At the back of the house, we hugged the wall, listening.
Nothing. Not a sound.
“I fear we’ve come on a wild goose chase, Yank,” O’Davis whispered.
“Maybe. I just want to get a look at that car in the garage.”
We slipped around to the side. I tested the garage door quietly. It was locked. I motioned with my hand, and the Irishman followed me to the front of the house. Something bothered me about the windows of the house—and that’s when I realized what.
They were dark, all right.
Too dark. Far too dark for a moonlit night. Someone had covered them—from the inside. A very strange thing to do.
The front entrance was a formidable gate of two huge doors with a giant brass latch. The thin hand of illumination that came from beneath the doors told me what I wanted to know.
Someone was inside, all right. And they sure as hell didn’t want anyone to know they were there.
“I think we’re on to something,” I whispered.
“Aye. But if me friend Hubbard was right, we may have jest stumbled onto a drug deal.”
“Could be. Or maybe they have the kid. We have to get inside and see. There were some French doors at the rear. I should be able to jimmy the lock.”
Silently, we returned to the backside of the house. I used my Randall knife. I pried at the lock, jamming the blade between the doors. The windows weren’t covered here—they had blacked out only the front part of the house. When the lock snapped, I opened the door an inch or so and slid my hand carefully up and down the edge of it, looking for a wire that might trip a burglar alarm.
There was none.
I put the knife back in its scabbard and stepped into the darkness of the house, Thompson submachine gun at hip level, ready.
O’Davis was a huge crouching shape behind me.
We were in some kind of den. The furniture was covered with sheets. The place smelled of mildew and old books. As my eyes adjusted, I could see the plasticine shapes of mounted game fish on the wall. The dead Canadian had been a “sportsman.”
It was a huge house. We made our way through a dark maze of hallways, through the linoleum expanse of kitchen, to another hall illuminated by the filtering light from the front room. We could hear faint voices now. Soft laughter. Animated conversation.
We ducked back into the kitchen quickly when a shape covered the hallway and came our way.
O’Davis and I waited on each side of the open doorway. I took my knife out, poised and ready.
There was the sound of a door slamming. A long pause. Then a toilet flushed.
The figure returned up the hall to the front room.
“We’ve got to get closer,” I whispered. “We’ve got to hear what they’re saying. If it’s about drug running, we’ll get the hell out and leave it to the police. If it’s about the kid, we’ll take them.”
“But not until we hear where they have him,” the Irishman warned. “Can’t take a chance of gettin’ the lad killed.”
I nodded. O’Davis was right. We had to take our time, plan our moves, and be very, very damn careful.
This was no time for a cavalry charge. Maybe the murderer of the Irishman’s lost lady, Cynthia Rothchild, was among them. But taking his life in revenge wasn’t nearly as important as saving the life of the kid.
“We’ll move down the hall, room to room.”
O’Davis nodded in the darkness.
The Irishman went first. When he motioned, I slid through the weak hall light, leapfrogging to the next room. It was a huge house. More furniture covered with sheets, more wooden crates. We moved noiselessly. What sound we did make was covered by the animated conversation in the main room.
At the end of the hall we ducked under a massive staircase. We could hear the voices clearly now. I held up an open palm toward O’Davis, telling him to stop. I waited for another outburst of laughter, then poked my head around the base of the stairs.
There were six men sitting around a massive oak dining table. A huge Canadian flag, red with white maple leaf, hung over a stone fireplace. There were charts hung on the wall, and more mounted fish. A layer of dust seemed to cover everything but the table.
A black man with a shaved head and a red scarf around his neck sat at the head of the table. His facial features suggested some Spanish inbreeding. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache and a handful of gaudy rings.
He dominated the conversation. Probably Onard Cribbs, the Jamaican that Hubbard MacDonnel had told us about. He had a sinister look about him: a smile that was more of a sneer and wild, unbalanced eyes.
The other five men were a ragged mixture of American and Jamaican accents. The guy with the long blond hair I had seen walking across the lawn looked to be about twenty-one, the youngest at the table. He had a prunish, feminine mouth and a row of bad teeth. Another white man sat beside him. Strictly American: expensive slacks and shirt with Playboy-style gold chains and flat computer watch. His face, crenellated with old acne scars, was shadowed with bluish stubble—the kind of beard that demands shaving three times a day.
These two sat together. They seemed nervous, anxious. Their laughter was forced. They shared a pack of Winstons, chain-smoking and stabbing the butts out in a heaping ashtray. A six-pack of Bud sat on the table, two cans left in the plastic harness.
The other three men were black. They wore ragged colorful clothes and no shoes. Two of them had the red, yellow, and green flag of Ethiopia sewn on their sleeves. The other wore no shirt. They all had bushy braided beards and long marled hair rowed into dreadlocks.
There was little doubt the three of them were Rastafarians, the Jamaican political/religious cult that preaches black supremacy, violence, and the daily use of marijuana. They call it the Wisdom Weed.
They passed a huge joint between themselves, never offering it to Cribbs or the two whites at the table. Their eyes were glazed, like huge black marbles. Their bag of ganja sat atop a long-barreled .357 on the table before them.
A friend of mine from Kingston had told me once about the Rastafarians. This was years after he and other hardworking blacks like him had been chased off that cesspool of an island by the thieves and lunatics. At the turn of the century a Jamaican named Marcus Garvey appointed himself the prophet of the black race. He predicted the birth of a black Messiah and the return of his followers to their homeland, Africa. He said his followers would inherit the earth—at the point of a gun. In the 1930s, the coming of a black king to Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, seemed a fulfillment of the first of Garvey’s prophecies. The blacks living in abject Jamaican poverty embraced him as a god. They began styling themselves after Ethiopian warriors, with hair braided into spiked vertical strands using animal dung as an adhesive, and smoking the Wisdom Weed.
They refused to work—for themselves or anyone else. And as poverty increased in Jamaica, so did the Rastafarian following. And so did crime. Theft became a way of life, and the murder of a white or a non-Rastafarian was hailed as a step toward Haile Selassie’s prophecy of black unity.
I felt my breath coming soft and shallow.
If these were the kidnappers of fourteen-year-old Tommy James, he would be killed ransom or no ransom.
I looked at O’Davis. He nodded, the resignation plain on his face. He knew what we were up against. I made a calming motion with my hand. He nodded again. There was nothing to do but wait and listen.
“So it’s all settled then, eh, gentlemen?” It was Onard Cribbs. His shaved head mirrored the light from the overhead lamp.
“I think so,” said the white man in the expensive clothes. The crispness of his voice couldn’t hide the apprehension in his voice. He obviously didn’t like doing business with the three Rastafarians. “If the rest of the goods are of the same quality as the sample, then we will pay your . . . friends three hundred thousand cash upon delivery.” He hesitated. “But I want Dirk here to test it before loading, if you don’t mind.”
One of the Rastafarians looked up quickly
. The other two paused in their smoking, eyes registering something lethal. “You no trust us, mon?”
“It’s not that. It’s just—”
“We can sell this heroin somewhere else, mon! Don’t need your shit, see?” The spokesman for the Rastafarians had a high raspy voice, thick with Jamaican accent.
The guy in the expensive clothes lit another cigarette and gave Onard Cribbs a nervous look, asking for help.
The black man with the shaved head stepped in, the smile more of a sneer. “Gentlemen, let’s not argue this late in the game, eh? Mr. Morro, you say your transport boat is offshore waiting?”
The man in the expensive clothes, Morro, checked his watch. “It should have arrived half an hour ago. Just off the reef line.”
I remembered the diesel engines and the ship without lights I had heard on the way out.
Onard Cribbs looked at the Rastafarians. “And I know the merchandise is here, because I helped unload it last night. So what’s the problem, gentlemen? A simple transaction, no?”
“Just don’t want no shit, mon.”
“You have to understand that Mr. Morro has his investment and his investors to protect—”
“Don’t give a damn about his honky investors, mon! He either want the stuff or he no want the stuff!” The Rastafarian’s speech was loud and incoherent. Quietly, the black man beside him had been inching his hand toward the .357.
Morro noticed. “We want it,” he said quickly. “We want it. You’ll get your money after the stuff is loaded.”
“Want it before, mon. Want to count it before. Then you load it.”
Morro was perspiring. Onard Cribbs seemed to be enjoying the scene. As middleman, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
I ducked back in behind the stairs feeling only disgust. It was becoming all too clear that we had stumbled onto a heroin deal, plain and simple. They had made no mention of the kidnapped boy. And we had given them plenty of time.
It was time to retreat. It was time to let these modern-day pirates go ahead with their deal. We would leave it to the Cayman police force.
But there was one more thing I wanted to check.
That silver sports car in the garage. Someone had taken shots at me, and if it was Onard Cribbs, I wanted to know why.
Using hand signals, I told O’Davis to stay. His expression asked why. He was as anxious to get the hell out as I was. I made a steering motion with my hands. He nodded his understanding.
I waited until they began arguing again before moving. I slid down the hall to the kitchen. It smelled of rancid grease. I stopped, trying to get my bearings. It seemed like the garage entrance should be right off the kitchen.
It was.
The door was swollen. It creaked as I swung it open. There were no windows on the garage door, and the place was pitch black.
I reached into the pocket of my commando knickers. They were still wet. I screwed down the lens cap of the little flashlight. It threw a concentrated beam. The garage floor was made of cement. It was piled with junk.
In the corner by the door were two wooden crates. The top of one of the crates was jimmied. My curiosity got the best of me. I lifted the top completely off.
In the crate were a half-dozen plastic sacks. They were stuffed completely full, like kapok in a cheap flotation jacket.
With my Randall knife, I sliced one of the bags open. The heroin came pouring out, as white and soft as flour.
One by one, I knifed the other bags.
If we were lucky, the Americans and the Rastafarians would spend enough time arguing over who had done it to give the Cayman police a chance to get here and arrest them tonight. It might have been a silly thing to do, but I felt frustrated—frustrated because I had seen the car.
It was silver. And a sportscar.
But it wasn’t a Jaguar. It was an old Mercedes. And it seemed to clear Onard Cribbs and his associates of any involvement in the kidnapping of little Tommy James and the murder of Cynthia Rothchild.
I was about to go back into the house and get the Irishman. It was time for us to get the hell away; to leave these drug runners to the cops.
But that’s when I heard the heavy ker-whuff of the .357 in rapid fire. And then the hair-raising screech of a dying man.
12
I dropped the flashlight and unslung the Thompson submachine gun.
I went running through the darkness of the garage, tripped, fell, and was immediately on my feet again.
I could hear animated voices. Loud Jamaican accents. I didn’t take my time now. And I didn’t worry about making noise.
I went crashing through the kitchen and down the hallway. Then I could see the Irishman still hiding behind the staircase. He was motioning wildly at me. And then I realized they hadn’t been shooting at O’Davis. They had obviously gotten into a fight among themselves. And O’Davis was telling me to be quiet; to hide and let them fight it out.
But it was too late. They had heard me coming. One of the Rastafarians crossed the distant space of the hallway, crouching when he saw me. I saw his arms jump as the .357 exploded. Plaster stung my face. I dove, rolled, and came up firing. The sound of the old Thompson made my ears ring. The Rastafarian went jolting backward, crashing through a window.
Realizing we had no alternative but to fight it out, the Irishman jumped from his hiding place.
“Freeze! Hold it!”
“Bust, mon! Goddamn cops!”
Another of the Rastafarians appeared from behind a chair with a clear shot at the Irishman. I had just hit the mouth of the hallway at full sprint. His sudden appearance startled me. But my unexpected arrival distracted him just long enough to save O’Davis.
I crashed into him in midstride, knocking the revolver out of his hand. He went down with a hoarse whoofing noise. There were more gunshots, answered by the deafening rattle of the Irishman’s Thompson. I had the Rastafarian on his back. He grabbed for my weapon, trying to wrestle it away from me. He had his head tilted back, trying to bridge me off. I hit him with an overhand right flush on the Adam’s apple, putting my weight behind it.
His eyes bugged and he clawed at his throat.
And then he lay still.
I heard the sound of crashing glass and jumped to my feet in time to see Onard Cribbs disappearing through a shattered window.
O’Davis raised his weapon to fire. I grabbed the barrel and shoved it away.
“There’re enough corpses around here,” I said.
His big Irish face was flushed with combat. He nodded his agreement.
There were, indeed, enough bodies.
The blond kid with the bad teeth, Morro’s chemist, rested his head upon the table as if asleep. The pool of blood in which it rested said he would never wake up.
“They planned on killing them all along,” the Irishman said thickly. “Cribbs had to be in on it. Even I could see it coming.”
“The Rastafarians?”
“Aye.” He motioned to the floor where Morro lay, his chest a spongy mass of crimson. “No great loss, killin’ the likes of him. They shot ’im when he stood ta shake hands, closin’ the deal. The blond kid didna get a word out before they shot ’im. Figured I’d jest let ’em go about killin’ each other till you came crashin’ in. Kind o’ glad ya did, Yank.”
The Irishman had killed the third Rastafarian. He was sprawled in a heap on an overturned couch.
“No honor among thieves,” O’Davis said. “Musta planned on killin’ the Americans all along, then hijackin’ the boat with the money.”
“Must have,” I said. I felt the old depression that always sweeps over me in a wave after I have contributed to the unreasonable loss of someone’s life.
I studied the bodies of the three Rastafarians. Born into poverty in some Jamaican shithole, what chance did any of them really have? And who wouldn’t have grabbed at the first religion that promised them escape—escape and the emotional relief of drugs?
They had been victims. My victims
. Life’s victims.
Still, there must come a time when excuses are of little consequence; a time when every man must stand accountable for the sum total of self. And I am not talking about the Christian Judgment Day, either. No matter what a man’s past, no matter how desperate the exigencies of his life, there must arrive a day when blame or praise sits squarely upon his own shoulders.
If the moral codes of a society are to survive, the actions of an adult life cannot be forgiven or excused by the difficulties of childhood.
These three had been victims. Victims of poverty, victims of a pitiful youth, and, in the end, victims of their own greed and hatred.
They would have murdered the Irishman and myself without flinching—just as they had murdered the two American drug runners.
But still I felt the wave of depression. The Rastafarian who had been driven through the window by the Thompson’s .45 slugs lay at an odd angle, as if his bones were made of rubber. The pool of blood from the Rastafarian O’Davis had shot was beginning to thicken. There was a purple clot forming on the neck of the third Jamaican beneath the matted beard.
It all seemed such a waste; such a damnable waste.
O’Davis stood silently beside me. He cleared his throat. “I could use a drink, Yank.”
“I might try some of that Irish whiskey myself.”
From outside came the muted roar of an outboard starting. It was Onard Cribbs, trying to get away in the powerboat.
Westy caught my eyes. “I get the distinct impression, brother MacMorgan, that Cribbs is responsible fer this whole bloody business.”
“Yeah,” I said, “He was playing one side against the other.”
The Irishman ejected one clip from his Thompson submachine gun and jammed in a fresh one. “I think we ought ta have a talk with the man.”
“We can still catch him?”
“I’ve got the fastest boat on the island, remember?” The Irishman’s smile was not a pretty thing to see. “Grand Cayman is a civil place, an’ the authorities will not be likin’ this slaughter. If someone is to get a chewin’ out, I’d prefer it be Cribbs.”
Grand Cayman Slam Page 10
