“Shit,” I whispered, ducking my head and shrinking behind the irate bartender. Gilroy pointed and said something to his companion as they dropped money on the table and hurried out.
“Excuse me.” I slipped around the furiously texting woman. As I moved past her, she gave me the finger.
“Yeah, you best run! Loser!” she yelled as I exited.
Now, I know it sounds like I’m some kind of womanizer, but in my defense, I haven’t had an ounce of sex since stepping foot on St. Thomas six months ago. During my last investigation, I had one date that Dana set me up on by losing a pool game at the Normandie, but it didn’t go so well, mainly because I forgot to show up.
Bartenders on St. Thomas all knew each other, at least the females seemed to, because Duffy’s and The Normandie were about as far apart as two businesses on this rock could be. Did they have a bartender’s union or something?
Once outside, my thoughts quickly returned to the crisis of the moment. Gilroy and his buddy had split up and were speed-walking across the parking lot in opposite directions.
Gilroy found his car, ripped out of his space and sped away. The other guy was nowhere to be found, so I headed to the boat slips in hopes of finding Gilroy’s boat, if indeed he owned one.
Having nothing whatsoever to go on, I helplessly scanned the marina. One of the St. John’s ferries motored in, a mixed crowd of natives and tourists dotting the deck. The wind caught one man’s baseball cap and sent it flying into the face of a woman behind him. She laughed and handed it back.
Swinging my attention back to the parking lot, I spotted Gilroy’s companion, who gestured feverishly as he shouted into his cell phone. Anticipating he would leave soon, I hailed a cab and waited. We sat in the lot, the meter ticking away, while the gray-templed man continued his heated conversation.
He ended the call, then hopped on a motorcycle parked outside Duffy’s.
The cabby dutifully took off in pursuit of the bike on my command.
There was little traffic going out of Red Hook, so although his bike was fast, the cabby, once I promised a generous tip, kept pace. After a while we circled back around up the north side to the small road that led to only one place: the archery club Harold and Junior had taken me to.
The cab let me out at the end of the road. It was quiet and green. The only noise, the distant sound of a car motoring up a steep incline and shifting gears. My mind also shifted as I switched my focus from the Bacon family to the Bacon family business.
I couldn’t enter the archery range without a Bacon in tow, and I didn’t want this suspect to know I’d followed him. That’s what I told myself. The reality was entirely different.
Chapter 27
The Normandie hadn’t changed much in the thirty-three years I’d been around, and probably hadn’t changed much in fifty. A large plaque bearing my father’s name should have been mounted on the wall for being a lifetime donor.
Irene stood behind the bar, pouring Bacon Rum and shooting Coke from a soda gun into a glass. She plopped a skinny straw in and stirred it expertly before placing it in front of a fat guy with slicked back hair and his ass-crack showing.
“Belt’s not working,” I said before sitting two stools away.
“What?” he slurred.
I shook my head, then repeated myself.
“Hey, man, fuck you!” he said, but remained seated. “I’m too tired after a hard day or I’d ... ”
“You’d what?”
Irene slapped the bar. “Boise! What the hell? What you want?”
“What do you think?” I said.
She watched me a long moment, then turned and poured a perfect Guinness from the tap.
“Eight bucks.” All business, as expected. “I better collect now or you might forget to pay.”
She made change, and I left a couple of ones on the bar. She picked them up and dropped them into a glass pitcher full of bills.
“So what, buying a beer and a twenty-five-percent tip supposed to make up for what you done?”
“No, but I’ve also apologized.”
“Yeah, once, over twenty-four hours later. How’s that make a girl feel, you think?”
“I’m an ass, what can I say.” The Guinness tasted good. “But your girl out at Duffy’s, that was uncalled for.”
She poured some whiskey into a glass for another guy at the far end, then came back.
“I can’t stop what people do,” she said.
“Oh, so you think that’s funny?” I muttered. “Real funny. I was working. That bitch ... jerk ... blew my cover. I lost my mark.”
She was doing something behind the bar which forced her to lean forward. She wore a loose-fitting tank top and her cleavage nearly smacked me right between the eyes. I maintained eye-contact, barely. What was it about this woman? Thank God for peripheral vision. On the top of her left breast, I could make out a small red butterfly tattoo.
“Boo-hoo, what you want me to do? You be nice and shit like this don’t happen.”
“I got caught up with work. Time got away.”
“I don’t go on dates much. That was the first in two years.”
“You won the bet,” I said. “I still want to honor it.”
“You still hanging around with your little red-head?”
“Dana? We still friends, but she off on some assignment. I’m more on my own this time.”
“Good. I no like she,” Irene sneered.
“Don’t worry about her. What about you and me?”
“I liked you better when I baby-sat for you, but I always liked your father. You have his nose.”
Here I was, trying to make time with a woman who only liked me because she had some power over me and I probably only liked her because when you’re a ten-year-old boy, of course you fantasize about having sex with your baby-sitter. The ten-year age difference didn’t feel so significant anymore. Something about her having been my first crush, I couldn’t let it go.
The case was important and the iron was hot, but right now, I wanted this more. I had forgotten about the dough and the family and Pickering and Kendal. Things were primal tonight. I wasn’t even thinking about a date, I wanted to consummate, but I’d never been smooth with women. I was a slow-roller, not a close-out.
I dumped some more beer down my gullet. It didn’t help. Stuffing my hands into my crotch below the bar was the only way to keep them from shaking.
She came and went like a bad radio signal for the remainder of the evening. Sometimes it felt like reception was clear, then the next time, nothing but static. I talked about our shared past, but that was cheating and it made me seem like a kid, not a man. Things had to move away from that tip. Away from my father, too.
She was now at the corner stool, talking to a guy who kept jerking his stubbled chin at me and making a dangerous face.
“Hey! You Terry’s kid?” the guy yelled down the length of the bar at me.
Ignoring him, I sipped my whiskey. I’d switched in hopes that the harder, leathery color and flavor would harden my nerve. Balderdash. Those bullshit sayings about liquid courage—they only worked if the drinker was able to completely let go. That wasn’t me.
When Irene was getting off, I walked her to her car, but really, she walked me.
“Honey, honey, you gotta hold your liquor better if you want to hang.”
The oppressive night weighed on me. My damp shirt clung to my skin.
She asked if I was okay, but it sounded like she was at the other end of a long tunnel. My head hung low as I leaned against the cool metal of her car. The door opened, and I tumbled into the backseat.
Lights flickered through the windows. From the front of the car, Irene said, “Don’t you hurl in my backseat, mi son!” Roger Miller’s King of the Road filtered out of the speakers.
“Stop the car.” I jerked up, unlatched the door, and poked my head out as we lurche
d to a halt. Everything gushed out of me into the gutter bordering the road. Tropical places had gutters, deep and wide. As a kid I used to straddle the v-shaped cesspools on my walk to school. A gross game of dare. If you lost, your shoes wound up covered in god-knew-what, running out in the brown water.
A bazooka joe wrapper was trapped in my throw-up. Joe’s grin and indecipherable words above his ever-jeering expression. We were in front of the cemetery where Roger and my grandparents were buried.
“I gotta go see someone,” I said, getting out and pushing open the gate.
“Boise! Where you going?” Irene said. “This is enough. Come back in this car. I’m tired. I’m going home. You can crash on my couch, but I’m not coming in no ghost-yard after midnight, you hear?”
A sad headstone read “Roger Black” along with his years of life and death. No one cared to write something meaningful to remember him by, like “Beloved Son” or “You will be missed.” Roger would not be missed, except by me. Did his Auntie Glor even miss him? I remembered our sleepovers and yelling for him to come out and play through white, metal louvers. Two powerful emotions gripped me: a longing to have my friend back and the need to piss.
Scanning the yard, I tucked into a corner and pushed up against the mildewed barrier wall. It burned a little coming out, but once it was over, I sighed with relief. Irene was so close behind me, I nearly bowled her over.
“What the fuck, Irene!” I said, still zipping my fly.
“What did you say to me? You are in the corner of a cemetery after midnight pissing and you asking me ‘what the fuck?’”
Pissing had sobered me up slightly, but I figured I should play up the drunk thing a little longer otherwise this conversation would dump into serious-ville mighty fast.
“Yeah, well,” I waved my arm over the silent expanse of greenery and death, “they don’t much care.”
She watched me a second, then shrugged. “I suppose you right. So why we here?”
“I thought you were frightened.”
“I’m not scared, but I ain’t been in a cemetery at night since I was messin’ round as a teenager.”
“So, about the time you were sitting for my parents?”
She got a thoughtful look on her face, the past running behind her eyes like a light show. “Yeah, I guess I come to the graveyard once or twice when I knowing you.”
Suspicions and questions rattled like the bones of the dead.
“With whom?”
“You wanna know who I make out with in a graveyard? Don’t remember.”
“There were that many?”
“You are a little fuck, aren’t you?” she said with a devious grin. “What you really want to know? Just ask, mi son.”
The dawning sobriety got the better of my bad judgment. There were questions you didn’t ask. They flung a relationship off a cliff. Most times, relationships wore away, the steady erosion of waves pounding against limestone, until one violent day, the rock crumbled for seemingly no reason. Between the two, I preferred slow erosion, but if I asked this question, the limestone would snap off and tumble into the sea.
“Nothing. Forget it,” I said.
“That’s what I thought. All bark. You always been all bark, Boise. You haven’t changed that much.”
“You calling me a boy.”
She shrugged and started back to her car. I yelled after her, “I’m not the one who’s afraid of graveyards!”
We were parked in front of The Manner, her car idling roughly. “You wanna come up?” I offered. My shame had no bounds.
“I like you, Boise.”
“Don’t say you like me. Don’t say that.”
“But I do,” she said, her voice getting slightly higher with faulty insistence. “I always have. You were a cute kid.”
“Here it comes.”
“I have to get home. It’s late. We’re really not supposed to even be out here.”
“What, the curfew? They don’t do nothing about that,” I said thickly. “I been out after midnight so many nights.”
“You not a woman.”
“You could ... ” My third eye watched me from above, cynical and judgmental. “You could stay here. I promise to behave. Dana stayed before, you can ask her about it.”
She sucked her teeth at the mention of Dana.
“Are you jealous?” I asked.
“Jealous? Ha! Mi son, I ain’t jealous nobody. Out!” She shooed me, scraping my skin with her fingernail.
“What time do you work tomorrow?” I really was never this persistent.
“Five.”
“Five. Then what’s a little more time out with a friend. I bet you’ve known me almost as long as anyone. We go back, what twenty-three years?”
She bit her lower lip, then said, “You really are cute, just like your old man. But you look like you ten. You got some other habits from him too.”
“Oh please, you serve the shit, don’t start.”
“I do, so I won’t. You right. I even drink my share. But Terry, he could put it away.”
“Don’t say his name. Between you and that asshole at the bar, that’s two mentions in one day.”
She muttered something indecipherable.
“What?”
“Nothing. I have to get up at seven and take my little brother to school. My mom has a doctor’s appointment. You happy now? You have to know.”
Chapter 28
Harold, Junior and I arrived at the archery range at ten the next morning.
“What’s that smell?” Harold asked, getting out of the car on the still damp dirt. “One of you dudes fart or something?” He waved his hand in front of his nose. Sometimes I wondered how old Harold was.
I sniffed the shirt I’d slept in. Yup, I stunk. “Dunno,” I muttered, “don’t smell anything, but I’m not much sensitive to smell.”
“Me neither. You live in a dorm, you learn to breathe out a lot,” Junior said.
Junior’s red face was peeling, and he rubbed at his skin. A thin, sugary snow drifted to the ground.
“Maybe your skin’s rotting,” Harold said, grabbing Junior in a playful headlock and knuckling his scalp.
The guy was a fun uncle. Driving a Rav-4, rough-housing, I always wished someone had done that with me. My father’s version of roughhousing wasn’t fun. He’d try, but in his drunken anger, he’d always wind up hitting me for real before long. In general, I avoided contact. Handshaking was one of the physical ways of connecting I had painstakingly worked on over the years. It was a safe zone; a connection with little danger.
Inside the seven-foot-tall walls that resembled a medieval castle, the outdoor archery field looked like it had been freshly mowed the day before. Harold clapped everyone he met on the back and was greeted warmly. We rode his coattails. Junior was more like me, formal but awkward. He’d get better over the years. At least, that was my hope for him.
After the meeting and greeting and grabbing a beer each from the adjacent indoor shop and lounge area, we went back out to the range. There were a few familiar faces amongst others I didn’t recognize. One face eluded me. Gilroy’s accomplice.
The flirt came up, waving an arrow around.
“You back,” she said to me. She didn’t wait for my response before whapping Harold playfully on his ass with the arrow. “Hey, love. Where you been?”
Harold leaned in, loving the attention. “Nowhere and everywhere, baby.” These two were made for each other.
Scanning the rest of the shooters and their companions, I found no one that resembled the man who’d met with Gilroy the day before.
“Hey, Harold.”
Harold was whispering something in her ear. Whatever he said made her open her mouth in a large “O” and slap him lightly on his shoulder. Two slaps so far, arrow and hand. Harold took her wrist, and they headed into a small grove of banana trees in the corner of the larg
e yard.
Continuing to survey the scene, Junior tapped me on the shoulder.
“That who you’re looking for?”
It took me a moment to spot Isabelle sauntering out of a door to my left. Her distinctive hair had changed color since last we met. Today, it was a very tasteful purple and black combo.
“Where’s that she’s coming from?” I asked.
“Members call it the smoking room. A lot of the guys smoke cigars in them high-backed chairs you see in rich dude studies with buttons and paisley patterns. They got lots of bookshelves with books about archery. It’s kinda pretentious you ask me.”
Isabelle moved past us, eyes distant. Moments later, the man Gilroy had met at Duffy’s the day before also emerged from the smoking room. I knew the guy looked familiar yesterday, but with the goggles, hat, and loose-fitting clothing, coupled with my having never seen him outside this archery range, he’d managed to fool me.
“Clever,” I muttered to myself.
“Sorry?” Junior said.
“That’s her uncle and coach, right?”
“Yup, he’s everything.”
“Name?”
“Jermaine.”
The man ignored Junior and me, although he passed within two feet, close enough for me to dial in on his thinly shaved beard and the faint scent of metal. Today he wore tight-fitting athletic-ware and nothing on his eyes. The eyes were the giveaway. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Isabelle’s coach-slash-uncle was involved. Jermaine. His features were burned into my memory.
“What’s that guy’s story?” I asked without taking my eyes off the stern-faced man. He pointed at the target, punched a stop-watch and she commenced shooting again. Like some kind of archer machine-gun turning right then back to the front over and over.
“He was a champion-level dude way back they say, but his temper got the best of him. In one competition, after he lost a lead, he took his quiver and broke every arrow. The ref wouldn’t let him borrow arrows, so he was d-qued. He was the favorite to win the Pan Am Games that year. He never competed again. Now he trains her like she’s his second chance. I shudder to think what he’d do if she quit or fucked up, you know?”
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