Grand Cayman Slam

by Striker, Randy

  As we got closer, the beach house grew in shape and definition. It was a stylish board-and-batten cottage built on rows of stilts. It glowed pale white in the moonlight.

  The covering of Australian pine needles blanketed our approach. We moved from shadow to shadow, both at once, keeping a sharp eye out for a guard.

  But there was none.

  The house was dark. But the Bentley sat in the drive—along with Sir Conan’s Mercedes. I couldn’t figure it out. But then the Irishman nudged me, pointing. Like many stilthouses, this one had a small paneled apartment built beneath. A yellow rind of light filtered from beneath the door.

  “May be a window on the other side.”

  “Aye. Let’s have a look.”

  We moved along the seaward side of the house. The surf roared and spouted upon the bluff below. The wind was heavy, weighted with salt.

  We could hear the voices even before we got to the window; animated voices in half-whisper. I lifted one eye up over the windowsill, the Irishman looking from the other side. There was a kerosene lamp on one of those plank picnic tables stained to resemble redwood. Near the lamp was a jar of peanut butter, half a loaf of bread, and a dozen tins of canned food.

  Sir Conan James and his alcoholic wife stood face to face in the haloing light. She looked angry. He just looked worried . . . and very, very tired.

  “ . . . because I’m not about to let you back out now, that’s why!” she was yelling in the same hoarse whisper. She stabbed out her cigarette in an empty can and lit another.

  “But Elizabeth, can’t you see, it’s hopeless! I was mad to go along with it in the first place!” He took her pleadingly by the shoulders. “Can’t you understand? Murder has been committed! Not one. Two! And the blood is on your hands, my dear, your hands!”

  She knocked his arms away. “Don’t expect me to cry over your two dead whores. I won’t, do you hear me? I won’t! I warn you, Jimmy, if you give in now I’ll tell them it was you who killed them. And just see what kind of scandal that brings. Why, the American is already sure that it was you!” Her eyes narrowed and her voice dropped. “Don’t you see, it will work. Tomorrow night when the whole Cayman police force is off looking for Tommy, a chartered plane will be waiting for us at the airport. We’ll fly to Kingston. People can be bought there. We’ll have our papers changed; well go to South America. It would take them years to get us out of there—if they tried. But they won’t. Your friends will see to that.”

  “And give Tommy just one more reason to hate us.” Conan James wiped a weary hand across his face, near tears it seemed. “Elizabeth, please stop fighting the inevitable. We’ve already been much too bad to have a son so smart. My women, your men, my drug dealings—he knew about them all along. Last night when they killed Cribbs and the others, we could hear the shooting. He thought it all very funny!”

  For the first time, Lady James seemed to waver. Her eyes clouded and her lower lip trembled. Sir Conan went on, “Elizabeth, tomorrow morning I’m going to the authorities and tell them everything. It’ll be hard on all of us, but no one will be hanged—of that I am sure.” His voice faltered, cracking. “I’ve been a bad husband, Elizabeth. And a worse father. But it’s not too late for us. Please believe me. It’s not too late!”

  The regal veneer of the woman, all the hatred and bitterness, melted into one long anguished sob. She fell forward into Sir Conan James’ arms. “Oh, Jimmy, do you really think so? If it could only be true . . . I’d do anything. Anything. You’re all I’ve ever wanted . . . you and Tommy.” She looked up at him, tears streaming from her eyes. “I feel so lost, Jimmy . . . so lost and helpless. The drugs and the stolen car, and now this. Please tell me you’re right . . . that there is hope!”

  For the first time, I noticed something moving in the corner; something unseen in the darkness. He came crawling into the small corona of lamplight, heels pulling, hips hunching like a worm. His feet were tied, hands bound behind him. I remembered the picture I had seen in his room: the huge brown eyes, the perfect translucent skin. Young Thomas James was a little taller than I had expected, but the features still suggested frailty, vulnerability, and that curious sensitivity of the super-intelligent. His head had been shaved. It prodded at some memory . . . the rock albums I had seen in his room. Punk rock. The skinheads. Picture of a bald rock warrior holding a rifle.

  His lips pouted like a child. “Don’t believe him, Mummy,” he said in a small, firm voice. “Please don’t believe him. He’s quite mad, you know.”

  Lady James’ arms slid away from her husband. Her expression was a mixture of love and horror. She reached out with a pale hand, touching her son’s face. He leaned toward her for a moment, then his head swung around and his teeth snapped, gnashing like an attack dog’s, just missing her arm. His eyes were murderous; dark orbs of madness.

  “And what if he escapes again?” said Sir Conan, voice quaking, taking her in his arms. “Just what do we do if he escapes again?”

  I backed away from the window, touching my finger to my lips. We stopped only once: to inspect a car hidden beneath trees and a layer of tarp. The Jaguar.

  All the way to East End, neither of us spoke a word. . . .

  18

  Twenty-one days after Diacona Ebanks’ funeral, I sat in the fresh sunlight of a Key West April wondering just what in the hell was taking him so long.

  I sat aboard my thirty-four-foot custom-built sportfisherman, Sniper, drinking a cold beer and watching the late-season tourists gawk at the fish gurry in the trash cans. There was one guy I really liked: a fiftyish Ohio-type in white socks, sandals, Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and a hat with Budweiser cans sewn to it. He had to have style to throw himself so totally upon the mercy of a cliché. The guy grinned at me and waved. I waved back.

  I checked my watch for the umpteenth time, then went to get another beer.

  My last days on Grand Cayman had not been easy. I’d felt gauzy, out of sorts, out of touch. Nothing seemed real. And I couldn’t seem to arouse even the energy to question my lethargy. Sooner or later, the crazies catch up with you. They pry at the brain and deflate the heart.

  And the Irishman had been no better. But he, at least, could bury himself in his reports to Government House. The international press got hold of the story, of course. The newspapers feed on the blood and misery of others.

  Yet the newspapers didn’t piece together all the story. They rarely do. Even Westy and I had to drop it all with a few questions unanswered. The kid’s alarm clock had been my first tip-off that it might be something other than an ordinary kidnapping—if there’s such a thing as an ordinary kidnapping. He usually got up at nine—so why, on the day of his disappearance, did he rise before the sun? Because his mother had somehow discovered he had killed Cynthia Rothchild, and she had cooked up a scheme to free her precious child of the responsibility. Even that late in the game, the kid had to be hanging on to some thread of reality. Because he went along with it. And he still seemed sane enough for his mother to trust him alone in the beach house—thus the telescope, so that he could signal her at night if he needed something. A phone call was out of the question. The Cayman police had the wire tapped.

  But the brilliant, demented Thomas James didn’t cling to rational thought for long. He had tried to kill me—thinking it was Westy—out of some misplaced jealousy. And then he had gone after my poor, lost Diacona. His last reasonable act had probably been allowing his mother to tape his bogus plea for cooperation with the kidnappers. The noble Sir Conan James, heavily in debt—as the news stories did reveal—and struggling to recoup his once great fortune through drug running, had little choice but to go along with it. He was terrified of scandal . . . and he had no idea how bad it was going to be.

  Even so, Sir Conan and Lady James had handled it all with admirable British stoicism. Even grace. Poor, demented Tommy had been arrested immediately and sent to a special sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, leaving his parents to deal with their own arrest charges. But in
every newspaper photo I saw they were clinging to each other, hand in hand, giving the reporters the same simple monotone statement: “At only fourteen years old, the doctors insist there’s hope.”

  Of course that didn’t bring my Dia back. Or Westy’s Cynthia. But sometimes, when the world turns gray and moody, and the wind bespeaks madness, you grab at any particle of justice you can find.

  As the man says: Something’s better than nothing at all.

  So in the depths of my depression, the Irishman had tried to brace me with the promise of a trip. A boat trip with Penn International Gold reels instead of Thompson submachine guns. And beer. Lots of cold beer. And rather than let him know his ploy was a miserable failure, I agreed. But then the idea began to grow on me. Why not bake the memories away with sun and good fish and unknown islands shimmering on the turquoise curve of horizon?

  So now I was waiting. And he was late. As usual.

  I cracked another frozen Tuborg, cut the foam with my tongue, and went back to the aft deck, taking my seat in the fighting chair. And that’s when I saw him coming: a huge red-haired gnome, seabag over his shoulder, knees pointed out awkwardly as he pedaled along the Garrison Bight sidewalk on my old ten-speed bike.

  When he saw me, he made an awful face. “Yank, I thought ya said ye’d have transportation waitin’ fer me at the airport?” he yelled.

  “I said you’d have wheels,” I yelled back. “I just didn’t say how many.”

  He leaned the bike against a palm, dumped his seabag, and jammed his fists on his hips, smiling all the while. “It’s a bloody bi-cycle!”

  “Can’t slip anything past you, O’Davis. Besides, I don’t own a car.”

  His face mimicked outrage. “Ya don’t own a—and ya had the gall ta mean-mouth me sweet little Italian Bess! Didn’t even meet me at the airport ta boot!”

  “We’d’ve looked pretty silly riding one bike. Besides, fat as you are, you can use the exercise.” I winked at him. “But look on the bright side, O’Davis. With you being late and all, I went ahead and bought all the supplies—not that I ever hoped to see any money from you. I got ten cases of Tuborg and ten cases of that crap you drink—stout. And enough food to feed a haybalers’ convention. That ought to last a few weeks.”

  He snorted. “Few days is more like it. Only ten cases of stout?”

  “It’ll get you away from the world for a while.”

  “Aye, an’ we’re both more’n deservin’, I’m thinkin’.” He swung the seabag over his shoulder and eyed me shrewdly. “It’s a crazy line ’a work we’ve chosen fer ourselves, Brother MacMorgan.”

  “You sound like a man who might want out.”

  “Might? Might? I’ve been doin’ a lot of thinkin’, Yank, an’ there’s no might or mebee about it. I do want out. I’m tired of the killin’ and the nighttime cops ’n robbers while our chubby bureaucrat bosses sit in their sweet offices and get rich with our blood.”

  I stepped from the dock aboard Sniper. She felt fresh and sure, ready for sea. Maybe O’Davis was right. Maybe I was ready, too. After all, wasn’t it just a game? One vast and meaningless blood sport that encouraged the chaos it supposedly fought? It was no revelation—maybe because O’Davis was only verbalizing what I had been feeling all along.

  “That story I told Diacona—the one about me starting a charter service on Grand Cayman? Could be it’s not such a bad idea after all?”

  The Irishman gave me a broad smile. “Now yer talkin’, Yank. Too many pretty tourist ladies fer me ta’ handle on my own! An’ I think ya might even make some money!”

  “Then for the winter I could come back here to Key West and guide—I wouldn’t want to give up fishing.”

  “Fishin’, is it? Odd ya should mention that. I’ve been thinkin’ about doin’ some charterin’ of me own. Right here in Key West of all places!”

  I chuckled and shook my head. I stood face to face with the Irishman, the beard on his big jaw rust-colored in the spring sunlight. His pale eyes actually seemed merry, without a care, for the first time since I had met him one morning in Mariel Harbor, Cuba.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  He took a huge breath of sweet morning air, then spit in the palm of his hand and held it before me.

  “Ah, I am . . . I am. Shake on it, lad, an’ we’ll tell them all ta go ta hell in a dogcart.”

  I expected myself to hesitate. But I didn’t. His handshake was as strong and sure as my own....