“I see it but I don’t believe it.” His buddy, squat and ugly as a blowfish, grinned back. “Whatchou doin’ here, girl?”
Peta danced into the circle of their lechery. She took off the backpack, dug into it, removed the ganja, and threw it to William. “Natalie says happy New Year.”
“You telling me you came all the way up here to give me this?” From his breast pocket he pulled out a packet of rolling papers and removed one. Reaching into the plastic sandwich bag filled with marijuana, he removed a couple of dried buds and rolled them between his fingers, which caused the bits of leaf to fall into the paper while the seeds and stem remained in his fingers.
“I need you to do me a favor, Willy,” Peta said as she watched him roll the ganja-filled paper into an expert joint.
“Anything.” William licked the end of the paper, rolled his tongue at her, and lit the joint. “Almost anything.” He drew deeply, then offered it to her. She took it and toked, drawing less deeply than it appeared, and passed it to Joe.
“It’s my birthday,” she said, taking the boxed cake out of the backpack.
Joe opened the box and pulled matches out of his pocket. He counted the candles. “Sixteen candles,” he sang out, jiggling himself. He put his arm around her and kissed her full on the mouth. “You legal now, girl.”
Peta pulled away. Grinned. Felt like throwing up. “I got a friend inside.”
“You want to go inside and celebrate with him?” Joe asked. “We not good enough for you?”
Willy laughed. “Sir fucking Dr. Arthur Marryshow, right?”
Happy birthday, dear Arthur, Peta thought.
“How about we light a fire under that cocksucker and turn him into a candle?” Joe said.
Animal! Peta thought, deliberately feeding on Joe’s callousness to harden herself for what lay ahead.
“Great shit.” William took another toke from the joint. “Bring anything else, sweetface?” He rummaged in the backpack and found the beers. “Let’s party.” He opened one of the bottles and slugged down the contents. “You too good to us, girl.” He belched loudly. Joe roared with laughter.
Their noises covered the sounds for which Peta had been waiting, three in succession, Frik’s practiced imitation of the distinctive deep-throated howl of the Mona monkeys he’d often hunted for his dinner pot. She looked at the sky. In the way of the Tropics, darkness had suddenly come upon them.
“Tell you what,” William said. “We’ll save the good doctor a beer and a couple pieces of cake in case he’s alive in the morning.”
“How about some for the other guards?” Peta asked, ignoring the loud beat of her heart in her ears.
“They’s inside. They’ll never know the difference. Nobody out here but us.”
There was a moment of silence as one man toked and the other opened and slugged down another Carib. Too late, Peta tried to cover the silence.
“What the fuck was that?” Joe said.
“Didn’t hear a thing.” William put his arm around Peta and pulled her toward him.
“Well, I did.”
“Okay, so maybe a dog took a loud dump. If it bothers you, go see what it was.”
Beer in one hand, weapon balanced by his forearm and lying across his shoulder, Joe took a step in the direction from which Peta had come. “I think I’ll just do that,” he said. He bent first to extract a large and messy chunk of birthday cake.
“You’ll miss the real party.” Peta pressed herself against William.
“I’ll be back,” Joe said. “Have to take a piss anyway. Might as well do a tour while I’m at it.”
He didn’t seem particularly worried until the sound came again—the harsh clang of something against metal. He stiffened and moved toward the noise.
Dear God, forgive me, I didn’t want it to come to this, Peta thought, as she swung into the action she and Ray had rehearsed.
Quickly, using maximum energy and strength, she removed the scalpel that had been disguised as part of her belt buckle. Imagine Willy’s a goat, she told herself; she’d helped kill those often enough before a family feast.
The illusion worked, aided by a massive rush of adrenaline. Before he realized what was happening, William’s carotid artery had been neatly slit. Her cousin Natalie’s husband.
She turned her attention to Joe, who was just about to round the corner that led to a scene he could not be allowed to witness. For a split second, she diverted her focus to William’s submachine gun.
“Don’t even think about it, sweetface.” Joe turned around, his weapon cocked. “This no toy in me hand, you know. Now, you mind telling Joe what be going on?”
“Sick dog was feeling me up,” Peta said, knowing how stupid she sounded after giving both of them the come-on.
“Sick dog?” Joe motioned at her with the rifle. “You sick bitch, if you ask me. C’moverhere.” She didn’t move. “Be a good girl, sweetface. Drop you knife and come over here. Slowly.”
She walked toward him, swaying her hips. She was taller than he was by some inches. As she came close to him, she could see over his right shoulder. Two figures stood behind him, no more than thirty feet away and exposed in the fullness of the New Year’s Eve moon.
Watching her, Joe put the remainder of the cake into his mouth. “Want some?” He held two fingers of icing next to her face. “Might as well. Fat won’t matter when you’s dead and you’s going be dead in a minute, you don’t tell me what’s going down.”
He had allowed Peta, encouraged her, to come close enough to implement Ray’s lessons. Praying that he had not yet released the safety on his weapon, she struck fast, kneed him in the crotch, and when he doubled over in pain, jabbed her thumbs into his eyes, then struck with the edge of her hand to the back of his neck. The gun clattered to the ground, along with his bottle of Carib. Clutching his balls and whimpering, Joe buckled and fell facedown into the dregs of the beer that had trickled from his bottle.
Thinking of the danger to Arthur, Frik, and Ray, and to herself, Peta did what she had to do.
He’s a goat, she told herself again.
In an act punctuated by the repeated clatter of a hard object against metal, she picked up Joe’s submachine gun and smashed his skull.
“I—”
“We saw what happened, Peta,” Ray said. “Thank you.”
“You all right, kid?” Frik asked.
An irreverent thought flashed through Peta’s mind. These two men were having fun. Educated, well traveled, experienced, they were not much more than altered, older versions of what William and Joe might have become. Ray, a demolitions expert turned stuntman, had come to Grenada to shoot some scenes for a Hollywood movie, and had stayed on when the revolution heated up. The truth was that he’d rather be shooting a gun than a film. As for Frik, the stocky expatriate South African was an oil magnate whose wealth was exceeded only by the size of his ego. Like Joe, he saw himself as irresistible to women. He acted as if he were Hemingway incarnate, and looked the part, especially when he had a crossbow slung over his shoulder.
“I had to hit the bars first,” Frik said, as if there were any way he could have been that accurate.
She looked at the crossbow, which was now in his hands. So the sound that had nearly gotten them killed earlier was an arrow—or a bolt, as Frik called it—hitting the bars of the window of Arthur’s prison cell and ricocheting back to the ground.
“Had to warn Art to get out of the way.”
Art? It’s Arthur, you dumb shit, Peta thought. She looked up at the window. Arthur was looking down at them. Even in the moonlight, she could see that his face was thin and drawn. He was a huge man, almost six feet five. Before his arrest he’d weighed over 250 pounds. By all reports, he had lost nearly a hundred of that during his year of confinement.
Peta waved and smiled at him, trying not to let her body language show how scared she really was, but he seemed to be too focused on Frik to notice anything else.