A Wanted Woman Part 19

"She gone. Tell your boyfriend this sweet a.s.s belong to me tonight. All the other girls have a botsie big and soft like rotten fruit, but yours is round and firm, hard like green mango on the tree."

He followed me through the crowd, outside into the coolness of the Caribbean air. Not until then did he give me some s.p.a.ce. A Honduran girl confronted him; this one just happened to be pa.s.sing by with a group of girls and saw him walking out of the club holding my backside, and she wanted to have harsh words with him. I kept going, waited across the street. I wanted this bulls.h.i.t off the books. Didn't want the Barbarians giving me more s.h.i.t. He left the girl, hurried and caught up. I let my hair loose, strolled behind a crowd of Canadians. Then the cricketer was behind me, had broken free from all other women, squeezing my a.s.s and telling me how good he was going to make me feel.

He said, "You walk so wa.s.sy."

"Enough of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

"What?"

"Let's get off the road before another one of your women shows up with her hot grumble and grunt and a slice of s.e.xton. Let's go here."

I led him toward the black-and-white sign in front of the Anglican church: THE CHURCH OF ST. LAWRENCE. We went through the wrought-iron gate, vanished from the world of sinners. He kissed me and groped me until we were in the rear of the monument to the glory of G.o.d, its architecture not on the level of the Neocla.s.sical, Gothic, and Baroque elements that were at St. Paul's Cathedral, but it still looked like a throwback to the 1800s when the area was, I think, just known as Bath Village.

He said, "Why you pouting?"

"What if I want to change my mind about this?"

"I don't like being teased. Don't dance with me half the night and let me buy you drinks and make me turn down other beautiful girls and get hard and think you can leave me with blue b.a.l.l.s. I don't change my mind so you can't change your mind. I have made your mind up for you. Understand?"

"Okay. I don't want you mad. You'd think me a slag, a dumb slapper, a bint, who was a c.o.c.k teaser, a cow too afraid to get some Harry Monk on the north and south."

"You have s.e.xy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Real s.e.xy b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

"Might even take off my top and get some on my Eartha Kitts."

"You have a beautiful mouth and I want you to leave red lipstick all over my d.i.c.k."

I led him to a shadowed spot at the end of the car park, an area that stood facing the jagged rocks on the calm beach. He pulled me to him, held my face with his dank hands, and licked my lips.

He said, "Your kiss real sweet, like cane sugar."

I opened my clutch, released its hidden compartment, took out what gave my clutch its weight. I took out a BC-41, one of the deadliest combat knives ever made, one that could chop the branch off a tree, its handle with a grip that could be used like bra.s.s knuckles, its blade surgical-sharp. The knife was nine inches long, the knuckle guard being almost five of those inches. His eager hands came up, grabbed my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pulled one from its bra, and sucked the nipple. I slid my fingers into the knife's grip, held his head, and closed my eyes. He pushed my straps from my shoulders, was busy sucking my left nipple-too much suction, yet the pain was sweet. It felt good. Felt so good for a moment.

I whispered, "You're a f.u.c.king Richard the Third."

"I'm a king?"

"No. You're a t.u.r.d."

The first two blows were hard and wicked thrusts, strikes that inserted the BC-41 inside of his body up to the knuckle guard, fast like a boxer putting jabs to his lungs, the full length of the blade digging in deep. That was the worst place to be stabbed. It created a sucking chest wound. The moment I pulled the blade out of its new home, he couldn't breathe. Right away he grabbed my hair and my wig came off, gripped in his hand as he coughed up blood. He went down on his knees. Eyes open wide. He was in shock. His lips trembled and he had a "what de s.h.i.te" expression on his face.

In my true voice I said, "Do you have any idea how f.u.c.kin' annoying you are? Jesus. I wanted to scream. You're pushy. You're a f.u.c.kin' bully. I hate bullies. But you. You have to be the most arrogant, irritating, annoying son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h in the Caribbean. You talk too much. You go on and on and on and just love to talk so you can hear the sound of your own irritating voice, and all of these women like you?"

If only Trinidad had gone this way. That was all that I could think at that moment. If only the target and no one else had been put down. If I hadn't been drugged, it would have happened differently.

I forced him on his back, cut away his belt, felt a lump in his front pocket, thought it might be a weapon, pulled it out, saw that it was a big wad of money, all hundred-dollar bills in American currency. It paused me. It was like a starving man finding a fresh loaf of bread, warm, still wrapped up.

I put the wad to the side and sat on his thighs, pulled out his p.e.n.i.s. I castrated him, held his offering in my hand, ready to force it down his throat. Those were the instructions.

Then there was a gap in the music. There was abrupt silence.

A momentary loss of power in the village had left me vulnerable.

Bracelets jingled behind me. High heels tapped the concrete. The wind brought me her scent, her familiar scent. The woman was tall. Wore a black sequined skirt that shimmied in the broken light. She was a dark silhouette, an unmistakably shaped silhouette, and I knew that as she stood in silence, as I had done a shocking thing on sacred grounds, her eyes were on mine.

With each breath I inhaled the scent of Lola by Marc Jacobs. It was the same girl from the club, the one who had been eyeing the cricketer all evening. She had been on my heels since I had arrived.

As the sea licked the sand she saw the blood dripping from my once-shiny blade.

My adrenaline was high. I was on fire. Couldn't stop sweating.

She stood in the shadows, underneath the shadows of the symbol of an imported religion.

Blade in hand, I went toward her the way I dreamed the LKs had come after me.

I went toward black sequins as they shimmered on Caribbean-brown skin.

She stood in the shadows holding a Beretta. An a.s.sa.s.sin's gun.

"Hurry up, Reaper," Petrichor said.

"Give me a moment."

"I'm late and need to get home to my husband."

"Let me do my f.u.c.king job, will you? Just let me do my f.u.c.king job."

I went back to the cricketer, flipped him over, and with my blade I cut the back of his neck.

TWENTY.

Six Roads, safe house The Caribbean sun pulled itself from the ocean at around five in the morning.

Unable to sleep with the sun shining on my face through the thin curtains, I sat up, pulled myself from two hours of fitful sleep, head aching, much on my mind. Looked at my hands, expected to see blood. My hands had been scrubbed clean. Dressed in a wrinkled blue T-shirt, red shorts, and black biker boots, I opened the bedroom window, smelled the smoke from cane fields that had burned half of the night. The air had owned a stench since I had arrived, another reason to keep the windows shut. I crawled out of the window, stepped around frogs, and went to the corrugated fence. Snails. Centipedes. Ants. Flies. Everything attacked me or was squished. The neighbor on the next road had a giant lime tree, its branches hanging over the shoddy, thrown-together barrier. I pulled four small limes from a low-hanging branch. The neighbor in the house near the main road was outside. Thin woman. Maybe thirty. Brown. Short hair. Five-foot-two in flip-flops, shorts, tank top. She saw me, went back to hanging laundry.

Area was quiet. Local dope man and his ashy-foot flunkies weren't up yet.

I climbed back inside the window, washed my hands, put on hand sanitizer, then scrubbed a can of sardines to kill all the germs, opened the can, deboned the fish, mashed it with a fork. I added lime juice along with chopped-up onions. After I sprinkled on a little pepper, I chopped up a tomato and added that, too. I grabbed a box of rice crackers, stared at the food, but put all of it to the side.

Tired, shopworn, and feeling five times my age, I brought the floor fan into the front room, put it on high. Stretched for thirty minutes. Down on my haunches, I put my laptop on the floor, popped in an Insanity DVD, did a plyometric cardio circuit as a warm-up then dug in deep and did max cardio conditioning and cardio abs. I shadowboxed, cursed my invisible opponent, then did katas.

I looked up at the walls and whispered, "f.u.c.k you, Johnny Parker."

Two hours later the workout ended, the floor below my feet a puddle of sweat.

I mopped the dull tile, and since I had earned my meal, I ate, chewed smashed sardines and crackers as I paced back and forth in my cell, unable to cool off, stormed from room to room, ended up in the stuffy bedroom. The previous day's newspapers were scattered on the worn-out, unmade twin bed, a bed that hadn't been made up since I arrived and wouldn't be, not by these hands. The sheets were twisted from my angst and insomnia, a dark vibrator unconscious on the sheets due to me trying to give myself therapy so I could get a decent night of sleep. I pushed the Barbados Advocate and Nation to the floor. The headlines for both papers were almost the same: FORMER WEST INDIES CRICKETER FOUND KILLED IN ST. LAWRENCE GAP WHILE OUT ON RAPE CHARGE. ACCUSED RAPIST MURDERED IN CHRIST CHURCH.

They remembered the cricketer dancing with a bashy English girl then arguing with his fiancee and almost getting into a ba.s.sa-ba.s.sa on the dance floor. "Bashy" wasn't a compliment. It meant I was wild 'n out, and their brown eyes saw me as a s.l.u.t. "Ba.s.sa-ba.s.sa" meant fight.

I showered in cold water, same as I had done for the last forty days. After the quick cooldown, I checked my phone again. Nothing from the Barbarians. Nothing at f.u.c.kin' all. Had to live my life.

I packed my backpack with extra clothes and just-in-case tools. Crawled out the back window again. The same curious neighbor peeped from her window when I started the Ducati.

I hit the Wynter Crawford Roundabout and attacked Highway 5. I outran the stench from the slaughterhouse and took the main highway toward Haggatt Hall and Government Hill, my destination the heart of Bridgetown. I drove tired, with the blood from a cricketer washed away from my hands.

Ten minutes later I was beyond Sky Mall, pa.s.sing the prime minister's home, maybe three kilometers shy of Bridgetown. Had to find the Chefette near the top of Broad Street.

An Amalgamated Security Armoured Division truck pa.s.sed by and I wondered how hard it would be to hijack them, too. Rumor was no one had ever nicked a money truck in Barbados. I could dress in the habiliments of a student at Princess Margaret, put on a wig that had ponytails, my backpack loaded with the guns I needed, catch them at a pickup, gun them down, be gone in sixty.

Over the past two weeks, I had given that boldness, that foolishness, serious thought.

Thinking along those lines told me how frustrated and desperate I had become.

I would have to find a way to make money and use that money to make my own plans.

I would have to find a way to escape from Alcatraz.

TWENTY-ONE.

Bridgetown, Parish of St. Michael.

Visited by the Spanish and Portuguese and left unclaimed until the English showed up and claimed it for King James I and turned paradise into an island of slaves harvesting sugarcane. Two-hundred and fifty miles northeast of my nightmare, Trinidad and Tobago.

Guyanese. White Bajans who were the offspring of Scottish indentured servants and Irish who were "barbadosed" to the island. The offspring of enslaved Africans. Chinese Bajans. Lebanese and Syrians. Jewish. Muslim-Indian. Some 80,000 people lived in Bridgetown and it looked like more than half were driving the roads and walking. It wasn't as diverse as New Year's Eve in Times Square or a Sunday afternoon on Santa Monica Pier; most owned darker hues than the people had in Trinidad, but I would fit in. I parked the Ducati illegally on Flower Alley, a slender and empty pa.s.sageway across from an American Airlines and FedEx outpost situated in another powder-blue building that looked to be around five decades old. I left my bike on the side of Access Point Cafe. A couple of lead pipes were in the alley. This pa.s.sageway didn't stink of urine, not like the serpentine alleys behind Cave Shepherd and on Swan Street. I picked up one of the lead pipes. Had a habit of collecting anything that could be a weapon, a habit I had picked up from Old Man Reaper. Solid pipes. A good swing could open a head. Both were the right size for stick fighting, or could be modified and turned into a pair of nunchaku.

I added both to the wicked things I carried in my backpack.

All I smelled was the scent of jerk chicken, oxtail, and snapper. Stomach growled. I put on a wig. Black pixie cut. Put a purple bandana on top of the wig. Darkened my eyes, became punk. I took off my boots, put on flats. The rain was tolerable by the time I made it to Broad Street. Thousands were in town.

Damaged motorcycle helmet in hand, sliding my backpack down my right arm, I went inside Chefette, inhaled the scent of curried meat and broasted chicken as I scanned the place. Didn't see the broker. I waited in a long line, ordered a vegetarian burger, fries, and a Mauby to wash it down. An unsmiling woman took my order and another with the same expression handed it to me.

I found the last empty table facing Broad Street. A few feet away a woman with long dreadlocks, hair soaked from the rain, begged for handouts from people as they left the ATMs in the area, three infants at her side. People with overloaded shopping bags pa.s.sed her by, kept on trucking.

The broker had six minutes to be in the seat facing me. Might give him five.

I pulled two newspapers from my georgie bundle. Sat one paper next to me, an American newspaper, used that to cover my anxious .380. I picked up the other, a local newspaper, saw an article about the dead cricketer staring at my face. I started reading. The first girl who went off on him at Sugar Ultra Lounge was Sherry-Ann Willoughby. Said they were engaged. She attended Queen's College, a model, a Miss Barbados World delegate last year. Vexed, she had left Sugar Ultra Lounge, gone to Storey Gap, and taken her anger to an off-road entertainment joint, thrown back drinks like they were tap water, hooked up with an ex-boyfriend, and spent the night at his mother's home riding his stiffness.

A jealous girlfriend was also a vindictive girlfriend. Betrayal was her alibi.

But having an alibi didn't mean that you had nothing to do with the crime.

I put the newspaper down, left it faceup, one article about the local TGIF shutting its doors, another about telecommunications company LIME sending home more than two hundred people, others about construction workers being let go, page after page of black-and-white misery looking up at my frown.

I checked the time on my phone. Black Jack had two minutes.

I scanned more of the newspaper. The cricketer was twenty-seven. His name was Scott Pinkerton. I had read his lips, had seen him tell another woman this, but he never told me. He had never asked me mine. Unlike the doorstopper I had received in Trinidad, the intel that had come from the Barbarians on the cricketer had been very thin.

If I had done the job and been sent away, curiosity would've died on the plane, but I was here and I wanted to know who he was. Ten kids in five countries, all less than ten years old. I saw no reason to put the man into the ground. No reason to kill him the way he had been killed. The paper printed that his father had had twenty-six children by almost as many women. They printed that like it was a good thing. Maybe for the man, not for the women. The cricketer had grown up in St. Michael.

Then came the writeup about the cricketer being accused of rape. He had paid the alleged rape victim off. She said that she had met him at Priva six months ago. He bought her shots, beer, and Ciroc, had left the club and stood in front of Limegrove and burned a tree with her, had gone back to Priva and danced with her, then offered her a ride in his shiny car. She accepted. He hit on her, demanded a.s.s for gas, weed, and liquor. She tried to get away. He grabbed her as he had grabbed me, only she was five-feet-three inches tall, didn't weigh more than ninety pounds. She said that he had overpowered her and battered her and raped her, then left her in the dirt, drunk, throwing up, come-soaked, and in tears.

After an hour with the cricketer, I chose to believe her.

I put the newspaper down, started packing my bag, eased my .380 from underneath the paper into the small of my back. Just then a horn blew outside the window. It sounded a half dozen times. The driver held up traffic, let his tinted window down and waved frantically. It was a man wearing tattoos from shoulders to wrists, an art form that was called sleeves in the tattoo world. He was in a twelve-year-old black BMW X5 that had left-side steering, a rarity on this floating rock. The first letter on his license plate was the letter G. St. George Parish. The ID on the vehicle matched the car number that had come in the text before sunrise. I sat back down. He parked illegally where the taxi drivers were herded, said a few words to the marginalized men in that group that yelled and complained, threw his hands up and snapped back at them, then crossed traffic on Broad Street, cut off cars, and came inside through the main entrance, hurried across damp floors and by noisy children and impatient teenagers and exhausted parents. He came toward me shaking his head like he was p.i.s.sed off, then sat down without saying h.e.l.lo, as if we'd been talking for the last four hours and he'd walked away to use the john and come back. I pushed my food to the side, but held on to my Mauby. He made himself comfortable in his seat. Black Jack was a slim man, toned and decent-looking, clothes simple, unremarkable, his T-shirt claiming, in red bold letters, that he was a SINNER BY BIRTH, SAVED BY THE GRACE OF G.o.d, EPHESIANS 2:8.

I read his shirt and said, "Seriously? Trying to get struck by lightning?"

"Good morning to you too, Reaper. Good f.u.c.king morning to you too."

He was Bajan by birth and that couldn't be hidden by his accent, but he wasn't black. Nor was his name Jack. He looked like Anderson Cooper with a goatee and dirty-blond-turning-white hair below his shoulders, yet something was very Brad Pitt in World War Z about him.

He said, "I'm upset that this contract I extended to you sub rosa is still open."

"The money hasn't been delivered."

"The word that I received was that the money was sent two days ago."

"They lied."

"Incompetent f.u.c.ks."

"Don't curse. Kids are around."

"Some of the parents here are cursing in front of their kids now, just in dialect."

"Look, I agreed to work for you on the side, provided that everything went smoothly. Black Jack, this is straight bulls.h.i.t. I've waited for a week for something that should have taken half a day."

"It's the island. Things move slower here."

"Time on all the clocks here move at the same rate as the time on my watch."

"I'll find out who dropped the ball."

"If it's not in my pocket by the time the sun drowns itself, then I'm done dealing with you."

He asked, "You gonna eat that burger or let it grow mold?"