Coconut lifted his machete and grinned. She took a small purse out of her pocket and counted out $1.30 Grenadian, enough for a pack of 555s at the supermarket up the road or a half pack at the bar.
“I’m thirsty for beer,” Coconut said.
Peta shook her head. “Don’t push your luck.”
He shrugged congenially, as if he had expected no different. “You be at Fantazia tonight for Calypso Night?” he asked, pointing at the building attached to the back of Gem’s beachside restaurant, Sur La Mer.
“Maybe,” Peta said, though she had absolutely no intention of partying there or anywhere else, with the exception of her obligatory appearance on theAssegai .
“Good enough.” He took off for the bar just as Ralphie strode into view. “See,” he called out. “I told you.”
“Hey, Ralphie.”
“Hey, Miss Peta.”
“You finished the job I gave you?”
“I finished it.” He moved off toward the fence. She stood up and followed him. He settled himself on the sand, took out a piece of coral and a small knife, and began to carve. She sat down next to him and waited in companionable silence, knowing he would give her what she wanted in his own time and not before.
After half an hour or so, he dug into his bag and pulled out the replica, set in the original gold bezel, and the loose real fragment. She took them from him and examined them closely.
There was no way to tell visually which one was the duplicate and which the real thing.
The only way she knew the difference was by feel. The original fragment seemed to draw the heat from her hand, making it tingle like pins and needles. The other felt like any piece of carved coral.
“Amazing job, Ralphie. I don’t know how to thank you. You just might have saved my life.”
“Then I have all the thanks I need,” he said gravely, and refused all offers of payment.
“I have one more favor to ask.” She held out the original toward him. “I don’t want to have this with me tonight. Will you hold it for me until tomorrow?”
He nodded and took it from her.
“Aren’t you curious about this?” Peta asked.
“I’m curious about how the universe works,” he answered.
Peta smiled at him. He was really something, her friend Ralphie. He could have followed in his family’s political footsteps. He could have lived like a rich man. Instead, he carved coral and sought the secrets of the universe. She thought about Frik, about how his search for the same secrets was motivated by a desire for self-aggrandizement.
She leaned over and kissed Ralphie on the cheek. “If for some reason I don’t come back and get it from you, find Manny Sheppard and give it to him.”
“You go to come back,” he said, as if he knew.
As Peta neared Blue Lagoon, she heard again the sounds of the New Dimensions. They were doing well for themselves, she thought, wondering if Frik had also hired Bosco, as he usually did. She had known Grenada’s one-man band all of her life, and enjoyed seeing him. He was an event unto himself, playing bass and keyboard, percussion and drums, doing his own arrangements, and playing pan and singing. Cute and fun, he was much in demand.
She parked her car outside the marina so that, if necessary, she could leave in a hurry, and footed it the rest of the way. The area was alive with music and people. Rum punch was being poured liberally and everyone was having a high old time, drinking, toking, dancing to the lively steel drums of the local musicians who had apparently forgone their usual gig at the Grenada Grand Beach Resort to oblige Frik.
She waved at the musicians and made her way through the crowd. Hiking up her miniskirt, stilettos dangling from her hand, she climbed onto theAssegai . The wooden table had been removed from the deck to make room for a spotlit dance floor.
As one song ended and another began, a circle of partygoers gathered around Peta. Some of them began to dance. She slipped into her sandals and moved to the irresistible rhythm of her favorite local calypso, Marsha MacDonald’s “Going Under.”
“Go, girl,” someone yelled. Someone else turned the spotlight on her.
Frik.
She had noticed him among those who preferred to watch. Now she saw that his gaze was riveted on the pendant she was wearing around her neck.
At the end of the song, the musicians closed their set.
Frik moved toward her, took her arm, and guided her down into the cabin, where a huge black form lay growling.
“Quiet, Sheba!”
The dog sent out one more test growl, objecting to the invasion of her territory, then stopped.
Peta followed the Afrikaner through the boat’s small galley and forward to his private study. The cozy wood-paneled cabin curved with the prow of theAssegai until it formed a point. Cushioned benches lined both walls, broken only on the starboard side by a locked cabinet which she knew contained an entertainment center and his communications equipment. Where the curving walls brought the benches together, a low trapezoidal wooden cabinet served as a display table. Standing in the middle of it was the small wire frame which held the two pieces of the artifact that Frikkie had so far recovered.
“Thank you, again, for coming,” he said. “And for bringing the piece.” Safely out of sight of the revelers, he reached out toward the pendant.
“Not so fast,” Peta said, enjoying the look on his face as she backed away. Smiling, she asked him to give her the privilege of placing the fragment into the model herself. “Just a whim,” she said. “Humor me.”
A trifle impatiently, Frik agreed.
Heart pounding, praying that Ralphie’s work was as perfect as she thought it was, she removed the pendant from around her neck, pushed the fragment out of its bezel and into the space he indicated.
It slid in and—Thank you, Ralphie—connected perfectly with the real pieces of the artifact.
“That just leaves Selene’s fragment,” Frik said. “And the one that’s in New York with Arthur’s effects.”
“I’m curious,” Peta said, trying to sound casual. “How did you know about that one?”
“Ray told me just recently,” Frik said. “Is that a problem? Itis mine, you know.”
“A problem? N-no. I don’t suppose it is.” She had never been completely sure that Frik knew about the piece in New York or, if he did know, just how he had learned about it. Her suspicions about the Daredevil stuntman returned tenfold.
“Ray says the piece is in New York, with Arthur’s effects. I’d like to go and get it,” Frik went on, his voice carefully benign.
Damn it, Peta thought. How was she going to get out of this one? “It can be released only to me, personally.”
“So I understand. Why don’t you let me fly you there. We can—”
Peta held up her hand. “I have a practice. I have students at the medical school coming in this week to begin the new semester and I need to prepare. There’s no way I can leave Grenada right now.”
“But—”
“Don’t pressure me, Frik. I’m not one of your flunkies.” Her anger finally overrode her caution, adding heat to her words. “I give you my word I’ll retrieve the piece in time for the New Year’s Eve meeting in Vegas. That’ll have to be good enough.”
37
On the night of the August new moon, Terris McKendry stood on theValhalla platform and wondered if he would ever again be able to trust a night of such darkness. To him it seemed that the world was holding its breath, waiting to unleash some hidden terror. His uneasiness had returned each month since the night on theYucatán when he and Joshua had first encountered Green Impact—the night that had cost Keene his life and made him into a cold-blooded murderer who would shoot a woman in the back.
Restless, he walked the metal decks at the wellhead level, high as a skyscraper above the placid water. Level after level, he climbed from one yellow-painted staircase to another, pacing, working off his nervous energy as he stared out into the night.