by dannal
“Can I show you something?” Max asked, covering his pistol back up with his shirt.
“Sure,” Isobel said, before blowing her nose into a tissue that Josue had handed her, “if it’s something good.”
Max led her by the hand through the villa, stepping into the kitchen and out the back door. The first thing she noticed was the gas-powered sugarcane crusher, and the massive pile of flattened spent cane.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“It’s a sugarcane crusher,” Max said, “and these are all the canes that me and Josue crushed the night before last.”
“What did you do that for?” Isobel asked, sounding genuinely ignorant about what he was talking about. “Are you going to make sugar or somethin’?”
“Remember when I told you about rhum agricole, and how it is the only rum made out of fresh sugarcane juice, most others being made from molasses?”
Isobel nodded. “You make rum?”
Max nodded. “I make rum. But I don’t have approval to make AOC rhum agricole Martinique. My island is not one of the designated cane growing areas, and I don’t expressly follow all of their rules. And also, they don’t know my operation exists, and I don’t pay taxes on my product sales either.”
“So, you’re like a rum-making outlaw,” she said, sounding a bit intrigued.
Max smiled. As empty as he felt at the loss of his friends, this woman shone like a ray of bright sunshine in his heart.
Max led Isobel out to the field of sugarcane, growing almost wild among the other foliage of the ilet, and occupying about half of Max’s total property. “There’re about three acres of cane here; maybe two and a half since our recent cuttings. Some of it was already growing here when I bought the place, Josue and I planted the rest. The ground is rocky and uneven here, so the idea of harvesting the cane with a tractor is unthinkable. Josue and I harvested all of that cane by hand.”
“What did you cut it with?” she asked, sounding interested in the process.
“I use a machete, Josue uses what’s called a cane knife. You want to see where the juice ended up?”
Max escorted Isobel down the staircase into his subterranean distillery. He flipped on the lights, and her face lit up as she saw the still for the first time. Her eyes gazed, childlike, as she took in the sight of all of the copper and brass, the tubes, pipes and valves.
“It’s like a steampunk time machine, or something out of Willy Wonka,” she said with a laugh.
I knew there was a reason I liked this girl, Max thought.
Max explained that he was keeping an eye on the cane juice’s fermentation progress, and that he would likely begin the distillation process the following morning. The five hundred or so gallons of juice would yield only three barrels of rum. He would age the rum in barrels purchased from a Scotch whisky distillery that had shuttered its doors after two hundred years of business.
“Scotch whisky, you say?” Isobel said, beaming with pride. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”
That was part of the secret to the unique finished product that Max produced; the French oak barrels, once saturated with maturing Scotch, now filled with rhum agricole, yielded a finished product with a distinctive flavor unlike any other.
Max drove Isobel back to her hotel in Tartane on his boat just before sunset. Before heading back to his ilet, the two had dinner at a beach bar where the proprietor grilled lamb chops on a huge outdoor grill, his face lighting up with the blazing orange glow every time the fire flared up. Max caught himself staring into the fire from time to time, burdened by thoughts of Jacques and Susan. But he snapped himself back to the present, doing his best to enjoy his time with the sweet Scottish school teacher.
Max walked Isobel to her hotel and kissed her goodnight. Then he made his way back to the fishing village’s pier and fired up his boat for the short leisurely trip back home.
As he neared Ilet d’Ombres, Max acted on a hunch. Rather than driving straight for the dock, he switched off his running lights as he drew close to the small island. He powered the motors down to a relatively quiet rumble and circumnavigated the ilet with purpose, scanning the island through the Armasight night vision binoculars he kept in his duffel bag.
Max spotted a dinghy—a small inflatable raft with a forty or so horsepower outboard tiller motor, tied off to the rocky north shore of the island—on the opposite side of the ilet as Max’s boat dock.
Doesn’t get more suspicious than that, Max thought. He pulled out his smartphone and called Josue.
“Yes?” came the urgent reply.
“There’s someone poking around our ilet, Josue. I would like you to quietly and quickly position yourself at the northern end of the island, and keep your eyes open for anything.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Josue said.
“Do it now,” Max said, an unmistakable sense of urgency in his voice.
He docked the boat and walked toward his villa, trying to keep his gait nonchalant. His senses were alive—he had no idea what kind of trouble he was about to encounter—but he was ready for it.
As he reached the end of the pier, Max noticed the island had fallen back into that strange quiet that suggested something was out of the ordinary.
Max walked toward the villa, slower than usual. He detoured from the front door, instead walking around to the back. He stepped right up to the edge of the cavern opening, where the still was located, and stood there for several minutes. He pulled a Cuban cigar from his duffel bag and clipped off the end before roasting the tip, and puffing the cigar until it blazed to life.
Another moment passed, and Max heard a woman gasp in the thick foliage somewhere to his left. He could not suppress a smile.
Momo, Tiny Deege, and Zann all sat, crowded around the tiny computer desk in Reggie’s room, inside Mama Dorah’s house on Lemon Street. The small space, packed with so much junk and so many people, gave Momo claustrophobic pangs of panic, and for a moment, he actually considered leaving the room, despite Mama Dorah’s insistence that he stay.
“Yo, what is all this crap?” Zann said, jerking his head from left to right, a half-empty bottle of Cristal dangling from his hand between his legs. He adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses and scanned the cluttered room. “Makes me feel nervous, just bein’ in here.”
“Would you rather go sit in the living room?” Tiny Deege asked suspiciously. Momo remembered the gutted cat and tried to hold back the involuntary shudder that started at his neck, and worked its way down to his right foot.
A small workbench stood near the door, cluttered with a soldering iron, several pairs of small pliers, partially-built circuit boards, along with all manner of other electronics parts and tools. An end table had a variety of gaming consoles stacked one on top of the other, nearly to the ceiling, while an entire corner of the room appeared to contain their various controllers, power cables, and boxes and boxes of game cartridges and disks. Three or four computers in various stages of repair sat on the floor by the unkempt bed, and posters of Black Ops and Grand Theft Auto were carefully tacked to the wall.
“Yo, Reggie, my man,” Momo said to Reggie, who presently occupied the chair at the computer desk directly in front of the thirty-inch monitor. The kid was eighteen years old, and he was Mama Dorah’s nephew, which gave Momo enough reason to exercise caution around him. “I gotta ask you somethin’.” Momo looked over his shoulder to make certain no one was watching by the door.
“Yeah, what?” Reggie asked, not looking up from the display. Momo noticed he was missing an eyebrow, likely a workshop accident, since the kid loved tinkering with soldering irons and propane torches and stuff.
“Is Mama Dorah’s deal for real? You know, that thing she do with the cat and the incense and all that.”
“Yeah,” Reggie said, adjusting his round silver-rimmed glasses. “It’s real.”
“It voodoo?” Zann asked, looking over his shoulder as well, although Momo didn’t know if he was scared of Mama Dorah or the bo
ogeyman. Zann took a long drink from his bottle of expensive Champagne.
“No, not voodoo,” Reggie said. “She always calls it the sight, so I reckon that’s what it is.”
“The sight?” Tiny Deege repeated. Now it was his turn to give a shudder. “Don’t know why you gotta go and gut out a cat.”
“Tell me what she said,” Reggie said, looking from one face to the next, finding each one looking more uncomfortable than the next.
“She said somethin’ ’bout a mountain top blowin’ off its stack,” Momo said, recalling the terrifying moment when Mama Dorah had revealed her “prophecy” or whatever it was.
“Sound like a volcano or some such thing,” Tiny Deege said, pulling a blunt out of his pocket and sticking it in his mouth.
“Please don’t smoke in here,” Reggie said.
“What you gon’ do ’bout it, chump?” Tiny Deege said, sounding like he might punch young Reggie in the face.
“It’s not me,” Reggie said meekly. “Mama Dorah doesn’t like it.”
Tiny Deege stuffed the blunt back in his pocket quicker than Momo had ever seen anyone do anything. “Whyn’t you just say that, little man,” Tiny Deege said, patting Reggie on the back. “No problem. No problem.”
“She said there was like thirty thousand people got boiled in their skin or some sick stuff like dat,” Zann said. “Look it up, Reggie. Look for a volcano done killed like thirty thousand geezers, boiled ‘em in their skin.”
Reginald punched the details into a search engine and waded through the results. One hundred thousand killed in Indonesia in 1815. Twenty thousand killed in Colombia.
“What else she say?” Momo asked the group. “We need more details to refine the search.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Zann said, tossing his empty bottle onto the floor of Reggie’s room, where it rolled over to join other trash such as Twinkie wrappers, wadded-up McDonald’s bags, and empty Big Gulp cups. “Hold onto the phone, ya’ll. Mama Dorah say somethin’ ’bout the Christian God? Somethin’ ’bout going up to heaven or some such?”
“Ascension Day?” Momo asked. “Was she talking about Ascension Day?”
“Yo, what dat?” Tiny Deege asked. He picked up a Star Wars action figure from Reggie’s computer desk and began playing with it, making it fire its tiny blaster at Zann’s crotch.
“Ascension Day,” Momo said. “It celebrates the day when Jesus wen’ up to heaven. After he been crucified. Plug it in, Reggie. See what we got.”
“Volcano, Ascension Day, thirty thousand people killed,” Reggie spoke as he typed.
“Mount Pelée?” Zann asked. “Where dat?”
“Martinique,” Momo said, reading over Reggie’s shoulder. “The mountain erupted in 1902. Says that a pyroclastic flow rolled down the mountain into the densely-populated city of Saint-Pierre. Superheated steam, volcanic gases, and dust raced down into the town at over four hundred miles per hour, covering the entire city in a two-thousand-degree cloud, killing everyone in minutes.”
Zann’s body shivered.
“So what Mama Dorah be sayin’ is that Josue is on the island of Martinique?” Tiny Deege asked, placing the action figure back down on the desk.
“Sounds like we goin’ to Martinique, boys.” Momo said. “How we goin’ get there, though?”
“We could fly?” Zann said.
“Ain’t nobody can fly, Zann,” Tiny Deege said, finding a Han Solo blaster on the floor and holding it up to Reggie’s head.
“Tiny Deege, you wasted,” Zann said. “We take a plane. You ever heard of a plane befo’?”
Tiny Deege started laughing. It was the kind of laugh only uttered by a drunk person when even the slightest hint of a joke struck one as the funniest words ever uttered.
“You will rent a boat, and you will travel together to the island, where you will kill Josue Remy!” The booming voice from the doorway caught everyone off guard, and a collective gasp erupted from the entire group. It was Mama Dorah. It was hard to say how long she had been watching the proceedings, but Momo felt a cold chill merely at the woman’s presence.
“We ain’t got passports,” Momo said.
“Reginald will help you apply for your passports, and you will follow his instructions to rent the boat you will take to the island,” Mama Dorah said sternly.
“Why don’t we just fly?” Zann asked, sounding meek, as if he worried he might be smote down at any moment.
“You will take a boat,” Mama Dorah reiterated. “It will be much easier for you to smuggle your weapons from here to Martinique. It would be almost impossible if you took a plane.”
“Okay, Mama Dorah,” Momo said. “We’ll go, an’ we’ll finish off Josue.”
“Yes,” Mama Dorah said, the fire back into her eyes as before. “You will do it, or you will never lead Ti Flow. You will kill Josue Remy, or you should not come back here again, lest you face my wrath.”
Max ran toward the struggle, still holding onto his cigar. He fumbled in his pocket for the small yet powerful LED flashlight he had taken from his duffel bag. He clicked it to life, and the cool bright beam cut a wide swath through the darkness, illuminating his way forward through the thick green growth of the ilet.
Max’s phone rang in his pocket. He quickly checked it as he stepped through the jungle-like tangle of foliage. T.L. Wilkinson. Not now, Terry, Max thought, as he rejected the call, and silenced the phone.
Max had almost reached the rocky northern shore of the island, when he encountered a tall black woman in a black tank top and jeans. He bathed her in the light from the flashlight. The woman was quite beautiful, Max decided, though she also looked like she was trying hard to maintain an ordinary countenance. Smoky was right.
Closer inspection revealed that the woman wore Josue’s right arm like a scarf around her neck. Her left arm was twisted behind her back; Max would have ventured a guess that Josue held it in a tight vise-like grip. She would be completely incapacitated.
“What are you doing here?” Max asked. “This is private property.”
“I got lost,” the woman said, her accent sounding French Creole, as if she was Martinican, as Smoky had surmised. “Do you have a phone I can borrow?”
“What are you doing on my island?” Max asked again. “Who are you working for?”
The woman appeared indignant.
“You’re not going to say?” Max asked. He stared coldly into the woman’s eyes and tugged hard on his cigar, and its tip burned to a brightly glowing orange. He exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“What are you going to do?” the woman said with defiance. Max could tell she was fighting hard to sound unafraid. Strong woman, he thought. Brave. “Try to burn it out of me?”
Max appeared taken aback. He hadn’t even considered such a thing. He dropped the cigar and stomped it underfoot. “Of course not. I wouldn’t hurt a woman. But what you tell me will decide whether you go home or if you spend the rest of the night in a jail cell.”
The woman struggled to get free, and Josue instinctively tightened his grip on her throat. “Okay, okay,” the woman said, gasping for breath and sounding rattled. “My name is Vivienne Monet. I am a private investigator.”
“Who’s your client?” Max reiterated.
“I was hired by the president of one of the rhum agricole distilleries on the island,” Vivienne said, “La Maison de Verre.”
Max nodded at Josue, who released the private investigator from his grip.
“Why?” Max asked.
“He wanted to know if you were producing rum here,” Vivienne said, rubbing her long, elegant throat. “He is angry that your product has become so popular around the islands when you are not a legitimate producer; he feels threatened by you. He wanted me to find out everything I could about your operation.”
“I found this,” Josue said, holding up a digital SLR camera, which had been slung over his shoulder by its strap. He tossed it to Max.
Max turned it on and toggled through the picture
s. There were photos of Max, Josue, the villa from nearly every angle, the cane field, the cavern opening. What shocked Max most though were the close-up shots of his still, his mineral water spring, and his laboratory.
“How did you get these?” Max asked Vivienne. “Don’t you know my distillery is booby-trapped with about forty pounds of C-4? How is it you, and my whole operation, haven’t completely caved in?”
“I was cautious going in, Maxwell,” Vivienne said. It was weird that she used his name. He almost felt as if she knew him well, and the sentiment was not mutual. He didn’t like it. “The bomb’s flashing red light was easy enough to spot, right there, on the wall. So was the trip wire used to arm it. What did you use, piano wire? I was able to see it without my flashlight even. You should think about using a more discreet security system in the future.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Max said, feeling betrayed at having his illegal rum operation scrutinized so meticulously. He began deleting the photos off Vivienne’s camera.
“No, don’t!” she shouted. “I need those. Do you know how many hours of investigation those represent? How am I going to get paid for the job now?”
“A good investigator wouldn’t have been caught snooping.” Max said.
“You’re right,” Vivienne admitted. “It was not my best work.”
“I’ll let you go, but you can’t come back here again,” Max said.
Vivienne Monet rolled her neck around and looked at Josue, who stood like a ghost amongst a row of guava trees. “I never heard you coming until your arm was around my neck. And once you’d gotten hold of me there was nothing I could do to get free. You are like a jaguar in the jungle. I could use a guy like you—”
“Goodbye, Vivienne,” Max said, handing the private investigator her camera. “You’re not poaching my best man away from me.”
Vivienne stumbled over an unearthed root sticking out of the ground as she took the camera from Max. She grabbed onto his shoulder to right herself. Max put his hands on her hips to steady her.
“Your best man?” Vivienne said with a short laugh, shaking Max’s hands off her torso. “He’s your only man. You two should think about hiring a few more men. I watched you cutting sugarcane, Maxwell. I almost called for a medic.”
