by K. T. Tomb
“Hello, Manny.”
Manny fought the urge to say hello back, then immediately felt stupid for thinking it.
“You’re probably quite upset with me at the moment, but just let me tell you something; tough shit. You’re a bum, and I don’t waste my money supporting bums. Now, that’s not to say I decided to disinherit you. You’re still the youngest in the family, so I think that maybe you just need a little motivation so you can stop being such a bum. I want you to know that I instructed my lawyer to keep an eye on you, in case a miracle happened after my death, and you turned out to be doing something with your life. It’s not important what it is, I don’t care if you’re trying to make money or if you’re volunteering at the homeless shelter but my hope is, you’re doing something, and if that’s case, Mr. Wright has instructions to make a proviso in my will to look after you. If not… well, you’re hearing me talk to you now, so I guess that explains all you need to know about it.”
The Old Man, in his familiar eccentric tweed jacket, half-moon spectacles and full grey beard gave a coughing laugh that betrayed the onset of the disease that would take his life just over a year later.
“Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever read anything in your life other than Playboy, but if you had picked up any of the books in your father’s library, or, say, asked any of us old bastards about where you came from, this next part might sound familiar. You’re going on a little trip and it ain’t no vacation.”
Padraig placed the briefcase that was now in Manny’s possession onto his desk. Manny really didn’t want to go to Detroit. He had been there once, and regardless of what the Motor City had once been in the sixties, it had fallen far from its former glory.
His grandfather was speaking again, “I want you to take good care of this case. I bought it for ten dollars back in fifty nine. Probably the oldest possession I’ve got, apart from the antiques and who gives a shit about them; your grandmother collected that crap. Inside it you should have found a map. The map is of a place where the McMillan family has a lot of history, but I doubt you ever heard of it, because it’s not the kind of information you find in the tits and ass publications.”
That bastard is enjoying this, Manny thought. Mocking me. I’d like to kick your ass, you dead old fart.
“This is the island of Montserrat. Now, us McMillan’s used to live on Montserrat, no doubt some distant fork of the family still does. The Irish McMillan’s settled there as indentured workers, working hard and saving their money. They also mixed in with the slaves there. In the middle of the nineteenth century, some old grand pappy of ours came into some land, citrus groves and such. Round about the same time, the Europeans and colonial Americans were getting good at hunting down the last of the professional privateers- pirates, to you and me- and it so happened that old Cormack McMillan was out in his lime grove one day when from up on his hill, he saw a ship coming into port, sails all torn up, looking like it’d been savaged fiercely. On a small island like Montserrat, this was big news. Everybody who was anybody went down to the docks, and who should step off the boat?”
The old man paused, and gestured towards the camera.
“I don’t fucking know.” replied Manny.
“Of course you don’t fucking know” said his grandfather on the TV screen, “because you’re a bum and you never asked me about anything important except what you could get. The guy who steps off the boat turned out to be none other than Captain Boysie Marlowe, one of the last pirates to sail the Caribbean. His time was up, and he knew it. He’d had his rear end handed to him by the French; his boat was done, and most of his crew was dead. He was running for his life, and there weren’t many places left for pirates to go. Now, Cormack was scared, like everyone else. He knew that if Marlowe and his pirates wanted to, they could make real trouble for everyone on the island; there wasn’t much law enforcement in them days, and none of your internet or mobile phones to call for help. So Cormack, being as smart as a McMillan can be, invites Marlowe into his home, gave them drink and food and quarters, and they got to talking. Marlowe, of course, wanted to get off Montserrat as quickly as possible, but his boat wouldn’t make it to the next island, let alone to South America where he would have a chance of escaping a hanging. Cormack had a boat, not a big one, only a mail runner, but it could just work. Marlowe said, ‘I could just take your boat, but you have shown us kindness, so I’ll trade you something for it. I can never return here for fear of my life, and I shall need the gold in my old ship for sure. I will trade you this map, which will show you where a great wealth is on this island, in exchange for your little boat.’ Now, Cormack didn’t much care for sailing, but what he did care about was his friends and family not getting any trouble from these pirates, so being a sensible man, he agreed. He didn’t think there was any such treasure, but if it got the pirates off Montserrat, so be it. The deal was done, Marlow left, and Cormack never told another soul about the deal he made with the pirate. Not until he had failed to find the loot, of course, and was too old to go looking anymore and he told his sons. And they tried, and failed, and then their sons came to America, and then it came to me.”
The old man had spoken for so long his throat was parched, and his voice cracked. His hand trembled as he sipped water, cleared his throat, and continued.
“I was going to go check it out myself, not that I needed any treasure there might be but out of interest, before I got too old to do it. Then round about ninety-five, the volcano there blew up, buried half the island, the old McMillan lime groves and all. It’s still smoking away out there; you can’t even get to the mountain anymore without official dispensation from the authorities. So, Manny, you have a chance to prove yourself. Maybe you’re not the smartest or most talented McMillan there’s ever been, but you’re still a McMillan, and that’s got to count for something. Go find out what this is all about. Earn your inheritance, and earn the right to be in this family. I’ve left you some notes and an open plane ticket in the inside pocket of this here briefcase. See you in hell, kiddo.”
The scene abruptly ended. Silence blossomed in the apartment. Manny, who had gotten to his feet without realizing it, swayed slightly as conflicting thoughts battled for dominance in his mind.
“Bullshit! You old fuck!” He spoke to no one.
Alone in his rooms, Manny didn’t have to fake a smile for his grieving family anymore.
“I wait my whole life to come into this inheritance, and you’re fucking with me from beyond the grave? You sick bastard! Sorry for existing!”
He picked up the briefcase and tossed it against the wall, dislodging a large mirror hanging there, and granting him seven years bad luck to go with the twenty-two he felt he had spent already. The briefcase had landed open, inside to the floor. Cursing his own stupidity at giving himself a chore to do, as he swept up broken shards of mirror, Manny gingerly picked up the briefcase. A slash ran from one end of the silken interior fabric to the other, across the inside pocket where through the tear, Manny could see the envelope which he knew contained plane tickets to an Island he had never heard of and didn’t care about.
There was another piece of paper there. He plucked it out, and unfolded it. In a bold typeface, five lines of some kind of awful poetry.
Colors blind the eye.
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.
Manny was too furious with everything, his family, and himself to bother puzzling out anymore of this cryptic nonsense. Leaving the broken mirror where it lay, he grabbed a beer from the kitchen. He felt he would need several.
Chapter Three
It was past midday when Manny surfaced in the aftermath of the seven beers and half a bottle of Baileys he consumed the night before. After regurgitating what was left in his stomach, he stumbled into the living room trying his hardest to remember some of what happened. He was grappling with the beginnings of a headache and was jo
lted back to reality when he cut his foot on the remains of the mirror still strewn about the floor. Manny switched on the TV, channel- surf while he drank coffee, and then he booted up his laptop. His ego was not in the best of shape following his one-sided argument with his dead grandfather, and it had resulted in the down spiral of self- pity that had resulted in an alcohol-fueled nightmare.
While he had reservations about the validity of the buried treasure hokum, he had come to the conclusion, somewhere around the five beer mark, that a trip to a tropical island might not be such a bad idea. Tropical islands meant sunshine and hopefully some hot bodies in bikinis to hang out with; that was without doubt a better option than freezing to death in New York until April next year. According to the airline tickets, he’d need to fly to Antigua first, and then take a two-engine prop island hopper over to Montserrat. He logged onto his laptop, and began checking flights from JFK Airport, but paused as he was typing the name into Google. Deleting it, he typed instead ‘Captain Marlowe + Pirate’. On the third site, the previous two belonging to works of fiction that had appropriated the Marlowe name, he found what he was looking for.
“Captain B. Marlowe, aboard the Suffering Amy, terrorized the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth century. He raided many island forts, and sunk ships of France, England and Spain.” Eventually captured, he was tried and hung for piracy, on November the 2nd, 1871. So, at least that part is true. From what he could find out online, Montserrat was still a no-go area for half the island. There were tours and such to see the volcano, but short of joining one and then bailing out of a moving truck, he didn’t see much hope getting up close to it, if this wild goose chase should even go that far. What would he do if the treasure was halfway to the middle of nowhere, where no one went? He didn’t think it would be a good idea to go roaming around an island with no clue where to go. The map was little help. The miniscule writing denoted three locations; the Volcano was clearly marked, which was understandable as it was surely the biggest feature of the tiny island. There was also a kind of parabola that might have been part of a circle or semi-circle once, with the legend ‘Look West’ written next to it. So... there was a widely curved path, that didn’t appear on Google Maps, and was made nearly two hundred years ago, and he should follow it to the west, when the path curves to the east and back to the west. That would mean he’d be walking away from what he should be looking at for a fair few miles, over what the internet told him was over the Centre Hills, and right across the valleys where an active volcano might decide to bury him under molten rock at any time. Great! Finally, there were three tiny, faded letters, which after a moment of analysis Manny decided spelled ‘E.I.C.’
He guessed he’d figure that out later once he got to the island. Getting back to the travel booking site, he began to make his reservations. From the apartment he’d take a taxi to JFK then on to Antigua, and Montserrat. Screw the old man, he was taking the challenge. He’d go and show him who deserved to be in this family. He’d show his brothers, his cousins and his dad; then none of them could tell him what to do, ever again.
Manny was not the only adventurer visiting Montserrat. While Manny, the youngest American son of an influential family, could not have any idea of the trouble he was getting himself into, Kang Xiaoping knew exactly what he was doing. Manny’s only experience of anything like what he was planning came from James Bond movies, and despite his complete lack of training in espionage, he thought he had what it took to pull off a treasure heist on his own. While he was still in the air somewhere over the ocean near Bermuda, Kang was arriving under cover of darkness, coming ashore on a dinghy launched from a small boat. He waded the last few paces through the surf at the deserted Bunkham Beach.
For all intents and purposes, he looked like any other tourist. Bad shirt, camera, cheap shoes, cheaper sunglasses in a shirt pocket and a duffle bag containing yet more awful clothes. His contact on the island had recommended Bunkham Beach as an easy entry point. There were steep, vegetation-covered cliffs stretching the full length of the bay, and only one way on and off the sand, unless you were a climber of prodigious skill. The beach itself was also very narrow, dropping off sharply into the Caribbean Sea, facing out across more than a thousand miles of empty water in a straight line towards Nicaragua.
Kang hiked up the beach, but did not leave the black sands for the rough path that led up to the Birds of Paradise Villa overlooking the beach. With no light source behind him, Kang was confident that even the sharpest eyed guest would not have seen him. Someone else did see him, however, and moved down to the shore trying to disguise his nervousness. He was another Chinese, dressed identically to Kang himself, the same shirt, right down to the same sneakers. Kang barely looked at him as he passed, but it was enough to notice that there was a good ten years between them in age, and the other was going grey at the temples where Kang’s hair was still thick and jet black. Kang was also taller, in far better shape, and had no protruding overbite. The fake-Kang muttered “Xièxiè, Xièxiè!” as he splashed into the water, clumsy and loud as a buffalo in the shallows. The oaf fell into the dinghy, and with little care for stealth began rowing madly out to sea as soon as he had managed to get in his seat.
Kang sucked air through clenched teeth with displeasure. Checking his luminous watch, he realized that there would be very little time for him to enjoy the sights of Montserrat, it was 4a.m. already, and he planned to be well on his way over the Pacific by noon. He had to get to work. Following the path the fake-Kang had taken down to the beach, the new and improved-Kang made it to the Villa in only a few minutes. The place was lit, but deserted. The Kang who had left in the dinghy had rented the entire 10- bedroom complex for his brief stay; opulent. The man had clearly gone soft on his fat government salary, and more than likely had taken plenty of bribes in his time to be able to afford this.
Entering by the sliding doors on the veranda, Kang proceeded to search the rooms for intruders. It was unlikely that there would be any, given the short time frame in which the two men had switched places at the beach, but he hadn’t stayed alive this long, in this business, by being sloppy. Satisfied he was alone, the new Kang Xiaoping emptied his duffle bag of clothes, drew a short, snub nosed pistol from a rolled up t-shirt, and settled down in a chair, looking out to sea. Dawn was on the horizon, a new day, and the job at hand would soon follow.
The Swashbucklers
is available at:
Amazon Kindle or Amazon UK
About the author:
K.T. Tomb enjoys traveling the world when not writing adventure thrillers. She lives in Portland, OR. Please find her at:
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