It cost me a lot of money to get to Kuta that day. I can't blame the drivers. I wouldn't have wanted to go anywhere in that weather either. The storms of the previous few days had been mere warmups for the main event. The rain hit so hard I thought it might leave bruises. Visibility was approximately three feet. The cedak driver who took me from Tetebatu to Kotoraya wore his arm out whipping the horse with his bamboo switch. The bemo drivers were only a little better off. At one point on the leg from Kopang to Praya the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved so hard that two wheels briefly left the road. The road was too slippery for the brakes to have much effect, and I thought for a second that I was going to be roadkill, but the driver weaved with superhuman skill through a herd of water buffalo that appeared suddenly out of the monsoon like dark omens.
In the end I made it. My watch told me it was five o'clock. This Kuta Beach was nothing like the one on Bali. It was simply a road that ran along the coast, with jungle on one side and beach on the other, and eight hotels clustered near the T-junction that connected to the rest of the island. I walked along the road to the nearest hotel. I didn't hurry. I didn't mind being soaked any more. I and all of my possessions had been soaked all day.
I checked into the Anda Cottages, which had no Morgan/Peter/Kerri/Ulrika in the register, went into my cottage, changed into my swimsuit, and hung the rest of my clothes out to dry. I didn't feel the desperate need for speed that I had felt when the day had begun. After seven hours of travel, there didn't seem any point in worrying about another fifteen minutes. And nobody was killing anybody in this downpour, of that I was pretty sure, not unless Morgan was going to break into their room and start swinging a parang wildly, and that seemed unlikely. His modus operandi was the ambush.
And besides the most likely scenario was that they were dead already.
I went to the common room to find out what was going on. I wasn't sure how I would bring up the subject. "So, anybody find a couple of murdered Swedish girls around here?" didn't seem like a winning conversation-starter. But then I saw faces that I recognized, Johann and Suzanne, the Dutch couple from Tetebatu, drinking Bintang-and-Sprite shandies. They waved at me and I joined them.
"When did you get here?" Suzanne asked.
"Today," I said. The waiter came by and I asked him for a beer and then, as I realized I hadn't eaten since the banana pancakes except for half a pineapple in Pao Montong, a dish of nasi goreng.
"You came here through the rain?" she asked.
I nodded and smiled sheepishly.
"We didn't think the roads were open," Johann said. "We were supposed to take a Perama bus back to the ferry today, but they said they could not go because of the monsoon." Perama was the Indonesian tourist authority, which provided air-con buses between major tourist destinations. A little more expensive than bemos, and without their gritty authenticity, but a whole lot more comfortable.
"The roads were pretty bad," I admitted. "I'm surprised I got here."
"Have you been in Tetebatu?" Suzanne asked.
I nodded and drank greedily from my Bintang, which tasted wonderful and felt much-deserved. "How are things around here?"
"They're good," Johann said, and Suzanne nodded her agreement. "Very peaceful. You can rent mopeds and bicycles and go up and down the road. An excellent road with nothing on it. The beach right here," he motioned towards the sea, "is not so good… "
"Coral pebbles, not sand," Suzanne clarified. "Difficult to walk on or lie down on."
"The surfers like it, though," Johann said, and he and Suzanne exchanged looks and laughed at some private joke.
"Lots of surfers here," Suzanne said.
"But down the road to the east, maybe two miles… "
"Oh, yes, there's a perfect beach," Suzanne said. "Wonderful. A big white… " She made an arc with her hands, searching for the right English word.
"Crescent," Johann filled in. "It must be nearly a kilometer long."
"But it's dangerous," Suzanne said. "You must remember, if you go there. The owner here, he says there's a terrible riptide in the middle of the beach, and people die there every year. Swept out into the ocean and drowned."
"There are no signs there, can you imagine?" Johann said. He sounded a little outraged. "No signs at all. It's disgraceful. But as long as you're careful, it's a perfect beach. And there's nobody there."
"A few locals with coolers on their heads, selling Cokes and pineapples, and that's it. No buildings, no stores, no hotels," Suzanne added.
"Sounds like paradise," I said. My nasi goreng had arrived and I attacked it with a will as they chatted to each other, nostalgically, in Dutch.
Five minutes later I felt a thousand times stronger. "Listen," I said, "I ran into an old friend of mine in Tetebatu, I think he was coming here, have you seen him?" I described Morgan and company.
"Oh, yes," Suzanne said. "The big man with all the tattoos. We had lunch with them yesterday. The girls seemed very nice. There was no Dutch man with them, though. I think he went east to Flores instead of coming down here. Just your friend and the Swedish girls."
"They went out to that beach, didn't they?" Johann asked her.
"They did," Suzanne said. "During the rain. When everyone else was staying in they went out to the beach. Your friend said that it was best then, that swimming in the rain was better because you didn't get so hot."
"And nobody follows you around trying to sell you a sarong," Johann added, and they both laughed. Sarong salesgirls were the bane of Indonesian travelers. I didn't laugh.
"Did you see them afterwards?" I asked.
"Let's see… did we?" Suzanne said, thinking about it. "I think we saw your friend last night, on the road."
"Yes, we did," Johann said. "But not the Swedish girls."
"That's right," Suzanne said. "Just your friend Morgan."
I sipped from my beer to cover my consternation. I felt so cold I nearly shivered. Morgan had taken Kerri and Ulrika to a deserted beach yesterday, a beach already known for death by drowning, with the monsoon thundering down and nobody else around. And he had been seen again, but they had not.
"I have to go," I said, putting my beer down half-finished. I was sure it was too late but that was no reason to delay. "I forgot something. I'll see you later."
I fled from their startled okays and went back out into the rain. It had not let up, which seemed amazing to me. Surely all the fresh water in the world had poured down on Indonesia in the last eight hours, and there could be no more to dump on us. I went to the roofed area I had caught out of the corner of my eye when I had entered the Anda Cottages compound, where the mopeds and bicycles were stored, along with a crudely lettered "For Rent" sign.
An Indonesian boy who couldn't have been more than twelve years old sat watching the bikes. I told him that I wanted to rent, and he looked at me as if I was crazy, but only for a moment. Every Indonesian knows that all white people are crazy; taking a bike during the height of a monsoon was not insane enough to be noteworthy. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that.
"You want bike or motorbike?" he asked. His English was passable. For a moment I wondered how many languages he spoke. Most of the Indonesians in the picking-white-coconuts business could conduct business in English, German, Dutch, and Japanese, at a minimum.
"Bike," I said. I wanted to get there fast but I'd never driven a motorbike before and figured these were not ideal conditions to learn in. He gave me a battered old iron thing which was a little too short and reminded me of the bike I once rented in China that lost its pedals five miles from town. But better than nothing. I wheeled out of the Anda Cottages and headed off down the road, in the direction Johann had indicated, looking for the beach.
The road was superb, no cracks or potholes, and nobody else on it. Jungle to my left, coral beach to my right, rain absolutely everywhere. I could barely hear the roar of the surf over the machine-gun noise of rain on the road. Once I built up a good head of steam the bike moved like a racing machine, carried along by its own massive inertia. The road inclined slightly upwards, which was good. I didn't like my chances going downhill at this speed in this rain with these brakes. The beach began to slope downwards to my right, steeper and steeper, until there was a wedge of vegetation between me and the coral gravel, a wedge that widened and widened until I had jungle on both sides. It was getting darker; either the clouds were growing even thicker or the sun was setting. The jungle was thick as a wall, and the clouds were so low I seemed to be riding through a tunnel.
Suddenly the jungle to my right vanished, replaced by a steep rocky slope that dropped to a beach so white it seemed to glow. Crescent-shaped, like the blade of a parang, the beach ran almost perpendicular to the road and was framed by a high wall of jumbled rock too steep to be navigable anywhere but where it met the road. It was a good half-mile long and I could only just make out the other end through the rain.
The opening in the wall of jungle to my right was only about a hundred feet long, and by the time I'd reacted and the brakes had stopped the bike, the beach was once again hidden behind vegetation. I walked the bike back to the rocky slope above the beach, leaned it against a tree, and began to descend. My Teva sandals were soaking wet, and the rocks were slippery with rain, and I had to use my hands to brace myself on several occasions.
Then I was on the beach. It was amazing how white the sand was even though it must have been darkened by the rain. Fine sand, damply solid, easy to walk on. It was about a hundred feet wide at its thickest. The storm was intensifying now, and I had to shield my eyes with a hand to see anything. The whitecapped waves roared and plunged into the beach again and again, as if they wanted to pillage it, carry every grain back to Davy Jones' Locker. Even in the bay they were at least six feet high. The open sea was twice that size, a churning maelstrom of whitecaps.
I couldn't see anything but sand, sea, rocks, and jungle high above. It didn't seem likely that he'd hide bodies here. They would have stood out like crazy against the sand. Maybe he'd hidden them under cairns of rocks? Hard work, but he was a big strong guy. I began to follow the line of the rocky slope, looking carefully under the rocks. The sky had grown darker still and I had to squint against the rain.
After maybe five minutes I heard a shout and nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked up. And nearly jumped out of my skin again.
"Balthazar Wood!" Morgan shouted. I could barely hear him through the rain and the sea. "As I live and breathe!"
I was about halfway along the beach. He was a little further along, maybe thirty feet away from me, between me and the ocean. I could see footprints leading back towards the ocean. He wore a blue swimsuit and carried a parang in his right hand like he knew how to use it. I was sure he did. He was the Great White Hunter, after all. He seemed an unreal figure, something out of a bad dream, looming out of the rain with his shaved head and that blade in his hand and those Chinese-dragon tattoos on his arms, as heavily muscled as a Marvel Comics superhero. His eyes shone with anticipation and his face was stretched into a giant carnivorous grin.
I backed away towards the road along the slope, moving slowly, thinking furiously. He followed, equally slowly. There was no rush after all. He had me at his mercy. There was no way I could scramble to safety up this steep slippery slope, and there was nowhere else to go. He must have been waiting for me. He must seen me from up high, come down and swum along the beach in order to catch me by surprise.
"I gave you a little examination, Woodsie!" he cried. "I put you to the test, and I'm sorry to say that you've failed!"
No: there was someplace to go. There was the ocean. He was a stronger swimmer than I was, but could he swim fast carrying that parang? I very much doubted it. But he'd already thought of that, he was moving to cut me off, staying between me and the surf.
"I warned you, Paul! I told you to fuck off and leave me alone! But you just couldn't do that, could you?"
My anger had abandoned me when I needed it most. My limbs were weak with terror. I was shaking so badly I could barely focus my eyes. "You sick fuck!" I hurled back at him, or tried to, but I had no breath in my lungs. He must have read my lips; he laughed.
"Don't you go worrying about those beautiful Swedish ladies you came down here to rescue now," he said. He was close enough that despite the drumming rain I could hear him without shouting. "Were you dreaming of saving their lives and receiving a few grateful blow jobs? They've landed you in a world of trouble, my boy. But they're still compos mentis, they're just fine. They went off back to Bali last night. Not without giving me a fond farewell though. That Ulrika is a wildcat in bed. You think I'm going to rid the world of a piece of ass like that? Now that would be a real sin."
"How?" I asked, still breathless. "How could you kill Laura? Why?"
His lips thinned and he spat. "That whore Mason? Fuck her. That cunt got exactly what she deserved."
I would make him pay, I told myself. If I somehow got out of this I would make him pay. "And Stanley Goebel? Did he get what he deserved?"
"Ah, him. Woodsie, I swear, I didn't even know his name when I did him. He was an act of pure opportunism. Just one more for The Bull. One more just like you."
He raised the parang high, to slash downwards, and stepped towards me. I wish I could say I tensed myself for a furious never-say-die battle, ready to fight like a cornered wolverine. But the truth is when I saw that blade gleaming above me in the rain all my rage and courage melted away and I cringed away from him, arms over my head, whimpering.
He could have swung the parang and ended my life. Instead he kicked me behind the left knee and I crumpled forward onto my hands and knees. I closed my eyes and waited for the fatal blow. But it still didn't come.
"You never know, Woodsie," he said. "Maybe if you try very, very hard you could convince your old mate Morgan that you really would leave him alone if you lived. Maybe if you sound just pitiful enough. Maybe if you show him what a truly pathetic fuck you really are."
He was only toying with me. I knew that. He wouldn't let me go, not now, no matter what I said or did. He just wanted to humiliate me before killing me. I scrabbled backwards on my hands and knees towards the rocky slope. One possible chance. But I felt too weak with fear for it to work. He followed.
I was going to die here. I felt a terrible cold certainty. These were my last moments on this earth. I tried to say something, to beg and plead like he wanted me to, to play for time, but I was so frightened I couldn't even speak. Not in words. I tried, but all that came out of my mouth were meaningless moaning noises.
My right foot came into contact with solid rock. I stopped backing up.
"Very disappointing, Woodsie," he said, as I crouched at his feet. "I thought you'd put up more of a fight. But you're just a snivelling little worm, aren't you? You and your woman both. That cunt Mason. She begged and sobbed and pleaded and sucked and licked, she did. But it didn't do her any good in the end. You'll have to try a little harder than — "
Maybe it was the mention of Laura that gave me strength. Maybe it was just raw animal instinct, fight or flight, a last desperate convulsion of muscles. He hadn't noticed that I had backed into the rocks behind me like a sprinter backs into starting blocks. I lunged forward with all the strength I had, not at him but past him, and I ran for the sea. I don't know if he swung at me or not, but if he did, he missed. After a few steps I stumbled, tripped up by the combination of forward momentum and rainsoaked sandals, but somehow righted myself midstride and continued into the surf.
When the water was thigh-high and I could no longer run I paused to tear my sandals off and dared a glance over my shoulder. One of the six-foot waves nearly knocked me off my feet but I managed to keep my balance. Morgan followed me into the water, moving at an unhurried jog. He had discarded the parang on the beach.
He looked amused rather than concerned. I knew why. I had no hope of outdistancing or outwrestling him. I was a comfortable swimmer, I had spent most of my teenage summers on the shores of Lake Muskoka in Canada, but Morgan had grown up on the beach. He swam like a shark. And he was at full strength, where I was sick and weak with fear and couldn't fully extend the knee he had kicked. All things being equal, he would easily reach me, and when he did, he was much too strong for me to have any hope of survival.
But all things were not quite equal.
I dove into the water and started to swim, controlling my motions, trying to keep my stroke smoothly powerful instead of frantic. After a few dozen strokes I allowed my feet to dangle downwards for a moment, and I felt it.
The riptide. My salvation. It grabbed at my ankles and pulled and in moments I had been sucked right in. Johann had been right, it was a monster, two or three hundred feet a minute. I swam straight into the center of the flow, allowing the current to carry me straight out, and then I turned, treading water, and looked for Morgan.
He was behind me, not far, maybe forty feet away. We were still in the bay but the sea was already so rough I could only glimpse him from wavetops. The gap between us widened. Then he reached the riptide, and he abruptly stopped swimming, started treading water, and looked out to the fearsome waves of the open sea, only a hundred feet away now.
I knew what he was thinking. I had nothing to lose. I was obviously better off taking my chances in the open ocean and hoping that a stray boat picked me up or the tides happened to wash me back to dry land. Better some chance than none. But he had to work out whether it was worth risking his own life here in the water by expending the time and energy required to find me, catch me and kill me. Not easy when we got out to the open water with its high waves, not on a day like today, not with the sun plummeting towards the horizon.
He turned and swam away, parallel to the beach, out of the riptide, away from me.
I had no time to feel relief. The current dragged me out of the bay and into the full, colossal, relentless force of the sea. I nearly drowned in those first few minutes. The churning waves threw me around like a rag doll, like a twig in a flood. I tried to float face up, but they immediately drove me under. I went back to treading water, but I had to work so hard to keep my head in the air that I knew I could not last long. Even when I did manage to breathe I had to keep my mouth pursed in a narrow slit to filter out the thick rain. When I breathed in just as an errant wave hit, and choked on a mouthful of salt water instead of a lungful of air, I panicked and only just managed to keep afloat with a frenzied dog paddle before getting hold of myself again.
I gave up on keeping my head above water all the time. I tried to conserve my energy, letting myself drift beneath the surface, coming up just long enough to breathe. This worked better than all-out struggle, but I could still feel myself growing slowly weaker. And I could no longer see land or even guess in which direction it lay. Downwind, probably. I could barely work out which way the wind blew, much less make any progress in that or any other direction. But I got the vague impression that the current was carrying me exactly the wrong way.
Looking back it's amazing how calm I felt. I guess fear is all about imagining the future, and while I was in the water I was much too busy staying alive to imagine anything at all.
Time passed, quite a long time, but I had no sense of it. After a while it seemed as if I had always been in this ocean, struggling for my life, that my other memories were nothing more than a momentary daydream. I was dimly aware that night was falling, the storm was abating, the rain slacking off and the waves growing calmer. But my muscles too were weakening, and I had to expend every iota of energy I could muster just to keep my head above water long enough to breathe.
When the silence was broken by the violent yodel of a horn I was so startled that I lost the rhythm of my movements and nearly drowned again. But I clawed my way back to the surface with desperate spasmodic movements, woken from semiconsciousness, perceiving the meaning of that horn through the thick fog of total physical exhaustion. A boat. There was a boat nearby.
I tried to shout, but between exhaustion and my brine-burned throat, only a wheezy rasp emerged. The horn sounded again, even louder this time, so loud it was actually painful. When my head submerged I could hear the thick churning sound of the boat engine through the water. A few moments later I saw lights, and heard human voices, and I found some untapped reservoir of strength and began to swim towards the light.
When I next looked up I was blinded by one of the lights. I waved my hands high in the air and tried to shout. Again I failed. But it didn't matter. They had seen me. "Over there!" a woman shouted. "There's someone over there!" I treaded water, forcing my limp arms to wave, until the boat loomed up next to me and strong hands pulled me on board.
I grabbed a railing to stay upright, my legs too weak to stand unsupported, and looked at my saviors. Four Indonesians and three white people. I recognized the whites. Johann and Suzanne. And Talena Radovich.
"You stupid fucking idiot," Talena said, and gave me a big hug.