Dead Island

by Mark Morris

  Sam shrugged. ‘I couldn’t take the pressure. The more people told me I needed to come up with another hit, the more it paralysed me. I started off playing big hotels in Vegas, then seedy lounges in Reno, then third-rate cruise ships.’ He shook his head. ‘But why the hell am I telling you this?’

  ‘Because you recognize a kindred spirit?’

  Sam snorted a laugh. ‘Yeah, right.’

  The stewardess returned with mohawk guy’s drink. ‘Anything for you, sir?’ she asked Sam.

  Sam shook his head. ‘I’m good, thanks.’

  The stewardess smiled and walked away. Mohawk guy opened the miniature bottle and took a swig. Smacking his lips, he turned back to Sam. ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’

  ‘Should I?’

  Mohawk guy paused and said, ‘I’m Logan Carter.’

  Sam looked at him blankly.

  The other man, Logan, looked a little put out. ‘The football star, Logan Carter? First round NFL draft pick?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Sorry, man. I don’t follow sports.’

  Logan gaped at him. ‘You don’t follow sports? That’s like saying you don’t follow life.’

  Sam shrugged again. ‘Sorry.’ He was silent for a moment, and then, almost reluctantly, asked, ‘So … you still play?’

  Logan’s face darkened. He drained the rest of the bottle in one gulp. ‘No, I … er … had to retire.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him why?’ said a voice from the seat in front.

  Logan blinked and jerked upright as though someone had slapped him. ‘Excuse me?’

  The passenger turned and knelt on her seat, her head rising above the seat back. She was startlingly beautiful, her skin the colour of teak, her hair a silky black waterfall. She had a snub nose, plump, almost purple lips that Sam guessed could be wide and smiling but were currently pursed in something like disapproval, and wide, dark, penetrating eyes.

  ‘I said why don’t you tell him why you had to retire?’ the girl repeated, her voice husky and warm.

  ‘What the hell has it gotta do with you?’ Logan asked.

  The girl pointed at him. ‘He didn’t recognize you, but I do. I know what you did.’

  ‘What I did? I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You killed a girl.’

  The accusation was so blunt that for a moment nobody moved or spoke. Then Logan, his face reddening with anger, spluttered, ‘I didn’t kill nobody.’

  ‘No?’ said the girl, tilting her head to one side. ‘So what would you call it?’

  ‘I’d call it an accident. And that’s what the judge called it too. So get out of my face, lady!’

  For the first time the girl turned her attention to Sam. He felt a stirring in his gut as her dark-eyed gaze swept over him, a sensation somewhere between desire and unease. The girl was incredibly beautiful, but in the way a panther was beautiful. Sam had a feeling she could be predatory, dangerous.

  ‘You ever killed anyone, Sam?’ she challenged.

  Sam’s first instinct was to ask her how she knew his name, but then he realized she must have been listening in on their conversation. He shook his head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. The guilt of it twists you up inside. Isn’t that right, Mr Carter?’

  Logan glared at her. ‘What part of “get out of my face” didn’t you understand?’

  Sam raised his hands. Peacemaker wasn’t a role he was accustomed to, but then again he wasn’t often in the presence of people who seemed even more fucked up than he was. ‘Let’s just cool it down a bit here, OK?’ he said, turning to Logan. ‘Listen … Logan. Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  Logan gave a bad-tempered sigh, glancing balefully at the girl. She smiled.

  ‘Yeah, Logan, why don’t you do that?’

  ‘I don’t have to justify myself to you,’ Logan said to the girl.

  She shrugged as if she couldn’t care one way or the other, a faintly amused expression on her face. Sam touched Logan’s arm briefly.

  ‘Hey. I’d like to know, man. I’m interested. And I got an open mind here. Hell, I’d never even heard of you till ten minutes ago. No offence.’

  Logan almost smiled at that. Then he pushed himself upright in his seat and said, ‘I need another drink.’

  ‘Why don’t we all have one?’ proposed the girl. ‘On me. Sam?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘I’ll have a soda, I guess.’

  ‘Nothing stronger?’

  He nodded at the empty miniature scotch bottle on Logan’s table. ‘I had enough problems of my own with that stuff. I ain’t going there again.’

  The girl attracted the attention of a stewardess and ordered their drinks – same again for Logan, a soda for Sam, a white wine spritzer for herself.

  When the drinks arrived, she said, ‘So, Mr Carter?’

  Logan squinted at her. ‘What are you, a cop?’

  ‘Used to be,’ she admitted.

  ‘That figures.’ He took a small sip of his drink – having poured the scotch into a plastic cup this time – and said to Sam, ‘I guess, like you, I was young and stupid. Unlike you, though, I had it all. I was a football star in high school and college, so I was … protected.’

  ‘Spoiled, you mean?’ said the girl.

  Logan scowled. ‘Look, who’s telling this story? Me or you?’

  The girl held up her hands, as if allowing him the floor.

  Still scowling, Logan said, ‘We don’t even know who you are.’

  Shrugging as if it was no big deal, the girl said, ‘My name’s Purna.’

  ‘Purna?’ repeated Logan. ‘What kind of a name’s that?’

  ‘It’s Australian,’ said the girl. ‘Aborigine actually.’

  ‘You’re an Aborigine?’ said Sam, interested.

  ‘Half – on my mother’s side.’ She turned her attention back to Logan – and suddenly smiled. Sam almost gasped. Her smile was every bit as radiant as he’d imagined, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. ‘You were saying, Mr Carter?’

  For a moment Logan looked bemused, as if he’d been bewitched by her smile too. Then he nodded briefly and said, ‘So … er, yeah. Like I say, I was protected. I had pretty much whatever I wanted – fame, money, women, fast cars.’ He grimaced. ‘That last one was my downfall. Well … those last two, I guess. I shoulda looked after myself more, but well … there were a lot of parties back then. A lot of parties. Anyway, this one night, I’d had too much to drink, snorted some coke … you know how it is. And this one guy, he started ragging me about my car, calling it a piece of shit, all that.’

  ‘What kind of car was it?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Porsche Spyder. Like James Dean used to drive. Classy car, man …’ For a moment Logan’s face softened and he looked almost as if he was going to cry.

  Sam nodded brusquely. ‘Sure thing. So what happened?’

  Logan took a deep breath. ‘I challenged him to a race. His fucked-up old Buick against my Spyder. I mean, he had no chance, but the dumb fuck took me on.’ He shrugged. ‘I wanted to teach him a lesson. Not just beat him, but really beat him, you know.’

  ‘But you ended up beating yourself, didn’t you?’ said Purna softly.

  Logan snorted a laugh, but it was hard, without humour. ‘You could say that. Took a bend too quickly. Lost control. Hit a wall at … I dunno … eighty, ninety miles an hour?’ He shuddered, took a drink. ‘Shattered my knee. End of my career. But that wasn’t the worst part.’

  Sam glanced at Purna, and then back at Logan. ‘The girl?’ he asked.

  Logan nodded. ‘Her name was Drew Peters. She came along for the ride. She took the full impact …’

  ‘But you got off,’ said Purna, her voice unreadable.

  Logan nodded and glanced at her, his face almost defiant. ‘Yeah, I got off. What can I say? I had a good lawyer.’

  ‘Money talks,’ she said, and this time there was a definite bitterness to her tone.

  ‘It’s what makes the world go round, baby,’ Logan
murmured. ‘Always has, always will.’

  Before Purna could respond, there was a crackle from the intercom and the voice of their pilot, who had introduced himself earlier as Captain Avery, announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be beginning our descent to Banoi Island airport. Could you please now return to your seats, put on your seatbelts and return your tables to the upright position. It’s a beautiful day on the island today, with temperatures in the region of 27 degrees Celsius, that’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the local time there is currently 11.52 a.m. In a few moments we will be descending through cloud cover, whereupon those of you on the right-hand side of the plane will be able to see the island as we begin our approach. I hope that you have all had a pleasant flight, and on behalf of New Guinea International Airlines, I thank you for flying with us today.’

  The pilot’s voice clicked off, and a few seconds later the engines began to rise in pitch. Purna, Logan and Sam strapped themselves in, Sam gripping the arms of his seat and looking out of the window as wispy white clouds billowed past the aircraft. He was not a nervous flyer, but he was anxious about what awaited him on the island. The gig at Banoi’s top resort hotel, the Royal Palm, had fallen into his lap like manna from heaven and he was determined not to blow it. This could be his last chance to prove he was not a joke, maybe his only chance to showcase his new material in front of a sizeable audience. And who knew, if even one or two of the record executives his manager had informed about the gig made the effort to turn up, it could even lead to a new record deal, his first in over six years. He was desperate to show the world he was not a one-hit wonder, that there was far more to him than ‘Who Do You Voodoo, Bitch’. He swallowed to clear the pressure in his ears as the plane swooped towards the ground, but his mouth was dry.

  ‘Hey, would you look at that!’ said Logan beside him, craning forward as far as his seatbelt would allow. Sam followed his gaze and saw a lush tropical paradise below, surrounded by an ocean so placid and clear it seemed to sparkle like a plain of blue-white diamonds. On the nearside of the island was the resort area – hotels, restaurants, bars and stores clustered around a vast beach of pristine white sand. Beyond that, covering a good seventy per cent of Banoi, was dense tropical jungle, which eventually gave way, on the far side of the island, to a bare and jagged mountain range, rising up from the greenery like the gnarled back of some prehistoric beast.

  ‘Looks like paradise, all right,’ Sam said, though he still couldn’t quell the nerves in his belly.

  Logan pointed to the right of the island. ‘What’s that?’

  Maybe a couple of miles offshore was a much smaller island, little more than a rock maybe half a mile in circumference, with a grey rectangular building situated on a plateau in the centre. The building resembled a huge but grim-looking office block, and was dominated by a flat-roofed tower at one end that jabbed up into the glorious blue sky like an accusatory finger.

  ‘Looks like a prison,’ Sam mused, noting the high electrified fence that encircled the building.

  Purna’s face appeared in the gap between the seats. ‘It’s Banoi high-security prison,’ she confirmed. ‘Full of psychos and terrorists. The locals call it … well, I can’t remember the actual word, but it translates as “hell in heaven”.’

  ‘How come you know so much?’ Logan said.

  ‘I read a lot,’ replied Purna. ‘You should try it.’

  The prison wheeled away from them as the plane banked slightly on its final approach to the island. Logan looked at Sam with eyes a little bleary from drink.

  ‘Welcome to paradise,’ he said.

  Chapter 2

  FAMILY HONOUR

  ‘ROYAL PALM HOTEL. How can I help you?’

  As she dealt with the customer request, Xian Mei wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing here. She hated living a lie, hated being out on a limb, and most of all she hated the fact that her life currently seemed to have no direction. She had been told that she was doing ‘important work for her country’, but what was so important about observing the habits of a bunch of wealthy western tourists? Banoi wasn’t exactly the front line, and being a receptionist on the desk of a luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere, far from her family and friends, was a long way from how she had envisaged honouring the memory of her father.

  Xian Mei still remembered that terrible night in October 1999 as if it were yesterday. She had been twelve at the time, at home with her mother, Jiao, her homework spread out on the kitchen table of their sixth-floor apartment in Beijing. She had been trying to finish early because her grandmother, Li, was coming to visit. When the front-door buzzer sounded, Xian Mei had at first assumed her grandmother had arrived early. Jiao, who had been preparing mutton dumplings for supper, raised her eyebrows good-humouredly at Xian Mei and strolled out into the hallway, drying her hands on a cloth. When she answered the buzzer, Xian Mei had been surprised, and initially a little relieved, to hear a man’s voice crackling from the intercom. Her first thought had been that she might have time to finish her homework before her grandmother arrived after all. She had no way of knowing at that moment that her homework would never get finished, that the mutton dumplings her mother had been preparing so lovingly would never get eaten, and that her life, and that of her mother’s, would never be the same again.

  The visitor was her father’s friend and partner, Detective Sergeant Paul Ho. Many a time Paul and his pretty wife Huan had been guests at her parents’ house, and their evenings together were full of laughter and good fun, and often – for the adults – a little too much wine. Xian Mei liked Paul, not only because he was full of jokes and compliments, but also because he often brought her a little present – a bow for her hair, a pocket-doll for her collection, a money box in the shape of a fat smiling cat.

  Paul did not bring her a present on this evening, however. Nor was he full of jokes and laughter. It had been raining and when he turned up on their doorstep he had water running down his face and dripping off his jacket. He mumbled an apology, but Jiao told him not to worry. She fetched a towel, and as he dried his hair and face she asked him in a hushed voice – almost as if she was afraid of the answer – what was wrong.

  Looking back, what Xian Mei now particularly remembered about that evening was the strange and uncomfortable tension that accompanied Paul’s arrival. It was almost as if it clung to him, a kind of darkness that caused her stomach to tighten, her mouth to dry up, the ends of her fingers to tingle unpleasantly. She felt it as soon as he stepped through the door. It was so strong that it drew her, almost unwillingly, from the kitchen. She felt as though Paul was a magnet and she was a shred of metal being dragged helplessly towards him. She sidled into the hallway but held on to the edge of the door, the only way of anchoring herself. Paul glanced up and saw her standing there, peering almost fearfully at him, and his eyes filled with such sadness and pity that it terrified her.

  ‘Can we talk privately?’ he asked Jiao.

  Jiao flinched and clenched her fists, as if his words had punctured her like a flurry of arrows, but she nodded. She glanced briefly at Xian Mei, who was shocked to see that her mother looked as frightened as she herself felt. As Jiao ushered Paul towards the lounge, Xian Mei stepped forward. Though her mouth was dry she forced herself to speak.

  ‘What’s happened to my father?’

  Once again, Paul turned those desperately sad eyes on her. Usually so confident, at that moment he looked lost, uncertain what to say. Jiao saved him from having to say anything by stepping in front of him.

  ‘Go back into the kitchen and finish your homework,’ she muttered almost angrily.

  ‘But—’ Xian Mei began.

  ‘No arguments! Just do as I say. Your grandmother will be here soon.’

  Jiao all but pushed Paul into the lounge and closed the door. Xian Mei retreated into the kitchen but she didn’t finish her homework. Instead she sat cross-legged in the open kitchen doorway, listening. She heard Paul speaking, but his voice was
too low and muffled for her to make out the words. Then he fell silent, and there was a pause that seemed to Xian Mei to stretch out for ever.

  And then – suddenly, shockingly – her mother cried out. It was a harsh sound, the kind you might expect to hear from someone who had been stabbed through the heart. It made Xian Mei jump, then wrap her arms around herself protectively. But although the cry was bad, the sound that followed was much, much worse. Xian Mei had never heard her mother weep before, but now she began not just to weep, but to wail, almost to scream. It was an awful, heart-rending sound; to Xian Mei it seemed to encapsulate all the despair and misery that existed in the world. Frightened by the intensity of her mother’s grief, she clapped her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes tight shut. If she had any doubts before, the noises her mother was making now had confirmed without question that whatever had happened tonight was the very worst thing ever.

  The rest of the evening seemed to pass in a terrible, murky fog. When the door to the lounge finally opened, it wasn’t Jiao who emerged, but Paul Ho. He let out a huge sigh and rubbed a trembling hand over his face. Then he realized Xian Mei was sitting in the kitchen doorway, staring at him. For a moment he looked almost guilty, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t, then he walked across and knelt beside her. His damp jacket smelled of the city – of rain and petrol and dark places.

  ‘You’re going to have to be very brave and look after your mother, OK?’ he said quietly.

  Xian Mei looked up at him. His skin was saggy and his eyes were red, and for the first time she thought he looked old.

  ‘Where’s my father?’ she asked.

  Paul hesitated. ‘You need to ask your mother that question.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Xian Mei persisted.

  Paul made a face as if he’d tasted something sour. Then he leaned forward and kissed Xian Mei gently on her forehead. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said.

  Xian Mei couldn’t get her mother to speak to her. She tried, but Jiao had locked herself in the bathroom. She didn’t emerge until grandmother Li arrived almost half an hour later. Even then the two women went into the bedroom and Xian Mei was forced to wait outside. When they finally came out, both were pale and grim-faced. Jiao told Xian Mei that Li would look after her, then she went out without answering her daughter’s questions.