Noble Chase: A Novel

by Michael Rudolph

  “Christ, what are you doing that for?” He blanched, looked around nervously to see if anyone was watching, and sat down heavily in the cockpit.

  “Listen, Leonard…,” she said in a determined tone of voice that left no doubt of her intentions. “If that lawyer of yours or any of Leung’s guys come within range of this boat, I’m going to blow their friggin’ heads off.” She pointed the gun at him, shaking it like a fist for emphasis before putting it down on the bench next to her. “Nobody is getting between us and that money.”

  “Do you really think it’ll come down to that?” He was shocked back to relative calm by the sight of the gun in her hand.

  “No, of course not.” She softened her tone, recognizing the need to reassure him. “As long as you and I stick together, we can pull this thing off. Now, go pick up Vincent.”

  “We don’t need him.”

  “Just get him, will you, and stop wasting time. Tell his mother he’ll be back in five or six days.”

  “How’re you planning to arrange that?”

  “We’ll send him home on a plane when we get to Panama.” Again her tone softened. “Now get moving so you can hurry back to me.” She was talking to him now like a naughty boy. He moved quickly in conditioned response to the stimulus.

  When the tiny Suzuki refused to start at seven fifteen a.m. the following morning, Beth opened the hood and saw the tangle of severed cables. Max and Andi joined her around the engine, staring somberly at the destruction. Their first reaction was that it was malicious mischief by local teenagers, except that none of the other cars parked nearby appeared damaged. Then, when Beth noticed her torn map, she knew there had to be more involved.

  Beth called the police on her cellphone to report the vandalism and then called Avis, hoping to obtain a replacement car. The police responded, but Avis was a dead end. Their answering machine cheerfully advised Beth that they did not open for business until ten a.m.

  Beth did not intend to wait. Digging around in her bag, she located the card given her by the clerk in Land Records. She called the number on the card, and within ten minutes, Ernest, the clerk’s brother-in-law, arrived in a vintage yellow Chevy belching thick black smoke from its exhaust, with the hand-lettered word Taxi and an irregular black-and-white checkerboard painted on both sides.

  Although Ernest apologized profusely for having no rental car available, he was able to splice the cables on the Suzuki with a big roll of electrical tape and a few feet of baling wire he found in his trunk. By eight thirty, they were on their way.

  After leaving St. John’s, they drove around for nearly an hour, half of which was spent getting lost and unlost, until they passed a familiar palm tree in English Harbour for the third time. It was at a point where the road turned north up toward where they hoped the Eric Leonard property was located, somewhere between Bethesda and Willoughby Bay.

  “Okay, navigator,” Beth said to Max, “the easy part’s over. Where do we go now?”

  “I have no idea,” Max answered confidently, looking for some hint of an answer on the detail-free map he held.

  “I know,” Andi offered gratuitously from the backseat, “let’s ask somebody.”

  “I don’t even know what to ask,” Max said. “There are no street numbers and no street names. Only an ‘X’ mark on this ridiculous map.”

  Beth drove on aimlessly for another five minutes before pulling off the road next to a shirtless young man in tight cutoff shorts and long dreadlocks, working on the rear engine of a battered Volkswagen Beetle.

  “Excuse me,” Max said to the man, who stood up from his engine repairs and ambled easily over to the passenger side of the car. “Can you help us?”

  “I’ll be happy to help you, sir.”

  “Could you please take a look at this map and tell us how to get to this spot over here with the ‘X’ on it?” Max held up the map for him to see, wondering if everybody on Antigua was really as polite and cooperative as they all seemed to be.

  “I know the area well,” the man said in a lilting West Indian English, ultrasolicitous and anxious to accommodate the carload of tourists. He examined the map carefully. “Ah, yes,” he finally said, a big smile extending across his face. “You are not far from there now.”

  “Good,” Andi said, relieved at the news.

  “You must follow this road that you are now on,” the man said, indicating to Max with his finger on the map. “Past the fork here, going left and then bearing right until you reach its intersection with Barrow’s Bull Road, where you must make a right turn. Stay on that road until you reach Fair Crossing Road and Cobb’s House Road, where you must make another right turn. The property you seek is on that road.”

  “How far away is it?” Max asked, confusion setting in.

  “Oh, it is not too far,” the Antiguan responded. “Less than a kilometer away from here.”

  “Thank you very much,” Max said. “We appreciate your help.”

  “It is my pleasure, sir,” the man said, waiting respectfully by the side of the road until Beth pulled the car away from him. He then returned to his own ministrations, tending to his car.

  Beth continued on in the same direction, driving slowly on the left-hand side of the narrow road, passing fewer and fewer houses, two forks, and no pedestrians. The road became more remote and the potholes larger and more frequent. She stopped the car at the first intersection she reached, a five-corner confluence of confusing choices.

  There were no street signs to mark any of the roads, two of which were nothing more than dirt lanes. There was a small grocery store nestled between two stunted palm trees on one of the corners, its shutters down, its door closed, its shabby walls with more paint peeled off than remaining. A faded red metal sign hung above the door, half of it rusted away, identifying the premises as the Red Lion Supermarket.

  “It’s almost nine thirty,” Beth said, looking down at the car’s digital clock glued onto the dashboard. “If that stand was ever going to open today, it would be open already.”

  “Let me see that deed,” Max said. “Maybe I can figure something out from the metes and bounds description of the property. It has to name some starting place.”

  Beth reached behind her into the backseat for the blue canvas bag with the Columbia logo lying on the seat next to Andi. She wedged it against the steering wheel, unzipped it, hunted around briefly inside, and pulled out her photocopy of the legal-sized piece of paper. “Here,” she said, passing it over to Max, “I couldn’t make any sense out of it.”

  “Didn’t they teach you to read a deed in law school?”

  “Yes,” she said defensively, “but where I come from, they all have civilized references to street names, street numbers, and lot and block designations.”

  “Bah! Humbug!” He took his eyeglasses out of their case, dropped the case back on the dashboard shelf, and began examining the deed. The front seat was barely wide enough for the two of them, so Beth had no trouble reading over his shoulder.

  “Here we go. Look,” Max announced, jabbing his finger midway down the front page of the deed. He began to quote: “Beginning at a point on the northerly side of Cobb’s House Road at a distance eight hundred and seventy-six feet, seven inches from the southwesterly side of the intersection formed with Fair Crossing Road…See? It’s easy. All we have to do is get out of the car and pace it off.”

  “Yes, but I hate to state the obvious fact that none of these roads are marked.”

  “Thank you, Andi,” Max said, somewhat less than appreciative. “We can narrow it down a little. We need an east–west road for it to have a north side.”

  “That eliminates the road we’re on and only leaves us with three other choices,” Beth said, adding, “two of which are nothing more than dirt paths barely wide enough for this car.”

  “Assuming this is even the right intersection to start with,” Andi said, looking around at the various options. “Can I see the map for a second?” She reached into the front seat
for it as Max handed it to her.

  “I feel like we’re playing Sword and Sorcery on the computer,” Beth declared.

  “Come on, you naysayers,” Max said. “It’ll take us two minutes to check them all out. We’ll use the car first and then we’ll pace out any likely-looking house.”

  “You don’t have to try them all,” Andi said with complete authority, looking up from the map. “Take the blacktop road.” She pointed over to her right.

  Without objection, Beth made a right turn and proceeded slowly in an easterly direction along the single-lane road, avoiding only a fraction of the potholes that pockmarked the surface, exposing the underlying coral base. “This four-wheel drive is sure coming in handy,” she commented. The car proceeded slowly, serpentine fashion, its chassis and passengers bouncing up and down, swaying from left to right.

  The road quickly deteriorated and closed in on both sides of the car, becoming overgrown with tropical growth. Beth recognized the familiar yucca plants and the occasional manchineel tree with its poisonous potential, but not the more exotic, spiny-looking bushes with their bright red and white flowers or the ones with yellow leaves and dark brown fruit.

  “This road doesn’t look like such a good choice,” Beth volunteered the obvious conclusion, and in return received icy glares from the front and backseat passengers.

  They passed a derelict automobile body, abandoned off on the right, partially hidden in the underbrush, its usable parts long since scavenged, only the rusting hulk remaining. A small green lizard scurried over its engineless hood and jumped into the brush as their car invaded his private sanctuary.

  As they approached what appeared to be a clearing on the left, the north side of the road, about fifty or seventy-five yards away, Beth felt her heart begin to pound. She continued to inch the car along the road at less than five miles per hour. “Something’s coming up on our left,” she said. “How far since we turned?”

  “Feels like a long way,” Andi said.

  “Let’s see what’s there first,” Max responded.

  Beth slowed the car down even more as the heavy growth on the left thinned out, became sparse, and then opened up on the remnants of what must have once been a lawn. The yard sloped down in the rear, providing an unobstructed view of the water a few hundred yards beyond where the crashing waves and turbulence announced that they were on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island. The property fronted the road for a few hundred feet before giving itself back into dense brush.

  The remnants of a two-story house stood in the middle of the property, its faded pink stucco walls standing, half its roof missing to expose it to the sky, revealing the charred remnants of a disastrous fire. Its doorless portico was protected by a wrought-iron gate hanging ajar on one remaining hinge. The same style of grillwork covered all the entire first-floor window frames, with jagged shards of broken glass still embedded in several of the panes.

  Beth felt her anticipation ebb as the destruction became apparent. The weeds climbing for light out of one of the first-floor windows made it abundantly clear that the house had been in this condition for some time. “Nobody’s lived here for a while,” she said, commenting on the obvious, slowly steering the car off the road onto the shoulder. She turned off the ignition and the three of them got out. “Dad, why don’t you pace out the distance back to the intersection? At least we’ll know then if this could be the right property. In the meantime, I’ll look around with Mom.”

  “Okay, might as well.” Max walked over to the spot where the clearing started and began pacing westward, back toward the main road, counting to himself as he took his long, measured strides.

  Beth and Andi strolled toward the back of the property, circling aimlessly around the house and peering through windows at its gutted interior. Finally, they sat down on a conveniently placed coral outcrop to await Max’s return. Free from the sound of the car engine, they could hear the roar of the Atlantic surf pounding up against the rock-strewn coastline.

  In about ten minutes, they saw Max walking up the road, one deliberate step at a time. His lips moved silently as he marked off the distance. When he saw them, he crossed over the property and sat beside them. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “It could be the right property. I measured two hundred and eighty-six paces going and two hundred and ninety-three coming. At a one-yard pace, that would be about right.”

  “It’s a dead end anyhow,” Andi said, her voice tinged with dejection. “Might as well go.”

  Beth nodded sympathetically and looked around for a final moment. Her curiosity was piqued by the sight of several lizards sunning themselves on a long, narrow bundle lying on the ground on the far side of the property. It was covered by a faded green tarpaulin held down by several large stones, a pile of empty paint cans, and discarded chicken wire. “Why don’t you two head for the car?” she suggested. “I want to take a look at that pile over there for a second.”

  “Okay,” Andi said, standing up next to Max. “Don’t stick your hands in any strange places. You might get bit.”

  “I’ll be back in a second.” She turned away from Max and Andi and strode over to the mound.

  Their backs were to Beth as they walked to the car, so they didn’t see her kicking the stones away from the tarp with her sneakered right foot. They also didn’t see her bend over the pile to peel back the tarp with her left hand after she chased the lizards away. They did hear her shout, however. They certainly heard that. Andi froze, absolutely certain that her beloved daughter had been fatally bitten by a snake.

  Max reacted instantly. He spun around and started running to Beth as fast as he could. Andi wheeled and followed right behind. As soon as she saw the animated way Beth was gesturing, jumping up, and pointing at the ground, she slowed to a fast walk and then stopped halfway.

  “Jesus, Beth,” Max exclaimed, reaching his stepdaughter. “You scared the shit out of us. What’s the matter?”

  “It’s the mast!” she shouted. “It’s the fucking mast!”

  “What in hell are you yelling about?” Then he looked down at the ground and saw that Beth had partially uncovered a sailboat’s aluminum mast, its rigging and halyards attached. It was resting on the ground next to a faded yellow canvas sail bag.

  “So it’s a mast. Big deal.” Max was unimpressed. “It’s a small one,” he estimated. “No more than forty feet tops, so it must be from a small sailboat, maybe twenty-five feet long. What’s that got to do with us? We’re looking for a fifty-footer.”

  “It’s a mizzenmast from a ketch!” Beth said, still shouting excitedly. “That’s why it’s so short. Look at the name marked on the base, Atrophy. Remember? That’s the name of the sloop with the ‘For Sale’ sign we saw at Nelson’s Dockyard yesterday. Only it wasn’t really a single-masted sloop, it was a converted two-masted ketch.”

  “Come on, that’s nuts.”

  “No, it’s not!” she insisted. “The mizzenmast on a fifty-foot ketch would be just about this size. They took down the mizzen to make it look like a sloop. Remember that funny-looking table in the cockpit? That was covering up the hole in the deck from the missing mast.”

  “Let me see what’s inside the sail bag.” Max knelt next to the bag, coaxed the knot apart, and opened it up. He pulled out the sail that had been stuffed inside, and Beth helped him stretch it out on the ground.

  She noticed a plastic identification tag attached to a grommet through the clew of the sail, reached over to look at it, and started to shriek all over again: “Sindicator! It says Sindicator! This sail came off of Sindicator! I cannot believe it!” She jumped up and grabbed her mother by the shoulders. “We have the slimy bastard!”

  “We still have to find him.” Max tried to calm her and himself.

  “We have to get down to Nelson’s Dockyard right away.”

  “It can wait for five minutes,” Max said. “I saw a lady opening that grocery stand when I was walking back along the road. Let’s talk to her first.”

 
The three of them piled back into the Suzuki. Beth started up the car and drove back out to the five-cornered intersection. An elderly woman sitting in a beaten-up wooden ladder-back chair outside the grocery stand stood up and smiled broadly, revealing a gap of several teeth, as Beth pulled the car to a stop in front of her.

  “Good morning, young lady,” the woman said to Beth. “And good morning to you too, sir, and to the lovely lady in the backseat. How may I assist you on a beautiful day such as it is?”

  “We were trying to find a house out here,” Beth said. “Is that Cobb’s House Road over there?” she asked, pointing to the road they’d just come out of.

  “That certainly is. You are quite right. But nobody is living on it.”

  “We saw an old dilapidated house down the road a bit,” Max said. “Is that the only house on the road?”

  “That’s the only one, you can be sure. Its roof is blown off by the big hurricane year before last, and some scurrilous vandals set it afire before the family could repair it. Teenagers, they were. Godless and shiftless. Smoking their filthy ganja.” The woman hawked and spit noisily into the dirt, shaking her finger in the air as if admonishing some invisible child who had misbehaved.

  “Do you know who lived there?” Beth asked.

  “Of course I do. I’ve lived here since coming over from Barbuda as a girl half your age. Owned this supermarket by myself for more than six years and ran it with my dear husband for thirty-two years before that, God rest his soul. I cannot get anybody to help run it. That is why I open it up so late in the morning. I cannot do it all myself.”

  “It’s important to take care of your own health,” Andi said sympathetically.