Scorpion

by Ken Douglas

  Her words were met with a chorus of applause and boos. Broxton was sure the applause was for her and the hisses for Ram. It was a crazy situation and there was nothing he could do about it except scan the crowd, and even that was useless. Who could he watch? Who could he single out? Everybody looked like a possible threat the way they were jeering Ram.

  Five hours and five minutes later the Sons of Trinidad were finishing their set. In a few minutes Tammy Drake and Ramsingh were going to take the stage. Broxton felt a tight sensation in the pit of his stomach. There was electricity in the air, both from the threatening storm and from the crowd anticipation. He felt the pulse of the crowd as he moved among it. The crowd moved as a single being, swaying, singing, and dancing with the beat, but somewhere among it danger lurked. He tasted it on the evening breeze.

  He pushed through the throng till he was at its fringe. The band finished, took their bows, then left the stage. The crowd quieted, gray clouds covered the sky. A cool breeze blew through the park, evaporating sweat, chilling a thousand souls, and chilling his, too. The hair on the back of his neck tingled. His spine quivered. A current ran through him, electric and cold.

  He stepped through the north gate and out of the park. He checked his watch. Five to five. Ram was never late. Police surrounded the stage. There was nothing he could do there. Plain clothes police wormed and worked their way through the crowd. That too, was out of his hands. He turned away from the stage and faced the Red House. So many windows.

  Then he saw her and his heart jumped. He smiled before he thought. He started to call her name, but checked himself. What was she doing here? She was supposed to be sailing up the islands. Movement caught his eye and he turned to see a pigeon land on the wrought iron fence not far from where he stood. For a brief instant he wondered if it was the same bird he’d fed earlier and again he thought of Paris. Dani was in Paris when Aaron Gamaliel was shot. Why did he think of that? She was in Zambia when President Jomo Seko was shot, too. Coincidence? Why was she here? Then he knew why the assassins in Venezuela were told to spare him.

  She started to turn toward him, almost as if she knew she was being watched, and he stepped back through the gate. He could see her through the iron bars, but she wouldn’t be able to make him out. She studied the street, raised an arm and gave proof to his thoughts when she greeted the man he’d seen from the water in Venezuela. The big man with the Texas accent. The man who had tried to kill Ram.

  He shuddered. A terrifying thought rippled through him. The plane, the hotel. She hadn’t used a rifle. She had no rifle now. She was standing just outside the park with the Texan, not to shoot but to watch. To watch the blast. It was going to be another bomb.

  He turned toward the gazebo on the other side of the crowded park. In a few minutes Ramsingh would take the stage. He wondered if it was set on a timer or if she was here to detonate it via remote control. He looked toward Dani again. She had a clear view of the stage from where she was standing, safely outside the park. She’d be outside the panicked throng. She could just walk away while the crowd fought to get out the gates.

  He looked around for a policeman. They were all in the park, surrounding the gazebo. For a second he thought about charging toward Dani, but Ram was going to take the stage shortly. Besides, the Texan could hold him off while she punched the remote. If she had a remote. If the bomb was on a timer there was nothing he could do. But if she was holding her finger over a button there was a chance.

  And he took it. Turning away from Dani and the Texan, he charged into the crowd, yelling, “Move aside! Emergency! I’m a doctor! Please, step aside!”

  The people at the edges of the crowd parted as he pushed and forced his way through in his mad dash for the stage.

  “ Hey, watch it,” a giant of a man yelled when Broxton slammed into his back.

  “ I’m a doctor, the prime minister is ill.”

  “ I’ll get you there,” the big African Trini yelled back to Broxton. “Get out of the way! Mr. Ramsingh needs his doctor!” The man hurled himself into the crowd, shoulder forward, as if he was blocking for a quarterback.

  Broxton kept his head down and his eyes on the broad back as the giant cleared the way, shoving people aside, shouting, “Doctor coming through! Step aside!” Then they were in the center of the crowd, people packed together. He smelled their sweat, felt their anticipation, touched their souls. The parting corridor the big man cut through the throng closed as soon as he’d pushed by. He was but a part of the pack, a single cell in the living, breathing, swaying and crushing crowd.

  People started applauding. Something was happening. He couldn’t see.

  “ Tammy, Tammy, Tammy,” the crowd chanted, excitement rising.

  “ Out of the way,” the big man yelled louder, trying to be heard above the applause.

  “ Tammy, Tammy, Tammy,” the crowd shouted as one.

  “ Hurry,” Broxton pleaded.

  “ Coming through,” the giant shouted, but the closer they got to the gazebo the slower the going. People were jammed together, back to front, shoulder to shoulder, but still the big man grunted, shoved and pushed. “Let the doctor pass,” he wailed, and to their credit, as tightly bunched as they were, people tried to get out of the big man’s way.

  “ Ladies and gentlemen,” Tammy Drake’s amplified voice boomed through mammoth speakers, “it’s good to be back. It’s going to be a wonderful evening.” The crowd went wild, yelling, clapping and whooping, drowning out the giant’s voice.

  People jumped, some swayed, some danced, some called out, they all clapped. Everybody in Trinidad loved Tammy Drake.

  “ Doctor coming through!” The giant pushed into the mass of people, shoving his way to the stage.

  “ It’s my great pleasure to bring Ramish Ramsingh up to the podium.”

  The crowd was muffled, but there were no catcalls, they remained respectful. Ramsingh wasn’t popular, but the audience wasn’t going to let politics ruin this musical night.

  Then they were at the stage.

  “ You, stop!” Broxton heard a rough voice scream. The giant dropped his shoulder and Broxton saw four uniformed policemen guarding the steps up the gazebo, all holding truncheons in hand, all raising them to strike. The giant spread his arms and dove into them, grabbing the center two and taking them down. The two on the outside swung their clubs, but the nightsticks hit only air as the big man rolled safely through.

  Broxton saw his opportunity and vaulted over the melee, landing on the stage as the prime minister took the podium. He felt a strong hand grab his arm, another wrapped around his neck.

  “ Hold,” Ramsingh said.

  The policemen relaxed their grips, but still held on to him.

  “ It’s all right,” Ramsingh added. “It’s Broxton. He’s in charge of security, remember?”

  ” Sorry, sir,” one of them said, as they released him. “We didn’t recognize you.”

  “ What’s going on?” Ramsingh said. The crowd, sensing something ominous, quieted, all eyes on the stage.

  “ Your wife is ill,” Broxton lied. “We have to go.”

  “ I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. Please forgive me,” Ramsingh said. “I have to leave. I hope you understand.”

  Broxton looked across the park as he put his arm around Ramsingh’s shoulder, and he locked onto Dani. She had her armed linked with the big Texan. She was too far for him to see into her eyes, but he knew she was boring into him. The Texan was holding something in his hand and Broxton didn’t think it was a Sony Walkman. He shivered, wondering if she would let him push the button.

  “ Is she all right?” Ramsingh asked, breaking Broxton’s concentration.

  “ We have to go,” Broxton said.

  “ All right,” Ramsingh said as Broxton, turning, pulled the prime minister toward the back of the stage and down the back steps of the gazebo. Cool sweat dripped from under his arms and his neck hairs were prickling. Any second it could all be over. All she had to do was giv
e the word and the podium, the stage, the gazebo, and several people would vaporize. He knew the truth of the thought as surely as he knew his own name.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “ Yacht Club, Yachting Association, Drake’s,” the youth shouted at Dani. The sun was still up, it was still hot. She wiped sweat off the back of her neck with her left hand as she signaled the young man with her right. “Yacht Club?” he yelled at her.

  “ Drake’s,” she yelled back to him.”

  “ This is crazy,” Earl said as she took his elbow and motioned for him to cross the street. The large green building on the corner across from the Globe Theater gave the place its name, Green Corner, and Dani was leading Earl to the maxi at the head of the line. There were already four people in it. The driver was waiting for six more.

  She passed it and climbed into the van second in line, taking a seat behind the driver. Earl jumped in and moved beside her. She leaned forward and put her mouth next to the driver’s ear as she draped a hand over his shoulder. “Go now,” she said, “and don’t pick up anyone on the way.”

  The driver, a thin Rasta man with dreadlocks past his shoulder, snatched the blue hundred from her hand. “We’re gone,” he said, and Earl slid the door closed as the van shot away from the curb, barely missing the maxi in front.

  “ Want a fast trip?” the driver asked. Earl recognized the Texas accent as he moved to the seat in back.

  “ Fast as you can and still get us there alive,” Dani said, getting up and moving to the back with Earl.

  “ Fucking crazy,” Earl whispered to her. “We’re making our getaway on a bus.”

  “ It’s Dani Street,” Broxton told Ramsingh as they made their way out of the park.

  “ What?”

  “ She’s the one behind the attempts to kill you. It explains why they wouldn’t kill me. She doesn’t want me hurt. And right now, I think she’s headed toward the ambassador’s yacht. She’s supposed to be taking it up island.”

  “ What are you going to do?”

  “ Go after her.”

  “ I’m going too,” Ramsingh said. Then he motioned to a young policeman standing next to a blue and white police car. “I’ll be taking the car, Gary.”

  “ Sir,” the policeman said.

  “ Mr. Broxton and I are going to use the car.” He offered the policeman a bright smile. The officer stood fast.

  “ I’m supposed to drive it.”

  “ Gary, I’m sixty-two years old. I know how to drive.”

  “ Not the point. I’m supposed to drive.”

  “ Look at me, Gary.” The policeman looked into Ramsingh’s hard gray eyes. “I’m the prime minister and I’m taking this car. Tell your sergeant that I gave you no choice. Then tell the president I’ll be out of touch for a day or so.”

  “ Sir?”

  “ Step aside, Gary.”

  “ Yes, sir,” the policeman said, as he opened the driver’s door and moved out of Ramsingh’s way. Broxton jumped in the passenger side and in seconds they were driving away from the park, the concert, and the thousands of fans who never knew how close they came to witnessing the assassination of a prime minister and possibly becoming victims themselves.

  “ Warren keeps his boat docked at the pier in front of Drake’s Shipyard. It’s a sixty-five foot sloop. Very fast. We’ll play hell trying to catch them. I don’t know if we can,” Ramsingh said, as they passed the maxi stand at Green Corner. They didn’t see Dani and Earl climb into the second maxi. They didn’t notice the maxi bolt from the curb. And they weren’t watching as it followed them down Western Main Road.

  “ We can’t have her arrested,” Broxton said.

  “ Don’t I know it,” the prime minister said.

  “ What are we going to do?” This time it was Broxton asking the question.

  “ Follow her and see where she goes. Play it by ear.”

  “ How are we going to do that?”

  “ I keep my boat at the yacht club. Not big and fast like Sea King, and the yacht club’s five miles this side of Drake’s so they’ll have a head start, but I’m a sailor, and Dani’s not. She’ll reef up, we won’t. We might get lucky.”

  “ Reef up?” Broxton asked.

  “ It’ll be dark soon. It’s blowing like stink out there. I know, I check the weather every morning, old habits die hard. She’ll be cautious and reef. That means she’ll bring most of her sail in.”

  “ What if she’s in a hurry?”

  “ She’ll be afraid of being overpowered. When the weather’s bad, you reef. Too much sail up and you can put your mast in the water, or worse you could roll the boat. It makes for a much safer and more pleasant ride if you reef when it starts to blow hard.

  “ You think we’ll be able to catch her?”

  “ Maybe, if she reefs, like I said. The wind will be at her beam, the best point of sail. She’ll cook. Seven, eight knots, even if she is reefed, but it won’t be fun with the kind of weather that’s out there. And there’s no place to hide in the Caribbean, too many yachties these days. There’s no such thing as a quiet or private anchorage anymore.”

  “ She won’t hide,” Broxton said. “She knows I saw her, but she also knows I’d never do anything to hurt Warren. Plus she thinks I’m still in love with her. She’ll be convinced I’ll keep my mouth shut. No, she won’t run or hide. She’ll think she’s in the clear. It would be just like her to take a leisurely cruise up the Islands, drinking, dining and dancing in the most public nightspots all the way to the Florida Keys.”

  They were quiet for a few seconds, then Broxton asked. “What do we do when we catch up to her?”

  “ That’s a good question.”

  “ She tried to kill you.”

  “ We don’t know that for sure,” Ramsingh said. He stopped at a red light, looked both ways, then ran it.

  “ She was with the man I saw in Margarita. That’s why I charged the stage. I’m convinced they had a bomb ready to blow.”

  “ And you thought if you were on the stage she wouldn’t set it off?”

  “ Yes.”

  “ But what if it wasn’t remote controlled? What if it was on a timer?”

  “ I didn’t think of that,” Broxton lied.

  “ Sure you did,” Ramsingh said. He waited through another few seconds of silence then added, “Thanks. I doubt any of my men would have taken such a risk.” Then he looked in the rearview mirror and changed the subject. “The maxi behind ran the light, too, with a police car in front,” he said.

  “ People don’t respect the law here,” Broxton said. “That’s part of your problem.”

  “ We have a long way to go,” Ramsingh said. Then he turned into the yacht club, oblivious to the maxi that sped around him and continued north on Western Main road toward Drake’s Shipyard.

  “ Fuzz is gone. Now we can move,” the Rasta driver said and he stepped on the gas.

  Earl watched the scenery fly by, fascinated by the rain forest that edged up to the road. He imagined monkeys, snakes, big cats and cannibals inside the dense jungle and shivered as he thought of witch doctors throwing bones and voodoo priests jabbing pins in lifelike dolls.

  “ Got snakes in there?” he asked the driver.

  “ Got plenty, man.”

  “ Poisonous?”

  “ Real deadly.”

  “ Monkeys?”

  “ Most died off, some kind of fever.”

  “ Cats, like lions and tigers?”

  “ No man.”

  “ How about voodoo?” He knew better than to ask about cannibals.

  “ We got that.”

  “ Shit,” he said, glad they were heading out of the country.

  “ I hear ya,” the driver said, then he turned on the radio, cranked it up loud and started singing along with a calypso song.

  For the next five or six minutes Earl stared at the lush, green vegetation as it whizzed by the window, wondering why they were leaving. The prime minister wasn’t dead yet. He turned
from the window, leaned toward her and whispered, “Where we going?”

  “ Grenada,” she said, whispering back.

  “ But we haven’t finished it.”

  “ Relax, Earl. We’ll be in Prickly Bay shortly after sunup. We’ll check in, go to town, be seen, talk to a few yachties and then we’ll board a plane and come back and finish the job. I don’t like doing it that way, but my father expects the boat to be in Grenada by tomorrow and that’s where it’s going to be, besides it’s a perfect alibi.”

  “ Won’t they have a record of us leaving the country?”

  “ You said you travel with a couple of extra passports, well I do too.”

  “ But everybody here knows you.”

  “ Earl, really,” she said. “Think about who I am and what I’ve been doing for the last several years. Don’t you think I can get by a customs officer without being recognized. Shit, I can be eighteen or eighty and I have a passport for every occasion.

  The guard left the guard shack as the police car pulled up to the gate. His uniform was pressed and the visor on his hat was as spit shined as his shoes. He wore the uniform like he was proud of it, but his stomach spoke of too many beers when he was off duty.

  “ Trouble?” he said, seeing the police car and looking in the window.

  “ No, Cletus, I’m just going for a sail.”

  “ Mr. Ramsingh, sir.” The guard stepped back.

  “ Would you call the president and tell him I went sailing for a day or so. Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow and explain everything.”

  “ I can’t call the president.”

  “ Sure you can,” Ramsingh said. “Get your clipboard and I’ll give you his private number.”

  “ I thought you were the prime minister,” Broxton said a few seconds later as Ramsingh put the emergency brake on in the parking lot.

  “ The president’s the head of state, like the Queen in England, and like in England the prime minister’s the head of the government. I’m elected, he’s not.”