Chapter 2
DAY 2: OCTOBER 15
Arlan O’Brien slipped on his flip-flops and stepped onto the sunlit deck of a massive, plastered, concrete house that overlooked the north shore of St. John and the Sir Francis Drake Channel, the mile-wide channel that separated the US Virgin Islands from the British Virgin Islands, or the BVI. He glanced to the east and saw whitecaps breaking over Johnson’s Reef. The seas had settled only a little since the front that passed the night before when, in the bright moonlight, he could see the large breakers on the reef from the same deck.
Arlan looked at his giant titanium watch, the only watch he’d ever worn. It was given to him by Captain Jay, Arlan’s mentor and the person responsible for all things dangerous and mischievous he’d experienced since arriving on the island a few years earlier. Arlan smiled as he remembered being handed the watch on Captain Jay’s dive boat while on his second dive ever—a wonderful nightmare of a dive in very deep water filled with sharks, blood and thrashing fish on the ends of spears. Just before going into the water, Captain Jay had handed Arlan a speargun and a mesh bag, pointed to Arlan’s new watch and told him he had to be back under the boat in forty minutes. The dive had been a recreational spearfishing expedition that consisted of a group of seasoned local divers, many of whom owned their own dive operations. They gathered every month or so to go on a “play dive.” These were aggressive dives, normally in deep, current driven and shark infested water where few recreational divers had any business diving, particularly tourists who had been certified in pools and gravel pits. This was the seasoned diver’s escape from the monotony of the daily grind of dealing with tourists who showed up with matching wetsuits and underwater knives strapped around their shins. Only Captain Jay had known Arlan was a rookie diver who had never been certified—in a pool or anywhere else. As soon as Arlan entered the water he’d realized he’d be on his own. The last words he’d heard before going underwater were, “Don’t worry, Rookie, it’s as easy as screwin’.” A few minutes later, once comfortable in the deep water, Arlan had experienced an underwater adventure that divers who’d been diving for decades rarely saw. Forty-five minutes later and back on the boat, Arlan was happy to be among the living.
Arlan walked back through the house, out the entrance and into the driveway. He left the doors open, the way they’d been for most of the life of the house. There was no reason to close and batten down doors on the island unless a hurricane was close. Burglaries were unheard of. Iguanas and smaller lizards, fruit rats, hummingbirds and an occasional goat could be found passing through or becoming part-time roommates in most island homes, but that was a minor tradeoff for the ability to live in a wonderfully open environment.
The house was owned by friends who had convinced Arlan to come for a short visit a few years earlier. He missed his return flight and had never left, eventually finding other places to stay on the island. When the owners of this home traveled or were back at their US home they often asked Arlan to house sit, which he was happy to do. The home’s architecture was stunning, and the views were even more so.
Arlan squinted in the bright Caribbean sunlight. The immediate pain behind his eyes reminded him that he’d stayed up far too late. He placed the sunglasses that hung from his neck onto the bridge of his nose, grabbed the handlebars of his Kawasaki 175CC dirt bike, lifted his right leg over the seat and settled in. Once comfortable, he raised the kickstand with his left foot, then used his right leg to kick the starter arm, at the same time twisting the throttle with his right hand.
Ring-a-ding-a-ding-ding-ding.
The two-stroke engine came to life, and Arlan fishtailed out of the long gravel drive and onto Centerline Road, one of three main roads on the island. He had five minutes to make the ferry which, contrary to most island things, was always punctual.
Why did I agree to meet the early boat? he thought as he glanced at his watch again.
Tommy Lowell, Arlan’s construction supervisor for the project he was developing, had called the night before to remind Arlan that he had a meeting with the building inspector at the ferry dock at eight in the morning.
It wasn’t really a meeting. Arlan had volunteered to pay for Blake’s daughter’s dress she needed to compete in a local beauty pageant coming up in a week. Arlan liked Blake and his family and knew they didn’t have a lot of money. He had to meet the boat and hand Blake an envelope with one hundred and eighty-three dollars in it, the cost of a bright-red dress on display in a shop on St. Thomas. Arlan could have had his secretary or Tommy deliver the money but preferred to keep the transaction quiet, lest anybody thought it a bribe. Arlan frowned at the thought that such a fine young lady had been thrust into the competition. She was a sweet person but was a hundred pounds overweight and had her father’s rough facial features. She had no chance to win a competition based on looks.
After three hairpin turns Arlan entered the stretch on Centerline Road that was flat and straight, if only for a half mile. It was the only place on the volcanic island that a standard transmission vehicle could see fourth gear. It was also bordered on both sides by the Iva Moses property—full of pigs, cows and a host of unfinished concrete block buildings that were the beginning of Iva’s dream of the first shopping mall ever on St. John. He had a lot of land and endless energy but didn’t have bank financing or a business model that would have told him that his dream may have been a couple of decades or more ahead of its time.
It was the pigs that interested Arlan as he increased power and nudged the shifter under his foot into the highest gear. About twenty pigs were huddled on either side of the road. The pigs on the left had already crossed the road and were waiting on their friends to cross so they could be on their way to the nearby landfill and the daily food scraps and other high-quality waste that tourism produces. The six pigs on the right side of the road had yet to cross.
Arlan had increased his speed and was screaming through the flat terrain. He’d be on the other side of the straightaway in seconds and would have to downshift. He glanced at his watch and turned the throttle a little more.
Ring-a-ding-a-ding-ding-ding.
He was a hundred feet from the pigs.
“Don’t cross,” he said out loud.
All but three crossed. Arlan lightly put his right foot on the brake pedal, and his hands opened to clutch the front brake handle if needed. He paused. The pigs made it across the road. He looked at the three pigs that stayed on the right side of the road and repeated, “Don’t cross.”
Ten feet away, a sixty-pound pig decided to cross.
“Motherfu...”
Arlan had no time to slow. Swerving would have made him drop the bike and skid down the road. Wearing shorts and no helmet, the slide would hurt and cause him to miss the boat. He chose to take his chances and remained upright. It was a small pig, he reasoned. He braced for the collision and wondered what the impact of a dirt bike against a pig would look like to a bystander. The thought made him smile, but only for a moment.
The impact catapulted him forward, his crotch landing hard on the gas tank. His hands found the clutch and throttle cables that were connected to the handlebars. He grabbed tight and was able to control the steering while his feet dragged the ground… Flintstone-style. Everything stayed that way until the bike came to a stop in the grass a few feet off the road.
Arlan looked down at his position on the bike, flabbergasted that he was still upright. He then looked back at the collision site and saw that the pig was alive—kind of. It was on its right side, and its left front leg kicked wildly in the air. It had made it to the other side of the road and, thanks to Arlan’s bike, would soon be on the other side of life. He couldn’t do anything to help the dying pig short of smashing its head with a rock, which would be messy and, if anybody saw him, he would be accused of pig murder. Arlan winced as he swung his leg over the seat and stood on the side of the bike. His balls would be sore for a w
hile.
He glanced at his watch. “Damn, two minutes.”
He wished he’d driven the Jeep, but he had left it at the office the day before, opting to ride home on his little motorcycle.
Arlan made a quick check of the bike and found nothing broken. The topsides of his toes were scraped raw from dragging on the asphalt. He kick-started the engine and gently sat back on the seat. The engine sputtered for a moment and then came to life. He settled into the seat, winced and continued to the end of the straightaway and down the steep, winding road to Cruz Bay. He’d call Iva later in the day and tell him about the pig and remind him once again to fence his animals in or risk seeing them become roadkill, or find a few wrecked motorcycles, or worse, along the road that bifurcated his property.
Arlan sped past the police station and waved at the uniformed Jimmy Dalmida, who laughed and motioned for Arlan to slow down, which he didn’t. As he approached the small park across from the ferry dock Arlan could see the crew untying the lines of the ferry. All of the parking spots near the dock were filled with taxis or surrey buses. Trucks with metal benches welded in rows on the frame behind the driver’s cab were covered with a canvas top to keep tourists dry. The taxi drivers who owned the trucks had dropped off their passengers at the ferry and were waiting for a different ferry full of passengers that would arrive from St. Thomas about twenty minutes after the hour. He waved and said “Okay” to several locals milling in the park and illegally parked the bike next to the small wooden kiosk used to sell ferry boat tickets.
“Hey mister, dat is no parkin place. Dat’s me kiosk,” a very large, uniformed West Indian lady shouted from the park. She hadn’t recognized Arlan, who had his back to her. When he turned, the big lady said, “Mr. Arlan, me son, whachu doin makin my life so hard?”
“Sorry, Miss Elsie. I’ll be right back. You can take the bike for a spin if you want,” Arlan answered.
“Wha? Me on dat motorcycle. Yo whan fo it to be flat as a jonny cake when yo go to come back?” Elsie shouted with a giant smile, making others in the park laugh.
“It’s okay. I’ve got insurance,” Arlan said and limped toward the boat, which was now a few feet from the dock. One of the crew had a thick coil of rope draped on his shoulder and was readying to leap from the dock to the boat. Arlan heard Elsie shout behind him, “You can get a ticket on da boat… if you make it der in time.”
Arlan limped past a group of boat owners huddled around the second of the two on-duty police officers, Jimmy’s brother Alex, who was listening to one of the boat owners explain that his dinghy was missing. Arlan knew all of the owners, who looked as though they had stepped out of a 1969 Woodstock time warp. He knew their boats and most of their dinghies, none of which were tied to the section of the dock close to shore that served as the official dinghy dock. He had no time to ask about the missing dinghies. Instead, he shouted to the crewman who’d finished his leap to the boat, who, upon seeing Arlan, leapt back to the dock and wrapped the heavy line around the nearest cleat while shouting for the captain to back up.
Once the captain brought the ferryboat against the dock, he stepped out of the wheelhouse and shouted, “Arlan, me son, why you always so late?”
Arlan shrugged and said to the captain, “Thanks, Ashley. I just need to give something to Mr. Blake. Can you hold the boat for a minute?”
“You gonna owe me. Maybe some lobsters next time you and Captain Jay go out huntin.”
“No problem. How big?”
The captain laughed and stepped back to the controls. Arlan ducked under the metal frame that held up the roof of the main cabin of the old ferryboat, which had been salvaged from the Gulf of Mexico where it transported oil rig workers for years before being retired as a ferryboat in the Caribbean. A few tourists were sprinkled around the cabin on the wood and plastic benches. Their luggage had been piled on the floor in the center of the cabin near the open rail where passengers would disembark. Locals sat together talking and laughing. Inspector Blake sat next to two older West Indian ladies.
“Good day, Miss Gwennie, Mrs. Hall,” Arlan said as he approached the group.
Mrs. Hall said, “Mr. Arlan, why you makin the captain turn around. You makin me late fo my weekly shoppin trip to da big islan.”
“Da big islan tis not gonna go anyplace soon, Mrs. Hall,” Arlan said, making everybody on the bench laugh.
Arlan handed an envelope to Mr. Blake, who thanked him and asked Arlan when he’d need another inspection on the construction project.
“I’ll let you know.” Arlan nodded to all three and said, “Have a good day.”
Arlan thanked the captain for holding the boat and returned to his Kawasaki. After a few greetings with locals he sped up the hill to his office at Gallows Point, a run-down building built by Richard, Duke, Ellington.
Ellington was a mystery writer who had built seven funky cottages and a bar on the property in the ‘50s and managed them until Arlan’s new partners bought the property. Many people speculated that Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival, written while Wouk lived in the Virgin Islands, was based on Gallows Point. Others were sure that it was based on a little inn near French Town on St. Thomas called Villa Olga. Others thought it might be about a small hotel on Hassle Island. They were all similar, and Wouk may have picked parts of all of them to pen his famous novel.
After an hour or so of phone calls, Arlan left his office to check out the construction progress. Tommy Lowell stood outside the office giving instructions to a masonry crew that had arrived late. Tommy was Arlan’s right-hand man, though Arlan often thought it should have been the other way around. Their friendship had come a long way since the awkward start a couple of years earlier. Captain Jay had been dragging the rookie around Cruz Bay and introducing him to many of the island characters. They’d entered one of the three bars on the island early on a Saturday night and sat next to a group of Americans who’d made St. John their home.
The man who sat on a bar stool had looked at him with penetrating blue eyes and asked, “A-are you n-new to the island?” Arlan smiled and shook his head.
“You m-must be th-the rookie C-Captain Jay has t-talked about.”
The man was about the same size as Arlan. Arlan had been sure the man was drunk and did everything he could to avoid him, grunting answers to his questions and trying hard not to make eye contact. The more Arlan avoided answering the man’s questions, the more intense the man became. After one beer, Captain Jay had saved Arlan by announcing that they’d be moving on. As they left the bar, Arlan found out from Captain Jay that the guy next to him was Tommy Lowell.
“He’s drunk,” Arlan had said.
Captain Jay had asked, “You didn’t piss him off did you?”
“Uh, well, maybe. He kept looking at me like he wanted to punch me.”
Captain Jay had said, “He wasn’t drunk… he stutters. And he doesn’t like it when you don’t pay attention to what he has to say. He makes you listen to every word, even if it does take a long time, and you already know how he’s gonna finish a sentence. He is kinda old-fashioned and all about chivalry and politeness and all of that shit. Hell, he’s even polite when he kicks your ass.”
Tommy and Arlan could have passed for brothers. Both were about six feet and rangy, though Tommy was a little more chiseled, and both had dark wavy hair and deep blue eyes. But Tommy, probably because of his stuttering, was a tough and skilled fighter. A state wrestling champ and a Golden Glove boxing champ in a previous life, Tommy didn’t like rudeness in people, no matter what size or how many. He especially didn’t like people to curse when talking to him. If they did he would ask them to stop. If they did it a second time he would ask them to stop and demand an apology. If they continued, they found themselves on their asses looking up at Tommy wondering what kind of apology would work best.
Tommy was also one of the most knowledgeable contractors on the islan
d, or anywhere, as far as Arlan knew. More importantly, he was liked by everybody, which was difficult on an island full of fiercely independent people with strong egos.
The masonry crew moved on to start their work day. Arlan told Tommy about hitting the pig and limping down the dock.
Tommy laughed and said, “W-we should take the Jeep and d-drive back up there and b-bring the dead pig back. We c-could have a pig roast f-for the workers.”
“I’m sure Iva has butchered it by now. He never lets anything wait.”
A plumbing contractor arrived and asked Tommy several questions about the job.
Arlan watched the contractor walk away, apparently satisfied with the answers.
Arlan said, “I saw a strange thing on the dock. Alex was talking to several boat owners. Their dinghies were missing.”
“I h-heard about that a while ago. But th-that’s not all.”
Arlan cocked his head, wondering how Tommy knew so much in such a short time. “What else?” he asked.
“The Ha-Happy Hobo is m-missing.”
“How do you know it’s missing? Maybe Stu is out sailing.”
“S-stu is off-island.”
Arlan shrugged and said, “Oh well, I guess it’ll show up sooner or later.”
Tommy smiled and said, “P-probably.” He then asked, “Is F-frank coming today?”
“He’s supposed to be here on the noon ferry. Maybe we should meet him at the dock.”
Frank Zapelli was the contractor that Arlan’s New Jersey partners forced him to hire as the general contractor for a new project at Gallows Point. Arlan had fought the decision but, as a 20 percent partner, was out-voted. It didn’t help that Frank had paid Arlan’s partners under-the-table cash for not insisting on a bond that was required in the contract but that Frank couldn’t provide because of bad credit.
“Are you g-going to fire him t-today?” Tommy asked as they waited for Frank.
A Fortnight of Fury Page 3
