The Seventh Stone td-62

by Warren Murphy

  "Try killing a small thing. See how you feel then. Just a small thing," his father said.

  "I swatted a fly this morning. It did nothing for me, Father."

  "Kill a little thing. Just so the family will see you are doing something."

  "How little?"

  "Warm-blooded," his father said.

  "I'm not going to harm some defenseless puppy somewhere."

  "Game. A game animal, Reggie."

  "All right. We'll have to plan something."

  "A safari," said his father.

  "Excellent," said Reginald Woburn III, knowing that a good safari sometimes took a year to plan and in that time he might get himself injured in polo or the stone might blow up or something or that poor Korean might die of a heart attack or be hit by a car-anything to get this family-legend thing off his back. "A safari. Wonderful."

  "Good," said his father. "The jet's engines are warming. It's been ready for takeoff all morning."

  Fortunately, there was Dom Perignon on the private jet but unfortunately there was this whitehunter type talking about guns and kills and saying what good sport it was all going to be.

  The first thing about Zaire, other than the stench of human waste in the capital city, was that it was extraordinarily hot, Reggie noticed. And worse, there was no way to hunt elephants from an air-conditioned van. It was considered unsporting. The second thing about Zaire was that the best trackers were Pygmies, little black Africans who were at an even lower social scale than the dirt-poor starving farmers.

  Reginald Woburn III saw some elephants at a distance from his Land Rover, saw lions, saw zebras, and would have preferred to see them all in the Bronx Zoo because that was a half-hour from Manhattan, whereas Zaire was a day by jet. Then the little trackers, downwind from the elephants but unfortunately upwind from Reginald Woburn III, started to run.

  "Come. Run. We'll lose them," said the white hunter. He wore one of those khaki hunting jackets with places for big shells, and polished boots and a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat with some leopard band around it. He was running too.

  "We can always follow the scent," said Reginald, who could barely move through the underbrush, much less run.

  "Watch your rifle. Hold it down. You can set that thing off," said the white hunter. His name was Rafe Stokes, he drank warm Scotch, smoked a pipe and had talked incessantly the night before about a good kill. Reggie had thought that the only good kill would have been by a can of bug killer. The insects were all over the place.

  Rafe Stokes, great white hunter, had talked so unendingly about the elephant as a friend, its nobility, its strength, its loyalty, Reggie had wondered if they were actually going to kill the beast or paint a medal on its smelly side.

  Reggie knew that there had to be more about elephants, something unpleasant. He found out that hot day stumbling through the Zaire brush. The largest gooiest thing in the world was an elephant dropping. It was the size of a round lawn table. It was a fresh dropping, Reginald knew, because it felt warm around his knees. Even after that, Reggie didn't want to kill an elephant. He just wanted to wash. He wanted to cut off his clothes and swim in lye for a week.

  Finally Rafe Stokes, great white hunter, signaled Reggie to stop. Now Reggie didn't want to stop. He wanted to run upwind from himself. But there he stood, with flies buzzing around, his leg warm and gooey to the knee, waiting for the hunter to tell him to shoot. He would shoot, he would go home and possibly delay the family for a year. Hopefully, he might even break a leg on this safari and make it two years.

  The hunter pointed. There, less than a hundred yards away, was a massive building with legs and trunk and tusks. Its ears were big enough for awnings. Great whitish swashes like camouflage coated the thick gray skin. It had rolled in mud, the white hunter had said. Elephants were good at that. They were also good at overturning cars, trampling people into goo, and hurling persons through the air like peanuts.

  Good reason to avoid them, Reggie had thought, when being told all this lore. He hated lore. Jungle lore was another phrase for elephant droppings. If it had any truth to it, they wouldn't call it lore, they would call it information.

  "Go ahead, he's yours," whispered the white hunter. The Pygmies stood nearby grinning, looking at Reggie, loooking at the elephant.

  Reggie sighted the middle of the thing between the V and the post of the sights.

  Some sport, he thought. He'd have to strain his neck to miss that monster.

  "Shoot," whispered the white hunter.

  "I will," said Reggie. "Just leave me alone."

  "He's getting ugly," said Rafe Stokes.

  "Getting?" said Reggie. The little black people were starting to edge back into the brush. The elephant turned.

  "The whole thing is ugly," Reggie said.

  "Shoot," said Rafe Stokes, raising his own gun. But still he waited. Reggie Woburn's father had warned Stokes that his son had to taste blood. If the hunter shot the beast, he would not be paid. Strange old coot, too. Didn't want the trophy. As the old saying went, the apple never fell far from the tree. Both of these Woburns were fruits. The father had assured Rafe Stokes, twenty-eight years in the brush, never lost a hunter yet, that the son would be the most marvelous hunter he had ever seen. Now, with the bull elephant roaring down on them like a house sliding down a hill, making the very gound tremble, Rafe was one trigger pull away from not collecting the rest of his fee.

  And then it happened. A shot went into the elephant's right-front kneecap. The fruitcake had missed, sending the bull elephant rolling toward them, crushing trees under its body. They sounded like little firecrackers going off as their trunks coughed up splinters at the sever point. Crack, crack, crack. And then the elephant's testicles exploded between its legs. The tenderfoot had missed a kill shot again as the hulk of the screaming beast rolled toward them, leaving a carpet of snapped trees and pressed bushes.

  The tenderfoot was reloading. He missed again, getting another knee. The elephant stopped rolling just in time and tried to rise but its front knees had been shot out. And then its trunk went from the powerful blast of the 447 Magnum rifle.

  The poor bastard screamed in agony.

  "Finish it, dammit," the hunter yelled to Reggie. "Just point to the head and shoot. Shoot, dammit."

  Rafe was pushing his rifle into the tenderfoot's hands. Use this, use this. Slowly, with measured pace, Reginald Woburn III took the elephant gun in his hands and felt the tooling of the stock and smiled at the sweating desperate white hunter.

  The elephant screams were a tingle in Reggie's ears, like music he had heard once in Tangiers when he was given the best hashish in the country and he heard a note for what must have been a half-hour. An illusion, of course, but an ultimate pleasure too.

  "I will finish it when I am ready," said Reginald. And then, very casually, shot off an ear piece by piece. It took four shells. They were big ears.

  "You can't do this," screamed the white hunter. "You've got to finish your kill."

  "I will. In my own way," said Reginald Woburn III. A great peace was on him now as the beast bellowed in pain. Reggie no longer minded the smell of his boots or the flies or the jungle because he had experienced that one great note of life and knew now what he should do. The white hunter's agony added to his joy.

  "I'm going to finish it," said the hunter, snatching back his rifle. He jerked the gun to his shoulder and with one motion put a bullet through the elephant's eye.

  Then he turned away from his client and let out a deep disgusted sigh.

  "That was my kill," said Reggie. "Mine."

  The hunter did not turn to look. "You have no right, Mr. Woburn, to torture the game. Just to kill it."

  "My rights are what I say they are."

  "Sonny, this is the brush. If you want to get back alive, you'll keep your mouth shut."

  "No, thank you," said Reggie, who now understood why his ancestor had been unable to publicly pay the assassin. "I just can't allow that. You see, there are th
ings I can allow and things I cannot. You just cannot talk to me like that. And most of all, you cannot take away my kill no matter how your sensitivities are bruised. Do you understand?"

  Perhaps it was the softness of the voice, so strange after such a brutal kill. Perhaps it was the quiet of the brush, as if a great killer now stalked through it, but Rafe Stokes, white hunter, loaded his gun again, keeping it tight by his body. This tenderfoot is going to kill me, he thought. He had a gun and he was standing behind Stokes. Was it loaded? Had he fired off all his shots? Stokes didn't know why for certain, but years of hunting had taught him when he was in real danger and he was in real danger now.

  He planted a foot and very slowly, with the gun ready, he turned. And there was Reginald Woburn III, smiling as foppishly as ever, trying to clean off his clothes.

  "Oh, c'mon," said Reggie. "You're so serious. Don't take me so seriously, for God's sake. We'll tell Dad I shot the beast and you'll get your money and I will get my family off my back for a while. All right?"

  "Sure," said Rafe, wondering how he could have been so wrong. That night, he had a drink with his client, toasted the hunt even though the head was too shot up for a good trophy, toasted the Pygmies and toasted Africa, which Reggie assured everyone he was never going to visit again.

  Rafe Stokes went to his tent for the best night's sleep he ever had. It never ended. Just after the hunter began to snore, Reggie went into his tent with a dinner knife and sawed through his throat, then buried the blade in his heart.

  It was delicious. Just as they were getting back to civilization, Reggie realized he didn't need the Pygmies anymore to guide him to the airport. So he took them as little snacks, popping their heads open with a pistol. If you hit them in the back of their heads, he realized, you could get the brains to fly out like a bowl of oatmeal getting a shot put plopped into it. Delicious. It was better than polo, better than cooling drinks on white verandas, better than the great summer balls of Newport, better than hashish in Tangiers. Better than sex.

  It was what he had been born to do.

  His father knew instantly that the change had occurred.

  "Your highness," he said.

  Reggie put out his right hand; palm down, and his father fell to one knee and kissed it.

  "It would be fortunate if this Korean is the right Korean," said Reggie. "But we are going to have to make certain."

  In his newfound wisdom, he had understood the seventh stone. One had to use time. That was what the years had given them. Time.

  First they would find out if the Korean was the one, and then they would use all the years of hiding to perform the one way that would have to kill him. It was right and just. A king should never bow to an assassin, otherwise even his own royal footprints would not be his own.

  The only thing Reggie now disliked about Palm Beach was that it was in America. If you killed someone, it wasn't like Zaire, where things could be arranged properly among civilized men. In America, they reacted toward killing like hysterics. They would lock you up and he couldn't afford time in jail for an American kill. But once you had the blood of men on your hands, elephants, deer and goats would never do again. He would have to be careful about his newfound pleasure until after he finished the Korean, if it was the right Korean.

  He thought about this while looking at Drake, the butler. He wondered what Drake's heart would look like pumping pitifully outside the chest cavity.

  "What do you want me to do with your dinner knife, Master Reggie?" asked the butler, seeing it pointed in his direction.

  "Nothing," sighed Reggie. Palm Beach was in America.

  He went back to the photograph of the stone. The pattern was clear now after so many centuries. Sword, fire, traps, one thing after another. Reginald Woburn III imagined how Prince Wo's followers must have been discouraged as each method appeared to fail. But they hadn't failed really. There were just six ways that showed what wouldn't work.

  The seventh would.

  Chapter Four

  It was one of those painfully beautiful Bahamian mornings on Little Exuma, the first sun kiss of the horizon in purples and blues and reds like some lucky watercolor accident by a child with the sky for a canvas.

  Herons perched on mangrove roots and the bonefish darted from flats to swamp just a little bit more safely that morning, because Bonefish Charlie was dead, and the first thing the constable said was not to let the tourists know.

  Bonefish Charlie, who had guided so many tourists around the shallows of Little Exuma to catch the jet-fast game fish with the sharp teeth and fighting heart, let the water wash his eyes and did not blink, let the water wash his nose and made no bubbles, let the water clean his mouth and small fish swim around his teeth.

  Bonefish Charlie had been maneuvered into the twisted mangrove roots in such a way that for a short while that night, as the tide rose, he could breathe. And then, as the tide rose just a bit more, he could only breathe water. Bonefish Charlie, who the natives had always said was more bonefish than man, wasn't. The proof positive was wedged into the roots as the tide went out. Bonefish thrived under the mangrove roots when the tide came in and Bonefish Charlie hadn't.

  "It ain't a morder," said the constable in that strange chopped British accent of the Bahamas, part British, part African, part Carib Indian, and part anyone else who traded and pirated in these waters over the centuries. "Not a morder and don't you be tellin' de white people."

  "I tell not a soul. May my tongue cleave to the roof of me mouth until it touch bone," said Basket Mary, who wove and sold baskets to the tourists down by Government House.

  "Just don' tell de whites," said the constable. Whites meant tourists, and anything smacking of murder was bad for the tourist business. But the constable was her cousin and he knew that it was too much of a horrible incident for Basket Mary to keep to herself. She would, of course, tell it to friends until she died. She would tell how she had found Bonefish Charlie and what he looked like with "the fishes who was always his friends swimmin' in his mouth like they found a coral in his teeth."

  And then with a great understanding laugh she would add that it probably was the first time his teeth were ever clean.

  All people died sooner or later and better to laugh in the Bahamian sun than to go around like whites on the grim business of changing a world that never really changed anyway. There would be other bonefishermen and other sunrises and other men to love other women and Bonefish Charlie was a good man so that was that. But, for the morning, it was a grievous and dangerous thing to talk about among the natives, wondering who had killed Bonefish Charlie because the last place in the world he would have drowned accidentally would have been in the mangrove roots he knew so well.

  It instantly replaced the news that there was a new owner of the Del Ray Promotions, owners of the new condominiums being put up for white folks. Strange fellows. Seemed to know the island a bit. Some of the friends of Basket Mary said there had been a family here like them with that name some time ago, but they had left to go to England and other places. Stuck together, they did, and some said they were here when the slaves were brought in, but of course it was not nearly so interesting a subject as the death of Bonefish Charlie in his mangrove swamp.

  Reginald Woburn III met the apologetic constable at his office and heard with horror that his bonefishing guide would not be able to take him out again that day.

  "Bad heart, Mr. Woburn, sir," said the constable. "But we got others just as good. You bought a good place here and we are glad you are here. We are a friendly island. We got the friendly beaches. We got the sun."

  "Thank you," said Reggie. Fellow sounded so much like an advertisement, he thought. He waited until the constable was gone and then retired into a room without windows. He flicked on a harsh single-beam light set in the ceiling. It illuminated a great round stone resting on a green velvet table. He shut the door behind him and locked it securely, then approached the table and fell to his knees where he lovingly gave one strong
kiss to the carved stone from a kingdom where his ancestors had ruled.

  Somehow the message was even clearer when he read it from the stone itself. His time had come. He was the first son of the first son of the direct line of his family. If the seventh stone were correct, the Korean's head would go like a ripe plum from a thin vine.

  Of course, there were still some mysteries about the stone. He pondered one strange word. It translated roughly as one house, two heads of one master. Two plums on the vine. Was that poetic? Or was the stone more knowing, more accurate than he even dared hope? He looked now on the words for how he would kill and he saw they could also be translated as "need to kill." The stone knew. It knew about him.

  He had needed the bonefish guide the evening before more than he had ever needed a woman, or needed water when he was thirsty. The man he had wrestled into the roots looked on helplessly as the water rose. Even now the man's words gave him a delicious little thrill.

  "Why you laughin', mon?" Bonefish Charlie had asked.

  He was laughing, of course, because it was such a delicious satisfaction, a little appetizer before the plums. Plums. That was what the stone said. Did that mean he would have to kill more than one Korean? If so, who was the other one?

  He had already hired the best eavesdropping specialist to implant all the latest devices in the Korean's condo. This too had been written in the stone, thousands of years before these devices were invented. What else could be the meaning of "ears better than ears, eyes better than eyes will be in your power at the beginning of the kill?" They had known that his would be the age for revenge. Reggie would know the every spoken word of the Korean and the white man who was with him. Might plums mean two Koreans or a white and a Korean?