by dannal
Max couldn’t help but smile. Despite the fact that Vivienne Monet had walked all over his private land, uninvited, and had intended to give away all of his secrets, he got a kick out of her. He liked that she was cute and playful despite the fact that she was obviously determined and strong.
“Boss,” Josue said, “she knows everything about our operation. She tells someone, we’re likely going to jail.”
“I didn’t know you could talk,” Vivienne said.
“So what do you think we should do, Josue? Kill her?” Max intended to sound sarcastic, because to him, it was a ridiculous suggestion. “If she turns us in, I guess we’re going to jail, because we’re letting her go.”
“A real gentleman,” Vivienne said.
“By the way, Viv,” Max said. “May I call you that?” He held the light from the bright LED flashlight on her chest to keep from blinding her. “Sorry about the cigar. I didn’t mean for you to think I’d hurt you with it.”
“I must admit, I was a bit scared for a moment,” she said, placing her hand on her hip. “But you don’t have that look.”
“What look?” Max asked.
“That dark look a man has in his eyes, when he is a man who likes to hurt women,” Vivienne said. “Believe me, I’ve seen it quite a lot.”
“Thanks for saying so,” Max said.
“A tip, Maxwell,” she said, checking her camera, before slinging the strap over her shoulder. “In the business you are in, don’t ever tell anyone what you won’t do. I might know now that you are a nice guy, but I also now know a place where you are weak. And if it came to it, I just might exploit it.”
“Thanks for the tip, Viv. Honestly, I am really glad to have met you. I hope we meet again, but not when you’re snooping on me.”
Vivienne disappeared through the dense plant life near the northern end of Max’s property, where he had earlier seen the dinghy. He heard her boat motor start up, and then wind up loudly as the small craft motored away from the ilet.
“Boss,” Josue said, in the matter-of-fact way that he said everything, “my wallet is gone.”
Max slapped his hand to his back pocket. “Mine too!”
The two ran toward the villa, rushing into Max’s accounting office, where he threw back one of his bookcases. It swung forward on hinges, revealing a small room, just behind. “I’ve got the Benelli, you get the Mini 30,” Max said. The two grabbed the weapons and headed toward the dock. Max hoped he had enough time to run her down in his Cobia before she reached land.
“Don’t shoot her,” Max said, checking to make sure the twelve gauge was loaded with shells, “we just want to give her a good scare. I think she has that coming, don’t you?”
Max ran toward the dock clutching his semi-automatic Benelli M4 shotgun, and he chambered a shell as he charged toward the dock. Josue clipped a magazine into the Mini 30 as he jogged beside Max. They had nearly reached the pier when they spotted the police boat driver casting off his stern line as Colonel Travere stepped onto the pier, sixty or seventy feet away, illuminated by the solar-charged lights attached to each piling, lighting up the full length of the pier.
Max stopped running and handed his twelve gauge to Josue. “Get these back in the villa, but be discreet about it. I’ll go talk to the gendarme and see what he wants. I’ll try to get rid of him quickly.”
“Right, Boss,” Josue said, holding the weapons in front of his body to conceal them as he walked back toward the villa.
Max continued forward toward the dock as if he were intending to welcome the inspector to his island. “Colonel Travere? Good to see you,” Max said, putting on a forced smile and stepping directly toward the commander of the gendarmerie on Martinique. He extended his hand toward the colonel for a shake. “Welcome to Ilet d’Ombre. What brings you out here at this late hour, Colonel?” Max asked.
“Trevor,” Colonel Travere said to the boat driver, “hand me that bag.” Max recognized the man in the police boat to be the guy who had held the bullhorn while Max was fleeing the police Zodiac while driving the stolen speedboat, The Cash Settlement. He hoped Trevor would not recognize him.
“I picked this up in town, and I could not think of anyone else I would rather drink it with than you,” Colonel Travere said, pulling the brown paper bag away from a bottle. He held it up so that one of the dock’s solar lights caught the tawny liquid inside, and Max was able to read the label.
“Trois Rivières single cask, bottled in 2006,” Colonel Travere said proudly.
Max had had a very long couple of days, and his patience was getting to that place where it was about to run out. It made him worried about what he might do. “Colonel, at the risk of sounding rude, I have to ask. What are you really doing here?”
“I bought this in town after work and thought you might want to share it with me, before I head home to have dinner with my wife.” Colonel Travere suddenly looked like he might actually be embarrassed. “Was this a bad time for me to come? I can go right now.”
“No, Colonel,” Max said. “Please, come up to the villa. I’ve got glasses and maybe we can rustle up some snacks as well.”
Max led Colonel Travere through the front double doors to the villa. They walked the main hallway, past the spare room where Max kept all of his scuba tanks, spear guns, and other skin diving gear, toward the sitting room where Max had a bar set up with glasses and a fridge.
As they walked the hall, Travere apparently noticed the light on in Max’s office, and he gravitated toward it like a bug. He must have been overcome by that natural curiosity every law enforcement officer was apparently born with.
“The bar is this way, Colonel,” Max said.
“Please, call me Edgar,” Colonel Travere said. “Is this your office?” The colonel had taken a step inside the cluttered office and his eyes scanned the room. “So this is where you do all of your accounting? I suppose there are worse places in the world that one can be an accountant.”
Max noticed that the last bookcase on the wall was still pulled partway forward. If Colonel Travere, Edgar, was to walk over and look, he would see a small room with dozens of pegs secured to the wall, each one holding a pistol, a shotgun, a scoped rifle, a submachine gun. It was very likely that Edgar Travere would take one look inside and arrest Max and Josue on the spot.
“Can I see the bottle?” Max asked.
“Certainly,” Travere said, passing the long bottle to Max.
Max scrutinized the label. “These single barrel offerings are pretty special, aren’t they?” he said.
“I find that single cask spirits tend to be a bit hit or miss, but so far the Trois Rivières offerings have been excellent.” Travere’s eyes fixated on Max’s desk. His policeman’s eyes scanned every article on the desk like a laser.
Max wasn’t worried. He had placed every pen, every manila folder, every scrap of paper on the desk to give the illusion it was the messy desk of an accountant who had just stopped for the day with several items in progress.
“Some of these bottles are very old,” Colonel Travere said, scrutinizing the half-dozen antique rum bottles which decorated Max’s desk. “J. Bally 1952? Clemént, what is this from the 1930s? These are sealed, Maxwell. What are you saving them for?”
“They’re just bottles I picked up in shops around the island. I thought they’d make interesting conversation pieces. I never really thought about drinking them.”
Travere shook his head as if he were dumbfounded. The gendarme had the bug, that was for sure. Rhum agricole was his drug, and he was a hardcore junkie.
“What is this?” the colonel asked, sounding suspicious.
“What?” Max said, maybe a bit too loudly and forcibly. Be cool, Max. But Max knew he could not hurt Colonel Travere. If it came down to it, Max would go quietly. He would yell to Josue to give him a sporting chance to get away, but Max could not hurt someone as decent as Colonel Edgar Travere.
“You have an entire box of Don Legado cigars on your desk,” Traver
e said, sounding disgusted. “These are crap, Max. I’ll make sure to get you something decent for your desk, some Davidoff’s, perhaps some Cubans. Can’t have you smoking this Dominican trash. Not that Dominican cigars are bad, some of my favorites hail from the D.R., but these, I wouldn’t let my dog smoke these.”
“Thanks, Colonel—Edgar,” Max said, trying to sound genuinely grateful. “I’m not much of a cigar smoker, so I suppose it was the packaging that appealed to me in the cigar shop.
“What’s this?” Travere said, facing the bookshelf which stood askew.
“Oh, Josue and I moved it earlier. We were looking for a mouse that scurried behind it,” Max lied.
“A mouse? You have mice on your island? I did not think there were any mice on Martinique.”
“Hmmm,” Max said, not quite sure how to respond.
“Perhaps it was one of the species of rat that live on the island,” Colonel Travere said. “I mean, I am no expert on such things, but I did a bit of research on the wildlife of the island when my wife and I were first considering moving here. I wanted to know what sort of pests and predators might be a problem were I to grow any kind of crops on our land. Here, I will help you put back the bookshelf.”
“Help!” Josue’s manic, terrified-sounding voice resounded from the kitchen.
Max and Colonel Travere both ran toward the commotion, finding the four-burner stove in the kitchen completely engulfed in flames. Apparently Josue had set some hot canola oil in a pan to heat up when he accidentally bumped the pan and spilled its hot flammable contents onto the gas burner’s open flame.
Max rushed out to his shed and grabbed a thirty-pound CO2 fire extinguisher, and in no time, the leaping flames were snuffed out. Thick black smoke spread throughout the villa like phantom fingers creeping from one room to the next.
“I took out some frozen beignet dough to thaw,” Josue said, sounding embarrassed. “I was going to make some for a snack. I was careless with pan of oil. Sorry about that, Boss.”
“It’s okay now,” Max said, slapping Josue on the back. “Colonel, this is my good friend, Josue. He takes care of my house and works as my assistant.”
Colonel Travere shook Josue’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Josue.”
“Say, why don’t we grab some glasses and take our drinks out onto the porch?” Max suggested. “Where it’s a bit less smoky.”
As they walked out behind the gendarmerie colonel, Max whispered to Josue. “Good thinking with the kitchen fire.”
Josue flashed his white teeth in a grin.
Max, Colonel Travere, and Josue sat on the cushioned rattan chairs at the front porch of the villa, smoking the Colonel’s last three Cohiba cigars, which he had pulled out of a leather cigar sleeve, and finished off the bottle of single cask rum. It had some nice notes of honey, tobacco, and licorice and a very smooth finish.
Travere mostly talked about his inherited plot of land near Saint-Marie. He actually talked a lot less about Max and his illicit rum-making operation than Max would have suspected. Still, Max could not help but wonder just what was the Colonel’s game.
“I’ve taken up quite enough of your time this evening,” Travere said, standing and extending a hand to Max. “I still have a fifteen-minute boat ride home, and my wife will be wondering what I’ve gotten up to.” Max shook the gendarme’s hand and thanked him for the drink. “Very nice meeting you, Josue.”
Travere walked down to the dock, where the driver of the police boat powered up the twin outboards, and made ready to shove off.
“What do you think the Colonel is up to, Josue?” Max asked suspiciously. “Do you think he’s shaking us down, letting us know that he knows what we’re up to? Or do you think he’s trying to catch us doing something next-level so he can collar us for something big?”
“Honestly?” Josue said, offering a rare moment of opinion. “I think he was just being friendly.”
- - -
Colonel Travere clung to the powder-coated railing that surrounded the Zodiac’s control console. The quick police vessel cleared the shallow waters of Le Robert Bay and the driver opened up the engines, heading flat out toward the tip of the Caravelle Peninsula.
“Sir, if I may be so bold as to ask?” the boat driver, a young second lieutenant named Trevor, said as he steered the boat across the light chop of the Atlantic Ocean. “What are you doing socializing with that criminal?”
“You think he was the guy who stole the boat the other night?” Colonel Travere asked seriously.
The young officer nodded. “I would bet a million Euros on it—if I had a million Euros. Can I borrow a million Euros, Colonel?”
Travere laughed. He struggled against the wind to get a long draw on the last of his Cohiba as the boat rounded the easternmost tip of the craggy peninsula.
“I think he’s a good guy, really,” Colonel Travere said pensively.
“But he’s a boat-stealing, rum-running, criminal thug,” Trevor said. “He almost killed me and Pierre.”
“As I recall the story,” Travere said, sounding unexpectedly fatherly, “you two did a pretty good job of that yourself.”
Trevor became quiet for several minutes, until the Zodiac reached a private dock that belonged to a neighbor of Colonel Travere. It was likely the security of knowing the guy next door was the top law enforcement officer on the island, but the neighbor was happy to allow the gendarme to come and go from the dock as he pleased.
“Seriously, Colonel. What are you doing with that guy?”
“Well, Trevor. I suppose I feel for the guy. He has been through a lot, and I believe he is still trying to figure some things out. You see, about five or six years ago he was on a vacation with his family in the Florida Keys. They rented a boat to go fishing and sightseeing. Max stumbled upon a major coke trafficker transferring about fifty kilos of product to a bush league distributor. The trafficker took one look at Max and opened fire with an H&K submachine gun. He killed Max’s wife and two very young children. Max himself was hit three or four times.
“I know he is a bit of a criminal, Trevor, but still, I cannot help but feel for the guy.”
Max opened his eyes and gazed at the cloudless sky. A circular canopy of balatá trees and tall palms framed the sky like a pale turquoise painting as far as Max’s peripheral vision would allow him to see. The sight struck him as both picturesque and incredibly peaceful.
Josue’s face popped in front of him, snapping Max back to his senses. The young Haitian looked down. He furrowed his brow into a deep look of concern.
“You okay, Boss?”
Max turned his head and promptly became aware of his position on a gym mat he and Josue used for sparring. Must have been choked out again by the wiry Haitian, Max thought.
They usually trained together three times a week. Max considered the combat training an important part of their readiness for the conflict that was almost certain to be coming soon to their lives. Presently, Max shook off the disorientation and looked back up at Josue, who offered his hand to help the older man to his feet.
After Max had first met Josue in a seedy street in Miami, he had learned that growing up in a small village outside of Port au Prince, Josue had spent his youth studying Jujitsu and tire machet, a Haitian martial art focused around fighting with the machete, both disciplines taught to him by a legendary uncle. From Josue’s description, Max gathered that the uncle had been a very old man, and also incredibly dangerous.
“Did you choke me out again?” Max said, realizing his voice sounded hoarse and dry.
Josue grinned. “Aye, Boss.”
Max stood up and braced himself. He stumbled to a cooler at the edge of the four cushioned mats which were connected together by Velcro fasteners. He grabbed out a yellow Gatorade, old school style, which he drank all at once. Then Max rubbed a dry towel over his face and slick black hair, mopping up as much of the dripping sweat as he could. Even after toweling off, Max felt as damp as if he had just stumbled out of the shower
.
“How did I do?” he asked.
“Until you let me slip behind you and apply the Hadaka Jime,” Josue said, grabbing a bottled water out of the cooler, “you really impress me.”
“The rear naked strangle,” Max said, spitting onto the nearby grass. “Well done, mon frère. Glad I have you on my side.”
Josue took a long drink of his water and toweled off his own face. It sort of caught Max off guard, but he was suddenly struck by how content the younger man appeared to be.
Max thought back to the violent day he had first met Josue; the skinny, frightened Haitian refugee had nearly been executed in the middle of the street, right in front of Max. Somehow—and some days Max still wondered how—he had stumbled into the altercation and managed to prevent it.
The two had been through a great deal together, and Max knew the worst of it likely lay ahead of them. Yet he still hoped for, longed for, peace at the end of it all, especially for Josue. The mysterious dark-skinned wunderkind had experienced so many trying days in his short life. Max thought he deserved a generous measure of peace.
“Let’s move on to tire machet,” Max said, stepping over to a table where several wooden training machetes lay alongside some made of carbon steel, their sharpened blades eighteen to twenty inches long.
Josue folded up the Jujitsu mats and stowed them in the storage shed behind the villa, unveiling a wide swath of green grass for them to train upon. They each chose a blade. Like gladiators, they each approached the center of the grass from a different side and circled each other like predatory cats.
Josue took the offense, while Max stepped carefully from side to side, lowering his center of gravity, and moving his machete swiftly to defend Josue’s graceful, practiced strikes. The exercise was not one man trying to hack away at the other, but rather it played out more like a dance. The moves took place deliberately and with elegance, a lot like fencing, but instead involving the wielding of a primitive razor-sharp jungle tool.
