Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (5 page)

“Use the alley entrance.”

With a screech, we took off.

It was still early in Saint Hippolytus. A few women walking out for bread. The cafes catering to a desultory somnambulant crowd. Serving up johnnycakes and fry jacks, huevos rancheros, last night’s leftover stew chicken, strong black coffee.

The smells made me hungry. I hadn’t eaten yet.

The usual bums slept in the usual doorways.

The drains smelled like festering evil.

When a yellow ghost-dog materialized in front of my wheels, I instinctively whipped the SUV sideways into a utility pole. Hitting the pole was not part of the plan. My head slammed against the windshield. The tinkle of breaking headlight glass rose to my ears like the fizz escaping from an open bottle of
agua mineral
. This was just before things went black for a few seconds.

For a moment I was back in the apartment above the
Chat Noir
back on Malibu Caye, looking down at Tony’s dead body. Black rings of dried blood smeared around each eye socket gave him a wild lemur-like look. The eyes themselves were split in twain as neatly as a filleted tilapia.

Then I zapped back to the Shogun in the here and now. My lip slit like the belly of a maggot; my head vibrating like a tuning fork.

Poe was trying to get out of the truck, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock the door. No practical skills whatsoever.

I grabbed his collar and yanked him backward. His head thumped the steering wheel.

Throwing the SUV into reverse, I shot back from the pole.

A hive of high-octane bullets ripped through the space where we had just been, slamming like wood-boring bees into the wooden house abutting the sidewalk. If we’d been there, Poe and I would have been
carpaccio
.

Someone wanted us dead.  Poe could get his brain around that.

I didn’t wait for a reprise. Pitching and yawing in the ruts, we tore up an alley and around the corner. Two wheels, baby. A second spray of automatic weapon fire went wide.

I kept glancing in the rear view, but after a half dozen twists and turns, nobody seemed to be following. I pulled to a sudden stop next to a cement block wall painted the color of someone’s rectum. A political statement or color blindness?

I looked at Poe, who appeared about as unhappy as anyone could without being dead. It’s always a shocker when you find out your boss thinks you’re expendable.

“We can’t go to your office,” I said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

“Turn around and take New Gulf Road. I know a safe house.”

I started driving again. Poe stared morosely at the dashboard.

“You’re ass is grass, man,” I said without looking at him.

“I know.” After a long pause: “Maybe we can help each other out.”

“I want my fucking money back.” And I didn’t trust him farther than I could throw a dead tapir. Which wasn’t far seeing as how they weigh about 500 pounds.

“How did you know I was involved?” asked Poe.

“Ariel gave me your name,” I said. “A precondition to a handjob he never got.”

Poe’s eyes burned for a moment as if I’d turned up the wick on one of those cheap plastic lighters.

“Who’s orchestrating this cluster fuck?!” I shouted.

“I work for von Richter,” said Poe.

The neo-Nazi
Oberstgruppenfuhrer
.

All this time I was careening like a madwoman through the narrow lanes and alleys of Saint Hippolytus. Past an abandoned factory protected by razor wire and some ancient rusting oil storage tanks, I swung the SUV down one last rutted byway, and we were there.

When we hit New Gulf Road, it was like a hallucination of a first-world highway heading straight to Hell. Two lanes of brand-new cement road disappearing into the endless tidewater swamps to the south. Lucky Saint Hippolytus itself occupied a gall-bladder-shaped volcanic extrusion older than the Bible.

The new mobsters had built their hideouts in those swamps, but their bars and nightclubs and bordellos and casinos were still in downtown Saint Hippolytus. Hence, New Gulf Road.

We sped along this dream highway, the Shogun’s tires thumping on the uneven seams between the cement sections. Occasional unmarked turnoffs whizzed by in my peripheral vision: dirt tracks instantly swallowed by the seething tidal vegetation.

I looked at my watch. We’d been on the run now for thirty minutes. Pretty soon they’d have a helicopter up looking for us. We needed to hide the car. We also needed to get far away, as fast as possible. Tilt.

“Turn here.”

We’d just cleared a long easy curve, like the outline of a classic pinup girl. I’m more a Jap manga type. Small-boned, quick and over-enthusiastic. With ash-black dyed hair and utilitarian tits.

The cutoff ID-ed by Poe was as nondescript as the others we’d passed. We bounced over the curb and slithered down a steep embankment into the maw of the mangroves. The private road looped through the swamp atop a low dirt levy connecting islands of higher ground overgrown with wild onion, sea grape, cocoplum and outbreaks of banana palms.

A shadowy hunting shack at the end of a dead-end turnoff brought to mind an illegal abortion clinic I’d once patronized in Mexico City. Alone, I’d taken the elevator to the eleventh floor of a crumbling half-empty building; then walked down a long ill-lit corridor to the door at the end, my stiletto heels tapping their way like two blind mice. I was nineteen.

Around the next bend, the view suddenly opened out. A low-slung post-mod beach house filled the foreground. Behind stretched the blue-green sea. An osprey took wing from a dead tree at the lower edge of the cleared area. An artificial beach of khaki-colored sand decorated the sea’s edge.

There were no vehicles parked by the house. Did this mean the place was empty?

“Think there’s anyone here?” I asked.

Poe looked at me like I was some new kind of idiot.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“Only one way to find out,” I replied, keeping the mundanities in play.

For whatever good it might do, I parked the Shogun facing back the way we’d come. But the dirt road was only one vehicle wide. Anyone driving in would block it like a cork in a bottle.

Clambering out of the truck, I stood stretching, feeling the morning’s tension like nails hammered in my shoulders and back. When I was done with the Gold’s Gym routine, I tucked the .45 in my waist and hefted instead the crass feather-light
el cheapo
, pissant mini-gun I’d taken from Poe’s pocket. At least it had bullets.

Watchfully we approached the house, Poe walking slightly in front but not blocking my line of fire.

The beach house was constructed as a series of overlapping oblong boxes. The façade of each made from a variegated combination of glass and odd-shaped sandstone chunks fitted together like a puzzle. Underneath, a superstructure of steel I-beams were bolted to poured-concrete pilings. The land in front graded upward in a wedge to support the steps leading to the solid teak door.

Poe took a key from under the doormat and unlocked the deadbolt. I skipped inside, gun first, scanning wildly. A boxy shiny-white entryway with stairways spiraling up and down to other oblong boxes.

Directly in front of me, suspended from wires like a Calder-esque mobile, hung the moth-eaten remains of a
Waffen-SS
officer’s uniform, including hard-brimmed cap,
achtung
boots and swagger stick. Thinking for an instant that it was an actual person, I dropped to one knee, pistol raised to fire.

“Relax, Muldoon. It’s just a memento.”

I looked at Poe.

“You figured out who I am.”

“It came to me while you were driving. Anne Muldoon, Tony the Microbe’s gun moll.”

Well, I’d been called a lot worse.

“Whatever.” I nodded at the uniform. “von Richter’s?” I asked.

“Actually I think it belonged to his great-uncle. Deceased.”

“I could give a shit.”

“Let’s get a drink,” said Poe.

My instinct said: Check the house. My nerves said: Get a double. I followed Poe down a stairway to the lower floor. He seemed to know his way around.

We came into the main living arena, split into zones for lounging, eating and cooking. Which left the upstairs for fornicating.

The space was an oblong box with a perfect view. On the far side of the thick glass, a few whitecaps scudded across the undulating disquiet of the sea’s surly surface.

Poe handed me a crystal cocktail glass. I put my nose to the rim and sniffed. Vodka.

I drank it off in one gulp.

When I heard a boot scrape on the stairway behind me, I knew I’d made the wrong choice back in the hallway.

“Drink up, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sure you’ve had a hell of a day so far.”

von Richter! As I started to turn, a sharply colder voice continued:

“But if you turn around without dropping that little toy onto the floor, I’ll cut you in half.”

The Saturday night special skidded across the terracotta tiles.

Suddenly I felt as woozy as a Victorian heroine with the vapors. Maybe the double shot of booze on an empty stomach brought it on or the shitload of stress I’d been under in the last forty-eight hours. Or maybe it was the first symptom of a massive brain tumor. Whatever the cause, my head spun in the opposite direction from my body, a black fog rolled across my brain. I collapsed like a soggy condom.

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say. I was back at Malibu Caye. At Tony’s flat. Tony lying there with a little worm of blood dribbling from a black nail hole in his forehead. Tony with a look of complete and utter surprise on his winsome face. Tony dead as a day-old scone.

But why was I sorry?

For myself? For poor dead Tony? For what I’d done? For the misplaced dreams and the roads not taken?

A photograph lay on the floor next to Tony’s body. Next to the pearl-handled .22-caliber revolver with the initials A.M. engraved on a silver inset.

The photo was of two men, naked.

One of them was Tony.

You get the rest.

Screams echoed in my head. They were mine.

From out of pitch darkness, streaks of light lashed across my retinas. I opened my eyes. I was back in the present. Naked. On the beach to one side of the shoebox house. The sea breeze whipped my hair across my face. My hands bound in loops of rough sisal held aloft above my head, the rope looped over a tree branch and tied off somewhere behind me. My toes barely touched the sand.

A blond Aryan type with deeply tanned wind-scoured skin stood in front of me, hands on hips, watery blue eyes feasting on my nakedness: von Richter for sure. Behind him, Poe sat in a deckchair, his feet propped on a canvas valise as fat as a pregnant sow.

“What are we to do with you?” queried von Richter. “In other circumstances, I’m sure we could find some piquant diversions to pass the time. But your presence here puts everything in jeopardy. No doubt your friend Ariel is using every available resource to hunt you down.”

He reached out his veiny hand and touched my left nipple. It hardened like a pink tessera. It was impossible to avoid his caress.

“Is that the four million dollars?” I asked, flicking my eyes in the direct of Poe and the canvas bag.

“How very astute.”

“So it was you who murdered Tony,” I said.

“Me?” von Richter laughed with genuine glee. “Did you hear that Poe? The little bitch thinks I killed her lover.”

Poe just looked nervous. “I’ll get the truck,” he said. “We need to go quickly.”

He pushed himself up out of the chair and, gripping the satchel, walked toward the Shogun.

“Yes, of course,” said von Richter, his voice drifting on the wind gusts off the ocean. When his eyes focused on mine, they were as cold as a January morning on the Baltic Sea. “You must look deeper inside yourself to unlock the riddle of Tony the Microbe’s murder.”

That’s when I remembered the razor in my blood-covered hands.

The explosion of a high-powered rifle split the afternoon into a million fragments. My eyes darted in the direction of the SUV in time to see Poe flail backward, then fall like a felled trunk of a mahogany tree.

von Richter curled into a crouch, a large ugly pistol suddenly in his hand. He lurched behind me, one arm wrapped across my belly. My flesh crawled. I felt the twelve below zero muzzle of von Richter’s weapon against my head.

“Give it up, von Richter!” boomed an amplified voice. “There’s no way out.”

The thup-thup-thup of a helicopter filled the sky. I was afraid von Richter would pull the trigger in a panic, blowing my brains to kingdom come on a perfectly nice afternoon in the tropics.

But suddenly he burst away, running low and fast toward the seaward edge of the beach, zigzagging to avoid the sharpshooter’s methodical sweep. His thin wiry physique sliced into the surf. Then he was through the tumbling spume and cutting across the billowing surface of the briny deep with a powerful Australian crawl, heading for one of the outlying mangrove cayes.

No further shots rang out.

The rhythmic thumping of the copter became the entire world. Sand swirled, stinging like tattoo needles against my skin. When the tumult of the helicopter’s landing subsided, I opened my eyes to see Ariel and two of his camouflage-bedecked minions coming toward me. One of the latter used a Bowie knife to release me from bondage, while the other retrieved the valise from where it had fallen from Poe’s grip.

Ariel threw an oversized military shirt across my shoulders. Buttoned, it hung to my knees.

In no time we were airborne: Ariel, me, the pilot, his two troopers and the satchel containing US$4 million.

I looked at Ariel. His face was as empty of emotion as a cigar-store Indian molested by stray dogs.

“What about von Richter?” I asked.

“My men will pick him up or the sharks will have a feast. We knew he’d taken the money. We just needed to flush him out of his hiding place. That was your job. There was a tracking device imbedded in the handle of my .45.”

“Now you’ve got Tony’s murderer and the money,” I said.

“When I arrested you at the airport, I didn’t have all the facts.” Ariel pulled my lizard-skin clutch from beneath his seat and clicked it open. His fat fingers extracted the photo of Tony giving it up the ass. “Looks like a valid defense to me,” he said. “But you still owe me a handjob.”