Rebel Island (21 page)

“Look, little bro.” Garrett’s voice was ragged. “Alex is a victim here. He’s missing, remember? He’s—he’s probably been murdered.”

“Or he made it look that way.”

“Come on! Can you see Alex blowing people up? Or shooting a lawman in the chest? Or hitting his own manager on the back of the head?”

He waved the guitar pick as if it were weightier evidence than all the bomb-making equipment.

“Garrett, Alex went out of his way to barricade this room. He lied about the ceiling collapsing. He knew what was in here. He
had
to. He was making bombs.”

“What do you want me to say? You want me to turn on my last goddamn friend?”

In the daylight from the unboarded windows, Garrett’s beard looked grayer than usual. His shirt was pale blue with a fading parrot on it, a remembrance of Buffett concerts past. He looked exhausted and defeated, but he’d still taken the time this morning to comb his hair, the same way he’d done on the Fourth of July, so many years ago, hoping to impress a girl.

“We need to find Alex,” I said. “He was ready to surrender before this weekend. He started negotiating with the marshals, anyway. We need to convince him to give up.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, little bro?”

“Yeah, Garrett. It’s been a hell of an enjoyable weekend. Exactly the honeymoon I had in mind.”

He wheeled himself over to the refrigerator and stared at the equipment inside.

In the silence, I heard something in the hall—a wet floor-board creaking. I tensed, looking around for something to use as a weapon, but there was nothing except my flashlight and several pounds of high-grade explosives. I opted for the flashlight.

I peeked outside. There was no one in the hall, yet I caught a scent that wasn’t salt water or mildew or even death. It was the faint amber scent that might have been Benjamin Lindy’s cologne.

When I came back into the workroom, Garrett had unscrewed
the grenade and was holding it in his lap.

“Where is he?” Garrett asked.

“Who?”

“Alex. If he’s hiding, we have to find him. Where is he?”

I thought about Benjamin Lindy, and what he might have overheard if he’d been eavesdropping. I thought about where a man could go on an island this size in the middle of a hurricane.

“I think,” I said, “it’s high time we visited the lighthouse.”

36

Calavera checked his watch. Only minutes left now.

His things were safely stashed away. He would retrieve the money later, after the storm had passed. Then he would disappear for good.

What would the police think? They would have little to go on. They would scratch their heads about Alex Huff’s fate, but eventually they would drop the case. They would accept the easy answer, because it meant less work.

No one would escape to contradict his story. He would make sure of that.

He looked at the last candy skull in his hand.

He had never meant it to be a calling card. The skull was a tribute, left at his early kills to remind himself of a dying child—a lone eleven-year-old girl.

It had been only one of many atrocities he’d seen in the army. Why this one stuck with him, he didn’t know. He came into the hut just as his comrades had finished their business. They slashed the girl’s throat to silence her. The killer turned to face him, his eyes glazed. The blade of his knife glistened red. Calavera watched the girl die. He saw the light go out of her eyes. Her family was already dead. No one would grieve for her or even know what had happened.

And Calavera said nothing. He walked out of the hut and carried on, checking for weapon caches.

But he memorized the faces of the attackers. Within a week, all three of them had died. Freak accidents: the first blown apart by a land mine where no land mine should’ve been; another burned alive by an incendiary bomb; the third the victim of a defective grenade. Afterward, before his division left the area, Calavera went back to the location of that hut—now a smoking pile of ruins—and placed an offering to the girl: a few cookies, a wilted flower, a candy skull.

Her death kept things in proportion for him. If an innocent like her could die senselessly, why should he feel guilt? Why not take the money of the wicked to kill the wicked?

Even so, he had tried to stop. He had thought the days of Calavera were behind him, until New Year’s Eve.

Now it was different. He had to kill indiscriminately to protect the only thing he cared about.

It isn’t too late,
he thought.
I could stop it now. I could warn them.

He threw the candy skull into the corner. There would be no tributes today. This was about survival.

He made sure his gun was loaded. Then he went out to complete his plans.

37

On our way out we passed the dining room, which is why I
saw Jose with the bodies.

“Wait for me,” I told Garrett.

“Why?” Then he saw what I saw, and he didn’t look too anxious to follow.

In the dining room, Jose had laid out the two dead bodies on tables, each wrapped in white linen. I could tell which corpse was Chris Stowall. He was frozen in the fetal position. The other, Longoria, I would’ve been able to recognize from the smell. A day of death had mingled unpleasantly with his regular Old Spice.

Jose stared at the two men the way he might study a dinner setting, wondering whether he’d put the salad forks on the correct side.

“You moved them,” I said. I have a talent for stating the obvious.

“Everyone was packing, señor. It seemed to me if we leave…”

He didn’t finish the thought, but I got it.
The dead have to leave, too.

When the police finally got here, they were going to have a forensics hissy fit. The bodies had been moved so many times. Yet Jose’s feelings seemed sensible, somehow. He was tidying up. Looking out for the guests. Even Longoria deserved some measure of final respect. Or maybe I’d just been spending too much time in this damn hotel.

There was a jangling sound from the kitchen, and Imelda appeared in the doorway, flipping through a big ring of keys. “Jose, I can’t—”

She stopped when she saw me. Her eyes were pink from crying. The keys in her hand looked like the same set Jose had used the night before, to let me look through the office.

“It’s all right,
mi amor,
” Jose assured her. “I’m almost ready.”

Imelda met my eyes briefly, set the keys on the nearest table and backed out of the room. Not for the first time, I had the sense she wanted to tell me something, but I’d begun to wonder if that was just the way Imelda was—perpetually frustrated by her inability to express all the strange horrors she’d seen in her life.

When she was gone, Jose pocketed the keys. He picked up two tins of marigolds from the floor—the same marigolds that had been on his altar upstairs—and set them at the feet of each corpse. I wondered if he’d packed up his old pictures, too, and the
ofrendas
for his ancestors.

“You’ll leave the bodies here?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, señor.” Then he focused on me, as if realizing that this was an odd place for me to be. “Where are you going?”

“To look for your boss.”

Jose kept the same stoic look he’d had folding linen over the corpses. “Do not, señor. Please. It isn’t worth it.”

“You’re trying to protect him?”

Jose said nothing. He picked up a bottle of tequila from the wet bar.

“You’ve suspected Alex for a while, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Help will come soon, señor. Let the police handle things. You should take your wife outside. Wait there.”

His tone was about as convincing as the cologne on the dead marshal.

“I’m going to the lighthouse,” I said. “Come with me, in case it’s locked.”

“Only Mr. Huff kept a key to the lighthouse. No one will be there. Now forgive me, señor, but I need to finish setting things in order.”

Putting the house in dying order.
That’s what my mother used to call it whenever she made me clean my room before our summer trips to Rebel Island. She never laid out corpses on the dining table, though.

I left Jose making his
ofrendas—
pouring shots of tequila for two dead men.

Outside, the rain had waned to a drizzle. I could almost tell
where the sun was behind the blanket of clouds. There was still nothing on the sea but wreckage—no sign of a boat, a fish, a bird. The water was receding around the island. The northern stretch was still gone, but the main beach was almost back to where I remembered. The pilings of the boat dock jutted above the waterline. A Volkswagen-sized metal drum, like a septic tank, had washed ashore nearby.

The lighthouse was locked. It had a solid door, weathered oak with a deadbolt. I stared at it resentfully. That didn’t convince it to open.

“He ain’t in there,” Garrett said. “Probably locked it when you two left last night.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t lock it.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, ’cause we can’t get in.”

“Back up,” I said. “Way back.”

“No way you’re gonna try busting that down.”

I hefted Maia’s .357. Hastily, Garrett wheeled himself way back. I put my face next to the door and yelled, “Alex, if you’re in there, move away from the door.”

I stepped back about fifteen feet.

In a lot of movies, I’ve seen people stand next to the door and shoot down at the lock, which always struck me as particularly stupid. The lock is metal. What you’re likely to get is killed by ricochet or peppered with splinters.

I shot three times down the center line of the door—top, middle, bottom. The .357 made three decent-size holes. I kicked the middle. The door split in half like a piece of perforated paper.

Inside, morning light filtered from the windows high above. Canvas sacks were stacked in one corner. Against the opposite wall were a table and chair and a bedraggled man slumped over with his head cradled in his arms.

“Alex,” Garrett said.

Alex Huff’s red shirt was ripped across the back. He wasn’t wearing any shoes and his feet were bleeding. He seemed to be asleep.

He reminded me of a murderer I’d seen once in a police station—a guy who’d been caught after torturing three women. He’d been hauled into the station, put in an interrogation room to sweat. Far from getting agitated, the man had fallen asleep instantly, like he was relieved to be caught.

“Yo, Alex.” Garrett wheeled himself over and shook his friend’s shoulder. I stayed at the broken door. One of my bullets had chipped off a section of the limestone wall just above Alex’s head. If Alex had stood up, he would’ve died.

He didn’t wake when Garrett shook him, but he sighed deeply. An empty tequila bottle rolled off the table and clunked on the gravel floor.

I stepped closer, my finger still on the trigger, though I was pretty sure Alex wasn’t faking. He smelled of tequila. His bare arms were crisscrossed with glass cuts.

I pulled him upright by his hair and he grunted, his mouth slack. His eyes opened and rolled back in his head and he coughed on his own spit.

“Alex,” I said. “Wake up.”

“Waaa.”

“Get up, man,” Garrett said. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Alex blinked. He struggled to focus on everything around him, scowling, as if Garrett’s question were an exceptionally good one. Then something seemed to occur to him. His expression turned miserable, and he put his head back down in his arms. “No,” he groaned. “No, no…”

“Alex,” I said. “We found the room with the bomb materials.”

He mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

“Come on, Alex!” Garrett pleaded. “Explain this to me, man. Please.”

“Hotel,” he muttered. “My hotel.”

“What about it?” I asked.

He raised his head. The pain in his eyes told of a man who’d lost everything in the world.

“Is it over?” he asked me. “Has it blown up yet?”

I ran into Markie in the lobby. Ran him over, actually.

“Get out,” I told him.

“What?”

“Now! Where’s Ty and Chase?”

“In the parlor with Lane and the old dude. But—”

“Get them all and get out of the building.”

I think he asked me what was going on, but I’d given him as much time as I planned to. I sprinted up the steps to find Maia. My vision was tunneling. My mouth tasted like salt. Nothing mattered except getting her and getting out.

She was in our bedroom, curled up asleep, but her eyelids fluttered as soon as I touched her shoulder.

“Mmm?” she said.

“Fresh air time.”

“What?”

“Come outside.”

She studied my face, her sleepiness quickly dissolving. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to get outside.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

I was tempted to pick her up and carry her, but I knew she’d never allow it, and I wasn’t sure I could do it safely. As it was, I let her lean against me as we took the stairs. Every step I imagined as a trip wire, a second ticking off a clock. I said nothing. I didn’t want to make Maia upset. But the house was now a minefield.

Maia didn’t ask. She knew it was that serious.

We got to the bottom of the steps and saw Ty, Markie and Chase lugging suitcases out the front door.

“A boat’s here?” Chase’s eyes were desperate, like a death row inmate waiting for a pardon.

“No, no boat.”

Just get out of our way!
I wanted to scream.

Finally we were outside. I guided Maia across the dunes, as far from the house as I could get her. Garrett’s wheelchair was stuck in the wet sand and he’d given up on it. He was sitting on an intact section of boardwalk next to the ruins of the pier. The wind swept his hair to one side. Lane sat with him, hugging him tight. Chase, Ty and Markie plopped their suitcases down and sat on them, watching me. Benjamin Lindy was there, dressed in a funeral suit, his face as gray as the clouds. He gave me a steely look.

“Jose and Imelda,” I said. “Where are they?”

Nobody answered. Nobody seemed to know.

I cursed.

“What’s going on, Tres?” Lindy asked me. “Where is Alex Huff?”

If I had been thinking more clearly, I would’ve caught the deadly resolve in his voice, like a machine that had been set to automatic. But I had other concerns.

“Stay here,” I told Maia. “Do
not
follow me.”

I ran for the house.

Inside: first floor. No one in the dining room except the corpses. They looked wet and they smelled terrible—doused in tequila. I didn’t have time to give their smell much thought. The kitchen was empty. The parlor and the office, nothing. I yelled for Jose and Imelda. No answer. I ran upstairs.

Third floor: Jose and Imelda’s room. The little altar had been cleared away. Some clothes had been packed and removed. The bed hadn’t been made.

The closet was open. One suitcase on the floor. Empty coat hangers. Their window had been un-barricaded. I looked outside; I wasn’t sure why. At the back end of the house, a line of battered dunes led down to the old boathouse where I’d scuttled the fishing boat the night before. And there were Jose and Imelda, just going into the boathouse. Imelda turned. She looked at the house, as if saying goodbye. She found her own window and locked eyes with me. For a brief second, she wasn’t sure who she was looking at—a ghost, perhaps. Then her eyes widened.

That’s when I heard the first noise. From the opposite side of the hotel, a rumble, like an approaching earthquake. The floor trembled.

And then a strange clicking sound nearby, like a toy being wound up.

I focused on the suitcase in the closet. The noise was coming from inside it.

I hurled myself against the window and the room erupted in flames.

I imagined Mr. Eli looking down at me, his face illuminated
by fireworks. Alex’s father stood next to him. There were others there, too, but I couldn’t make out their faces.