buy a house for her and her kids. Sent a little something to this woman Altycia Andrews and her son, Terrance, who live just outside of Mo Bay. Otee got a little something. We spread it around a few other places, too.”

The Gators broke from huddle and came out to the ball.

Barbara said: “Well, that sounds very generous of you. But is there any left?”

“Oh, I’ve got a little cushion,” I said.

The quarterback dropped back, pumped to the right, then hit the flanker, a true freshman out of Belle Glade, who went all the way for the score.

The crowd was on its feet. With Barbara’s help, I stood up, too. Slowly because of the knee. But it would be alright. Everything would be alright.

We cheered.

Read on for an excerpt from
Bob Morris’s

Bermuda Schwartz—

the new
hardcover from
St. Martin’s/Minotaur

He knows he will die. No use fighting it now.

“Where is it, Ned?” his killer says.

The words sound far away, as if he were lying at the bottom of a well and someone was calling down to him.

It reminds him of when he was a boy. Three, maybe four. Delirious with fever. Meningitis.

His mother and sister stand by his bed
.

“Is Neddie going to die?” his sister says.

“Shhh,” his mother quiets her.

And then the sound of his sister crying.

He remembers how he pulled himself back to them, willed himself not to slip away, crawled out of that deep, dark well to where he belonged.

But now . . . there is nothing he can do.

“It’s still down there, isn’t it?” his killer says.

He doesn’t try to answer. His body is shutting down. All that is left of him has retreated to a small safe place, a place beyond fear, beyond pain.

The boat engine idles. He can feel it throbbing through the deck, hear its low rumble. The sound is comforting.

It makes him think of Polly. Her and her yoga. How she talked him into practicing it with her.

It felt good to stretch, to sweat. And to watch Polly, so graceful, so beautiful.

What he couldn’t handle was the part, at the very end of a session, when they had cooled down, and Polly would fold her hands, as if in prayer, close her eyes and start in with that “Om” business.

“You’re supposed to chant with me,” she would say. “It’s the universal hum, our connection with the life force.”

He would try, really he would.

“Ommmm. . . .”

But it was too hippy-dippy for him. He would start laughing. And Polly, unable to help herself, would start laughing, too.

He loves her. Their time together has been so brief.

The rumble of the engine. . . .

He tries to match its tone.

“Ommmm. . . .”

“What’s that, Ned?” his killer asks. “You trying to tell me something?”

He feels his killer close to him.

“Ommmm. . . .”

“Sorry, Ned. You’re not making any sense. But that’s okay. I know what I need to know. And I think it’s still down there. Else, why would you have come back, eh?”

He feels tightening in the ropes that bind his arms and legs.